Tj In a chapter of reminiscences which is given at the end of the second volume of the Letters of Erskine of Linlathen, Principal Shairp writes ; " Mr. Erskine utterly repudiated the character which Eenan's Vie de JSsus drew of our Lord, and almost resented the fatuity which could separate with a sharp line the morality of the Gospels from their doctrinal teaching as to Christ Himself. He used to say, ' As you see in many English churches the Apostles' Creed placed on one side of the altar, on the other the Ten Commandments, so Kenan would divide as with a knife the moral precepts of the Gospels from their doctrines. Those he would retain, these he would throw away. Can anything be more blind ? As well might you expect the stem and leaves of a flower to flourish when you had cut away the root, as to retain the
1 W. M. Clow, TJie Secret 0/ the Lord, 65.
ST. MATTHEW xvi. i9 307
morality of the Gospels when you have discarded its doctrinal basis. Faith in Christ, and God in Christ, is the only root from which true Christian morality can grow.' " l
2. The history of St. Peter, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, reveals the facts that the lofty promise contained in the text was fulfilled in three important particulars.
(1) He is first in the first election to the vacant apostolate. He is first in the first great conversion of souls. His word rolls like the storm. It cuts and pierces like the sword. We do not require to have the imagination exalted by the vast gilded letters round the cupola of St. Peter's at Eome. This is truly to hold the keys, and to roll back the doors of the Kingdom !
T[ My mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life ; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved. But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preach- ing, because an entire change in his way of dealing with God's Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even altered — I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was " wise unto salvation " — but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing ; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh power — with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled, but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that n dsp/xbv irpaypa, burned with a new ardour ; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion or dwindled into lethargy. . . . From being elegant, rhetorical, and ambitious in his preaching, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved), keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity of meaning and power which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and 1 Letters of Thomas JSrskinc of Linlathtn, 1840-1870, p. 375,
308 THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM
deeper words. He then left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and ilutter around the circumference and corners ; he was bent on the centre, on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at another's hand: then he took up with the word "apprehend"; he had laid hold of the truth, — there it was, with its evidence, in his hand ; and every one who knew him must remember well how, in speak- ing with earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating way, looked into the palm of his hand, as if he actually saw there the truth he was going to utter.1
(2) But the great promise to Peter is fulfilled in a second way. Spiritual sin would steal into the Church ; it would glide in under a haze of profession and pretence, as Milton tells us that Satan passed in mist into Paradise. It is Peter who speaks with such awful power. Simon makes an attempt to buy the gift of God with money, and brands upon his own name for ever its ill- omened connexion with the foul offence (far from obsolete) of buying spiritual offices. Peter's voice pronounces his condemna- tion. " All men," says the Koran, " are commanded by the saint." All men know, if only by instinct, that this priesthood of good- ness has been won at the cross, in blood, the " crimson of which gives a living hue to all form, all history, all life." Let us no longer lose our purchase of this mighty term, through fear of its sacerdotal connotations. Dissociated from the institution, as it has been well pointed out, the true priest makes good his claims to mediatorship in the heart of his fellows, solely by the possession of those spiritual qualities which create and confirm the impres- sion that he is nearer to God than they.