The Keys of the Kingdom

I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.—Matthew 16:19.

When this promise was given the little Galilean company was standing on one of the lower spurs of the Lebanon, amidst the pleasant rush and music of its countless brooks, with the grey walls of the Roman castle at Cæsarea Philippi in the distance. Peter had just made his great confession, and by his swift and far-reaching intuition had established his place as foremost man of the Twelve. It was under these circumstances that this peculiar form of expression was first used by our Lord. After speaking of the supernatural knowledge that Peter had received from the Father, Christ goes on to announce the important relation of Peter, as the first possessor and witness of such knowledge, to the Church of the future. And then He advances a step, and speaks of a future gift of light and power and dominion to Peter which the Apostle should receive from His hand: “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

I

The Keys

“I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

Keys are the emblems of authority, and this language was addressed to Peter because of the power that was to be conferred on him. He was to arrange and toil, determine and order, in the affairs of Christ’s Kingdom, not, of course, absolutely, but under Christ, for Christ is the Head. Peter’s authority was to be real, but none the less derived from and dependent upon Christ’s will. Now, as Peter’s power was not to be absolute, so it was not to be solitary. It was to be shared by the other Apostles. That is not brought out in the text, for here Christ is dealing only with His servant who had so grandly confessed Him. But later on Christ conferred on the entire company of the disciples the same wonderful power and privilege as He had conferred on Peter, when He said, not to any Apostle in particular but to the entire Church, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” One outcome of the authority was that Peter, like the others, could bind and unloose, could forbid or enjoin, what should be done in the Kingdom of Christ. Through the Apostle Christ was to express His will. Through him the Master was to carry on and carry out His purposes. What Peter ordered would be what Christ desired. What Peter forbade would be the things Christ disapproved, and herein was the reality of the power, herein the vastness of the privilege, that Christ was to work in and through him, for that is loftier and grander than for any man to devise and determine unaided and unguided of the Spirit of God. And it is in virtue of this real and true guiding Spirit that we have the Epistles of Paul, and Peter, and John, and others developing the doctrine of the cross of Christ, and setting forth the source of and the power of the Christian life.

1. If we refer to another occasion upon which Christ used this metaphor of the keys, we shall find that Christ was accustomed to associate with the expression knowledge and the specific power that comes from knowledge. To the lawyers He said, “Ye took away the key of knowledge.” The reference here can only be to the knowledge that unlocks the gates leading into the Kingdom of Heaven. That was Christ’s future gift to Peter. Putting this side by side with the fact that Christ has just been speaking of a knowledge of His own person and character that had been given to Peter, what can the knowledge that Christ would by and by give be but the knowledge of the Father, of which He was the one only spring and channel amongst men? It was through that knowledge that Peter was to open the way for men into the Kingdom of Heaven. “To bind” and “to loose” was to teach and to rule in the Kingdom of Heaven, in harmony with the knowledge received from the Father. We observe that the promise deals more immediately with things, not persons; with truths and duties, not with human souls. The Apostles dealt with souls as all other disciples of Christ deal with them, intermediately, through the truths and precepts on which the salvation of souls turned. The power of the keys, of binding and loosing, was in reality the power of knowing the essential truths of God’s character and will.

(1) It is the power of a teacher. Among the Jews, when a scribe was admitted to his office a key was given to him as the symbol of the duties which he was expected to perform. He was set apart to study with diligence the Book of the Law, and to read and explain it to the people. Jesus Christ reproved the Rabbis and Pharisees of His day for having taken away the key of knowledge, and for shutting up the Kingdom of Heaven against men, that is, trying to lock good men out. They knew little of the spirit of the law which they taught, and their teaching produced evil fruits in the lives of their countrymen.

There is a sense in which all who faithfully preach the word of the Kingdom hold the keys. When we say that we have got the key to a difficulty, or that an army holds the key to a position, we mean that, however long it may be before the proof of the power is manifested, yet it is there. So with those who proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus. Their word may be derided, their warnings scorned, their entreaties mocked at; yet as the word they speak is not their own but the word of God, so shall that word loose or bind, shut up or set free. But it is the Lord who does this; man is but His agent for declaring His message. Every command or threat is heard by conscience, but the thing that is declared may be long a-coming. It will come, however. So with every word of the gospel: the truth in Jesus is the key of the Kingdom: the decisive proof we may be long in discovering, but early or late every one must find a barred or an abundant entrance, according as he has given heed to or neglected the word of life.

