is Person and the truths that lie in Him, are the fountains
of all our knowledge of God and man. To be Christ's is to take Him as
the master who has absolute authority over conduct and practice. His
commandment is the Christian's duty; His pattern the Christian's
all-sufficient example; His smile the Christian's reward. To be
Christ's is to take Him for the home of our hearts, in whose gracious
and sweet love we find all sufficiency and a rest for our seeking
affections. And so, if ye are His, Paul, Apollos, Cephas, all men are
yours; in the sense that you are delivered from all undue dependence
upon them; and in the sense that they subserve your highest good.

So the true democracy of Christianity, which abjures swearing by the
words of any teacher, is simply the result of loyal adherence to the
teaching of Jesus Christ. And that proud independence which some of
you seek to cultivate, and on the strength of which you declare that
no man is your master upon earth, is an unwholesome and dangerous
independence, unless it be conjoined with the bowing down of the
whole nature, in loyal submission, to the absolute authority of the
only lips that ever spoke truth, truth only, and truth always. If
Christ be our Master, if we take our creed from Him, if we accept His
words and His revelation of the Father as our faith and our objective
religion, then all the slavery to favourite names, all the taking of
truth second-hand from the lips that we honour, all the partisanship
for one against another which has been the shame and the ruin of the
Christian Church, and is working untold mischiefs in it to-day, are
ended at once. 'One is your Master, even Christ.' 'Call no man Rabbi!
upon earth; but bow before Him, the Incarnate and the Personal
Truth.'

And in like manner they who are Christ's are delivered from all
temptations to make men's maxims and practices and approbation the
law of their conduct. Society presses upon each of us; what we call
public opinion, which is generally the clatter of the half-dozen
people that happen to stand nearest us, rules us; and it needs to be
said very emphatically to all Christian men and women--Take your law
of conduct from His lips, and from nobody else's.

'They say. What say they? Let them say.' If we take Christ's
commandment for our absolute law, and Christ's approbation for our
highest aim and all-sufficient reward, we shall then be able to brush
aside other maxims and other people's opin