I am not sure that these are not days in which special circumstances make it specially necessary to take this counsel specially to heart. We all know it, as a commonplace of religious history, that there are many varied ways in which the servants of God are tried, and that at different periods, the real hostility of the world to the Church being steadily the same, different methods of trial colour the history of the Church; and the use of one set of worldly weapons seems for the time to supersede the use of another set; and, by consequence, the need of vigilance on one side of the camp seems to dispense with the need of vigilance on the other. There have been days of fiery persecution quite incompatible with any idea or theory of contempt-days of fearful hatred; there have been days of apparent prosperity, and of the dangers of ease and success and influence; ages of wealth and power as well as of impotence and humiliation; and theories of a kingdom that is of this world before the time, and of rest when there has been no victory.

God gives wisdom to His wise to see the trial as it comes and when; there is a voice of joy and health in the dwellings of the righteous even when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall; there is, and always has been, in the time of the greatest slackness, a cry in the churches,

T

"Awake, awake," who sayest, "I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked."

Now, it sometimes strikes one that these days. are, for the children of the kingdom, and most especially for the ministers of the word of God, rather like days of despising. I do not see why we should blink the issues of the question; and it is very necessary, as the question has arisen, that we should try to clear our conceptions of the circumstances, and make out how far it is a true statement, how far it is our own fault that it is true, and in what way we can turn the trial, if it is a trial, to profit. If we are despised, that is, we must be careful to guard against such content with the world's contempt as will lead us to shelter ourselves under the general idea that Christ's servants must expect to be despised, forgetful of the duty that lies upon us all, that Christ's service must not be made despicable by our unworthiness. Now there are some things in the popular literature of the day, and in the tone of social intercourse which popular literature reflects and exaggerates, that show signs this way. And there is a tone in newspaper writing, and in political speaking, sometimes a tone of patronage and sometimes of disparage

ment, a tone which seems to convey an idea of supercilious and complacent superiority.

We are all of us, I imagine, to some extent familiar with the treatment of the clerical character in popular fiction; the constant occurrence of grotesque types of curate, rector, and bishop, utterly unlike anything in our experience, unless indeed it be ourselves that are photographed unconsciously—for what we see to be true of no one else may be true of ourselves-drawn in lines. and colours and invested with habits, and made to speak and think and act, in ways and on motives and with results conceivable only on a hypothesis of wilful misrepresentation, or of absolute ignorance coloured by professional dislike. We know at once the type of the Low Churchman, the High Churchman, and the Broad Churchman in fiction, and how the balance of the plot is weighted by the supposed sincerity, or the gratuitous hypocrisy, or the self-complacent impracticability of the types and characters. Possibly some of you know how these things are treated on the stage as well as in story-books. Anyhow, the readers of newspapers and of the speeches of public men know that it is the fashion to treat religious questions as mere academic theories, and the men concerned with them as living in a world outside of reasonable comprehension, and busying themselves with

matters material only in the eye of schools and parties. I cannot, I need not, now and here give illustrations; but you all know how, for instance, the question of religious teaching is contested, and what is the nature of the arguments by which the need of it is defended or the requirements minimised. In all this there is contempt of a sort, a despising which, as it is very provocative, is correspondingly a mode of trial.

Perhaps I am wrong in attaching so much importance to these outward signs, but where we know, both by bitter experience and by divine warnings, that there does exist the deep and strong current of hostility of the world and the course of it to the Church and the service of it, we cannot be too careful in our estimate even of the smallest matters. They may be, they are, a part of the trial of the faithful; only the faint-hearted will faint under them; the weak may be irritated by them into foolish self-assertiveness; the strong may be provoked to a wrath that is itself a snare, or to a contempt which tempts to cynicism or recklessness: all have a duty on them that that which is good be not evil-spoken of by their fault. "Let no man despise thee." And how? The words of the apostle to Timothy, the parallel passage to the text, referring more explicitly to the person to whom he was writing, are, "Let no man despise

thy youth;" and it is a word of caution that this explicit reference makes, I think, more specially telling to the younger men who are taking on themselves the vows and responsibilities of the ministerial office. The consideration follows very naturally on the thought that I tried to work out last night. I must not, indeed, press the words of St. Paul addressed to one of the chief instruments of the building up of the Church, Be thou an example of the believers, τύπος τῶν πίστων, an ensample to them that believe I must not press the words as being of direct and equal cogency in the case of the young men who are ordained to-day. The thought that you are to be an example to the faithful may well be toned down to the thought that you are, each one of you, to live as one whom they need not be ashamed to take as an example. But it certainly means not less than that. Your idea must be to live so that neither believer nor unbeliever, neither the hostile critic nor the condescending patron, shall see in you anything that shall justify him in despising you as a type or specimen of what believers are, or despising other believers because he sees something to be despised in you. The exhortation and advice comes to you, not merely with reference to the inner life; the light that is in you, that the Father of Light, the Son, the Light of the World, the Holy Ghost, the