it, there was, when He was upon earth, and therefore
there is now and for ever, a burning indignation against all wrong and
falsehood; and especially against that worst form of falsehood--hypocrisy;
and that worst form of hypocrisy--covetousness which shelters itself
under religion.

When our Lord saw men buying and selling in the temple, He made a scourge
of cords, and drove them out, and overthrew the tables of the
money-changers, and said,--"It is written, my Father's house is a house
of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves."

When He faced the Pharisees, who were covetous, He had no meek and gentle
words for them: but, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye
escape the damnation of hell?"

And because His character is perfect and eternal: because He is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, we are bound by the Christian faith to
believe that He has now, and will have for ever, the same Divine
indignation against wrong, the same determination to put it down: and to
cast out of His kingdom, which is simply the whole universe, all that
offends, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

And if any say, as some say now-a-days--"Ah, but you cannot suppose that
our Lord would propagate His Gospel by the sword, or wish Christians to
do so." My friends, this chapter and this sermon has nothing to do with
the propagation of the Gospel, in the popular sense; nothing to do with
converting heathens or others to Christianity. It has to do with that
awful government of the world, of which the Bible preaches from beginning
to end; that moral and providential kingdom of God, which rules over the
destiny of every kingdom, every nation, every tribe, every family, nay,
over the destiny of each human being; ay, of each horde of Tartars on the
furthest Siberian steppe, and each group of savages in the furthest
island of the Pacific; rendering to each man according to his works,
rewarding the good, punishing the bad, and exterminating evildoers, even
wholesale and seemingly without discrimination, when the measure of their
iniquity is full. Christ's herald in this noble chapter calls men, not
to repentance, but to inevitable doom. His angel--His messenger--stands
in the sun, the source of light and life; above this petty planet, its
fashions, its politics, its sentimentalities, its notions of how the
universe ought to have been made and managed; and calls to whom?--to all
the fowl that fly in the firmament of hea