When Luther opened the long-closed Bible in the Gospels and Epistles, he was bringing forth out of his treasury things new and old. He was binding and loosing the consciences of men. When Andrew Melville, in Scottish history, took King James by the sleeve as that pedant was arrogating to himself a spiritual power which was his neither by law nor by grace, and called him “God’s silly vassal,” reminding him that there were two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland, he may have been lacking in courtesy, but he was proving himself a scribe of the Kingdom. When John Brown of Harper’s Ferry stooped to kiss the child in its slave mother’s arms as he passed to his death, men of vision might have seen the keys of the Kingdom at his girdle. All men now realize that in his own rude way he taught the things of Christ to his own generation. Wherever and whenever the Christian Church, through its ministers and people and its inspired saints, shall stand to proclaim some high duty or to renounce some hoary wrong, they shall bind and they shall loose, and they shall fulfil the function of the Church in the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 65.]

(2) Again, we are reminded that knowledge is necessary to life; we believe and then do. The great principle is taught that the morality of Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that whoever, like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ’s nature, and all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that his judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man will correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his hold upon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality, namely, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” These are gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are much more truly understood as belonging to all who “possess like precious faith” (as Peter says) than as the prerogative of any individual or class.

In a chapter of reminiscences which is given at the end of the second volume of the Letters of Erskine of Linlathen, Principal Shairp writes: “Mr. Erskine utterly repudiated the character which Renan’s Vie de Jésus drew of our Lord, and almost resented the fatuity which could separate with a sharp line the morality of the Gospels from their doctrinal teaching as to Christ Himself. He used to say, ‘As you see in many English churches the Apostles’ Creed placed on one side of the altar, on the other the Ten Commandments, so Renan would divide as with a knife the moral precepts of the Gospels from their doctrines. Those he would retain, these he would throw away. Can anything be more blind? As well might you expect the stem and leaves of a flower to flourish when you had cut away the root, as to retain the morality of the Gospels when you have discarded its doctrinal basis. Faith in Christ, and God in Christ, is the only root from which true Christian morality can grow.’ ” 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, 1840–1870, p. 375.]

2. The history of St. Peter, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, reveals the facts that the lofty promise contained in the text was fulfilled in three important particulars.

(1) He is first in the first election to the vacant apostolate. He is first in the first great conversion of souls. His word rolls like the storm. It cuts and pierces like the sword. We do not require to have the imagination exalted by the vast gilded letters round the cupola of St. Peter’s at Rome. This is truly to hold the keys, and to roll back the doors of the Kingdom!

My mother’s death was the second epoch in my father’s life; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved. But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching, because an entire change in his way of dealing with God’s Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even altered—I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was “wise unto salvation”—but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh power—with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled, but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that τι θερμὸν πρᾶγμα, burned with a new ardour; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion or dwindled into lethargy.… From being elegant, rhetorical, and ambitious in his preaching, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved), keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity of meaning and power which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and flutter around the circumference and corners; he was bent on the centre, on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at another’s hand: then he took up with the word “apprehend”; he had laid hold of the truth,—there it was, with its evidence, in his hand; and every one who knew him must remember well how, in speaking with earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating way, looked into the palm of his hand, as if he actually saw there the truth he was going to utter.1 [Note: Dr. John Brown, Horœ Subsecivœ, ii. 9.]

(2) But the great promise to Peter is fulfilled in a second way. Spiritual sin would steal into the Church; it would glide in under a haze of profession and pretence, as Milton tells us that Satan passed in mist into Paradise. It is Peter who speaks with such awful power. Simon makes an attempt to buy the gift of God with money, and brands upon his own name for ever its ill-omened connexion with the foul offence (far from obsolete) of buying spiritual offices. Peter’s voice pronounces his condemnation. “All men,” says the Koran, “are commanded by the saint.” All men know, if only by instinct, that this priesthood of goodness has been won at the cross, in blood, the “crimson of which gives a living hue to all form, all history, all life.” Let us no longer lose our purchase of this mighty term, through fear of its sacerdotal connotations. Dissociated from the institution, as it has been well pointed out, the true priest makes good his claims to mediatorship in the heart of his fellows, solely by the possession of those spiritual qualities which create and confirm the impression that he is nearer to God than they.

