cerning this responsibility. He said that "necessity was laid upon him," that he had a Gospel to preach, and that preach it he must; it was no question of choice, but of absolute and inevitable constraint. No doubt he had felt responsibility before; every earnest man does; no man can be it for a post of trust, whether high or low, whether as a servant or as a prince, who does not feel responsibility; but the responsibility felt by a man conscious, as St. Paul was, that Christ has spoken to him, is deeper and more energetic than all other responsibilities, as heaven is higher than earth and God greater than man. God speaks, man must obey. So thought and feit St. Paul; and, humanly speaking, the history of the Church, and the present condition of Christendom, and the religious life of your souls, Christian brethren, are to a great extent the result of the fact, that St. Paul felt his responsibility as a man, in and through whom God had been pleased to reveal His blessed Son.

Let us leave St. Paul, however, for a few moments, and let me remind you how that God has from the beginning revealed Himself to man, and that the spiritual condition of man before God has depended upon the way in which he has received the revelation. To be able to receive a revelation from God, this is one mark of humanity; and to be able to reject the revelation, this is another. In a certain sense, a very sad and painful sense I admit, but still a certain sense, the power of rejecting a revelation is even more distinctive of humanity than the power of receiving it. What I mean is this: God takes the clay, and, like the potter, forms such vessels as He will, and He puts into those vessels what He pleases; and when He made all things at the beginning, He impressed His own will upon

them, and declared them to be "very good;" and really the first thing that made an unspeakable gulph between man and the other creatures which God had created was the act of disobedience, that is, the rejection of God's revelation. Put yourself in the first man's position. God reveals Himself by a command: "Eat not of the forbidden tree; in the day that thou eatest thou shalt die." That was Adam's Bible, it was emphatically the Old Testament, the first and earliest covenant between God and man; and Adam did not feel his responsibility as a being entrusted with a revelation; it did not rule his life and control his actions; he did not consider what mighty issues depended upon his mode of dealing with his trust. Yea, hath God said this? You not to touch a tree which

is so pleasant to the eye, so good for food, and so much to be desired to make one wise? You not to use your reason? You to be tied down by paltry, arbitrary, unmeaning rules? and so forth. Oh! there was rationalism in Paradise, and it was Satan that introduced it; and because man allowed Satan to lead him astray, and would not simply bend himself to the revealed truth of God, therefore he fell into sin.

Next observe that the whole course of sacred history, since the days of Adam, has been a history of revelations. God has revealed, unveiled, discovered Himself to this man and to that, in order that he to whom God has been revealed may reveal Him to others; the process of which St. Paul speaks when he says, "to reveal His Son in me," is the very process which has been going on from the beginning. Look at Noah. God revealed Himself to Noah at a time of great darkness and wickedness; and when the Apostle, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, speaks of Noah in his grand catalogue of

men of faith, as of one who being warned by God of things not seen as yet was moved with fear and built an ark to the saving of his house, he means to say that he was a man who felt his responsibility as entrusted with a revelation from God; that revelation of wrath to come was a trust; how should it be dealt with? Should it be despised? should it be reasoned about? should it be ridiculed? should Noah's ingenuity be employed to prove that it could not be true? No: God had spoken, and therefore all such conduct would be wicked and absurd; there was but one way of dealing with such a trust; "according to all that God commanded, so did he." Well done, Noah! That is faith shewing itself in works; that is the true way of shewing a sense of responsibility.

Look at Abraham. "The Lord had said unto Abraham." That is the very beginning of his history. The world had got into a very bad state, there was very little knowledge of God, very little fear of Him, I should suppose not much love of Him; and when it pleased God to commence that series of revelations which culminated in Jesus Christ His Son, He did it by speaking to one chosen minister; He revealed Himself in Abraham, and He told Abraham that he must leave his country and his father's house, and go into a strange land, and there become a great people, and the source of blessing to the whole world. What did Abraham do? He simply obeyed. I suppose it cost him as great an effort to leave his home and emigrate to a strange country as it would have cost one of us. But he did it: he felt under constraint, not his own master; the word which God had spoken to him,-however it was spoken, and this I do not know,-this word became his law; the responsibility of having received a revelation ruled all

his subsequent conduct; he, like Noah, and unlike Adam and Eve, did not reason about the matter, and try to evade the commands of God, but he simply submitted himself to those commands, even when they would seem to rob him of his chief treasure, and sacrifice his only son. And so Abraham, like Noah, and unlike Adam and Eve, gained a place in that Apostolic roll of men of faith to which I referred before. "He went out," says the Apostle, "not knowing whither he went:" no, but he knew why; and he who knows the why, and can find the answer in the revelation of God, need not trouble himself about the whither.

Once more, look at Moses. You see precisely the same characteristics of conduct. He, too, received a revelation from God; and the pressure of the responsibility which that revelation brought with it is made all the more conspicuous by the fact that Moses shrank from it, and tried to evade it. His shy, gentle, retiring spirit saw nothing tempting in the leadership of a nation, and much that was very repulsive in being set up in opposition to Pharaoh: and I believe that many notable men who have figured in the world's history have been in like manner meek, retiring men, who have been forced into action by the overwhelming sense of duty; certainly no instance can be more striking than that of Moses. The vision of the burning bush, the proclamation of the Name of God, the clear announcement of the mission to Israel, all these pressed upon Moses' conscience. Still he would escape if he could. Might not Aaron go? Were there not many men more suitable for the work-bolder, stronger, better, than he? No, there must be no excuse, and Moses dares not be disobedient. The responsibility of having received a revelation from

God triumphs over everything, and so Moses became what he was.

And what was he? why, another and one of the chief of those men of faith who "subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises." And let me say in general that men of faith and men who feel their responsibility, as having received a revelation from God, are men of the same class, or rather the same men described in different ways. Faith implies a revelation, and men of faith are just those who feel that a revelation must not be trifled with, must not be set aside, must not be contemned, but must be adopted as the law of life. Let me strengthen this view by reminding you that the catalogue in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, to which I have been referring, is remarkable for the absence of two names: it does not contain the name of Adam, and it does not contain the name of Jesus Christ: and why not? For very different reasons. Not the first Adam, for, alas! he despised God's revelation; not the second, for He was the revelation Himself. Christ our Lord was not a man of faith, because He was one with the Father; and it would be an insult to Him to speak of His responsibility as having received a revelation from God, because He alone saw the Father unveiled from all eternity, and came down from heaven in infinite condescension to reveal Him to mankind. Oh! it is a melancholy thing to think upon, that the list of men conspicuous for their faith should want the name of him who is the father of us all, who was created in the image of God, and to whom first God made a revelation of Himself; but it is not melancholy to miss from the list the name of the second Adam, because the omission marks Him out as the Lord from heaven, and