The Commonwealth of Christ

So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.—Ephesians 2:19.

1. These words were addressed to Christians of Gentile birth who had been brought out of the darkness of paganism into Gospel light. The Apostle reminds them that in the days of their ignorance they had no part in God’s promises or in the hope of Israel. They were separated by a great wall from the elect people. The Jews were God’s household, and the Gentiles were outside. But now the cross of Jesus has broken down the dividing wall and brought Jew and Gentile together. The Heavenly light shines equally on the faces of both. Faith makes all races of one kin and kind. We are all alike fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God.

2. St. Paul had to labour strenuously and continuously against Jewish exclusiveness. The last thing that the Jews would think of was to admit the Gentiles to equal rights with themselves. One has smiled, rather sadly, to see men whose desperate eagerness to keep hold of some small privilege they had got was even exceeded by their desperate terror lest anybody else should get hold of anything like it. Now St. Paul set himself to put this selfish and jealous littleness down. So far, he has quite succeeded. For though human beings do yet try to keep worldly advantage and privilege to themselves, excluding others, it is ages since any professed Christian thought to keep God’s grace or Christ’s mercy so. Everybody knows that there is no more certain mark of really being within the Fold than the earnest desire that all we know and care for should be brought into it likewise. No Christian can even be imagined as desiring to keep this great possession to himself, or as grudging any human being his entrance. We have the believer’s feeling on this matter in memorable words once spoken by him who wrote this Epistle—words which, when and where they were said, combined well the grace which comes of high culture with the heartiness of Christian kindliness—“I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.”

I heard Dr. Alexander Whyte, of Edinburgh, speak recently about the great Puritans John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. He bade us read them; he told us of his own debt to them. “Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, and Richard Baxter and Matthew Henry, they are all upon my shelves. But not they alone! Side by side with the Puritans stand the works of great Catholics and great Anglicans. It is not with the Puritans alone I hold fellowship; I hold fellowship also with those other Christians between whom and the Puritans there seemed to be a great gulf fixed. I hold fellowship with Augustine, and pour out my soul in the words of his Confessions. I hold fellowship with À Kempis, while he teaches me the Imitatio Christi. I hold fellowship with William Law while he addresses to me his Serious Call, and with Jeremy Taylor while he discourses about Holy Living and Holy Dying. I hold fellowship with Newman and with Robertson, as I read their sermons—two men sundered far from each other, and both of them ecclesiastically separated from me. In my study every day of my life I enjoy the ‘Communion of Saints.’ ”1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 178.]

I

The Disabilities of Aliens

1. The Gentiles hitherto had been in the position of strangers and sojourners. As aliens they had no rights of citizenship, and all they could look for was temporary hospitality. They had no real standing within the commonwealth. Gentiles and Jews stood apart in their agelong traditions and customs. The Apostle has expressed in strong, emphatic language the ancient separation between the two. He has spoken of the Greeks as “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—as those “that once were far off,”—of the “middle wall of partition” to be broken down; and no words could picture too strongly the great gulf that had divided these families of men. The descendant of Abraham—conscious of the election of his race to stand alone among men, as the people of Jehovah; exulting in the noble train of lawgivers and prophets who had come forth from the secret place of God to proclaim the final glory of the Jew; trained to believe in one great Invisible, of whom there was no likeness “in the heaven above or in the earth beneath”—had learned to look with hatred or contempt on the outcast, lawless Gentile, with his image of God in every valley and on every hill. And the Greek—living as the free child of nature; having no law but the darkened light of conscience; feeling in heaven and earth to find the presence of an Infinite Beauty, whose Image he tried to carve in grace and majesty in snowy stone—had come to look with philosophic pride on the stern land of the Hebrew, and in philosophic scorn on his strange, exclusive loneliness. But not only were they at enmity with each other, they were both at enmity with God, and tried painfully by ceremony and sacrifice to avert His eternal wrath.

2. The chasm that divided the one from the other seemed almost impassable. There were deep and seemingly irreconcilable differences between them. Those differences did not vanish even when Jew and Gentile both turned Christian; they continued to subsist, as any reader of the New Testament may discover for himself. It is no exaggeration to say that there was, in the early days of Christianity, a Jewish Church and a Gentile Church. And yet “in Christ” the differences were solved, and Jew and Gentile might greet one another as brethren. “So then,” cries the Apostle, exulting in the effects of the reconciling work of Christ, “ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.”

