writing of the house of Israel.' The suggestion of being inscribed on
the burgess-rolls of a city is the first idea connected with the word.
In the New Testament, for instance, we find in the great passage in the
Epistle to the Hebrews the two notions of the city and the census
brought into immediate connection, where the writer says, 'Ye are come
unto the city of the living God . . . and to the church of the first-born
whose names are written in heaven.' In this very letter we have, only a
verse or two before my text, the same idea of citizenship cropping up.
'Our _citizenship_ is in Heaven, from whence also we look for the
Saviour.' That, no doubt, helped to suggest to the Apostle the words of
my text. And there is another verse in the same letter where the same
idea comes out. 'Only act the citizen as becometh the Gospel of Christ.'
Now, you will remember, possibly, that Philippi was, as the Acts of the
Apostles tells us, a Roman colony. And the reference is exquisitely
close-fitting to the circumstances of the people of that city. For a
Roman colony was a bit of Rome in another land, and the citizens of
Philippi had their names inscribed on the registers of the tribes of
Rome. The writer himself was another illustration of the same thing, of
living in a community to which he did not belong and of belonging to a
community in which he did not live. For Paul was a native of Tarsus; and
Paul, the native of the Asiatic Tarsus, was a Roman.

So, then, the first thought that comes out of this great metaphor is
that all of us, if we are Christian people, belong to another polity,
another order of things than that in which our outward lives are spent.
And the plain, practical conclusion that comes from it is, cultivate the
sense of belonging to another order. Just as it swelled the heart of a
Macedonian Philippian with pride, when he thought that he did not belong
to the semi-barbarous people round about him, but that his name was
written in the books that lay in the Capitol of Rome, so should we
cultivate that sense of belonging to another order. It will make our
work here none the worse, but it will fill our lives with the sense of
nobler affinities, and point our efforts to grander work than any that
belongs to 'the things that are seen and temporal.' Just as the little
groups of Englishmen in treaty-ports own no allegiance to the laws of
the country in which they live, but are governed by English statutes, so
we have to