its peace-the peace which it can give. It does nothing but stir up tumults against us. It will not allow us to settle in peace anywhere, even if we would. It persecutes us in one city, and we are sometimes happy if, after the express permission of our Master, we can save life by fleeing to another.

It will not grant us the protection of its laws. Its magistrates suffer us to be beaten before their judgment-seats, and will not allow the law to be put in force on our behalf.

It enacts laws against us. It suffers all nations to follow their own forms of false worship, degrading and brutal though they are, and yet it will not allow us to worship our God with a worship untainted with one particle of superstition.

It allows us to be deprived of our goods, and condemns us to poverty-to abject poverty, in mines from which the light of day is shut out.

It deprives us of our good name. We are called atheists on the one hand, and on the other we are supposed to be the slaves of such degrading superstition that we eat human flesh in our secret assemblies.

Above all, it deprives us of life, and so does what it accounts its worst. So that, if our only hope through Christ's coming were in this world. -if the only advantages we could look for from Christ were the peace of this world, the friendship of this world, the protection or

patronage of this world, we should be indeed miserable.

Now, observe, I am here making a slight change in the Apostle's words-in what I am assuming his reasoning to be. I am supposing him to say we are thoroughly, or very miserable. He, on the contrary, says we are of all men most miserable. Why does he say "of all men ?" Have not other men misery besides Christians? And if other men are miserable without Christian hope of a resurrection, and Christians themselves have no hope of a resurrection, why there is an equality.

No: we are to take into account other things which Christ reveals which very much intensify the evil plight of those who, if such a thing can be, have only hope in Him so far as this world is concerned. For Christ reveals to us God. He not only reveals to us God, He makes us acquainted with God. By showing to us Himself, He shows to us that eternal Father of all of Whom He is the express image. How miserable then it would be, how unspeakably miserable, if through Christ we should have fondly hoped that we had become acquainted with the God of all, and conversed with Him, and experienced-or fancied we had experienced-His present love; and then, when we are removed hence after a short time, we should find that Christ's introduction of us into the favour of God was a delusion, and that we

are as far from attaining to the God whom He has made known as ever.

Such would be indeed a miserable course and a miserable end. The future the darker, because of its seeming brightness. We should be in such a case the greatest dupes amongst men. Our hope has been more intense than the hope of others, and so, on the strength of it, we have foregone more, and to be at last disappointed would be the height of misery.

Such is the reasoning of the Apostle, and it may be carried farther than this; for, as it is with the servant, so with the Master. If Christ rose not from the dead, then, in the way we have indicated, He of all men was the most miserable. He drank so deep of the cup of sorrow, that He was called in prophecy "a man of sorrows." All of you have doubtless heard of the tradition about Him, that though He often wept, He never smiled once, and but once we read that He "rejoiced in Spirit.'

Well, if He rose not it was not merely that One Who tasted little or no human joy was dealt hardly with; but it was that a life so big with promises of immortality ended in the blackness of darkness.

The taunt of His mockers would then have been well founded: "He saved others, Himself he cannot save."

He would have shown His Almighty power in alleviating or dispersing all human misery

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even death itself-and yet have been Himself at last vanquished by bitter pain and death. He would have beguiled others with the promise of a kingdom, whilst He had really none to bestow; so that it would have been a delusion to have listened to Him whilst He said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;" "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted," for He would not have been Himself comforted.

His Body could not have been the Bread of life, as He said, if, after it had been given in death, it had not resumed life. In fact, His whole life, His every word would have been a broken promise; the most glorious of promises utterly shattered and dashed to pieces. And what more wretched? What, in the whole universe, could be even named besides such a conclusion in point of misery?

So that this thing is true, both in Christ and in His apostles: "If in this life only we have hope in Him, we are of all men most miserable."

But to all this it may be rejoined, that surely a good man who had suffered in the cause of virtue, or had gone through much labour and vexation for the good of his race, would be recompensed by God whether Christ had risen or not, or whether he had hope in Christ or not? No! St. Paul, at least, could not for a moment entertain any such a thought.

The future state was not to him a state of happiness enjoyed by disembodied spirits, in an heathen Elysium, or even in a Jewish paradise, or in Abraham's bosom: it was his risen body caught up to meet Christ, and after that living ever with the Lord.

He would not suffer for a moment that in any church, over which he had oversight, men should hold the immortality of the soul apart from that Resurrection of the body which was consequent on the Resurrection of Jesus. To him Jesus alone had "brought life and immortality to light.”

Again, St. Paul did not lead a life of suffering and distress because he preached virtue, or morality, or goodness, or the being and attributes of the one true God, but he underwent all that befel him because he preached the salvation of all men through the Blood of Jesus, and because he preached through Jesus the Resurrection of the Dead.

So that all his preaching of God and holiness was bound up with the preaching of Jesus. His very preaching of God was that God was the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he dismissed from his mind all idea of a future except in the likeness and in the presence of his dear Lord. So that we can well understand how, if in this life only he had had hope in Christ, he would have been of all men most miserable.