plural form. The Professor's curiosity was aroused, and he asked : " Why do you put it so ? Is there another that you wish peace to ? " " Yes," replied the Jew, " Peace be to you and to the angel over your shoulder."
1. The first gift that Jesus had for them was a high confidence in their cause. Without that a Christian life cannot well be lived. He does not mean that we should live by sufiferance, creeping timidly under the shadow of men's example ; we are to have eyes and a conscience to know the truth, and courage to maintain it. The Christian Church has been built up by the fidelities of true men, and it gains no strength from those who have not courage to be faithful. These will come in thousands when the fashion once is set, but they bring nothing with them. They, certainly, can never be described as the city set on a hill which cannot be hid. Jesus Christ is the Lord of all the brave, and His gift is the high heart which sees its course and does not reckon odds.
^ Peden, the Covenanter, speaks for all right Christians when he says, " For my part, I seek no more, if He bids me go." And in one of his sermons the refrain is this : " They sought no more than His commandment ; they went and He carried them well through." ^
2. But the deijpest hurt in the life of a man is not the ill his neighbour threatens ; there is a controversy behind that, a war in his own conscience, a sense that his own life is wrong, and that God and he are somehow not at one. And " Christ preached peace." He brought forgiveness to men, the assurance of God's forgetful- ness. To the most faulty He declared the goodwill of God, assuring them of a place in His heart from which all their sin and folly have not banished them. There are powers in God to part us from our sin, so that it can never rise against us any more ; and these powers are centred in the Cross of Christ, in which right was done to justice by Him who came to rescue men from what they had deserved.
^ Christian peace, the peace which Christ gives, the peace which He sheds abroad in the heart, is it aught else than a glorified harmony ; the expelling from man's life of all that was causing disturbance there, all that was hindering him from chiming in with the music of heaven, in which now shall ^ W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ theSono/Ood, 173.
ST. JOHN XX. 19, 20 339
mingle for ever the consenting songs of redeemed men and elect angels ? ^
^ I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.^
^ The realization of our peace with God, which constitutes or causes peace with ourselves, presupposes the reality of that peace with God; it does not create it. The fact must precede the knowledge of the fact, it cannot result from it. The ear does not discourse sweet music, or the eye produce a pleasant picture ; in each case the organ of sense embraces an already existing reality. The rule holds good in the spiritual creation. That perfect harmony of will and reason and religious emotion which we denominate peace of conscience is not the cause of the sinner's reconciliation with an offended God, neither is it identical with it ; it is the result and product of an actual reconciliation. For the condition of our own minds is as it were the shadow and reflection of the relation in which we stand to God. So long as we are at enmity with Him, so long as we feel ourselves to be exposed to His most righteous indignation, there is strife and war and tumult in our hearts. Only out of peace with God, and the conscious realization of that peace, can flow quiet of heart and peace of conscience.^
^ Perhaps no Christian, since the days of the Apostles, has illustrated the true peace of the soul, which Jesus Christ gives, so fully as the great St. Augustine. Eead his " Confessions." What a restless life his was before his conversion. His intellect was tossed on the waves of speculation, and he could grasp no re- assuring truth. His heart was distracted by the ideals of false philosophy and sensuality in its various Protean forms. His conscience was profoundly stirred by conviction of sin ; he was hurried along by a very tempest of passions, and there was no peace.
Then came his conversion. Jesus " rose in the soul." There was a change, which brought peace. Tolle, lege, " Take it up and read," were the words he heard in his agony ; and he took up the scroll and read, "The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness " ; and those words of St. Paul fell on the ear of his soul, and there was peace. His intellect surveys the vast realms of revelation and nature, and sees Christ — the Divine Logos — everywhere. His heart turns its
^ Archbishop Trench, in The Litera/ry Chv/rchmom (1892), 167. 2 Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Flosa. « W. B. Jones, The Peace of God, 860.