The alienation of Gentiles from the Divine covenant was represented in the structure of the temple at Jerusalem by a beautifully worked marble balustrade, separating the outer from the inner court, upon which stood columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions, some in Greek and some in Latin characters, to warn aliens not to enter the holy place. One of the Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago, and is now to be read in the Museum of Constantinople. It runs thus: “No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple and the enclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for the penalty of death which he will incur.”1 [Note: C. Gore, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 104.]

II

The Widening of the Commonwealth

1. Every race had looked forward to some hoped-for better society.—The Jews had for generations, often with the fiercest impatience, expected the coming of the Messianic kingdom. The Greeks had been encouraged by their teachers and philosophers to aim at creating the perfect city and perfect state. Plato himself had not only written his wonderful book on the ideal Commonwealth, but had for a time acted as Prime Minister to a despot who was willing to make such laws as the Athenian statesman might suggest. The Spartans, the Athenians, and the Macedonians had each in turn tried to build up the ideal state, and the bloody and treacherous history of the Greeks in general is not without nobility when we watch it as a tragic effort at making a really Godlike state. Far more impressive than the Greek history had been the Roman patriotism and the Roman imperialism. This forced itself upon the world as something gigantic and irresistible, that bound together nations and religions the most diverse in one mighty whole. Here in the Roman empire that Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread far and wide, and made many hope that better things were in store.

2. Christ came to found an ideal society.—How did He do it? He selected a few men who had the faculty of believing. They were not men of great imagination, or talent, or culture. They were men who could believe in the unseen. These men He trained, until at last one of them uttered the faith that had been growing in the hearts of all, and said to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Immediately Jesus saw that His long and arduous task was on the way to completion. He saw that He had in this little group of men the lever with which He would turn the world upside down. He was filled with exultation and delight. He was beginning already to see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, and He cried out, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah.… I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” The great word was out now and the great idea launched upon the world. One confused fisherman, with a few men of like mind of whom he was the leader, formed the solitary rock in the midst of a world of shifting sand, and upon this rock Jesus would build His Church—a society embodying His spirit, living according to His laws, steadfastly administering His principles to the whole world, little by little leavening the lump, the society of the meek who should inherit the earth!

The Roman Empire had in Paul’s time gathered into a great unity the Asiatics of Ephesus, the Greeks of Corinth, the Jews of Palestine, and men of many another race; but grand and imposing as that great unity was, it was to Paul a poor thing compared with the oneness of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Asiatics of Ephesus, Greeks of Corinth, Jews of Palestine, and members of many another race could say, “Our citizenship is in heaven.” The Roman Eagle swept over wide regions in her flight, but the Dove of Peace, sent forth from Christ’s hand, travelled farther than she. As Paul says in the context, the Ephesians had been strangers, “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,” wandering like the remnants of some “broken clans,” but now they are gathered in. That narrow community of the Jewish nation has expanded its bounds and become the mother-country of believing souls, the true “island of saints.” It was not Rome that really made all peoples one, it was the weakest and most despised of her subject races.

What the early Christians felt when they embraced Christ and joined the little churches in their own cities, was that they had become members of a new race, a new and heavenly community, which was their proper and eternal home. Until now they had thought themselves mere human beings, born into a very strange and often cruel world, without any definite or trustworthy knowledge as to their destiny, plagued with toil and hardship, I disease and the fear of death. But now suddenly their whole perspective was altered. Instead of being citizens of this world they were citizens of heaven, and only sojourners and strangers in the earthly life. Instead of being units in a confused and wearisome life that soon went out into nothingness, they were members of a blessed and everlasting family of which God was the Father, and Jesus Christ the loving herald of His purposes.1 [Note: N. H. Marshall.]

Foremost and grandest amid the teachings of Christ were these two inseparable truths—There is but one God; all men are the sons of God; and the promulgation of these two truths changed the face of the world, and enlarged the moral circle to the confines of the inhabited globe. To the duties of men towards the Family and Country were added duties towards Humanity. Man then learned that wheresoever there existed a human being, there existed a brother; a brother with a soul immortal as his own, destined like himself to ascend towards the Creator, and on whom he was bound to bestow love, a knowledge of the Faith, and help and counsel when needed.1 [Note: Mazzini.]

