worthy to be received, understood, thought upon, and prayed over.

But this is not nearly all. We have not one but four accounts of Our Lord's life and death and resurrection. Now we should have imagined, seeing that four holy men were inspired to write about the words and actions of One who was always going about preaching and working miracles-we should have imagined, I say, seeing that they were all inspired by the Same Spirit-that they would have given us four altogether different series of events, but instead of this we have three of them going over pretty much the same ground. A large portion of St. Matthew's Gospel is repeated in St. Mark, and a great proportion of the incidents recorded by St. Matthew and St. Mark we have in substance again in St. Luke.

Let us pause, and consider the lesson that we cannot but draw from this. We read of our Lord usually speaking to the multitudes in parables. In one place we are told, "Without a parable spake He not unto them." It is very probable then, more likely than not, that our Lord during the time of His public ministry spake above a thousand parables; very probably, if the truth was known, many more; of all these we have about thirty given in the Gospels. These, then, are the most im

portant for us to know. Take one of these, the parable of the Sower. Instead of this parable being recorded only once, we have it three times over. In each of the three first Evangelists we have slightly different versions of it.

Now I dare say that if we had had to choose for ourselves we should rather have had only one version of this parable, and we should have preferred having two other parables of the Lord whom we love which have not come down to us in the place of one three times repeated. But God, you see, has evidently seen it best to give us, not three separate parables, but three versions of the same. By this how very deeply and earnestly has He impressed upon us the lessons taught by this similitude. Oh, then, have

we all of us heard it; heard it, that is, with the ears of the heart? have we marked it, learnt it, inwardly digested it? If we have done so we have learnt and digested some very fruitful and some very awful lessons. We have learnt and inwardly digested that the truths of God's word that we hear read and preached are the seed of eternal life in our souls; that this seed is sown broadcast over the hearts of men in thousands upon thousands of congregations of Christians every Sunday; that the reason that it produces in so many not only no fruit, but no appearance of life at all, is because Satan and his angels are so actively at work in each

congregation, and in the heart of each particular soul, to catch away the word sown; that when the seed is sown and springs up above the ground, that is, when men show some signs of being influenced by divine things, even then, in a great many, it withers away, the ground of their hearts being so shallow; again, in many, many more cases, those good things of this world that we so run after and have such anxiety about, choke the word, and only in a few does it bring forth the fruits of goodness, righteousness, and truth. Now such is reading, marking, learning, and inwardy digesting the parable of the Sower. You read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the parable when you really look upon the word of God as the seed of eternal life, when you continually examine yourself as to what sort of hearer you are, when you take heed how you hear, when you pray God to deepen the ground of your heart, and when you faithfully examine yourself as to the effect of the world and its good things upon your soul.

We have taken a parable; let us now take one of our Lord's miracles. Our Lord, from all that we can gather from Scripture, worked multitudes of miracles of which we have no account in the four Gospels. Now of all the wonderful things which He did, what is the one that apparently the Holy Spirit would have us most careful in reading, marking, learning,

and inwardly digesting? Unquestionably the feeding of the multitudes with the few loaves and fishes. For we have two miracles of miraculous feeding, in all their leading features the same, only in one case it is Our Lord feeding five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, in the other four thousand with seven and a few small fishes. We have the first of these two brought before us by each of the four Evangelists, we have the second by two out of the four, so in fact we have six different records of what is nearly one and the same miracle. Now surely this is a very loud call to us to take notice. In the room that is taken up in the pages of the Evangelists by this oftrepeated story of almost one and the same thing, we might have had six entirely different stories or incidents of Our Lord's wonderworking power; and yet the Holy Spirit in His unsearchable wisdom has withheld the pens of the Evangelists from giving to us six wonderful works that we do not know out of the thousands that Our Lord performed, and has made them repeat substantially the same story six times. There must be something in it to mark, learn, and digest, and what that is it is not hard to conjecture. We cannot read over the account of this miracle without thinking of Our

*Matt. xiv. 15, xv. 32; Mark vi. 35, vii. 1; Luke ix. 13; John vi. 5.

Lord as the great nourisher of the souls of His people; feeding them first with His doctrine, then with His body and blood. We cannot read over these accounts without our minds reverting to the sacramental feast that Christ spreads for His people. We cannot help thinking of Him being present at every celebration of the Lord's Supper, and feeding His Church through the hands of His ministers as He fed the multitudes through the hands of His disciples.

Again, we have many other of our Lord's miracles three times recorded, i. e. in each of the three first Evangelists. We have the stilling of the tempest thrice written for our learning; we have the demons cast out of the man who dwelt among the tombs three times recorded; so with the raising of Jairus's daughter; so with the woman coming and touching the hem of Christ's garment; so with the walking on the sea; so with the healing of the man with a withered hand; so with the opening of the eyes of the two blind men by the wayside. Now when by God's special inspiration, instead of having in each Evangelist things entirely new, we have the same things repeated, it is as if God said to us, Take note; mark well these things that My Son has done; look to Him as One stilling the most angry passions; look to Him as casting out the most inveterate lusts; look to Him as opening the eyes of the