Francis of Assisi is pre-eminently the saint of the Middle Ages. Owing nothing to church or school, he was truly theodidact, and if he perhaps did not perceive the revolutionary bearing of his preaching, he at least always refused to be ordained priest. He divined the superiority of the spiritual priesthood. The charm of his life is that, thanks to reliable documents, we find the man behind the wonder worker. We find in him not merely noble actions, we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word; I mean, we feel in him both development and struggle. How mistaken are the annals of the Saints in representing him as from the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul hour after hour, fighting against himself, against the suggestions of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years of his life were indeed a via dolorosa as painful as that where his Master sank down under the weight of the cross; for it is still a joy to die for one’s ideal, but what bitter pain to look on in advance at the apotheosis of one’s body, while seeing one’s soul—I would say his thought—misunderstood and frustrated.1 [Note: P. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. xv.]

(3) But there is exhibited yet another fulfilment to the great promise. Peter is also the first to divine the secret of God, to follow the mind of the Spirit. He climbs rapidly to the highest peak, and is the first herald of the dawn. The old is, no doubt, very dear to him; he clings to all that is devout and venerable with the tenacious loyalty of a true Hebrew churchman. He goes up “into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.” He ascends the house-top “to pray at the sixth hour.” The services of the Temple and of the synagogue go on upon a parallel line with the first eucharists. But this Hebraic Christianity, or Christian Hebraism, cannot continue indefinitely. There are souls among the Gentiles longing for forgiveness, for rest and purity. They are not to dwell in the shadow, to tarry disappointed in the vestibule for ever. It is for Peter to fling back the doors once again. He receives the vision in the house of Simon, the tanner, by the seaside.

Far o’er the glowing western main

His wistful brow was upward raised,

Where, like an angel’s burning train,

The burnished waters blazed.

And now his part as founder and rock is almost over. The reception of Cornelius is his last great act. The last mention of his name in St. Luke’s narrative is in these sentences: “There rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter. And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up and said unto them”—his last words are characteristic—“But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they.”

II

The Power of the Keys

“Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Although the notion of opening and shutting shades off into that of “binding and loosing,” it is obvious that the less familiar expression would not have been substituted for the more familiar without some specific reason, which reason is in this case supplied by the well-known meaning of the words themselves. The figure of “binding and loosing,” for “allowing as lawful, or forbidding as unlawful,” is so simple and obvious that no language has been wholly without it. Twice besides the expression is used: “Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:18); and “Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:23). On these occasions the words are spoken to others besides St. Peter, and on each occasion the sense is substantially the same: “So great shall be the authority of your decisions, that, unlike those of the ordinary schools or Rabbis, whatsoever you shall declare lawful shall be held lawful, whatsoever you shall declare unlawful shall be held unlawful, in the highest tribunal in heaven.”

1. It is, as it were, the solemn inauguration of the right of the Christian’s conscience to judge with a discernment of good and evil, to which up to this time the world had seen no parallel. In that age, when the foundations of all ancient belief were shaken, when acts which up to that time had been regarded as lawful or praiseworthy were now condemned as sinful, or which before had been regarded as sinful were now enjoined as just and holy, it was no slight comfort to have it declared, by the one authority which all Christians acknowledged as Divine, that there were those living on the earth on whose judgment in these disputed matters the Church might rely with implicit confidence. In the highest sense of all, doubtless, this judgment was exercised by Him alone who taught “as one having authority, and not as the scribes,” and who on the Mount of the new law drew the line between His own commandments and what was said by them of old time. In a lower sense it was exercised, and has ever since been exercised, by all those who by their teaching or their lives, by their words or their example, have impressed the world more deeply with a sense of what is Christian holiness and what is Christian liberty. In an intermediate sense, it has been exercised by those whose special gifts or opportunities have made them in a more than ordinary degree the oracles and lawgivers of the moral and spiritual society in which they have been placed. Such, above all, were the Apostles. By their own lives and teaching, by their Divinely sanctioned judgments on individual cases (as St. Paul on Elymas or the incestuous Corinthian) or on general principles (as in their Epistles), they have, in a far higher sense than any other human beings, bound and loosed the consciences, remitted and retained the sins, of the whole human race for ever.

The Jewish scribe kept the treasury of knowledge. His keys were his powers of reading and understanding and applying the law of God. He was the expositor of God’s word, the interpreter of God’s mind, the commentator on God’s counsels, the teacher of the truth made known to him by God. He bound the things of God—His laws, His ideals of life and duty, His lawful sanctions, His sacred and mystic revelation of Himself—upon men’s hearts and consciences. He loosed men’s minds and wills from any bondage, or any tyranny of unrighteous laws, and he enabled them to refrain from indulging in things forbidden. What the Jewish scribe with the keys of knowledge and truth and duty was to the Law, the Christian Church should be to the Kingdom of God. “Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” That describes both Christ’s own office as the Master and His disciples as His Church.

