world, he cared not for human applause or censure.

He sought only God's glory, and the truest good of men; and he turned at once her thoughts, and the thoughts of others like her in the crowd, into a different channel when he said,

'Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the Word of God, and keep it!'

May this blessedness be ours! We hear the Word of God, indeed, abundantly. That which prophets and kings of old desired to see of God's Goodness, and have died without seeing, we see from our very childhood. That which multitudes of living men throughout the world are longing for, in the secret desires of their souls, though they know not what is the true cause of their spirit's craving, we enjoy to the full, by the free gift of God, in the knowledge of His Love, and the glad tidings of the Gospel of Grace. And we have not only heard with our outward ears, but doubtless, in some measure or other, God himself has conveyed His Word to our hearts; we have heard it with our spirit's ears, and have thus become responsible for hearing it. May we keep that Word which our Father speaks to us,-feed daily on the living bread, which He supplies to us, as the token of His Fatherly Presence with us, and grow thereby more true and faithful in our work on earth, more conformed unto His Image, more 'meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.'

We have here, in this text, another passage brought before us by our Church, as the Gospel of the day, which stands evidently in very close connection with the subject of last Sunday. I have not chosen these subjects for myself: but they are pressed upon us, by the order of our Church, as specially fitted for our consideration in this season of Lent, as suited for all of you, for the babes in faith, as well as for the men in understanding, for the weak and feeble, as well as the lusty and strong. And therefore I do not think it right to evade this Sunday, any more than the last, the questions which are thus raised. The mere reading of the passage from the Holy Table must make some impression upon the mind of the hearer, must leave behind some kind of feeling with respect to it; and it is only right that the true bearing of its contents upon our religious life of to-day should be set before you, and the

true lessons derived from it, which it contains for our warning and guidance.

Most probably, the words before us were intended primarily to represent directly the case of the Jewish Nation. The Evil Spirit, which once possessed them, when they rebelled against their Divine King, and gave themselves up to all manner of idolatrous practices, seemed for a time to have gone out of them. Ever since the period of the Babylonish Captivity, that sore and heavy judgment which at length struck terror into their consciences, they never appear to have fallen away again into the sin of open idolatry. In this they may have been influenced, not only by the warnings of their own great prophets, but by the example of their Persian masters, and their contact with the principles of the Zoroastrian religion, in which fire, indeed, was reverenced as the symbol of the Divine Being, but all idolatrous images were strenuously abhorred. Moreover, the great body of the Jews did not return from the exile, but only those, for the most part, whose hearts were touched by the desire-not only to return to their own land, but to serve, with greater zeal and faithfulness than of old, Jehovah, the God of their fathers. Those, who were indifferent, who were wanting in patriotic and religious spirit-and especially those who were addicted to idolatry, who still in Egypt 'burnt incense to the Queen of Heaven,' Jer.xliv.15-28, and by the waters of Babylon 'set up their idols in their hearts,' Ez.xiv.4,-most probably did not care to return from the places where they had settled down among the heathen.

However this may be, certain it is that, whatever other sins the Jews committed after their return from the Captivity, they no longer worshipped idols. No human sacrifices were now offered to the Sun-God, the Baal, or Lord, of the tribes of Canaan, as Jeremiah tells us they were offered in his time:

'They have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire,which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.' Jer. vii.31.

"They have built also the high places of the Baal, to burn their sons with fire as burnt-offerings unto the Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind.' Jer.xix.5.

No 'abominations,' that is, indecent symbols, were now

set up in the very Temple of Jehovah, nor impure rites performed in his worship, as we learn from Jeremiah, and from the Deuteronomist who wrote in very nearly, if not quite, the same age as Jeremiah, was actually the case in the time of king Josiah, just before the Captivity.

The children of Israel have done evil in my sight, saith the Lord; they have set their abominations in the House which is called by my Name, to pollute it.' Jer. viii.30; see also D.xxiii.17,18, 2K.xxiii.7.

