of our strength. We shall come so close up to all the world's wickedness that it cannot strike us. We shall be saved from it by our pity for it. We shall be far from its contagion the closer that we come to its needs. We shall be as pure as the angels the more completely we give ourselves up to the ministering angels' work. This is the true positiveness of the Christian's purity the real safety of the loving and laboring life.

These, then, are the powers for our preservation. I cannot recount them without feeling anew how deep they go. Is it then true that none of us can keep himself unspotted from the world unless his life be full of reverence for God and trust in Christ and tender pity for his fellow-men? What is that but to say, that "Except a man be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God?" Oh, what poor makeshifts all our laws and decencies and proprieties appear beside the live power of the new manhood of grace. Oh, how hard and hopeless seems the prudent, watchful, timid man, who is trying to save himself by constant self-denials, beside the new freeman of the Lord Jesus Christ, full of the high ambitions and sure hopes of the heavenly life.

Some of the world's dangers change from age to age. Our own time has its own forms of danger, and it is free from some that once beset our fathers. But so long as the world is still the world, the great mass of its corrupt influence is still the same. Lust, falsehood, cruelty, injustice, selfishness, these are about us as they were about Noah and Abraham and Moses. But it is possible to be so given up to Christ and to fellow-man that they shall not hurt us. It is possible for us to walk through the fire and not be burned; but it depends always and wholly

upon whether He walks there with us. Let us not trust ourselves, for we are weakness. Let us trust Him, and work for all who need us, for so shall we go pure through all impurity, and come at last home, where the children shall be safe forever in the Father's house, the sheep gathered forever into the Shepherd's fold.

XI.

A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON.

Then were there two thieves crucified with Him. - MATT. xxvii. 38. "I am crucified with Christ."- GAL. ii. 20.

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WHOEVER reads the story of our Lord's crucifixion as we have read it here this morning feels that a part of its humiliation was that He did not suffer alone. Crucifixion was terrible and disgraceful enough in itself, but if Jesus had hung upon His cross with nothing near him to disturb the impression of His calm serenity and innocence, it might well have happened that the people who stood and watched would have lost sight of the disgrace, and would have felt the majesty of the sacrifice. Already that place of suffering might have seemed as glorious as it has seemed to the world since. An awe and wonder, almost ready to break out in thankfulness and praise, might have spread through the multitude who watched the spectacle of heroism and love. But, as it was, they went to the prison and dragged out two wretched culprits who were waiting for their doom. That there might be no doubt about the disgracefulness of the Saviour's sufferings, they hung Him between two thieves. One on the right hand and the other on the left, those malefactors advertised the ignominy of His pain. Their friends, the thieves and roughs of Jerusalem, were side by side with His disciples in the crowd. The loathing of all honest

men was heaped upon them, and He, hanging there with them, in the same condemnation, was covered with the mantle of their sin. He had come into their lot. He

bore their curse. He took His share in their disgrace when He was crucified with them.

It was not many years afterward that the great St Paul, whose life had become wonderful to himself as he saw under what new motives and to what new purpose it was lived since he became a disciple of Jesus, when he tried to sum up that life and tell the beauty of its associ ation with his Lord, used this strange language: "I am crucified with Christ." His life was full of suffering, and suffering which had to do with sin. He found himself every day "dying to the world," that is, separated by self-sacrifice and pain from the wicked things about him. In all that suffering, which was at once the token and the means of higher life, he felt himself drawn towards and taken into the experience of his Master. he was suffering, so Jesus had suffered. As he by his suffering was able at once to bear his testimony against, to separate himself from, and also to help the sinful world, so Jesus had declared, upon His cross, at once His holiness and His pity. Paul saw in his ministry of self-sacrifice a dim, imperfect, far-off echo of his Lord's, and so he told the story of his new life in the terms of the story of that life into which it had entered, and he said, "I am crucified with Christ."

As

I have brought these two passages together, because, in their union, they bring out the complete truth on which we wish to dwell upon Good-Friday. The cross before which we stand to-day has both its humiliation and its glory. It is a tragedy that bewilders and dis

mays us. It is likewise a proclamation of peace and hope. In the degradation of Christ, which compelled Him to be crucified with the thieves, there is a picture of how very low He stooped to our condition. In the triumph of Paul, at his participation with Christ, we see how the believer is taken into his Master's privilege. The two belong together. Christ was humiliated into our condition that we might be exalted unto His. Christ was crucified with man that man might rejoice in being crucified with Christ. Both the depth to which He went to seek man and the height up to which He would carry man, were set forth in the cross. Alas for him who, standing on Good-Friday and looking at the crucifixion, does not see both of these, does not learn at once how low his Saviour went to find him, and how high he may go if he will make his Saviour's life his own! Let us look at both the scenes. Let us try to understand both thoughts, Christ's crucifixion with man, and man's crucifixion with Christ, and bind them both together in one humbling and inspiring truth.

Turn, then, first, to the cross upon Calvary, and let us think about Christ's crucifixion with man. In the prison at Jerusalem there are two robbers lying, waiting for their death. It is sure to come. Their crimes have doomed them to it. As they look back over their miserable lives they can see how from their boyhood, when their vice began, they have been steadily and certainly moving on towards this destiny. Their sin has deepened, and, with their deepening sin, the darkness of the coming death has gathered round them. They have known whither they were going. They have known that some time or other a life like theirs must bring a violent