Go into an observatory, and watch some astronomer as he is following the transit of a star. His telescope is so adjusted that an ingenious arrangement of clock-work is made to shift it with the transit of the star. His instrument is moving in obedience to the movement of the star in the heavens. But the clock-work does not move the star. The astronomer has made his faultless calculations; the mechanic has adjusted his cranks and pendulums and wheels and springs with unerring nicety, and every movement in the telescope answers to the movement of the star in the far-off heavens. The correspondence rests on knowledge. And so when the things that are bound on earth are bound in heaven. Every legislative counsel and decree and movement in a truly apostolic and inspired Church answers to some counsel and decree and movement in the heavens. But then the power of discerning and forecasting the movements of the Divine will and government rests upon the power of interpreting the Divine character and applying its principles of action, as that character is communicated to us by Jesus Christ.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 266.]

Over thirty years ago Scotland was overwhelmed by a great commercial disaster through the failure of one of its leading banks. It was a calamity that could not stand alone, and day after day the strongest business houses were compelled to suspend payment. The distress brought upon the shareholders, many of them widows and orphans brought in a single morning to poverty, was so great that a gigantic lottery of six millions sterling was proposed. One half of these millions was to be given to subscribers. The other half was to be given to relieve the distress of those who were impoverished. The object seemed so praiseworthy, and the misery was so widespread and so extreme, that many of the wisest and clearest minds in Scotland gave it their support. Suddenly Principal Rainy, the foremost Christian minister of this land in his day, raised his voice. In a letter full of invincible argument, couched in courteous and appealing terms, he protested against this appeal to the very passions and follies, the greed and the gambling, which had produced the ruin. The scheme was dropped in a day. He had bound and loosed the consciences of men. All Scotland understood, for one moment at least, the true meaning of the power of the keys.2 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 64.]

2. The power given by these words perhaps goes further still, and implies, under certain extraordinary conditions, fitness and qualification to pronounce an unerring spiritual judgment upon the soul’s relation to God. And this leads us to ask the question, Upon what conditions does this power of opening and closing the Kingdom of Heaven, and of retaining and remitting the sin of men, rest? We observe, in the first case, that nothing whatever was promised to Peter, except so far as he was already the subject of a teaching inspiration, and was to become so in a yet richer degree in future days. He held the keys, and could bind and loose in so far as the Son was revealed to him by the Father and the Father by the Son, and not one iota beyond. He could not open the gates of the Kingdom by any private authority and apart from the possession of these truths. Then we come to the promise of this same power to the whole congregation of the disciples. There is no power of binding and loosing apart from Christ’s indwelling presence within the Church. And then we come to the last case. Christ connected the power of absolution with a symbolic act, in which He made the disciples recipients of His own life, and partakers and instruments of the Holy Ghost by that fellowship. But it will be observed that there is no valid retention or remission of sin that can be pronounced to men, except by the lips of which the Holy Ghost is the unceasing breath. Given that condition in the case of either priest or layman, one may safely extend to him the power of absolution.

As the doctor takes the key of his drug-store and selects from the specifics that are arranged around him, he kills or makes alive. His key means a power of absolution. When it is first put into his hand he is instructed with as solemn a responsibility as the Judge who pronounces death-sentences. When he selects this drug, or looks upon that as hopeless to apply under the conditions into which the patient has fallen, he is dealing with questions of life and death. And so Christ in His closing admonitions to the disciples teaches that they are not dealing with speculative truth only. The doctrine they are set forth to disseminate is not, like the curious and trivial questions discussed by some of the Rabbis, a matter that cannot possibly affect the spiritual well-being of a single human soul in the slightest degree. They are not following out questions that have a hypothetical value only. It is not for some idle debate in the groves that they are setting forth in the scanty outfit of couriers. They are commissioned to deal with grave, spiritual destinies. “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.”1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 268.]

We are told that, throughout the strain of the civil war in America, Abraham Lincoln found a true priest in the godly and much-suffering woman who had charge of his children. He, who became more powerful than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for the man he was, tells us how he was sustained in that awful crisis of national calamity and personal sorrow by the prayers in his behalf of this stricken, yet believing woman. She knew God, Lincoln felt, so she became God’s priest to Lincoln. He resorted to her for intercession on his behalf—he who would, as one truly remarks, have treated with “courteous and civil incredulity a proffer of sacerdotal good offices from Cardinal Gibbons.”2 [Note: A. Shepherd, Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 231.]

