boy, but more than that, he was perfectly friendless. Those who were nearest to him were all dead, and the entire interest of his guardian exhausted itself in paying the schoolfees as they became due. When the holidays came, and we all bounded home, he remained at the school, for he had nowhere else to go. I thought little or nothing about it. Certainly Certainly his position did not move me into pain, until one day his loneliness broke upon me with appalling reality, when in the class-lists he appeared as the premier boy in the school. His triumph was most distinguished and brilliant, but he had no one to share it! No father, no mother, no kinsman, no friend! I felt that in his success he was more desolate than in his defeats! His bereavement seemed to culminate in his triumphs! Let me illustrate still further. I had a friend who in his matured life published a book on which he had bestowed the hard labors of many years. Some time before its publication his wife died, and he was left alone. The book received an enthusiastic welcome, and now enjoys high eminence in its own department of learning. I spoke to my friend of his well-deserved reward, and of the triumph of his labors. His face immediately clouded, and he quietly said, "Ah, if only she were here to share it!" I say, his loneliness culminated there, and his sharpest pang was experienced in his sunniest hour. And it is not otherwise with the moral triumphs of the soul. When I sin and falter, I feel I need a Companion to whom I can tell the story of my defeat: but when I have some secret triumph I want a Companion to share the glow and glory of the conquest, or the glow and glory fade. Even when we conquer secret sin the heart calls for a Companion in the joy! And here He is! "My presence shall go with thee!" If you will turn to the book of the Psalms you will find how continually the ringing pæans sound from hearts that are just bursting with the desire to share their joy and

minister to our progress by re-arranging our environment, and removing many of the snares and pitfalls from our path. But in this serious business of temptation it is little that friend can do for friend. The great battle is waged behind a door they cannot enter. The real fight, the death-clutch is not in some public arena, with friends and spectators gathered around: it takes place in awful and desolate loneliness! In the secret place of every temptation no earthly friend can be near. A man might possibly wrestle with wild beasts, if the theatre were in publicity, in publicity, and amid the plaudits of assembled crowds: but to contend with beasts in secret, to slay

One

them behind the closed and muffled door, is desperate and lonely work. But we need not be alone! Presence can pass the door that leads to the secret place. "My presence shall go with thee," not as an interested or applauding spectator, but as Fellowworker, Fellow-fighter, Redeemer and Friend. The loneliness of the wilderness is peopled by the ubiquitous presence of the LORD.

And there is the loneliness of death. It is pathetic, deeply pathetic, how we have to stand idly by at the last moment-doctor, nurse, husband, wife, child-all to stand idly by, I say, when the lonely voyager launches forth into the unknown sea! "It is the loneliness of death that is so terrible. If we and those whom we love passed over simultaneously, we should think no more of it than changing our houses from one place into another. But every voyager goes alone!” Alone? Nay, there is a Fellow-voyager! "My presence shall go with thee." The last, chill loneliness is warmed by the Resurrection Life. There is a winThere is a winsome light in the valley, as of the dawning of grander days. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me." "My presence shall go with thee!" "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee."

care.

Now, my brethren, if only we firmly believed, and clearly realized this gracious Presence, what would be the ministry? Well, we should work without worry. We should step out without dread. We should waste no energy in fruitless fear and sapping We should face the new year not daunted by our ignorance. The great Companion may still think it good to deny us the light of comprehension but then, though we may not comprehend the nature of the entire way, He will see to it that we have light at the next turning of the road. Don't let us be afraid of our ignorance. Our Companion is a great husbander

of light, and at the appointed moment, when "his hour is come," He shall "bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday."

And do not let us be afraid of our weakness. You feel about as little like carrying the possible load of this new year as a grasshopper! Never mind! Perhaps that is how we ought to feel. You must leave something for the great Companion to do! Do not let us try to carry our GoD and our burden too! You remember that passage in Isaiah where, with pathetic irony, the prophet declares that the people are busy carrying their gods, when all the time the great Jehovah is waiting to carry the people! No, our little strength will soon leak out. The real combatants are not our weakness versus the burdens and difficulties of the year, but all these things versus our Almighty Friend! "My presence shall go with thee," and thou shalt lack neither light nor might; "as thy days so shall thy strength be,' and "at eventide it shall be light."

"And I will give thee rest." Aye, but we must lean upon Him and allow Him to carry our load. An aged, weary woman, carrying a heavy basket, got into the train with me the other day, and when she was seated she still kept the heavy burden upon her arm! "Lay your burden down, mum," said the kindly voice of a working man. "Lay your burden down, mum; the train will carry both it and you." Aye, that's it! "Lay your burden down!" The LORD will carry both it and you! "I will give thee rest:" not by the absence of warfare, but by the happy assurance of victory: not by the absence of the hill, but by the absence of the spirit of fainting. will give thee rest."

"I

And so I commend you, and all who are near to you, to the kindly care and fellowship of this great Coinpanion. May you each and all have a happy new year, spent, every moment of it, in the light of His most gracious presence.