3. Salvation comes to the individual through society.—The salvation in the Bible is supposed usually to reach the individual through the community. God’s dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural development. For man stands out in history as a “social animal.” His individual development, by a Divine law of his constitution, is rendered possible only because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations of his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high development as an individual. This law, then, of man’s nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the “commonwealth of Israel” that the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St. Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it is still through the Church that God’s “covenant” dealings reach the individual.

It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of the Asiatic Christians, before their conversion, as a state of alienation from the “commonwealth of Israel.” They were “Gentiles in the flesh,” that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of mankind. They were without the Christian society, and therefore presumably without God and without hope.

A lonely faith is an undeveloped, undiscovered, untested, unedified faith. Like a man cast on a desert island, it does not know what is in it; it cannot open out its natural germs. It is through the slowly realized recognition of its part in the manifold and multitudinous kingdom of which it has become a member that it discloses its increasing capacities.1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, God’s City, 35.]

The devout meditation of the isolated man, which flitted through his soul, like a transient tone of Love and Awe from unknown lands, acquires certainty, continuance, when it is shared-in by his brother men. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of the Highest then first does the Highest, as it is written, “appear among them to bless them”; then first does an Altar and act of united Worship open a way from Earth to Heaven; whereon, were it but a simple Jacob’s-ladder, the heavenly Messengers will travel, with glad tidings and unspeakable gifts for men.2 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellanies, iv. 11.]

It is so easy in happy family life, in absorption in one’s special work, to forget the duties of a citizen, to avoid the fret and stress, may-be the hardships and the danger, of politics and social duty. But it is not enough for men to be “kind towards their friends, affectionate in their families, inoffensive towards the rest of the world.” The true man knows that he may not decline responsibility for those whom God has made his fellow-citizens. And higher still, higher than family or country, stands Humanity; and no man may do or sanction aught for either, which will hurt the race. Ever before Mazzini stood the vision of the cross, Christ dying for all men, not from utilitarian calculation of the greatest number, but because love embraces all.3 [Note: Bolton King, Mazzini, 266.]

III

The Privileges of Citizens

1. They were now citizens—no more strangers, that is, outside the Kingdom of God entirely; nor even sojourners, that is, resident foreigners, such as were found in most ancient States, enjoying some measure of protection and privilege, but not the full rights of citizens. Such was the position of proselytes in Israel. But now, Paul says to his Gentile readers, ye are no longer in any inferior position, but fellow-citizens with the saints, i.e. the people whom God has separated to Himself out of the world. Ye have all the privileges which these enjoy; nay, ye have them in common with them, so that there is absolutely no difference, since all alike now have these privileges on the same ground, that of the reconciling work of Christ. Ye have, through Him, an even more blessed position than the saints under the old covenant had, ye are “of the household of God”—not merely citizens of the Kingdom of God, but children of His family. This flows from the access to God as Father asserted in Ephesians 2:18.

Roman citizenship was in many respects a unique thing. At least there is nothing in the modern world quite like it. When you speak of a citizen of Leicester or of London, you think of one who has either been born or has spent the best years of his life there, who has home, friends, and interests centred in its activities. Roman citizenship did not mean that. It was an imperial privilege rather than local. London indeed gives its freedom to a few honoured strangers, and that bears a faint resemblance to the Roman practice. The Roman citizenship was conferred upon a few persons all over the empire, persons who, had never set foot in the great city. It was given to them for some service they had done, and descended to their children. Paul did not see Rome until he was an old man, but he was all his life a Roman citizen. And it meant in brief three things:—First, it was a grand Freemasonry. It brought a man into companionship and brotherhood with Romans everywhere. It gave him entrance to the best society. It made him one of a superior race, and put upon him a mark of nobility. Secondly, it conferred upon him certain legal rights. It was an aegis of protection over him. Roman law and all Rome’s power were behind him. He could not be tried, condemned, or punished save by Romans, and if ever he was wronged, misjudged, falsely accused, he had the privilege of carrying his cause to the highest court, and appealing to Cæsar himself. And thirdly, there was his responsibility. Wherever he lived, in Tarsus or Ephesus, he remembered that he was a Roman, that Roman manners were expected of him, that his conduct must be that of an imperial race, and that he must try to fashion the place of his abode and the things of daily life as far as possible after Rome’s best models.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 159.]

