rit and of temper in individuals and in nations,
in public and in private matters, that, too, is in flagrant
contradiction to the principles that are taught on the Cross to which
you say you look for your salvation. Have you got forgiveness, and are
you going out from the presence-chamber of the King to take your brother
by the throat for the beggarly coppers that he owes you, and say: 'Pay
me what thou owest!' when the Master has forgiven you all that great
mountain of indebtedness which you owe Him? Oh, my brother! if Christian
men and women would only learn to take away the scales from their eyes
and souls; not looking at Christ's Cross with less absolute
trustfulness, as that by which all their salvation comes, but also
learning to look at it as closely and habitually as yielding the pattern
to which their lives should be conformed, and would let the
heart-melting thankfulness which it evokes when gazed at as the ground
of our hope prove itself true by its leading them to an effort at
imitating that great love, and so walking worthy of the Gospel, how
their lives would be transformed! It is far easier to fetter your life
with yards of red-tape prescriptions--do this, do not do that--far
easier to out-pharisee the Pharisees in punctilious scrupulosities, than
it is honestly, and for one hour, to take the Cross of Christ as the
pattern of your lives, and to shape yourselves by that.

One looks round upon a lethargic, a luxurious, a self-indulgent, a
self-seeking, a world-besotted professing Church, and asks: 'Are these
the people on whose hearts a cross is stamped?' Do these men--or rather
let us say, do _we_ live as becometh the Gospel which proclaims the
divinity of self-sacrifice, and that the law of a perfect human life is
perfect self-forgetfulness, even as the secret of the divine nature is
perfect love? 'Walk worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.'

III. Then again, there is another form of this same general prescription
which suggests to us a kindred and yet somewhat different standard. We
are also bidden to bring our lives into conformity to, and
correspondence with, or, as the Bible has it, 'to walk worthy of the
calling wherewith we are called' (Eph. iv. 1).

God summons or invites us, and summons us to what? The words which
follow our text answer, 'Who calleth you into His own kingdom and
glory.' All you Christian people have been invited, and if you are
Christians you have accepted the invitation; and al