spirit that the prophet sends Naaman away with his case of conscience unsolved, dismissing him without either formally giving him the permission he asks for, or formally condemning his proposed line of conduct. His faith must grow, and his

duty will afterwards become clear.

I do not apprehend that any of you is likely to be persuaded by our study of the history which has been under our consideration into a belief of the lawfulness of a cowardly concealment of our convictions, or of a refusal publicly to act on them. That, after all, is not the fault to which at the present day there is the strongest temptation. I suppose there never was a time at which there was more freedom of speech in both directions. On the one hand, the man who disbelieves not only in Christianity, but even in Theism, can publicly profess his unbelief, and try to make converts to it, not only without fear from the law of the land, but even without fear that he will not be able to retain a high degree of social consideration; and on the other hand, the sincerest of Christians who takes the strictest view of his duties, if he boldly proclaims and honestly acts on his convictions, will only command the higher respect of those who do not share his faith. In commenting on our story, therefore, I have felt all along that I need give myself little trouble to

prove that bowing in the house of Rimmon is not lawful to you; my only difficulty was to make it conceivable how it could ever seem to have been tolerated in Naaman.

One lesson we are safe in drawing from it, that of tolerance and charity in our judgment of others. We cannot do wrong in placing our own standard of duty high, but we may easily be rash in judging severely of those who permit themselves what we condemn. The error is one to which our temptation is the greater the less our experience of life. There are no so severe judges as the young. When they have fixed in their minds their code of duty, they are stern in exacting conformity with it, slow in accepting any excuse for deviating from it. And so also with the uneducated. When they are strict in their acknowledgment of duty and their obedience to it, it is usually to some conventional code they give their allegiance, and those who follow a different rule are unsparingly condemned. I should be sorry to speak in such a way as to lead you to think that the boundaries. between virtue and vice were so uncertain that you could not venture to condemn wrongdoing lest haply the error might really be in your own standard of judgment. Yet instances, when a wider experience has convinced us of reasons for modifying our first rigour, are numerous enough to make

us cautious to let a sense of our own fallibility temper our severity. In particular this may be said, and it has to be borne in mind, that two persons at the same point may be judged very differently according to the direction in which their face is set. One may have reached it in the progress of struggling upwards for more light; the other fallen to it from shutting his eyes to the light before him. Naaman's bow in the house of Rimmon may be but the last remaining relic of an idolatry which he is in the process of forsaking altogether; in the case of an Israelitish visitor to Syria it might be the first sinful compliance in the catalogue of those by which his allegiance to his father's God was given up. And this consideration may guard our charity in judging of others from depressing our own moral standard. It is possible that we could come to be where they are only by turning our back on the light to which they, in their way, are striving. Let us ever be careful, while we endeavour that our conscience shall be as rightly informed as we can, that our conduct do not fall below the standard of our conscience. May God's Holy Spirit so guide and rule our hearts that we may know what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same.

IX

SHAME

"Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith; who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."HEBREWS xii. 2.

"DESPISING the shame."

These are the words

to which I more particularly invite your attention. That part of our blessed Lord's trial which consisted in the shame to which He was put, must have affected Christians more forcibly in the first ages of our religion than it does in ours. For the first sufferers for Christ had to brave a trial which was not endured by the stoutest of their successors, from the shame of the confession. In the next age, when the Christian society had been fully formed, the confessors were supported by the public opinion of their own community. They might be brought before the tribunal or cast into prison or threatened with tortures or death; but the thought most likely to occur to any of them

was not, how shameful is my position, but how glorious. I suppose if we asked ourselves what kind of death is the most honourable and glorious we could not make a better answer than the death of a martyr. We honour the brave soldier who dies on the field of battle fighting for his country: yet he has done no more than risk his life, and he might reasonably have hoped to escape; but the martyr who, with full knowledge that persistence in his confession means inevitable death, abides to the end, enduring all that his persecutors can inflict on him,—and that not in the hurry and excitement of a battlefield, but in cold deliberate choice, often made when the bodily frame has been depressed by imprisonment and other suffering, surely performs a more difficult and therefore more honourable achievement. Accordingly the Christian martyrs were cheered by the almost worshipping admiration of their brethren at the time, and their names have held the most glorious place in the annals of the Church ever since. There was more shame then in drawing back from the confession of Christ than in remaining steadfast. Accordingly we read in one of the earliest authentic records of Christian martyrdoms that it was possible, by the aspects of the prisoners as they passed along, to discern the difference of their confessions. Those who had bravely wit