o cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the
temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too
high-minded to care for popularity themselves.

True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those
Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot
be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is
to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from
Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme
effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges:
and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only
wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a
mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a
really eloquent passage of his book on the _Emotions and the Will_, {0a}
then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more
human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural
phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.

Only wait: and fret not yourselves; else shall you be moved to do evil.
Remember the saying of the wise man--"Go not after the world. She turns
on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough, she will turn round to
thee."

SERMON I. THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS. A GOOD FRIDAY SERMON.

PHILIPPIANS II. 5-8.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in
the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made
Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a slave, and
was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man,
He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of
the Cross.

The second Lesson for this morning's service, and the chapter which
follows it, describe the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, both God and
Man. They give us the facts, in language most awful from its perfect
calmness, most pathetic from its perfect simplicity. But the passage of
St Paul which I have chosen for my text gives us an explanation of those
facts which is utterly amazing. That He who stooped to die upon the
Cross is Very God of Very God, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe,
is a thought so overwhelming, whenever we try to comprehend even a part
of it in our small imaginations, that it is no wonder if, in all ages,
many a pious soul, as it contemplated the Cross o