walls and gates of pearl in the splendor of the revelation there. Many men hear and believe. Many men hear and do not believe. Suppose we took a higher strain; suppose we cast all selfishness aside; suppose we pointed to a world all full of wickedness, a world self-willed, rebellious against God; suppose we went to men and said: "Think of this. Every time any man humbly takes God's forgiveness, enters into Christ's service, begins a godly life, that man becomes a new witness to this world of how strong and good the Saviour is. Here is Christ. There are the men who need Him. If you will let Him fill and possess your life, He will make these men see Him through you. And look, how they need to see Him! Not for yourself now, but for them, for Him, take His forgiveness and give up yourself inwardly and outwardly to Him." So used one grows to find men respond to the noblest motives who are deaf to a motive which is less noble, that I am ready to believe that there are men among you, whose faces I know, whom I have so often urged to be Christians, who might feel this higher appeal. Is it nothing that by a new purity and devotion in your life, brought there by obedience to Christ, you may help men out of their sins to Him? His promises seem to the men you meet too good to be true, so glorious and sweet that they are unreal. Take them to yourself. Let them shine in their manifest power through the familiar windows of your life. Be a new man in Christ for these men's sake. Put your hand in His, that as He leads you other men, who have turned away from Him, may look and see you walking with Him, learn to love Him through your love. I do not believe any man ever yet genuinely, humbly, the roughly gave himself to Christ without some

other finding Christ through him. I wish it might tempt some of your souls to the higher life. I hope it may. At least I am sure that it may add a new sweetness and nobleness to the consecration which some young heart is making of itself to-day, if it can hear, down the new path on which it is entering, not merely the great triumphant chant of personal salvation, "Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins be glory and dominion;" but also the calmer, deeper thanksgiving for usefulness, "Blessed be the God of comfort, who comforteth us that we may be able to comfort them that are in tribulation."

Such are a few of the illustrations and applications of the truth which I have tried to define and to urge upon you this morning. The truth is that we are our best when we try to be it not for ourselves alone, but for our brethren; and that we take God's gifts most completely for ourselves when we realize that He sends them to us for the benefit of other men, who stand beyond us needing them. I have spoken very feebly, unless you have felt something of the difference which it would make to all of us if this truth really took possession of us. It would make our struggles after a higher life so much more intense as they become more noble. "For their sakes I sanctify myself," said Jesus; and He hardly ever said words more wonderful than those. There was the power by which He was holy; the world was to be made holy, was to be sanctified through Him. I am sure that you or I could indeed be strengthened to meet some great experience of pain if we really believed that by our suffering we were to be made luminous with help to other men. They are to get from us painlessly what we have got most painfully from God. There is the power of the

bravest martyrdom and the hardest work that the world has ever seen.

And again, it would make our spiritual lives and experiences more recognizable and certain things. Not by mere moods, not by how I feel to-day or how I felt yesterday, may I know whether I am indeed living the life of God, but only by knowing that God is using me to help others. No mood is so bright that it can do without that warrant. No mood is so dark that, if it has that, it need despair. It is good for us to think no grace or blessing truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.

I have not painted an ideal and impossible picture to you to-day, my friends. This truth and all the motives that flow from it may really fill your life. They filled the life of Christ. Come near to Him; be like Him, and they shall fill yours. So your Gethsemane and the angels that come to you after it may be precious to you as His were to Him, not only for the peace which they brought Him, but because they were to be the fountain of strength and hope to countless souls forever. May God grant us something of the privilege of Christ, which was to live a manly life for God's sake, and also to live a godly life for men's sake; for it was thus that He was mediator between God and man.

11.

THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE.

"Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now?"-- JOHN xiii. 37.

It is from passages like this that we have all gathered our impression of St. Peter's character, an impression probably clearer and more correct than we have with regard to any other of the Lord's disciples. Here is all his impulsiveness and affection, the unreasonableness and impatience which still excite our admiration and our love because they strike the note of a deeper and diviner reason, of which the prudent people seldom come in sight. They were sitting together at the Last Supper. Jesus had just told his friends that He must leave them. Simon Peter was the first to leap forward with the question, "Lord, whither goest Thou?" Jesus replied, “Whither I go thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me afterwards." There was the promise of a future companionship between the disciple and the Master, which was to carry on and complete the compan ionship of the past, whose preciousness was now coming out as it drew near its close. There opened before the loving man a mysterious but beautiful prospect of some more perfect paths through which he might walk with Jesus, and find the completion of that intercourse of which the well-remembered walks through the streets of Jerusa

len and the lanes of Galilee had been only the promise The keen joy of dying with his Lord seemed all that was needed to finish the joy of living with Him; and when he sees all this deferred, when Christ is, as it seems, gathering up His robes to walk alone into the experience that lies before Him, Peter breaks out in a cry of impatience, "Why cannot I follow Thee now?" The life with Jesus, which is the only life for him, seems to be passing hopelessly away. The promise of a future day when it shall be restored to him does not satisfy him; indeed it hardly seems to take hold of him at all. He wants it now. It was unreasonable. So it is unreasonable when by the side of your friend's grave you wish that you could die and enter at once upon the everlasting companionship. So it is unreasonable when, as your friend goes alone into a cloud of sorrow, the sunlight of prosperity in which you are left standing seems hateful to you, and you grudge him his solitary pain. How unreasonable Peter was appeared only a few hours later, when his denial proved his unfitness to go with Jesus into the mystery and pain which He was entering. It is an unreasonable impatience, but it is one that makes us love and honor the unreasonable man, and adds a new pleasure to the study of all Peter's after-life, as we watch him treading more and more in his Lord's footsteps, and at last really fol lowing his Lord into His glory.

It has seemed to me as if this verse opened a great subject, one which is continually pressing upon us, one that is full of practical bewilderments; a subject that must come home to the thoughts of many of the people in this congregation. That subject is, The Withheld Completions of Life. St. Peter felt dimly that the life of