than at all their other exhibitions of the same hardness; how the Jewish rulers met His divine anger with theirs, and decided that the only adequate answer to the demand,

Is it right to do good on the sabbath-day, or to do evil?' must be a conspiracy to put Him to death. St. John could not say more on these points. But there was a subject which it was his especial office to handle. He shows us how Jesus made the defence of the fourth commandment, in its letter and its spirit, a means of asserting His own relation to God. My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Man was bidden to work because God worked. Had GOD ceased to work, then, on the day of rest? Was He not nourishing the earth, and causing it to bring forth and bud on that day? Was He suspending His labours for His creatures on that day? The argument, like those about the ox and the ass falling into the pit, was broad, simple, direct; one of those which men who have lost their life, their humanity, their godliness, in their books, are tormented by hearing; one which opens the deepest abysses of thought and consolation to those who are seeking for a living God, for a Father of their spirits. But such seekers cannot be content with a command to work because God works, to rest because God rests,-they must know how the command can be obeyed. They must know on what foundation the command stands. If there is a Son of Man who can say, 'I work because He works; I do as my Father does;' He may give the sons of men power to work and power to rest. His union to them and to God is the foundation of both.

I have replied, then, to our second question as well as to the first. I have showed you how the act by which Christ, in the judgment of the Jews, broke the Sabbath-day,

uaturally led to what was in their judgment an act of blasphemy. It was not that He dispensed with a law of God because He was the Son of God. It was not that He put a new sense into the law of God because He was the Son of God. It was that He could interpret the law of God fully. It was that He could accomplish the law fully. It was that He could unfold the Gospel which was hidden in the law. It was that He could show in what God's rest consists, by showing in what His own rest consisted; what God's work was, by the works which He did Himself in the might of God's Spirit. And thus, by one sign, He declared that men are not the servants of angels, and that they are the children of a Father.

O brethren, may those to whom God has given a better and a nobler Sabbath, which commemorates God's rest in the risen Son of Man and Son of God, never forget the truth which He taught the Jewish people respecting their Sabbath, or repeat the Jewish sin by making it a mere legal day instead of His day!

DISCOURSE XII.

THE SON DOING THE FATHER'S WORK

[Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Easter, April 20, 1856.]

ST. JOHN V. 43.

I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.

I SPOKE to you last week upon these words,- Therefore the Jews sought to kill Jesus, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.' I tried to ascertain what connexion there was in their minds between these two offences; I tried also to show you how their feelings respecting the Sabbath-day were involved in their general feelings respecting the Law and respecting the dominion of angels. If there was a Son who was higher than angels, who could express the very mind of God-if that Son was actually in the nature of man-all their thoughts of God and of man must be changed; they must regard Him whom they worshipped as something else than a mere lawgiver, removed to an immeasurable distance from His creatures, only holding occasional intercourse with them through beings of a different order from their own. They must look upon human beings,-that is to say, not only upon theriselves, but upon publicans and heathens, upon

those whom they regarded as utterly cut off from God,-as standing in a very near and close relation with Him. This, therefore, was the most horrible of all conceptions to them, one which struck at the root of their pride, of that which they called their faith. They might suspect Jesus before, they might despise Him; but the moment He called God His Father, suspicion and contempt gave way to hatred. It was clear enough why He was setting institutions at nought; it was clear enough why He claimed to heal sick men, whom the ministrations of angels could not heal. By His words and His acts He was bringing God and man into the most dangerous proximity. He, 'being a man, was making Himself equal with God.'

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This last charge I did not dwell upon; I reserved it for our consideration to-day. The discourse of our Lord which follows in this chapter has reference to it. No words throw more light upon it than those which I have taken as my text from one of the latest verses. The answer to the charge begins in the nineteenth verse. 'Then answered Jesus, and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.' You will feel at once that this sentence is the expansion of that plea which Jesus put forth for the cure which He had wrought on the day of rest, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' But, I think, you will feel also how wonderfully it meets the other more awful accusation, that He was raising Himself to a level with God. If it had been true, it would not have been a new charge. Ye shall be as gods,' was the first temptation presented to human beings, the temptation to which they yielded. The ambition had never

ceased in any age or in any man. Jesus would have been but the Person who exhibited it in its highest power, who expressed it with the greatest boldness. But if the doctrine which St. John asserts at the beginning of his Gospel, which he has been working out in every passage of it since, is a sound one; if there is a Word who was with God and was God; if that Word was made flesh, and the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father shone forth in Him; then Jesus was the one Person in the world to whom this charge did not apply; the one Person in whom there was no ambition of making Himself equal with God. And this is what He declares here: You think I am exalting 'myself; on the contrary, this proclamation which I am making of a Father, this claim which I am putting forth to 'be His Son, is the abdication of all independent greatness, the denial that I am anything in myself. I can do 'nothing of myself but what I see the Father do.'

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Here is the new revelation, the discovery of the real ground upon which all things stand,-the will of a Father commanding, the will of a Son submitting. Here is that idea of Godhead which men had been seeking for,—if haply they might feel after it and find it,-in which they had been living and moving and having their being, yet which they had always been rebelling against and contradicting, and which every thought and act of self-will and pride had been putting at a distance from them. The lowliest of all, He who was called the 'carpenter's son,' was able to speak it out, to translate it into language, as His whole life. translated it into act. And this union of wills, this inward substantial Unity, He declares to have its basis in love, the underground of Deity,- For the Father LOVETH the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth.'