tty strife in Corinth
and carries for us the wholesome lesson that one main cause which keeps
men back from Christ is a too high estimate of themselves. Some of us
are enclosed in the fortress of self-sufficiency: we will not humbly
acknowledge our dependence on God, and have turned self-reliance into
the law of our lives. There are many voices, some of them sweet and
powerful, which to-day are preaching that gospel. It finds eager
response in many hearts, and there is something in us all to which it
appeals. We are often tempted to say defiantly, 'Who is Lord over us?'
And the teaching that bids us rely on ourselves is so wholly in accord
with the highest wisdom and the noblest life that what is good and what
is evil in each of us contribute to reinforce it. Self-dependence is a
great virtue, and the mother of much energy and nobleness, but it is
also a great error and a great sin. To be so self-sufficing as not to
need externals is good; to be so self-sufficing as not to need or to see
God is ruin and death. The title which, as one of our great thinkers
tells us, a humourist put on the back of a volume of heterodox tracts,
'Every man his own redeemer,' makes a claim for self-sufficiency which
more or less unconsciously shuts out many men from the salvation of
Christ.

There is the fortress of culture and the pride of it in which many of us
are to-day entrenched against the Gospel. The attitude of mind into
which persons of culture tend to fall is distinctly adverse to their
reception of the Gospel, and that is not because the Gospel is adverse
to culture, but because cultured people do not care to be put on the
same level with publicans and harlots. They would be less disinclined to
go into the feast if there were in it reserved seats for superior people
and a private entrance to them. If the wise and prudent were more of
both, they would be liker the babes to whom these things are revealed,
and they would be revealed to them too. Not knowledge but the
superciliousness which is the result of the conceit of knowledge hinders
from God, and is one of the strongest fortresses against which the
weapons of our warfare have to be employed.

There is the fortress of ignorance. Most men who are kept from Christ
are so because they know neither themselves nor God. The most widely
prevailing characteristic of the superficial life of most men is their
absolute unconsciousness of the fact of sin; they neither know it as
universa