f love, came
back on him to arouse successive surges of grief. Contrast Christ's
love with your ingratitude, Christ's constancy with your fickle
devotion, Christ's meekness to take the yoke of His Father's will, and
your unwillingness to bear His cross of shame, and ask if you, too,
have no cause for tears like those that Peter shed.

It is remarkable that Peter should have fallen here. His open,
ingenuous nature was not given to lying, his impetuous character was
not prone to cowardice. Accustomed from boyhood to meet death in the
wrestle with nature for daily sustenance, he was not subject to the
apprehensions of a nervous dread. None of his fellow-disciples would
have expected the rock-man to show that he was clay or sand after all.
But this was permitted that we might learn that our noblest natural
qualities as much need to be dealt with by the grace of God as our
vices and defects. Many a fortress has been taken from a side which
was deemed impregnable. No one expected that Wolfe would assail Quebec
from the Heights of Abraham.

How often we have fallen into the same trap! We have, perhaps, been
thrown into a company where it was fashionable to sneer at evangelical
religion, and we have held our peace; where the ready sneer was passed
on those who dared still to believe in miracle and inspiration, and we
have been silent, where condemnation has been freely passed on some man
of God whom we owned as friend, and knew to be innocent, and we have
not tried to vindicate him; where some great religious movement in
which we were interested was being discussed and condemned, whilst we
have coolly joined in the conversation as if we had not made up our
minds, or were totally indifferent. We have been unwilling to be
unpopular, to stand alone, to bear the brunt of opposition, to seem
eccentric and peculiar. Let those who are without sin cast their
stones at Peter; but the most of us will take our place beside him, and
realize that we, too, have given grief to Christ, and grave cause to
His enemies to blaspheme.

But, be it remembered, the true quality of the soul is shown, not in
the way in which it yields to temptation in some moment of weakness and
unpreparedness, but in the way in which it repents afterward. Do we
weep, not for the penalty we dread, but because we have sinned against
Christ? Are we broken down before Him, waiting till He shall restore?
Do we dare still to believe in His forgiving and renewin