saints in the book of Judges are Gideon, Jephtha, and Samson. The saints of the Acts are Peter, Stephen, Paul, and James.

What is the lesson to be got from this comparison? Is it that lower degrees of righteousness are acceptable to God, provided that a man is zealous for the Church and people of God?

No: it is this, that the law itself being alone, being without the promise of the Spirit, could not make men saints after the true pattern of the King of Saints.

It was emphatically "weak through the flesh," because there was no Spirit promised to all; and though that Spirit was given here and there to one and another, yet He, the very Holy Ghost Himself, could not antedate the coming of Christ. The Spirit has now the picture or image of the only begotten Son in our nature to copy upon our hearts: nay, more-Christ is given to us in order that He may be reproduced in us. Are these my words? No, my brethren. The Apostle says, "Christ IN you." And the Saviour Himself says, "WE," (meaning Himself and His Father) "will come into the Christian, and make our abode with Him." Again He says, and His words must mean some great thing, "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." When we read of an Old Testament saint, or great character, coming manifestly below the standard which we know to be good and right, the great

lesson we learn is the need of Christ-of Christ incarnate to furnish us with a new nature, i. e., to be a new Adam, to be in us for good what the old Adam was for evil. These old saints had only the old nature, the nature of the first Adam; in no sense could they then be partakers of the humanity of Christ, seeing that Christ was not yet in the flesh as the "second man."

Then, too, we learn the need of Christ crucified, for, before this, men could not be drawn to God as they were afterwards, and are now. It is "the love of Christ which now constrains us, because we thus judge that if one died for all then were all dead."

Then, too, we learn the need of Christ crucified as the one grand Pattern of meek, suffering, submissive, obedient, and yet unconquerable and all-conquering love.

Then, too, in another sense, we learn the need of Christ's death, for by His Death the way was opened for God to rain down a plenteous stream of the Spirit, and that Spirit the Spirit Whose fruits are "in all goodness, and righteousness, and truth." Before the Crucifixion, and consequent Glorification of the Son of man, there was some deep reason in God's counsels why the Spirit should be given sparingly and in measure.

After the Crucifixion the very first thing that the risen Saviour did was to breathe that

Holy Ghost upon His waiting disciples, and the first sign that proved Christ's Glorification was the abundant Pentecostal shower, which made at once three thousand spring up and grow, and bear fruits of righteousness such as the world. had never before witnessed.

And now one word of application in conclusion. Because through no merits of our own or of our fathers, we are living in this nineteenth century of grace after Christ has come; we are living in this "ministration of righteousness."

We are not living under the ministration of condemnation; we are living under the ministration of the Spirit of life. If then we are unforgiven, unreconciled to God, unrenewed in righteousness, it is in spite of blessings and promises which the bearers of those great names which we have almost worshipped from our childhood, Moses and Joshua, and David and Samuel, and Isaiah and Daniel, had not.

If we are yet unrighteous, i. e., if we are unmindful of God, unjust, dishonest, impure, unloving, ungrateful, unthankful, unholy, uncharitable, unforgiving; if our tempers are unchastened, our desires uncontrolled, our tongues unruled; if our interests and our consciences are never at variance; if we are in any of these ways unrighteous, it is in spite of much, very much-so very much that if God should but give us a glimpse of it we should be struck dumb with astonishment and dismay.

For we are unrighteous in spite of the fact that we have been all our lives living in the ministration of righteousness-all our lives living in the ministration of the Almighty Spirit of righteousness.

We are unrighteous in spite of a Bible which contains the life of the righteous One Who came down amongst us that we might "serve God without fear in holiness and righteousness." We are unrighteous in spite of a Baptism in which we are buried with a righteous Saviour, that as He was raised up from the dead, so might we walk in newness of life. We are unrighteous in spite of the Cross of Christ, in spite of the Resurrection of Christ, in spite of the most solemn warnings of the future and irreversible judgment to be executed by Christ, and in spite of the promise of a life everlasting in bodies incorruptible, glorious-bodies having all the power, the properties, the swiftness of spirits, because raised up in the likeness of the Body of the Son of God.

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XV.

STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS.

1 PETER ii. 11.

'Dearly beloved, I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation."

THE Apostle here beseeches his converts, as strangers and pilgrims, to "abstain from fleshly lusts," and to have their "conversation honest among the Gentiles." Some persons have thought that, in using such language, he speaks as the Apostle of the circumcision to Jewish converts, wholly or principally; the Jews being then a scattered people, as they are now; and they have brought forward as a proof that he had principally Jews in his mind in giving such an exhortation, that he speaks of the need of their having their conversation honest among the Gentiles; but we are to remember that the Christians of the Apostolic times answered in a far greater degree to the description of "strangers" and "pilgrims,” and that they had the fullest right, in contrast with the