which he owed, and which he could never pay: but because he would not forgive his fellow-servant the hundred pence, his lord delivered him to the tormentors until he should pay all that was due unto him. Let us take warning from his example. In the first novelty of awakened convictions, in the first overwhelming accusations of conscience, in the first moments of the sense of pardon, we may perhaps be incapable of ungenerously denying to others that which we have just experienced ourselves on so much more magnificent a scale: it may be unlikely that when first we hear the words of compassion from the mouth of our much injured Lord, when first we saw the price which was paid for our transgressions, we could insist with jealous rigour on our own rights, and take our debtors by the throat. But a time may come when, having gone out from the presence of our merciful Lord, we may forget his benefits: a time may come when the first flush of novel gratitude shall have given way to the self-satisfied contentment of ancient and assured possession: when being no longer overwhelmed by the hopelessness of accumulated debt we shall have ceased to remember the agony with which we sought its remission. There is such a thing, as the very Apostle whose question occasioned this parable assures us, there is such a thing as the becoming forgetful of the purification of former sins1. From the fearful consequences of such forgetfulness may God in his infinite mercy deliver us!

Those who have been forgiven much, naturally love 1 2 Pet. i. 9.

much in return: they love God, whose mercy has been so signally extended to themselves: they love the brethren, who are the common objects of God's bounty, and animated with a common affection for the Redeemer. But it is because they continually feel the greatness of the sins which have been remitted them that they thus love: it is because their "iniquity is ever before them" that their hearts burn with gratitude and sympathy. God may forget, as he has in his unutterable inconceivable mercy promised that he will forget all our sins, and remember our iniquities no more: but such forgetfulness were unsafe for us. We have no better security against pride and all its bad concomitants of unforgiving obduracy and exaggerated sensitiveness, than constant remembrance of what was our condemnation before we obtained pardon. If ever we find ourselves getting into a habit of taking for granted the petition in which we daily pray for daily remission of our sins; if we find ourselves avoiding selfexamination upon the subject of our relations with our fellow-men; if ever we begin to detect a morbid accuracy in recollecting wrongs and injuries; if ever we find a rising disposition to look rather to our rights on others than to our duties towards others—we may conclude that forgetfulness of past remission is stealing over us, and is blinding us to our present far different state and if we are wise, if we will condescend to be warned before it be too late by that word of God which refuses to be bound by the trammels of any system of theology, we shall not encourage ourselves with what may be the delusive

assurance of our final perseverance, but shall at once return to our God with the most humble and earnest prayer that he would not suffer us to fall back into the condemnation which awaits those who, forgetting the magnitude of their remitted guilt, for ever forfeit the mercy which they refuse to grant !

SERMON VII.

ST MATTH. iv. 1, and vi. 13.

“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen."

THE history to which the first of these texts introduces, and the petition which forms the second, lead to the darkest, at once the most mysterious and most awful, recesses of the human constitution and of the spiritual world. Temptation and its Author are here brought before us and we are instructed by the very Being who was designedly exposed thereto, to pray that we may be spared the fearful trial. Let us consider the subject practically and may God enable us to arrive at that practical sense of it which shall conduce to our eternal deliverance from evil!

I invite your attention to a practical, as opposed to a speculative treatment of the subject, because I am convinced that all speculative knowledge is here denied us. So long as we are in our present state, all we can know is what the Bible plainly tells us. To attempt being wise

above what is written is here the merest folly. For can we pretend to understand how the sinless Son of God could be really tempted of the Evil One to sin? Can we understand how He who was purity impersonated could really feel the seductive force—the persuasive stress—of temptation to do wrong? And yet had not Jesus experienced this in all its energy, how could the Apostle have ventured to comfort us with those words, of which so many have felt the powerful consolation," We have not an High Priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one that was in all points tempted like as we are1!" Of God in his own solitary essence St James declares, that "He cannot be tempted of evil2:" and the very contrast between this declaration concerning God in Himself, and the declaration of another Apostle concerning the God-Man, Christ Jesus, does but more plainly evince and more forcibly exhibit the truth and the reality of our Saviour's temptation. Unless we shrink from the plainest declarations of Holy Writ, we must believe that Christ was as really tempted as Adam was: as really as any of ourselves are tempted: though unlike Adam and ourselves, "without sin1." This is the difference. Temptation had no effect on Him, save to enable him more fully to sympathise with us. But how this could be-how a Being in whose Person the Divine and the Human were inseparably joined could be subjected to the full force and sense of that from which the Divine, in itself, is infinitely sundered,—this is a mystery as much

1 Heb. iv. 15.

2 James i. 13.