tolerated and sinners emboldened, through your simplicity, your timidity, your faint resistance, or your half-hinted consent! Truly you have need of sound wisdom and high principle in your walk through an evil world. The men of the world are ready enough to misunderstand even what is right in you, and to speak evil even of what is good. Give them no room for the sly remark, the shrewd suspicion, the insinuated doubt, which the very appearance of evil in you will suggest. Plead not an innocent or a laudable design, as though your policy might tend to win. souls. Be not wiser than your God; but be faithful to him. It were hard to say how much of the world's carelessness in sin, as well as of the ill success of the gospel, may be ascribed to the feebleness of the testimony which believers bear against the world, and the uncertain sound which their trumpet gives. Let there be more decision among true Christians, a higher tone of feeling, a higher standard of conduct-greater consistency, greater earnestness, greater separation, a more unequivocal zeal for God, a more unhesitating care and consideration for the interests of righteousness and the souls of men; and the people of the world may be made at last to know and feel that Christianity does put a real distinction, now and for ever, between them and the people of God. Alas for the tendency of many a Christian's walk to cherish the very opposite delusion! When unconverted men find you in their company, free and unconstrained, nay, ready to go along with them in some doubtful liberty of pleasure, or some questionable plan of profit, do they understand, can they be satisfied, that you really believe them to be in a

lost and guilty state? Are you at any pains to show them and make them feel that you believe this? Would it not be benevolent in you to do so? Are they under the wrath of God?-are they going down to hell? Do you believe that they are? And is it fair, is it generous, is it kind, to leave them, amid all your intercourse with them, still by possibility under the impression that, after all, you cannot seriously think the difference between you and them so very vital, else you would scarcely treat them and their plans and pleasures so favourably as they see that you do? Your tender mercies are cruel indeed, if such be the issue of them! Be sure that, not less out of charity to them than out of a regard to your own safety, it concerns you to realize, and to live as realizing, the momentous truth-" We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness" (1 John v. 19). Such knowledge is no nurse of vain-glory; for it implies a recognition of the free gift of God: "And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life" (1 John v. 20). And it deepens and renders intense the feeling of duty and responsibility: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen" (1 John v. 21).

VII.

HEROD WEAKNESS GROWING INTO

WICKEDNESS.

ON THE CHARACTER OF HEROD, TETRARCH OF GALILEE,

MARK VI. 14-19.

"And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her."-MARK Vi. 26.

THERE is a very remarkable quality to be observed in the evangelical histories; it is the tone of calm simplicity and candour which uniformly pervades them. Among many singular and admirable characteristics of their style and manner of composition, this is not the least. There is everywhere a mild and passionless equanimity, a quiet dignity, which marks the guidance and superintendence of a spirit truly divine. Not a trace, not a vestige or feature, anywhere occurs of wrath, or bitterness, or envy, or railing accusation, or evil speaking, or malice, or resentment, or any of those seeds and symptoms of human passion, which are so apt to disfigure the writings of uninspired men on subjects which interest and excite their feelings. With entire self-possession, or rather with an entire oblivion and forgetfulness of self, they write as the disciples of the meek and lowly Jesus,-who, when reviled, reviled not again,-when buffeted, threatened not.

Nor is theirs the calmness of affected philosophic im

partiality, the indifference or insensibility which some think it the height of wisdom to assume when they write, as if in carelessness or in scorn of all the high and spirit-stirring recollections, and the deep, heart-moving associations, which their subject should suggest. The writers of the New Testament are not thus destitute of interest and sympathy in what they write. They write with feeling. They write from the heart. None, indeed, could write narratives so simply and profoundly cordial and hearty, without being hearty and cordial themselves. But yet what is remarkable in them is, that they are never betrayed or hurried into the slightest excess. There is not a word, not a hint, of extravagance or exaggeration, or unbecoming heat and intemperance: all is fervour, indeed; but it is the chastened and subdued fervour of heavenly meekness. They never lose their temper. They are never hastily provoked to utter unadvisedly one single sentence. They never wonder, though they have wonderful things to tell of. They never fret or rage, though they have intolerable wrongs to set forth. They show no studied enthusiasm to recommend their cause, no impatient resentment against its adversaries; although theirs was a cause to rouse from their depths all the soul's emotions of admiration, exultation, triumph, and revenge. Still there is no violence of feeling in what they write, but a plain and temperate record of facts.

And is not this especially singular? Is it not a proof of divine influence restraining all human pride and human wrath, and leaving nothing but the forbearance and single-minded devotion to the majesty of sacred truth,

becoming the historians of Heaven's own acts and counsels? Even when they are most tempted to launch forth into declamation, or to indulge in invective, still all the narrative is calm.

Here, for instance, what an occasion had they for impassioned oratory! What a handle for stirring men's minds might they have seized in the tale of cruel wrong which they had to relate! No colours could be too dark to paint the atrocity of the transaction; no language strong enough to denounce and stigmatize the perpetrators of so foul an enormity. There is the mean and dastard tyrant, who would fain have been a villain had he dared, but whose coward spirit made him a mere tool. There are the monsters in female form, whom unhallowed lust and passion converted into blood-bounds. And the deed itself unparalleled in the annals of cold-blooded crime, a match for the blackest cruelties of the blackest pages of Roman story, casting quite into the shade that savage inhumanity which could make its jest of slaughter, and find a fit accompaniment for its strains of levity in the carnage and conflagration of a devoted city! Here was an occasion that seemed to justify, nay, to call for indignation,-here was a theme on which the friends of the murdered and martyred saint might well be expected

to grow warm.

But no. They forget not their character as historians of heavenly truth. They condescend to no vivid painting, no passionate upbraiding. They simply discharge their office, and tell their story. Nay, it appears almost as if, instead of exposing the full and aggravated enor