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I. TRUTH ITSELF NEVER WEARS OUT; BUT ITS DRESS DOES. Carlyle, in his never-to-be-forgotten Sartor Resartus, has shown us how all truth takes to itself some form, or dress, or skin. Life craves manifestation. Truth without a body is powerless. Facts need words to describe them, and make them live and act. It is through the words, or the expression, or the dress or body, that we come to get our ideas of the truth or life these contain. The world itself is but God's thought put into form; the movements of the stars are the expressions of God's delight in the orderly; the flowers, His thoughts of beauty; the waves, the expression of His might and gentleness; music, one of love's voices, the expression of the affections and emotions, as words express reasoning and intellectual processes. Christ Himself is the completest expression in form of the invisible and otherwise unknowable. Truth, thought, spirit, deity we cannot know apart from form. All must clothe themselves before we can recognise them and make them our friends and helpers. The Incarnation of Christ is only the highest expression of a universal series of similar experiences. This being so, it is easy to see how important form, clothing, may be. Mr. Ruskin, "in" the Ethics, boldly says: "You can always stand by form against force. The philosophers say there is as much heat, motion, or energy in a tea-kettle as in a sier-eagle. Very good; it is so. It requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle to take the eagle up to his nest. The kettle has a spout, the eagle a beak. The kettle a lid, and the eagle wings. But the kettle cannot but choose sit on the hob, whilst the eagle can choose to recline on the air, sail over the highest cliffs, and stare with undimmed eye at the full glory of the sun." The eagle's glory is her form; the steam kettle's force. Here we see the beauty and use of form. The truth to be remembered about form is — that it dies, that it is often defective at the best, and that as it grows old it loses its force. The body of the old eagle is not equal to the flights of its youth. Words which are truth's body are at best. often a poor body, an inadequate garment; and words grow old and lose their force.

II. AT TIMES WE NEED GIVE TRUTH A NEW DRESS. The very beauty of some forms is their danger. We love them so much we keep on using them, until familiarity robs them of their full force, and we treat them as we should not — that is, with much less respect and attention than we treat stranger sounds and forms. Splendid words, like grace, glory, blessing, mercy, faith, pardon, come to be tripped so lightly with the tongues and so often, that hundreds never get to know their real meaning at all. Hence it is that dear old tunes and texts may become idols. When we use words in song or in prayer, and only use them because they have been so often used, and are the correct thing, or were the correct thing, to say, then our worship is a farce and a delusion, and the time for a change has come. It is impossible not to know that we all often ask for blessing and grace with no clear definite thought or purpose of what blessing and grace mean or involve; and when we do so, then the words grace and blessing are become as the serpent of brass — a delusion and danger, a mere Nehushtan. God Himself has had regard to this very need in man; and for man's sake He has condescended to use variety in giving and expressing truth.

III. This need of realness leads me to observe THAT WE ARE PRONE TO SET AN ENDUE VALUE ON THE OLD, AND WE MUST GUARD AGAINST THAT DANGER. What history is the history of the conflict which has raged ever when change has had to be made! If Galileo said the world was not a fiat surface; if Walton said the Hebrew vowel points were not inspired; if geology said the world was not made in six times twenty-four hours; if ever a new view of the method of inspiration were suggested — nay, if the Church itself undertook to revise the Bible translation — what a Babel of contention and conflict arises; what gloomy prophecies of ruin and disaster are indulged in!

IV. This brings me to notice our duty — THAT IT MAY BE WISE AND RIGHT SOMETIMES TO SACRIFICE THE CLOTHING FOR THE TRUTH'S SAKE. The Bible, specially the New Testament, is a wonderful example of this duty. It is said that there is only one spot in all Palestine of which we can say, with absolute confidence, It was on this very spot Christ must have been (so carefully have the New Testament writers guarded against the worship of localities); except in the solitary case of Jacob's well.

V. Our last point is this — IN CHRIST ALONE (THE TRUTH) THE CLOTHING NEVER WEARS OUT. That is a marvellous statement about Christ — that "He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." He never needs revise His truth; He never has more experience or wisdom. We should not think it a compliment to a man to say be thought at sixty just what he did at thirty. We expect riper experience, larger views, and sounder judgments. But Christ never needs thus grow; He is for ever perfect in form and spirit. The Gospels are a wonderful illustration — in fact, the whole Bible is a wonderful illustration — of this truth. The Book never grows old; it is always young and in the front of life's race and battle.

(R. H. Lovell.)

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KJV: He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.

WEB: He removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah: and he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for to those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan.