The Pulpit Commentary — Acts — Volume 1 — Section 14

eocioty, of which the gospel l\lone was the first seed I Now turn to the beginnings of the gospel as here exhibited. One upper chl\mber at JeruS1Llem, a city in the 11\Bt de.ye of its trouhled existence, contained tho whole number of those who acknowledged Christ as their Miu;ter. Measured by any worldly standard, e.nything feebler or more absolutely insignifice.nt the.n the.t company cannot be imagined. Dut the grain of mustard Beed was to become a. tree in which the birds of the air should mako their nests; the little leaven was to leaven the whole lump; the stone was to become a great mountain which should fill the whole earth. And so it has como to pass thRt the upper chamber at Jerusalem has p;rown into the Church Catholic, the mother of all the saints that a.re, or have been, or a.re to be hereafter. What an infinite encouragement to our faith is this! What a ground for adoration of him whose grace and power and faithfulness work such marvellous effects I ,vhat a ground of sure and certain hope that he who bas cn.rried his work thus far will finish it, to his own glory, and the exceeding joy of the Church which he has redeemed with his precioll8 blood I Vers. 15-26.-The rewards of iniquity. The physical laws by which the material world is governed are not more fixed and certain than the moral laws which secure to iniquity its just reward. Nor bas tbo pa.tieut a.nd honest inquirer more di!Bculty in ascertaining those laws than the physicist has in ascertaining tho laws of nature by observation and experiment. Neither is it peculiar to Holy Scripture to set forth the sequences of cause and effect which occur under those moral laws; the history of the world and our own daily experience do so likewise. Holy Scripture does but record and exhibit typical and striking instances by which our own observation nnd experience are confirmed. Now, there is one feature common to a great many, perhaps more or less to all, acts of iniquity, viz. that they have, so to speak, a double reward. There is the reward which the worker contemplated as the fruit of his misdoing; and there is the reward which he lost sight of, but which followed by an inevitable necessity of the moral Law of God. Both are clearly exhibited in the awful case of Judas. The reward which he looked for, and for the sake of which he betrayed the innocent blood, was the possession of thirty pieces of silver. We know the poverty of the Son of man, and that he had no silver or gold., no houses or lands,I with which to reward his followers. We know how days of toil succeeded one the other during which the gains were indeed immense-souls nourished, enlightened, instructed in the Word of God, prepared for the kingdom of heaven, weaned from sin, won to righteousness-but not such gains as would please the worldly mind. And we know the mind of Judas, that it was very covetous and greedy of lucre. We know with what eyes he looked upon Mary's costly offering of love, and how he was wont to rob the bag which contained the al.ms for the poor. We can well believe, therefore, that to a mind so constituted and so depraved the possession of thirty pieces of silver appeared no mean reward. It would be some consolation for the loss of the portion of the three hundred pence which he might have abstracted from the bag had the ointment been sold and tho price given to the poor. Perhaps he had set his heart upon that very field which was bought with the price of blood, and which was to become the strangers' burial-ground. .Anyhow, be got his reward. He did the deed and he got the money," the reward of iniquity"- the reward which he looked for as the fruit of his sin. .And sinners very often do get their expected reward. .Adam and Eve became "as gods, knowing good and evil ; " Gehazi obtained his two talents of silver and his two changes of garments; Ahab got possession of the coveted vineyard ; Zimri gained a throne by the slaughter of the house of Baasha; the men o! Gibeah slaked their lust on the Levite's concubine; liatred, revenge, ambition, continually by iniquity obtain th~ir reward, a~d the pages of Scripture and of profane history, as well as our own expenence, teem with examples of the reward of successful wickedness. But now let us look at the other reward of iniquity; that which comes in due season as the inevitable fruit of ~he just judgment of God; that of which Horace, heathen as he was, Hpoke, when he said- " Raro antecedentem ecelestum Deaeruit pede pcena claudo." Judas has got his money. Perhaps he has concluded his bargain for the field. He ia '10 longer a poor man like bis llfastcr.The former j!;ains of robbery ba,·c been swelled  on. 1. 1-26.] TllE AOTS OF THE APOSTLES. 0