from His kingdom. Surely it is He Himself who puts it into our hearts to find our holiest hope, our firmest comfort, our calmest peace, our noblest glory in the Cross.

Yes; He who foreshowed His Cross by many figures before He suffered, now that He has suffered, leads back the eyes and hearts of His people to the holy tree, the chosen altar, on which was offered up the one atoning Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. The brazen serpent lifted up by Moses in the wilderness was a type of Christ lifted up on the Cross. All who looked upon the serpent of brass were healed from the deadly bites of the fiery serpents; so Christ heals from the bite of the Old Serpent who brought death into the world. They looked and were healed; Christ says by the prophet Isaiah, "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth;" again He pleads by the prophet Jeremiah, "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see, if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted Me in the day of His fierce anger." He says Himself most expressly, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life."" It is not any great thing which Christ has bid us do. He only bids us look to Him. Could He have made salvation easier? Could He have said anything more gracious than, "Look and be saved?" If we * St. John, iii. 14.

are not saved, who will be to blame? Are any of you, my brethren, conscious of the misery of sin, yet still living in sin? Why do you not look to Christ? Why do you not confess your misery to Him? Why do you not ask Him to deliver you? Why do not you fix your eyes, and your whole heart, upon Jesus on the Cross? That look of faith and love can save you. Healing virtue will flow forth from the Crucified as you gaze upon Him, and staunch the deadly wound of sin, which you have allowed the devil to inflict upon you. Here is your hope and your refuge.

But you will say, perhaps, "We cannot come : this is just what we complain of, that, although the way of salvation is easy, we have not strength to walk in it." Well, then, ask of Christ, and He will give you strength; for He promises: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me."" If you cannot go to Him, look to Him, and He will draw you to Himself. Keep His cross ever before your eyes, ever in your heart. Meditate upon His sufferings who was nailed there for you, and pray in such a prayer as this : "O blessed Saviour of the world, who by Thy Cross and precious Blood hast redeemed us, save me and help me, a miserable sinner." What then will Christ do for you if you thus pray to Him? He will intercede for you. When the children of Israel were fighting with their enemies, Moses upon the mount was praying for them with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross: as long as he held up his arms and prayed, Israel prevailed, but

St. John, xii. 32.

when he let down his arms, Amalek prevailed. In this he was a type of Christ who made intercession for us upon the Cross; and now, while we are fighting with our enemies, and His, He continues to intercede for us. While we pray, and by faith see Him upon the Cross, He makes intercession, and then we prevail. If we cease praying, and lose our faith in His atonement, we can have no certainty that He intercedes for us: but if His intercession should cease, the Devil would certainly prevail. Thus was Christ upon the Cross prefigured in the Old Testament; and thus He leads us back to contemplate His dying love, and bids us hope for salvation from the misery consequent upon our sins, by that precious Sacrifice which we there behold offered up for us.

O my brethren, may we day by day love the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ more and more, find it our highest glory, and despise all other good things in comparison with His love who died for us upon the Cross! But how must we thus grow in the love of our crucified Saviour, how advance in heavenly wisdom that we may glory as we ought in His Cross?

It must be by viewing the Cross of Christ as St. Paul viewed it.

For observe, my brethren, he did not glory merely in the memory of the Cross as of something past and gone, with which he had nothing to do except in memory. The truth is, the Cross must enter spiritually into our daily life, and influence all we do, or say, or think, if it is to be the Cross of Salvation for us. "God forbid," St. Paul says, "that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom, or whereby (as you may read it in the margin of your Bibles) the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." You see it is not enough that we should glory in the Cross absent : we must glory in it present, the guide of our steps, the restrainer of our hopes and desires through this pleasure-loving world. The crucifixion is to be realized in our lives. The vain pleasures of the world, its sinful indulgences, its empty honours, are to be nailed by us to the Cross: our very bodies are to suffer, as if crucified with Christ, when they rebel against the purity which He enjoins us. Whatever pain it may cost us, whatever struggle, whatever anguish, we must put down the sinful lusts of the flesh, for the love of Christ crucified. The pleasure, dear as a right eye, the gain, valuable as a right hand, must be plucked out, must be cut off, if they offend in us against the holy law of Christ. We must make ourselves indifferent to the world's blame, or contempt, when the fear of it would deter us from doing the will of Jesus: we must despise its praise, and harden ourselves against its attractions, when they would entice us from the love of a crucified Saviour.

Thus will the world be crucified 10 unto us and we 10 "Crucifigatur vobis mundus, crucifigimini mundo. Quid est hoc? Felicitatem non quæratis de mundo: abstinete vos a felicitate mundi. Blanditur mundus, caveatur corruptor: minatur mundus, non timeatur oppugnator. Si bona mundi non te corruperint, si mala mundi non te corruperint, crucifixus est tibi mundus, crucifixus es mundo." St. Aug. Serm. cclxxxix. 6.

unto the world; and thus shall we grow in the true, healthful, abiding love of Jesus and His Cross.

Let us now proceed to look a little more in detail into the working of this great principle, in the life of Christian man.

God in His bounteous kindness has surrounded us with many beautiful and desirable objects. He has placed us in a world which He made very good: and though by the sins of men misery has entered into the world, marring much of its original beauty, and overclouding all its liveliest enjoyments with fear, or dulling them by satiety, yet there remains much that is fair, bright, and hopeful, much that is desirable and enticing. But our position in the midst of those things which to Adam in his innocence were all joy, is a very different one from his. Ours is a position of danger and fear, of doubt and suspense. We serve a Master who died for us upon the Cross. We have only recently escaped, if, indeed, we have escaped at all, from the miserable bondage of sin, which leads to death eternal. Death temporal has still a hold upon us, and will one day take us away from all the pleasures that this life can afford us. It is plain, then, that we are not to take the pleasures of this life as our portion: it is clear that it is a matter of great consideration how we may best live this earthly life under these circumstances. We need a measure, or standard, of the world's good things; a touchstone by which to try their real value, to shew whether they are sinful or innocent, whether they are beneficial or injurious. The Cross is the measure we require: by it all things must be tried. Only those