to Christ's 'image and superscription' stamped indelibly, however faintly discernible, upon each precious spiritual coin once minted in His treasury! It is the very keenness of this consciousness of the ownership which makes us strong and earnest in combating that which would deface it. It is because we see Christ's purchase, it is because we see one of God's spirits, inside each body; encased and enshrined in each most frail, most imperfect, most sinful life, which meets us on earth's common trivial highway it is therefore that we would wrestle with the spirit-hosts of evil which have occupied and desolated it. We know that what God speaks of is always the reality. No kingcraft or priestcraft, no Gregory or Constantine, can stay by change of name or form the internecine strife, earth-wide and age-long, between good and evil. It lies deeper than national conversions or European reformations. It rages still, in hearts and lives. And though the blessing of even a nominal Christendom is above gold and precious stone, it does but leave where it was the spiritual strife and the individual responsibility: it does but render more obscure, more perplexed, more difficult, the personal warfare, because it gives added force to the burning words of St Paul, 'We wrestle, not against flesh and blood.' You see then the double risk, in this complication of the struggle, of that unreadiness which is our subject. The separate encounters, of which the life's sum is the defeat or victory of the Christian, are generally unexpected, sudden, ... and impalpable. They come to us, not so much in the form of open sinners, bitter scoffers, or avowed infidels, warning us off by their look, or sounding the alarm by their utterance. They come to us, not like the profligates in the Proverbs, saying, 'Let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent. Cast in thy lot among us, let us all have one purse:' on the contrary, so far as the persons of our warfare are concerned, they are men like us, or better than we; full of kindly sentiment, full of knowledge and ability, men whom it is pleasant to meet, honourable to know. And to stand aloof, as though either our faith or our conduct gave us the advantage over them, to treat them with suspicion, to read them moral lectures, to reprove them for carelessness or heterodoxy, to wear armour in their presence as though they were our enemies, would be not only a misery but a folly and a presumption, destroying the hope of profiting them, and dishonouring by the very spirit and temper the cause and Gospel of the Saviour. And yet, my brethren, from this very converse we return home, again and again, conscious that we have practically betrayed or denied Him. In our hearing, soldiers of Christ as we call ourselves, words were spoken, principles were avowed, judgments were passed, acts were estimated, not in accordance with Christ's rules, nay, on suppositions, tacit yet evident, which would have made His. Cross and His Crown alike superfluous and nugatory. We sate by, not with the excuse (itself insufficient) of mortal terror, of imminent martyrdom, if we should say the word for Christ; no, in security, in calm, in indifference; or, if not that, then in awkward irresolution, in the surprise of unpreparedness; because we expected no such trial, because we never thought that that sort of thing was the Christian conflict, because we took it for granted that society was recreation, because we would not spoil an enjoyment, our own or another's, by what we called to ourselves 'dragging in religion.' Yes, but, to go a little deeper, for this other and truer reason, because we had omitted to prepare ourselves for all risks by a habit and temper of watchfulness; because we had refused to listen betimes to St Paul's counsel before us, 'Stand therefore-having your feet shod with the pre |