In the times of the Maccabees, of which some account is given in the apocryphal books bound up in our larger Bibles, the Jews endured nobly great sufferings on account of their religion, from those who attempted to force them to comply with idolatrous ceremonies. And in the days of our Lord himself there was a very great general outward show of religion throughout the land. There was the temple at Jerusalem crowded with hosts of worshippers at the three great Festivals: there was the synagogue in every town and village, in which the Law was read and expounded continually. There were professors of religion, talking loudly, and making great display of their prayers and fastings,-Pharisees, who stopped in the corners of the streets, to perform their devotions in the sight of men, and Scribes, who could repeat whole passages of Scripture by heart, and set forth the minute directions of their ritual with the most scrupulous accuracy. Verily, the house was swept and garnished.' But the Spirit of God was not there in possession of it. When brought low by their afflictions, and made to reflect upon their former national sins, they had not truly humbled themselves before God, and besought of Him that cleansing grace, which should prepare their hearts to be the abode of His Indwelling Spirit. They had only put away some outward forms of sin; the root of the matter was still there; a stubborn, proud, self-righteous heart was the heart of this people still, even as it was in the days of old, when the Deuteronomist wrote of them :

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'They have corrupted themselves: their spot is not the spot of His children they are a perverse and crooked generation.' xxxii.5. And so, in the language of the text, the 'unclean spirit' returned with sevenfold power to possess and rule them for his own. Their religion became, too commonly, hypocrisy, their prayers, formalities, their thanksgivings, the

expression of an arrogant, boastful self-confidence-' God! I thank thee that I am not as other men are,'-instead of a grateful, loving, outpouring of the soul by men, rejoicing meekly in the gifts of God's Love, and longing to share them as freely as possible with others. They indulged in heart the same evil thoughts as before, but with a cloak now of religious pretence. As in the time of old, when the Psalmist wrote,

'Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood,'so it was in the days of Christ; only now their wickedness was intensified by the fact, that they had far more abundant light, that they professed all the while a zeal for God's honour, they prided themselves on knowing His Will,they made their boast of being taught by the Law. But their true state of mind had just been signally evidenced, when they had looked upon that holy and loving one, had heard him speak his words of Truth, had witnessed his pure and innocent life, and yet had the hardihood to ascribe his acts to the spirit of evil:

He casteth out devils through Beelzebub the prince of the devils.' Men, who could do this, must indeed have been very far gone in wickedness. This was even to blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, of whose presence and aid 'without measure' in his ministry those gracious words were continually witnessing. The last state' truly of that people was worse than the first.'

Such appears to be the sense, in which these words. were originally spoken, as we gather it from the connection in which they stand, and especially from the clause added in Matt.xii.45,

'Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.'

But let us now examine more closely the expressions here employed. We are told at the beginning of the passage

Jesus was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake, and the people wondered.'

We have here, then, an instance of the kind which I referred to last Sunday; where, in the language and mode of thought of that age, a person, merely afflicted with dumbness, was said to be possessed with a devil. No doubt, our great Divines, at the time of the Reformation and after

wards, by whom our present Liturgy was prepared, believed fully, many of them, like Bishop Hall, in the reality of demoniacal possession. And so they have expressly introduced these passages in the Gospels for the first three Sundays in Lent. But all this has now passed away. No one nowadays, as I observed last Sunday, takes a deaf or dumb child, a blind person or a paralytic, or even a lunatic or a maniac, to a priest, to have the demon exorcised. We have recourse at once to the physician. And so, in one of our colonial journals of the past week you may have seen a short extract from an article which appeared in a recent number of the Monde, the French ultramontane or papal organ, as follows:

Satan is the sole author of all evil that happens on the earth. All diseases, all disorders in nature, all epidemics, droughts, inundations, famines, all miseries, pains, sufferings, death,-in short, all evil is the work of the devil. One of the greatest evils of the present time is, that in practice, at least, no one believes in the devil. The monster has his own way, with victims who refuse to believe in the existence of the tormentor.

This charge or statement is perfectly true, that ‘in practice, at least, no one believes in the devil.' Men, indeed, often speak about 'the devil,' as they speak about 'the world' and 'the flesh,' personifying in this way certain forms of evil, and discriminating different classes of sins. And it may still be at times convenient to do so: as St Paul speaks of men 'receiving the spirit of the world,' of their being conformed to this world,' of the flesh lusting against the spirit,' of our 'crucifying the flesh.' But no one supposes that 'the world' and 'the flesh' are real persons, by whom living men are tempted, with whom they have to struggle, by whom they may be overcome and possessed nor do we in these days believe in the devil,' as the author of all evil'.

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of all diseases, all disorders in nature, all epidemics, droughts, inundations, famines,—all miseries, pains, sufferings, death.

These expressions do but serve to represent to us, in a definite compact form, certain classes of sins; and they also remind us that we are bound to resist those sins, with the same resolution and firmness, as if they were really personal enemies to overcome the world,' to 'crucify the flesh,' to resist the devil,' to fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil.'