Do you know where the lightning is to fall next? You do know that, partly; you can guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit, which is as that lightning when it shines from the east to the west.-The Crown of Wild Olive.

BETWEEN TWO THIEVES

By JOHN RUSKIN

Mark xv. 27.

I happened to be reading this morning (29th March) some portions of the Lent Services, and I came to a pause over the familiar words, "And with Him they crucified two thieves." Have you ever considered (I speak to you now as a professing Christian) why, in the accomplishment of the "numbering among transgressors," the transgressors chosen should have been especially thieves-not murderers, nor, as far as we know, sinners by any gross violence? Do you observe how the sin of theft is again and again indicated as the chiefly antagonistic one to the law of Christ? "This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the bag" (of Judas). And again, though Barabbas was a leader of sedition, and a murderer besides (that the popular election might be in all respects perfect), yet St. John, in curt and conclusive account of him, fastens again on the theft. "Then cried they all again saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber." I believe myself the reason to be that theft is indeed, in its subtle forms, the most complete and excuseless of human crimes. Sins of violence usually are committed under sudden or oppressive temptation. They may be the madness of moments; or they may be apparently the only means of extrication from calamity. In other cases, they are the diseased acts or habits of lower and brutified natures. But theft involving deliberative intellect, and absence of passion, is the purest type of wilful iniquity in persons capable of doing right. Which being so, it seems to be fast becoming the practice of modern society to crucify its Christ indeed, as willingly as ever, in the persons of His poor; but by no means now to crucify its thieves beside Him! It elevates its thieves after another fashion; sets them upon a hill, that their light may shine before men and that all may see their good works, and glorify their father in-the opposite of heaven.-Time and Tide.

CHRIST'S WARNINGS AGAINST MONEY

BY JOHN RUSKIN

Matt. xxv. and elsewhere.

Have you ever observed that all Christ's main teaching by direct order, by earnest parable, and by His own permanent emotion, regards the use and misuse of money? We might have thought, if we had been asked what a divine teacher was most likely to teach, that He would have left inferior persons to give directions about money; and Himself spoken only concerning faith and love, and the discipline of the passions, and the guilt of the crimes of soul against soul. But not so. He speaks in general terms about these. But He does not speak parables about them for all men's memory, nor permit Himself fierce indignation against them, in all men's sight. The Pharisees bring Him an adulteress. He writes her forgiveness on the dust of which He had formed her. Another, despised of all for known sin, He recognizes as a giver of unknown love. But He acknowledges no love in buyers and sellers in His house. One would have thought there were people in that house twenty times worse than they; Caiaphas and his like, false priests, false prayer-makers, false leaders of the people-who needed putting to silence, or to flight with darkest wrath. But the scourge is only against the traffickers and thieves. The two most intense of all the parables: the two which lead the rest in love and terror (this of the Prodigal and of Dives), relate both of them to management of riches. The practical order given to the only seeker of advice, of whom it is recorded that Christ "loved him," is briefly about his property. "Sell that thou hast."

And the arbitrament of the day of the Last Judgment is made to rest wholly, neither on belief in God, nor in any spiritual virtue in man, nor on freedom from stress of stormy crime, but on this only, "I was an hungered and ye gave Me drink; naked, and ye clothed Me; sick, and ye came unto Me."-Time and Tide.

CHAPTER IX

THE GOLDEN CHAIN-CHRYSOSTOM TO JOHN WESLEY

THE golden chain of Bible expositors has never been snapped, from Paul's day to our own, though in more than one period the link wore perilously thin. The examples which make up this chapter are drawn from preachers sundered by time and race and Church, but they belong to a great Fellowship of the Word, and their ways of treating scripture will be noted with interest by their successors of our own time. The examples of Chrysostom, Luther, and the classic French preachers could not but suffer in style in the author's translations. The seventeenth century was peculiarly rich in England in preachers of extraordinary originality, varied scholarship, and sometimes of a whimsical humour. A number of the pulpit princes of that age have been drawn upon.

I

THE FATHER OF EXPOSITORY

PREACHING

"A NEW CREATION"

By CHRYSOSTOM

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation." -2 Cor. v. 17.

The Apostle has led the Corinthian Christians from love to holy living, and he proceeds to show how the very works of

grace conduce to that end. Wherefore he adds, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation." If anyone has believed in Him, he says, he has come to a remaking of himself, for he has been born from above through the Spirit. Wherefore on this account, he says, we ought to live to Him, not as if we were our own, or as if He had only died for us, and had risen as the first-fruit of ourselves, but as if we had come to another life. Note how many confirmations of beautiful living he instances. Wherefore he calls this by the heavier name "justification," in order that he may the better demonstrate the completeness of the revolution and the transformation. Afterwards, pressing further on what has been said, he shows how we are a new creation. "Old things have passed away," he says, "all things have become new." What kind of "old things"? It is true he says sins, and impieties, and all things pertaining to the Jewish law, but these are not all-there are better things than these, he says. "Behold all things are become new." "All things are from God." Nothing from ourselves. For remission of sins, worship, and unspeakable glory have been given to us from Him. No longer only from the things to come, but from the things of the present, he urges them. Note, He has said that we are to be raised from the dead, to come to immortality, and to have an eternal home. But since present things are more powerful than things to come to stir up those who do not believe in these, to increase faith, he shows how many things we have already received, and what we are. What were they then when they received the gifts? All dead. "For all," he says, "are dead," and "He died for all." So He loves all with equal love. From the most ancient time, all had grown old in evil things. But lo, here is a new spirit, for it has been purified; a new body, a new worship, new promises, and a testament, and a life, and a table, and a garment, and in short everything new. Instead of the Jerusalem below we have received the metropolis above, instead of the material temple we have received a spiritual, instead of tablets of stone tablets of flesh, instead of circumcision baptism, instead of manna a lordly body, instead of water from the rock blood from the side, instead of the rod of Moses and Aaron the cross, instead of the promise the Kingdom of Heaven, instead of myriads of priests one High Priest, instead of a senseless lamb a spiritual One. These things, and things like unto them, he means when he says, "All things are

new." And all these things are from God through Christ and His gift of Him. Wherefore he adds, "who has reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation."

II

STARS OF THE REFORMATION

The Reformation, as has been said in the second chapter, was a time of return to the Bible. It held "in its right hand the Book open," and the nations drank in the Bible as read and expounded by the Reformation preachers, as travellers in a waterless desert drink greedily when, parched and faint, they come to the palm-fringed wells of some Elim. The Bible re-made the nations that kept it open, it put iron into their blood, it started them on the march of progress, it was the textbook of democracy. The preacher became the teacher and leader of the Reformation peoples, and God raised up great preachers to do His glorious work. They realized that they had a work to do, and we find in their sermons a note of grim earnestness and passionate appeal, and an absence of the rhetoric that is merely ornamental. The great Reformation preachers, as a rule, used the language of common life. They were appealing to "the common people," and they had to get the vital points of the Reformation Gospel into their minds by the simplest and directest ways. The examples that follow are

notable illustrations of the Reformation combination of strength and simplicity. An example of Calvin as expositor was given in the chapter on "Exegesis and Exposition."