selves forming day by day, to be our spiritual, indestructible inheritance in the everlasting future. If the fiery trial which is to try us is to spare our work, it can only be by our now welcoming the candle of the Lord to search us, and prove it; and the only guarantee for our personal acceptance and our public coronation is a "life hid with Christ in God." THE DIVINE SILENCES. Preached in the Chapel Royal, St. James's, March 2, 1890. "But IIe answered her not a word."-MATT. xv. 23. CHRIST, we see, had His limitations, His moods of sternness, and His defeats. His limitations, imposed on Him by His Father, recognized and accepted by Him in unquestioning dutifulness, and given as the reason for declining to exercise His ministry across the Jewish boundaries, are instructive in two ways. They indicate in an impressive and striking fashion the mighty and indisputable fact of the Divine Sovereignty, which crosses, and perplexes, and, it may be, disappoints us at every turn of life; which we can neither explain, nor deny, nor evade, nor resist; and which, if it may well fill some of us with unspeakable thankfulness for the blessings which it has bestowed on us, to others is the unfathomable problem of a clouded righteousness. “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." It was enough for Him to know that, and He accepted it. His Father would presently justify Himself before the world. Of course the limitation of His ministry to the Jews meant the loss of it to the Gentiles; but "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" |