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How different are the estimates of earth and heaven! How different is man's standard of judgment from that which Scripture calls "the shekel of the sanctuary"! The world drives its saints into deserts and caves of the earth. The world says of each, what it once said of one, "Away with such a fellow from the earth — it is not fit that he should live." God looks down from heaven upon the children of men, sees their rash judgments, hears their hard sentences, one upon another, and says, just of those whom the world counts wanting in every attribute of sociability and citizenship — "of whom, on the contrary, the world was not worthy." Let us try to estimate aright this parenthetical comment. "The world." This cosmos of sense and matter, with its pleasures and its ambitions, its lustings and strivings and warrings, its vanities, its falsehoods, and — its children. Yes, there are those who live for it and for it only, and who count any other life an enthusiasm, a fanaticism, or a hypocrisy. And the world is very real — who shall speak to the contrary? Very substantial, very powerful in its edicts, its threatenings, and its punishments. This is its day, and it makes the most of it. The world "knows that it has but a short time" — and there is a misgiving, too, under its vauntings, which make them more arrogant and imperious. Such reflections are necessary to the understanding of the text. And they enable us to go forward, and show why men of faith are so repulsive to the world; why, in days of violence, they are persecuted; why, in days of tranquillity, they are courteously, but effectually, ostracised. There is a natural hostility between faith and the world. The one lives for the future: the other lives for the present. The one sees the Invisible: the other places Him at an immeasurable distance. Nowhere is the world really stronger than in Christendom. To profess faith — to fight for the faith — is the world's masterpiece of self-tranquillising. Are we not all of one speech? Why be more scrupulous, more sensitive, more religious, than your neighbour? The world worshipping is twice the world. It has made its covenant with death — with hell it is at agreement. And that which might seem to be faith's remedy is forbidden her. "Wilt Thou that we go and gather them up?" Wilt Thou that we discern for ourselves between the false and the true, between the nominal believer and the real believer, within the professing Church, and within the visible communion? Not so. "Lest, while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them." At all risks, the world and the Church must be mingled together in the present; if so be the influences of grace may yet touch the worldly, and bring them into the fold of the real and of the true. Thus we are taught to look more at principles than at persons. We must not, we cannot, go apart by ourselves, and leave the Church-world to its own ways and its own devices. If it excommunicates, if it drives into the desert, it must have its way: and it will set its mark, if not publicly yet in secret, upon all who refuse to speak its thought and to do its bidding. The man of faith, the consistent Christian, may be in the world, of it he cannot be — and the world knows it. The world of the home, the world of the school, the world of the shop and the counting-house, the world of fashion and of society, feels and resents the reproving speech, and yet more the reproving silence, of the man who quietly and consistently lives for the unseen, and turns all his thoughts and actions that way. And this is the closing lesson of the chapter of faith. We are reminded that there is a "world " present and active in the heart of Christian England, and that there is also, side by side with it, not only a visible professing community, which, for us, is almost coextensive with it, but also a secret society, knit together in a bond of spiritual sympathy, not only by the possession of common ordinances of worship and rules of living, but by the actual presence, within each member, of the Holy Spirit of God quickening, guiding, enabling, sanctifying — drawing their desires heavenward, and making" that world," the world of heaven and of God, more real and more present and more persuasive to them than all the pleasures and all the interests of things seen and temporal. We are reminded also that in this realisation of the invisible God lies a power, and a dignity, and a patent of nobility, altogether different, in kind as well as in degree, from all the greatness and all the honour which can be conferred by rank or wealth, by genius or intellect, by the admiration of senates or the favour of kings. "Of whom the world was not worthy" is God's description of the very men whom the world casts out as fools or madmen. Live now, at all costs, for "that world," whether "this world" shall curse or bless. In pureness, in meekness, in diligence, in love unfeigned — with the Holy Spirit within you — so pass the time of your sojourning, and look for your rest and your home in the one "city which hath the foundations," the city of the everlasting glory, whose light is the crucified and risen One, whose Architect and Artificer is God.

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented;

WEB: They were stoned. They were sawn apart. They were tempted. They were slain with the sword. They went around in sheep skins and in goat skins; being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated