and despair. Dear friend, you mistake. Satan's agency

does not exclude God's.

God permits it for good.

Satan means it for evil, but

Satan would make it the means of your undoing. God intends it to test you, to stimulate you, to show you your own weakness, but to show you also his power to save. Do not let Satan have his way! Cry mightily to God! He will enable you to overcome, and to tread down Satan under your feet. He may not take away the thorn, but he will surely say to every one who trusts him: "My grace is sufficient for thee; for my power is made perfect in weakness."

King Henry the Seventh had as his emblem, in all the windows of his palaces and churches, a carven crown in a bush of thorns. It had a double significance. On the one hand, in this life there are thorns for every crown of pleasure or riches or power or honor; and, on the other hand, for all the thorns that pierce the flesh during the Christian's earthly pilgrimage there is a crown of glory in God's future kingdom. Let me add to Henry the Seventh's emblem this meaning also: We do not have to wait for the kingdom, but we have it even here. John speaks of the kingdom and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ. Bearing the thorn in the flesh, in the strength of Christ, we have already victory achieved and heaven begun. We are more than conquerors through him that loved us; our very pains are turned to pleasures; and, whether we see it or not, the angels see, and God our Father sees, the amaranthine crown upon our brows.

XXXIII

1 CHRIST'S MORAL SYSTEM 1

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. (Phil. 4:8.)

IT has sometimes been urged as an objection to Christianity that, if it does not cultivate really ignoble qualities of character, it certainly leaves out of its plan of human development some of the elements of true manhood, and so is false by defect. It has seemed to me that a sermon upon Christian morality, its essential characteristics and aims, might remove any such unjust impressions and convince us of its supreme claims upon us. I shall best accomplish my purpose by arranging my thoughts in a series of answers to the question: In what respects is the moral teaching of the Christian system superior to the moral teachings of other systems of religion? Of course I mean by the Christian system, not the practices or prejudices of any given body of men who call themselves Christians, but the teachings of Christ and his apostles, as we find them in the New Testament. Let us go to the fountainheads and judge each system by the words of its foun

1 A sermon preached in the Emmanuel Baptist Church, Albany, N. Y., July 29, 1883.

ders. If possible let us look at Christian morality and other systems of morality in their essential principles, and determine which is most worthy of our study and adoption.

The words of the apostle which I have taken for my text intimate, first of all, that the moral precepts of Christianity are not necessarily new or undiscoverable by human reason, but that their superiority lies rather in their combination and complete freedom from error. It cannot be denied, nor should we wish to deny, that more or less clear adumbrations of Christ's noblest precepts occasionally appear in the writings of heathen who lived before his advent, or who knew nothing of his teachings. Confucius published the Golden Rule when he said: "What you wish done to yourself, do to others," and declared that his doctrine consisted in "having the heart, and in loving one's neighbor as one's self." "Hatred," says a Buddhist sacred book, "does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love-this is the eternal rule." "It is never right to return an injury," says Plato. "A philosopher, when smitten, must love those that smite him, as if he were the father, the brother of all men," said Epictetus. “It is peculiar to man," said Marcus Antoninus, "to love even those who do wrong. Ask thyself daily to how many ill-minded persons thou hast shown a kind disposition." "He compares the wise and humane soul," says a recent writer, " to a spring of pure water which blesses even him who curses it; and the Oriental story likens such a soul to the sandalwood tree, which imparts its fragrance even to the axe which cuts it down."

There are such precepts as these in the writings of heathen moralists. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that on this account the moral systems of the heathen could bear comparison with that of Christ. For such precepts as these are rare indeed before Christ came; rather the venturous guesses of a noble mood than the fundamental principles upon which a whole body of doctrine was built; single rays of the true light flashing out amid great darkness, rather than indications that universal benevolence was recognized, even in philosophy, as the soul of morals. Side by side with these fragmentary glimpses of truth are multitudinous and fatal errors. Confucius, for example, recognized no personal God as the author of law and the model of love; the worship of an abstract heaven and an abstract earth which he established was united with a worship of departed spirits and a worship of himself. Buddhism likewise was a moral system devoid of all authority, because it confessed no supreme God, who was at once Legislator and Judge; while by substituting for God's approbation the selfish motive of accumulating a stock of merits, it made virtue to be a mere calculating prudence. Plato held that men needed no motive but the right itself—if you taught them right they would be sure to do it-and then in his ideal Republic he abolished marriage and the family, encouraged some most shameless vices, and provided for the putting to death of young children that were diseased or deformed. Epictetus had for his ultimate virtue a philosophic insensibility; we should not suffer ourselves to be troubled by anything external, nor be moved in the least by the sufferings or the wickedness

of our neighbors; even the wife and children of the philosopher should be reckoned as things external to him. And Marcus Aurelius, Stoic as he was, was a prey to superstition, and persecuted Christianity. The uncertainty and nothingness of all human things," says another, "the resistless stream of life in whose vortex all being is swallowed up and disappears, was the ever-recurring burden of his thoughts. Sorrow and disappointment cast a black veil of mourning over his whole system of contemplation and over almost every one of his reflections. Farewell to hope! all ye who enter here,' was the inscription over the gate leading to the Sanctuary of the Stoa."

I have thus set the errors and defects of these heathen writers over against their occasional utterances. of moral truth, not to disparage them, but simply to show the relation they sustain to Christ. They give us faint rays of light, like the first glimmerings of the dawn, but Christ is the Sun, from whose unseen disk all their light proceeded, and who gathers up all into himself when once he has risen upon the world. It is no objection to Christianity that some of its truths were dimly perceived before Jesus came. This only shows that Christianity is founded on the needs and constitution of human nature, and therefore is eternal truth, just as the great doctrines of our religion, Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, Judgment were faintly foreshadowed by the wild mythologies and rites of paganism; and this only proves that human nature craves such doctrines to satisfy its wants, but finds its satisfaction only in the clear revelations of the Scriptures. So the broken lights of morality among