compliance with God's will, in His constant service of
mankind, in the sweetness and gentleness and strength of His personal
character. There is no path of legitimate duty into which we are
called to go, in which He does not precede; for when He putteth forth
His own sheep, He goeth before them, and His sheep follow. As of old,
His disciples saw Him going before them ascending up to Jerusalem, and
they followed Him; there is no path of arduous duty and suffering in
which He does not still precede.

Following Christ involves almost certain suffering at first. When
Peter asked what they would have, who had left all to follow Jesus, the
Master did not hesitate to say that the bitter herb of suffering would
mingle with all the dishes with which their table might be spread: and
when James and John tried to bespeak the right and left seats of the
throne, He spoke of the cup and baptism of pain. But afterward, when
the cross and grave are passed, then the fullness of joy and the
pleasures, which are at God's right hand forever-more!

We may follow Christ, and yet our paths diverge. Peter and John had
been close friends. In them, the binary stars of love and zeal, labor
and rest, action and contemplation, revolved in a common orbit.
Together at the grave, in the boat, in the temple, in prison; but their
outward fellowship was not permitted to continue; perhaps if it had, it
would have been too absorbing. It is in silence and solitude that
spirits attain their complete beauty, and so the Master is sometimes
obliged to say to us, "What is that to thee? follow thou Me."

In following Jesus, with the shadow of the cross always on his spirit,
Peter learned to sympathize with his Master's anticipation of death,
which in earlier years had been incomprehensible to him, and had led
him to say, "That be far from Thee, Lord"; and it gave him finally the
opportunity of fulfilling his first resolve to go with Him to prison
and to death. We often think ourselves strong to do and suffer long
before patience had done her perfect work. We rush impetuously
forward, and are overwhelmed. Then our Master has to lead us about, to
take us round by another and longer route, to train us by toils and
tears and teachings, till, hopeless of our own strength and confident
in His, in our old age we cry, "I must put off this my tabernacle, even
as our Lord Jesus Christ hath showed me."

If the old legend is true, Peter was crucified with his hea