Him, yet His love would be discovered as itself the fountain of them all. Even the Son, the great Intercessor, will not say to them that He will pray for them, if they take prayer to mean anything which is to alter the Father's purpose, or augment His love. For of His will His own words are the utterance and expression. He came forth from the Father, and is come into the world. He is going back to the Father to unite the world to Him.

'His disciples said unto Him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb. Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.' It seemed to the disciples as if all clouds were now scattered. they thought the Man was already born into the world. Alas! it was in their own faith they were still in part believing, not in Him. The travail-hour must be passed through by them as by us; that which would scatter all trust in themselves, that which would leave them only God to trust in. Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, in which ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone.' Their hour of weakness was at hand. It would be also His. They would be deserted, and He would be deserted. And yet He adds, 'I am not alone, because the Father is with me.' 'Your faith will perish. Even I shall cry, " My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And yet that eternal union 'which I have been declaring to you, which I have come into the world to manifest, will be unshaken. This deser'tion will make it manifest. And because that is unshaken, 'your union with me will be unshaken also. Nothing which I have said to you will prove untrue. "These things have

'I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the 'world ye shall have tribulation,"—that world which sur'rounds you, and in the evils and faithlessness of which you share. "But be of good cheer; I have overcome the 'world." Its wars and divisions and hatreds have not vanquished me; I have vanquished them. Not the king whom the world has chosen for itself, but the Son whom 'the Father has set over it, shall reign in it for ever and ' ever.'

DISCOURSE XXVI.

THE PRAYER OF THE HIGH PRIEST.

(Lincoln's Inn, 10th Sunday after Trinity (Afternoon), July 27, 1858.)

ST. JOHN XVII. 1.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.

THE more we enter into our Lord's teaching, the more profound is our apprehension of the dignity, the awfulness, the divinity of words; the more we confess their insufficiency. If He who was in the beginning with God is the Word, if words have been the expression of His mind, they awaken those thoughts in our minds which they are intended to clothe. But if the Word has spoken of Himself as a Son; if He has said that He has come from a Father; if He has promised a Comforter, He has taken us out of the region of words into the heart of the realities which they represent. It is the Son Himself who reveals the Father: what could words effect without His Person? The Father Himself, He has said, draws us to the Son: words would be spoken in vain if there were not that wonderful and loving attraction upon the hearts of the creatures whom He has formed in the image of the Son. The Spirit's work is to produce that inward conviction which

words cannot produce, to act upon the man himself, to bind those into fellowship whom the diversities of speech and custom have made unintelligible to each other, to testify to men of the Father and the Son, as the ground of all speech, thought, and being. But here, as throughout this Gospel, the deepest revelation is the commonest and simplest. As we enter into the region of the divine relations, of divine communion, all must tremble; none are forbidden to approach. Intellectual differences disappear ; here every spirit may find its home.

We sometimes ask ourselves, as we read the prayer in this chapter-and it is good that we should ask ourselves— • Is this the model of our prayer? Is Christ giving us an example here that we should follow in His steps? Or does 'it stand awfully alone, separated from every other that 'ever has been or can be offered; one which we are to 'wonder at the more, because so vast a chasm separates it 'from all our acts and efforts of devotion?' I believe that if we have not understood the acts and discourses on the Paschal night, there can be but one answer to this question. The Son of God praying to His Father the night 'before His Passion,-how entirely isolated,' we should say, must such intercourse be from all that ever has been, 'from all that can be conceived of! What blasphemy to 'connect it, even in thought, with the petitions of those who have little to do but to confess their sins, and supplicate forgiveness!' But if we have studied these chapters; if we have learnt that when the disciples saw Christ they saw the Father; if we have understood that He is the Vine, and they the branches; if we have known what He meant when He told them that they were to ask in His name, that their joy might be full; if we have observed how He

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distinguishes the disciples from the world, and yet how He teaches them that everything they do is to be done for the world, and as a witness of God's love to the world; then, I think, we shall feel that it is the greatest of all contradictions to suppose that this prayer does not contain in itself the essence and meaning of all prayer, that it is not the one which best expresses the wants and longings of every man, that it is not the prayer of all the children of God, in all places and in all ages, because it is the prayer of the only-begotten Son of God.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come.' He had spoken to His disciples of an hour of travail, which was to terminate in a new birth for them and for the world. The world knew nothing of this hour; no one of its works or pleasures was interrupted; that night was like every other night. The disciples had a dull sense of present oppression, a vague presentiment of approaching calamity. But they, as little as the world, felt what the sorrow was, still less what joy they had to expect when it was over. He knew it all. He knew inwardly that that was the hour to fulfil the purpose for which He was come into the world. The life and death of the world were gathered up into it. The feeling would have been intolerable if it had been a solitary, separate one; but the foresight of it had been given Him by His Father; the sense that the hour was come was imparted by Him; His prayer was the acknowledgment of that which had been revealed to Him, His filial acceptance of that which had been prepared for Him. And surely, brethren, all prayer must be this. It is the acknowledging of that, be it sad or joyful, which has been given to us; it is the casting our experience upon Him