3. Yet the responsibility is always with the man himself. To each soul personally God gives the keys of his own destiny and bids him unlock life’s closed doors; puts in his hands the rudder and bids him steer his bark; gives him the tools and bids him model his own character. This is the most solemn fact of all, for this is an undivided and unshared responsibility. I may throw on others the blame for the failure of the State and the sins of the Church; but for my decisions respecting my own life I am alone responsible. In vain the reluctant receiver protests against taking the key of his own life; in vain he endeavours to pass it to some other one; in vain he seeks to avoid the necessity of deciding life’s problems and making life’s choice. Sometimes he seeks a father-confessor and asks him to take the key and bind and loose his life for him; and the father-confessor may accept the trust. But it is in vain. Every one of us shall give account of himself to God. Whether the father-confessor sits in a priest’s chair, or in a Protestant minister’s chair, or in a religious editor’s chair, he can take no responsibility; he can give counsel, but that is all. To each soul God has given the keys; each soul must bind and loose for itself.

A father whose wealth is in ships and warehouses and railroads, but who has an acre garden attached to the country homestead, summons his boys one spring, as he is going to Europe, and says to them, “I put this garden in your charge; spend what you will; cultivate according to your own best judgment; send the product to the market; and account to me for sales and expenditures when I get home.” “But, Father,” say the boys, “what shall we sow?” “I cannot tell you; you must judge for yourselves.” “Where shall we sell?” “Find out for yourselves.” “What prices ought we to get?” “Learn for yourselves.” “But, Father, we know nothing about gardening; we shall make dreadful mistakes.” “No doubt you will,” replies the father, “and you will learn by your mistakes; and it is your learning, not the gardening, I care for.” “But, Father, we are afraid we shall bankrupt you.” The father laughs and replies. “You cannot bankrupt me, if you try, with a summer’s gardening on an acre plot.” “But, Father,” finally protest the boys, “we are afraid that when you come back and see how poorly we have done you will find fault with us and be sorry that you gave us such a trust.” And the father catches up a piece of paper and writes upon it: “Know all men by these presents that I hereby appoint my boys, James and John, my true and lawful attorneys, to do all things that may be necessary in the cultivation and charge of my acre garden, and I hereby ratify and confirm beforehand whatever they may do.” And he signs it, hands it to them, and goes his way. So God gives to us, His children, in this summer day out of eternity which we call life, and on this little acre plot of ground out of the universe which we call the world, the responsibility and the liberty involved in the charge of our own destinies, and with this He gives power of attorney promising beforehand to ratify and confirm whatever we do in loyal service to Him and in loyal allegiance to His name and honour.1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 187.]

Whatever may have been the influences which concurred in effecting this fundamental transformation in Dr. Martineau’s philosophical system, there can be little doubt that when he preached the striking sermon on “The Christian View of Moral Evil” the process was virtually completed. That discourse gives expression in the most emphatic terms to the doctrine of Ethical Individualism, which forms the keynote of his moral philosophy. “This sense,” he says, “of individual accountability—notwithstanding the ingenuity of orthodox divines on the one hand, and necessarian philosophers on the other—is impaired by all reference of the evil that is in us to any source beyond ourselves.… There is no persuasion more indispensable to this state of mind, and consequently no impression which Christianity more profoundly leaves upon the heart, than that of the personal origin and personal identity of sin,—its individual incommunicable character.… Hence it appears impossible to defend the doctrines of Philosophical Necessity—which presents God to us as the author of sin and suffering—from the charge of invading the sense of personal responsibility.”1 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, ii. 271.]

The Keys of the Kingdom

Literature

Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 175.

Book (W. H.), The Columbus Tabernacle Sermons, 71.

Burrell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 306.

Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 57.

Fraser (J.), Parochial and Other Sermons, 302.

Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 151.

Jerdan (C.), Gospel Milk and Honey, 54.

Lewis (L. H.), Petros, 65.

Norton (J. W.), Golden Truths, 326.

Selby (T. G.), The Imperfect Angel, 261.

Wright (W. B.), The World to Come, 45.

Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 376 (F. R. M. Hitchcock).

Church Family Newspaper, Feb. 17, 1911 (F. S. Webster).