'They have broken up, and have passed
through the gate, and are gone out by it; and their King shall pass
before them, and the Lord on the head of them.' The Prophet knew not
that the Lord their King, of whom it is enigmatically said that He too,
as well as 'the Breaker,' is to go before them, was in mysterious
fashion to dwell in that Breaker; and that those two, whom He sees
separately, are yet in a deep and mysterious sense one. The host of the
captives, returning in triumphant march through the wilderness and to
the promised land, is, in the Prophet's words, headed both by the
Breaker and by the Lord. We know that the Breaker is the Lord, the Angel
of the Covenant in whom is the name of Jehovah.

And so we connect with all these words of my text such words as
designate our Saviour as the Captain of our salvation; such words as His
own in which He says, 'When He putteth forth His sheep He goeth before
them'--such words as His Apostle used when he said, 'Leaving us an
ensample that we should follow in His steps.' And by all there is
suggested this--that Christ, who breaks the prison of our sins, and
leads us forth on the path to God, marches at the head of our life's
journey, and is our Example and Commander; and Himself present with us
through all life's changes and its sorrows.

Here is the great blessing and peculiarity of Christian morals that they
are all brought down to that sweet obligation: 'Do as I did.' Here is
the great blessing and strength for the Christian life in all its
difficulties--you can never go where you cannot see in the desert the
footprints, haply spotted with blood, that your Master left there before
you, and planting your trembling feet in the prints, as a child might
imitate his father's strides, may learn to recognise that all duty comes
to this: 'Follow Me'; and that all sorrow is calmed, ennobled, made
tolerable, and glorified, by the thought that He has borne it.

The Roman matron of the legend struck the knife into her bosom, and
handed it to her husband with the words, 'It is not painful!' Christ has
gone before us in all the dreary solitude, and in all the agony and
pains of life. He has hallowed them all, and has taken the bitterness
and the pain out of each of them for them that love Him. If we feel that
the Breaker is before us, and that we are marching behind Him, then
whithersoever He leads us we may follow, and whatsoever He has passed
through we may pass through. We carry I