stows as a
Teacher, and unique as His act and attitude in that respect are, the
name either of teacher or of disciple fails altogether to penetrate to
the essence of the relation which knits us together. It is not enough
for our needs that we shall be taught. The worst man in the world knows
a far nobler morality than the best man practises. And if it were true,
as some people superficially say is the case, that evil-doing is the
result of ignorance, there would be far less evil-doing in the world
than, alas! there is. It is not for the want of knowing, that we go
wrong, as our consciences tell us; but it is for want of something that
can conquer the evil tendencies within, and lift off the burden of a
sinful past which weighs on us. As in the carboniferous strata what was
pliant vegetation has become heavy mineral, our evil deeds lie heavy on
our souls. What we need is not to be told what we ought to be, but to be
enabled to be it. Electricity can light the road, and it can drive the
car along it; and that is what we want, a dynamic as well as an
illuminant, something that will make us able to do and to be what
conscience has told us we ought to be and do.

Teacher? Yes. But if _only_ teacher, then He is nothing more than one of
a multitude who in all generations have vainly witnessed to sinful men
of the better path. There is no reformation for the individual, and
little hope for humanity, in a Christ whom you degrade to the level of a
Rabbi, or in a Church which has not pressed nearer to Him than to feel
itself His disciples.

There was a man who came to Jesus by night, and was in the dark about
the Jesus to whom he came, and he said, 'We know that Thou art a Teacher
come from God.' But Jesus did not accept the witness, though a young
teacher fighting for recognition might have been glad to get it from an
authoritative member of the Sanhedrim. But He answered, 'Except a man be
born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.' If we need to be born
again before we see it, it is not teachers of it that will serve our
turn, but One who takes us by the hand, and translates us out of the
tyranny of the darkness into the Kingdom of the Son of God's love. So
much, then, for the first of these names and lessons.

Now turn to the second--

II. The Disciples must be Believers.

That name begins to appear almost immediately after Pentecost, and
continues throughout. It comes in two forms, one which is in my text,
'the faithf