In the time of the Apostle when the mass of the population were slaves, the goods and chattels of their masters, lying at their absolute disposal for life or death, to be a Roman citizen was a distinction the value of which those who know nothing of slavery but the name can only very inadequately estimate. To be a citizen was to be a man, an integral part of a commonwealth. It was to be identified with its glory: it was to be shielded and armed with the majesty of its influence. In the very name there was a power that commanded the instant reverence of all that could not boast the privilege, and the sympathy of all that did. Hence the alarm of Lysias upon discovering that Paul was a Roman, and the deference which he, who had only purchased his freedom, could not help paying to the man who could declare himself freeborn. But what is mere civil freedom in comparison with spiritual freedom—freedom “from the law of sin and death”; freedom from the curse and tyranny of evil and the evil one; the freedom conferred by “the perfect law of liberty”; freedom to obey the instincts and impulses of our spiritual and immortal nature, and to enter into communion with the Invisible and the Eternal. “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves besides.”2 [Note: J. H. Smith, Healing Leaves, 410.]

2. They now belong to the fellowship of the saints.—They are citizens in the holy state—the commonwealth of the people consecrated to God—citizens with full rights and no longer strangers or unenfranchised residents. The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost, that the entire nation is holy, “a kingdom of priests.” It is because this is true that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the one body, but the whole body is priestly, and all are citizens—not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God.

To the Apostle Paul every Christian was a saint. Turn to the inscriptions of his letters. This is the kind of address we find: “Paul and Timothy, to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi.” “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colossae.” “Paul, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, even them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” It is quite obvious the references here are to living men and women, the men and women who formed the membership of these various churches. These were Paul’s “saints.” And, further, he does not confine the term to a select few in each church, conspicuous for their special piety. The people whom Paul addresses as “saints,” we soon discover, were very far from being perfect people. They were, indeed, full of faults and imperfections and failings. Think of the people at Corinth with their quarrellings and excesses and sensualities! And yet Paul thinks and speaks of them as “saints”! It is not simply that in these faulty and imperfect Christians he sees the promise of the glorified saint, just as the naturalist may see the giant oak in the tiny acorn! Faults and all, these Christians were “saints,” in this sense, that they were consecrated to God, and had given themselves to Christ. For that is the New Testament meaning of the word “saint”; it means one dedicated, set apart, to the will of God. And, in spite of all their shortcomings and sins, these early Christians had given themselves to Christ; the deepest thing in them was the love they bore to Christ; the life they lived, they lived in the faith of Christ. And every one of whom that can be said, according to the Apostle’s teaching, is a “saint.”1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 169.]

After being in China more than twenty years Griffith John said to young missionaries, “Preach the Gospel, and take time to be holy as the preparation.” In the Mission Conference in Shanghai, in 1877, he said, “The missionary must above everything be a holy man; the Chinese expect it of him. I am persuaded that no minister can be a great spiritual power in whom this is not in good measure seen. He must be more than a good man; a man who takes time, not only to master the language and the literature of the people, but to be holy.… Brethren, this is what we need if this empire is to be moved by us. To this end the throne of grace must be our refuge; the shadow of the Almighty must every day and every hour be our dwelling, we must take time to be filled with His power, we must take time to be holy.”2 [Note: A. Murray, Aids to Devotion, 47.]

3. More intimately still, they belong to the family or household of God.—A household is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the Divine household, in which God has provided stewards to make regular spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped, encouraged, disciplined, fed. But there is another idea which, in St. Paul’s mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the “divine family.” It is that in this household we are sons and not servants—that is, intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be “subject to ordinances,” or to “the weak and beggarly rudiments,” the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. “Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you.” “Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances? Handle not, taste not, touch not.” It is perfectly true to say that what St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands, not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit.

The prominent characteristic of a family is mutual affection. A family is held together by love. There is the love of the father for each and all, and there is the love of all for him and for each other. And so it is in the Divine family. “God is love”; pure, infinite, eternal love. This, as it is the glorious summary of His perfections, the grand resultant expression of all His attributes, is the characteristic of every individual member of His spiritual family. “We love him because he first loved us” and “This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” That, however, which the Apostle seems to have had more particularly in view is the high privilege which attaches to this Divine relationship. “Ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”: that is—as children of God, born of His Spirit, and genuine members therefore of His spiritual family, you have a peculiar interest in His love and care. He, the Father of all men, is emphatically your Father. Others He regards indeed with the love of benevolence, but you He regards with the love of complacency. Others participate in His universal goodness, but you are the objects of His special solicitude. A child has a certain right to the consideration of his father which no stranger to the family possesses: and so you, as members of God’s family, have a claim upon His affection which none but His spiritual children can allege. Having received from Him not “the spirit of bondage again to fear,” not the spirit of a slave, which shuns His presence and quails before His eye, but “the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father,” so He privileges and encourages you to come before Him lovingly and trustfully, with all the freedom and confidence of a child, casting all your care upon Him, and looking for all things in that boundless love which has pledged all His attributes and excellences, all His treasures of grace and glory, for your perfection and blessedness.

