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I. IT HAS BEEN MADE AN OBJECTION TO CHRISTIANITY THAT IT INVOLVES A SYSTEM OF RELIGIOUS PRIVILEGES LIMITED, FOR SOME TWO THOUSAND YEARS, TO A SINGLE NATION: and although the New Testament proposes a more catholic plan, still it makes itself responsible for the Old. How is this consistent with the benevolence of a God whose love is wider than the world?

1. Long before this separation of Israel, God declared that it was not a permanent law. At the very moment when the selection began, an explicit prediction was carefully annexed to it that it would be expanded into a grand brotherhood of the world. Abraham, in whom the special calling began, was the very man to whom the Lord said, that among his descendants there should be a "seed," a certain wonderful Son, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. That mysterious Shepherd-king of the whole human flock was to have a Hebrew mother (Galatians 4:4), so as to connect the special preparation with the universal blessing: but that He might be free of every possible human restriction, His Father was to be the Father of all that live. The promise in Genesis is as broad and as catholic as the preaching in the Acts.

2. Is there anything in this selection that justifies it? Why does a missionary gather in a score or two of children, out of hundreds, into a school, leaving the rest for the time untaught? When a Christian merchant wants to benefit paganism, why does he choose out one or two native youths of bright parts and send them to England for an education, instead of scattering spelling books among the heathen houses? When you want to introduce into a manufacturing interest an improved machinery, why do you send a single student to the best engineering school instead of exhorting the agents and masters of the mills to improve themselves in that department of science? The principle is that of selection and concentration, for the sake of a general benefit, and such is the nature of the human mind and of human society that practically this is the better and shorter way. Now, when Moses was lying all unconscious of it in the little rush basket in the Nile, the great problem was how to stop the race from going any further wrong, and how to turn it about, and get it ready for the setting up of a Divine order. And this was to be done not by thrusting in of an arbitrary revolution which would simply set the outward works all right, but would leave the springs of spiritual life — love, choice, energy, faith — all untouched. The thing wanted was to bring in and set up these grand interior holy forces in the soul. God took, therefore, the practical way. He chose out one nation, and sent it to school to learn the prophetic rudiments of Christianity and to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. This is the key to the scheme. Was not the plan magnificent? Can the best critic or the shrewdest objector suggest a wiser? And when we take a view of the whole Old Testament history, with all its strange incidents, its erring heroes, and faulty saints, intermingled with its splendid virtues, its sublime loyalty, its eloquence and poetry, and its supernatural prophecies, is it not a very poor thing indeed to carp at an unexplained passage here and there, or to sneer and cavil at some half-veiled feature in the majestic working out of the design? And all this while the original intention was never forgotten. When the Jew should have been drilled and taught, the Gentiles would be gathered in. No sidereal motion in astronomy, no regularity in celestial cycles and orbits wilt be more sure than the rising, in the due time, of the Epiphany star — "A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of My people Israel."

3. Another explanation to relieve the alleged narrowness of the Jewish religion is its constant progress as it goes on. With the intensest hostility to everything foreign; with an intolerance and superciliousness all the more tenacious because bound up with their religious scruples, there was ever a mighty hope of the breaking down of all international walls, and the gathering in of all to an equal share with themselves in the peace and glory of the Messiah's dominion. The strain grows louder and more confident all along. till, in Malachi, we have it resounding in that sentence, to which the famous saying of the great orator, where the morning drum beat of the British Empire circles the earth, is but a feeble figure: "From the rising of the sun, even unto the going down of the same, My name shall be great among the Gentiles," etc.

II. GIVE A FEW MOMENTS TO A USE OF ST. PETER'S WORDS WHICH WILL BRING THEM DOWN TO OURSELVES. "In every nation he that feareth God," etc.

1. The sense here is not theological, but popular; so that they are wide of the mark who suppose that the apostle means to take back all that he preached of every man's need of repentance and faith. He means this: — In every nation, now that Jesus Christ has come, there is an equal access to the open door for every tongue and tribe and people. The Pentecostal signs mean nothing less. There are no external disqualifications, and no internal incapabilities for being saved. "Fearing God and working righteousness" is the ground of acceptance, not meritoriously, into heaven, but into the privileges and helps of the Church as the school for heaven. Christ died for all. The Church is Catholic. And while St. Peter spoke, "on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost."

2. So the Word and Spirit of Christ go on constantly filling out our small measures of charity and hope — breaking up our petty judgments, enlarging our sympathies for all classes. We have a great many personal and private limitations.

(1) The circle of our own purely personal interests. Christ, by the Cross of His sacrifice, makes a constant remonstrance against these; and unless we catch His spirit, and give up self for service, we can be none of His.

(2) The circle of the family. This is a little wider, but often only a little. We may only see ourselves, and love ourselves, in our children. But our doctrine requires us to see whether our absorption in our own domestic pleasures restricts our sympathies for strangers.

(3) The circle of our own social set — a very dangerous as well as subtle enemy to true spirituality and nobleness. All the mutually admiring and complacent members just reflect each other's prejudices, study to please each other's whims, and so, of course, must stop growing in all that constitutes greatness of heart. Then there is the circle of business engagements, where the slave of mercantile ambition, or routine, sacrifices home, church, and his higher life for the poverty that is starving him.

(4) The circle of patriotic attachments. Scarcely yet — Christian as we claim to be — has the idea of the brotherhood of nations entered into the statesmanship, much less into the politics and legislation, of even civilised man.

3. We are not to suppose that Epiphany signifies to us a mere sending out of a few missionaries to foreign countries. Done earnestly and heartily, that is worth doing, and, the more we do it, the more Christian-like we become. Men may say they prefer to give their missionary money nearer home, where they see what becomes of it. But remember that it is by setting up standards and beacons, Christianising a few here and there, even when results look small, that a great testimony to Christ is finally given.

(Bp. Huntington.)

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KJV: Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:

WEB: Peter opened his mouth and said, "Truly I perceive that God doesn't show favoritism;