The Lamb and His Army.

Sermon preached in Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin.

"These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for He is the Lord of lords and King of kings, and they that are with Him are called and chosen and faithful."REV. xvii. 14.

THER

`HERE is a power in contrast to heighten effect and to set off beauty, which is universally felt and recognized. After the troubles of an angry sea, the haven of rest is most grateful; after a night of fitful gusts, and of sweeping rain-storm, the clear shining of a morning, balmy in its tranquil freshness, and rich in golden sunlight, wears an aspect of peculiar loveliness. And so in like manner, brethren, that heritage of peace which our blest Redeemer, ere He breathed His tender last farewell, bequeathed to His people, when He said " Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you," that legacy of peace,

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even the peace of God which passeth all understanding," can never be estimated at its real worth, can never be felt and known to be that priceless treasure which the Divine Testator meant it to be, until he who has received it has proved its power to keep his heart in troublous times, and has learned by experience that there is such a thing to be had on earth, to be had from God, as tral peace subsisting at the heart of boundless agitation." And this blessed truth, of which the Church of Christ has been learning the full reality with ever-increasing joy, from age to age, avails equally now (in all its consoling and compensating power) for the Church of to-day-for us, too, in our time of need and difficulty-for us upon whom the ends of the world have come ! And that it is so may well make us to "thank God and take courage," in the present crisis of the Church. For most assuredly, the existing aspect of things, whether regarded from the standpoint of politics or religion, is the very reverse of peaceful and assuring. That man must surely be blind and deaf, who does not see and hear enough to convince him that the sounds and signals of approaching conflict are vexing the political atmosphere; that the shadows, deep and dark, of a coming struggle are being projected on the track of the nations and of the Church; while on the one hand a cruel and usurping sacerdotalism, and on the other a turbulent and lawless democracy, are assuming proportions, formidable and appalling, with the possibility of our witnessing, before very long, a combination and conspiracy of the two against the truth of God,

and the liberties, the sacred liberties, of man!-—a repetition, in short, of that which took place, in a representative way, eighteen centuries ago and more, when Herod and Pilate were made friends together against Jesus Christ, though they had before been at enmity between themselves. With all this in view, our wisdom lies in looking rather at ourselves than at our difficulties, in seeing to it that we fully and rightly understand our responsibility as the soldiers of Christ, that we ourselves are in our right place in the great battle-field, and that we are bravely fulfilling there our own allotted parts and duties.

Now, the passage under consideration will help us to do this. It seems at once to sound the signal of danger, and to raise the song of victory! Read in the light of passing events, it confronts us at once with the lengthening shadows and the deepening darkness of a coming night of trial, and yet also with the rising glories of a morning of joy! It belongs, this passage does, to one of those two profoundest portions of Sacred Scripture which deal respectively, the one with the mysteries of God's love, the other with the deep things of His providence. This latter of the two, viz. :-the Book of Revelation-has been, as you all know, very variously expounded by different classes of interpreters. Some, (namely, those who hold what has been called the Preterist view) regarding the events here presented to us in symbol, as already fulfilled, substantially things of the past when viewed from the position in which we now stand. Others, again— namely, those who advocate the Futurist theory, choosing

rather to project all, or the greater portion, of the events here predicted into the future, and to refer them to that great day, the Day of the Lord, of which the seer speaks in the first chapter, when he tells us that he was

εν πνεύματι εν τη κυριακῇ ἡμερα”a theory which has found some of its ablest modern exponents amongst the alumni of this university, and which has been advocated not seldom in other days, from this very pulpit, in discourses marked by great ability and research. But between these two lines of interpretation, and in a measure distinct from either, there has been marked out a third-a kind of via media-by far, to my mind, the most consistent and intelligible of the three-namely, that which, while it deprecates any attempt to trace out a regular sequence of events from the contents of this book in the successive unfoldings of its sacred symbolism, nevertheless, assumes that much of what is written here is intended to foreshadow the history of the kingdom of Christ on earth, during the period between the Apostles' days and the second coming of the Son of Man—a line of interpretation which the analogy of Scripture elsewhere renders not only plausible, but, to my mind, probable in the highest degree. For it seems most unlikely that He who was careful to provide (in His Divine wisdom) that there should be extant for us a written record of His dealings with mankind and with His Church on earth for the previous 4,000 years, should suffer the last and most momentous period of its history to pass away without a like provision—a provision which obviously, as it was to