little, in reality tells so much, and is fraught with such encouragement, and consolation, and heavenly wisdom. We have heard much in our time of the bondage of a creed; how we surrender our freedom when we tie ourselves down to forms of faith. We are told sometimes that truth is infinite, and that we shut ourselves out from the possibility of attaining to it if we commit ourselves to any set of opinions. This is the language of modern religious liberalism. But this new gospel does not tell men, what they all learn by sad experience, that in religion, as in moral action, there is no slavery so complete as the slavery to ourselves. True spiritual freedom is not the privilege of thinking as we like about God, any more than it is of acting as we like towards Him. Our Lord told His disciples that through His Word they should know the truth, and that the truth should make them free. He did not tell them that if they had freedom of action and belief it would lead them into truth. Who is the free man in an earthly community-he who obeys the laws, or he who seeks ever to evade them? Who sails the ocean in the confidence of security-he who obeys one unerring compass, or he who steers this way to-day and this to-morrow, trusting to

his latest guess? Who is free as regards the world to come-he whose view of it is St. John's, or he who changes his opinions from day to day, according to the last conversation, the last book, or his own mood, for the time, of mind or spirit? I think that any one whose views thus fluctuate, while he rejoices in his mental freedom, does not find a spiritual freedom follow in its train. He begins to weary of his uncertainty, and longs to find some justification for desisting from the endless search. He feels with regard to the pole-star of Faith as Wordsworth felt towards that of Duty:

"Me this unchartered freedom tires ;

I feel the weight of chance desires :

My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same."

And this desire for repose-a desire to find rest for the spirit in some thing or some person -is the master-yearning of every man's life. We want to be delivered from falsehoods, from vanities of all kinds, from delusions which hold us one day only to yield place to others the next. We try to find rest in some object short of the highest, and we feel that we are only hiding from us our own poverty, and that when

say,

this object has been attained there will remain a Power, a Righteousness, above us to which we have not been reconciled. St. John offers us a method, different from our own. He does not "Be good, be true, and you shall find out God." He says, "Take to your comfort a hope, and this hope shall make you pure." We have all, my brethren, tried for ourselves other methods. Let us try this, if it is yet untried, and see whether we shall not find a motive and a guide which can set us free from ourselves, and shed light upon many of those perplexities which hang about us yet, and make our pilgrimage, without that hope, a bitterness and a gloom.

SERMON III.

MURDER, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

(JUNE 30, 1867.)

"And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.”—2 SAM. xii. 7.

IF King David had lived in a period of what is called "secular" history, and in a time and country upon which modern religious or political prejudices could have been brought to bear, we may form some idea how his life would have been treated by historians. Books would have been written to extol him to the skies: books would also have been written to prove him a consistent hypocrite. On the one hand, his crimes would have been ignored, or palliated by the alleged necessities of policy: on the other, they would have formed the chief topic of the writer's eloquence, and we should have been asked to withhold common respect from the man who could deal as David dealt by Uriah the Hittite. Partisans would rise on both sides of the question, and men who had not the

means or the power of forming an opinion would ask, "What is truth?" Nay, might even ask the question—more dangerous still to leave long unanswered-"What are right and wrong?" He would have fared as Mary Stuart or Cromwell have fared. If David had had his Lingard, he would also have had his Froude.

But there is a third method of treatment to which the life of David would be probably subjected. Wearied with the special pleading of party, some writer would appear with a determination to resist the temptations of partisanship, and would set himself the task of proving that his hero was in reality no hero; that he was neither an angel nor a monster, but somewhere between the two. He would set himself to show that his good acts were neither so good, nor his bad acts so bad, as had been hitherto supposed. The good that was in him would be judged in some degree by reference to the evil; the evil, by reference to the good. A balance would be struck, and our attention would be called from the items on either side of the account to the result as arrived at by the biographer. This is the third kind of treatment which the King of Israel would have met with at the hands of historians.