with pleasure and delight, and will now in your hearing, as it were, and ere long in their hearing also, hear testimony to your integrity, to the unspeakable comfort of your souls. O be careful to keep a conscience void of offence both towards God and towards man. Remember that, as your comfort de- pends on the preservation of your integrity, so does his honour. The ungodly may do what they will, and no reflections are cast upon religion : but if an Israelite do any thing unworthy of his profession, the Gospel itself, yea, and the Lord Jesus Christ also, is condemned for it. Cut off occasion then from those who seek occasion to calumniate the way of truth ; that while you have the comfort of your integrity, God may be glorified by it, and his enemies be put to silence.]
John ii. 11. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory ; and his Disciples believed on him.
AFTER thirty years of privacy, the time was come for our Lord to enter on his public ministrations. He had received both visible and audible testimony from heaven, and had been pointed out by his fore- runner, John the Baptist, as " the Lamb of God, that should take away the sin of the world." Now at a marriage feast he begins in a private and unosten- tatious way that series of miracles to which he after- wards appealed as incontrovertible proofs of his Divine mission. Who the parties were, whose nup- tials were here celebrated, we know not : but, from the peculiar interest which the mother of Jesus took in accommodating the guests, we think it highly probable, that they were some friends or relatives of her own. But, however that might be, our blessed Lord made that feast the occasion of working his first public miracle, and thereby of manifesting forth his glory.
The two points for our consideration are,
I. The manifestation which our Lord here gave of his glory —