Sin brings separation from God. The word “depart” uttered to the workers of iniquity is not an arbitrary one. It voices a law of God that runs through all His moral realm. Sin pushes the prodigal away from his home and friends, his property, his pleasures, his reputation, his character, even his clothes and his food. The law of the word “depart” has driven him away from everything that was beautiful and of good report. Behold him in his rags and loneliness—feeding swine. Think it not strange, if that man is driven from God and goodness who yields himself to sin. By a changeless law of moral repulsion, he is pushed away. Is it hopeless? Yes, as long as his back is turned toward God. But let him “come to himself,” let him feel his sin and degradation, let him long for home, for forgiveness, for his Father’s face, and the law of changeless love takes hold of him.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 77.]

4. The higher status involves a heavier responsibility.—The enfranchised must do credit to their citizenship; they must live as becometh saints, and manifest the spirit, not of slaves, but of sons. Christian citizenship must begin with the thought of our individual life and purpose. The truly good citizen is made out of the truly good man. The common life is made of our individual lives, and the whole cannot be better than the constituent parts. If, then, our citizenship is to be a Christian citizenship, we must first of all be Christian men. The first thing that the Spirit of Christ does for every one who is in any real and vital sense a disciple, or, as we say in our modern phrase, a Christian man, is to lay hold of the spirit, breathing into it new aspirations, creating, as St. Paul would have said, the new man; and the new man in Christ thus born of the Spirit finds his heart aglow with new aims and new ambitions, new purposes and ideals of conduct. He is illuminated with new thought and with new conceptions of duty and of happiness.

God knows if I could in any way, by preaching that great part of the Communion of Saints, make men generally feel how they are living one in another, and how every single soul has his share of responsibility for his fellows, and every single soul his blessing from undertaking that responsibility, and how any single soul receives a blessing from the fellowship of his fellows in everything that he undertakes—if I could impress that upon my countrymen generally, I would be content to do nothing more in all my life than to preach this greatest of all Christian doctrines.1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 312.]

As Paul waited in his Roman prison, he had all around him soldiers and civilians, high and low, men of various types and kinds, most of whom claimed, we may suppose, Roman citizenship, and, moreover, nearly all of whom were members of the household of Cæsar; and we can imagine the discussions of which these great texts in his letters are the echo. Yes, he says, you claim to be citizens of this great Empire of Rome, you are members of the household of Cæsar, and you are very proud of it all; but do you also remember that you have to think of your real calling as something deeper and broader and higher and more enduring than all of these, if you are to be in the best sense good citizens of the Roman Empire and good members of the Imperial household; why, then you must bear always in mind that you are called of God to live as members of the commonwealth of Christ, to remember in all circumstances that you are fellow-citizens with the saints and of God’s household.2 [Note: Bishop J. Percival.]

The Nation some time ago gave the story of a business man, the inheritor of an honoured name and honourable business traditions, who had a temptation put in his way to abandon the old methods of his firm, and join a great trust that cared more for its dividends than the welfare of its workmen. There was money in it, and the man was sorely tempted. But on the night in which the decision was to be taken, he fell into a reverie in front of his fire, and he seemed to behold his old father looking at him, with such concern in his eyes; and at the sight of his father’s face the temptation lost its power; he must act as his father’s Song of Solomon 3 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 184.]

The Commonwealth of Christ

Literature

Beeching (H. C.), The Apostles’ Creed, 83.

Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 104.

Boyd (A. K. H.), Sermons and Stray Papers, 198.

Fleming (S. H.), Fifteen-Minute Sermons for the People, 122.

Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 158.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 102.

Jones (J. D.), Things Most Surely Believed, 166.

Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 81.

Smith (J. H.), Healing Leaves, 407.

Stuart (E. A.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 86.

Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 102.

Christian World Pulpit, lxv. 397 (Percival).

Church of England Pulpit, xliii. 269 (Terry).

Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Andrew, St. Thomas, xiv. 48; All Saints, xv. 410.

National Preacher, xl. 51 (Smith).