[CONCLUDED]

Then a second thing that marks Sadduceeism, we might say a second element in the Sadducean leaven, is this; It is a tendency to prefer experience to revelation, or to prefer the wisdom of the world to the wisdom of God. Now experience is a great word and a great thing, and the older we grow the more we prefer things which have a distinct flavor of experience about them. But it makes a great difference whether the man makes the thing he calls his experience in the world without God, or whether he makes his experience with God in the world. You must make your experience in the world; there is no other place to have experiences. A man must live in the world; he must live in the range of realities that God has created as the place of our education. If we do not live in the world, we do not live at all. The greatest mistake that anybody can make in this world is to think that the world is not a good enough place for him to live in, and that the only way to live is to come out of the world and have nothing at all to do with it. A person who does that gets no experience and no wisdom of any description whatsoever. You have got to live where other people live and take the responsibilities that God has created for all men; and if you take them with Him, then you can become wise with God's wisdom, with the real wisdom of life.

But the Sadducees were always tempted to go into the world without God. I said that they managed the foreign affairs f their country, and they came inevitably into contact with other nations; especially they came into contact with the Greeks and their education, and science, and philosophy, and poetry, and culture generally. They found when they went into that world that it was not altogether a bad world; they found a great many things in the Greek world that attracted them, a great many things that were good, and very good. In fact, the Sadducees thought: "Quite good enough for us; we would be delighted to

be just like that." They began to feel that it was irksome to have a special revelation which laid special obligations upon them, and called them to be something that men living only in the world were not called to be. They felt it would be more largeminded, more philosophical, more generous not to claim anything that did not belong to all the rest of the world, but just to recognize that they could stand where other men stood and meet all human beings on an equality, and sink or swim or take their chance with the mass of mankind. I say they felt the attraction there was in that life, and they felt it was something paltry and not quite worthy or not quite true in claiming to be in a position of privilege that implied special responsibility. Revelation! they did not like the idea of revelation; they preferred the idea of experience and living in the world, and learning all that God would teach there, but that God should teach specially, that God should call men with a particular calling, that there should be a people of God in a peculiar sense, with peculiar duties and hopes, that was an idea to which a kind of aversion was born in their minds, and they nourished that aversion and gave it free scope.

Now I believe that that insinuating kind of Sadduceeism is the strongest of all the temptations that there are in the world at this moment. Remember the Sadducees were brought up to believe in revelation; they were born Jews. They were God's ministers in His temple; they had the law and the prophets in their hands all the time. And that is how we are brought up; we are all brought up to believe in revelation; we are all brought up to believe that we have a special revelation in the Holy Scriptures; we are brought up to believe that God speaks to men in this Book in a Iway in which God does not speak to men anywhere else in the world; and surely it is not going beyond the truth to say not only that we are brought up to believe that, but we are brought up in such a way that we really experience that. I suppose we

can all remember times when we took our Bible into our hands and read quite simply and actually heard the voice of God speak ing to us, heard words that searched our consciences, words that filled us with awe, words that made us feel that Somebody was speaking to us Who could tell us all things that ever we did and Who knew us better than we knew ourselves. And again, words of unspeakable grace and tenderness, words falling from the lips of Jesus that drew out our hearts to Him, and we felt that love like this could be nothing less than the love of the living God our Saviour. I say we have all had experiences in connection with our Bibles like that. But remember, the inspiration of the Bible is not a doctrine; it is a fact; and a fact is something that you can only know by experiencing. We do not believe that the Bible is inspired; it is not a doctrine with us that the Bible is inspired; we have experienced that the Bible is inspired. God has actually spoken to us out of the Bible, and we know that we heard His voice, and that it was no other voice but His.

And then we grow up, and we come into contact with other things besides the Bible: we come in contact with other minds, with other nations, with other religions. We read the sacred books of other countries; we hear of inspired books among the Mohammedans, and among the Hindoos; we hear of the inspiration of great poets, even in the heathen world, men to whom the spirit was given that they might be in other nations what the law and the prophets were among the Jews. Then a vague kind of feeling comes into our minds that perhaps the Bible is not after all so unique and so solitary as we thought it was, and that we have been giving it too great a place in our minds, too incomparable a place, and that we must depress it a little and bring it towards the level of other books and not ascribe to it that incomparable and solitary value that we did when we were children. I say the tendency to do that is the leaven of the Sadducees. Everything, no matter what, everything that blunts the edge of our early experiences of God speaking to us through His Word, everything that makes the Bible less awful to conscience, everything that makes the Bible less touching to the heart, everything that makes Mount

Sinai or Mount Calvary mere commonplace and ordinary places, where we can be without Leing deeply moved, deeply humbled, or greatly inspired, everything of that kind is the leaven of the Sadducees, and we have got to fight against it in our life.

Mind you, I do not say in the least that God never spoke to anybody except in the Bille. You do not need to believe that. The Bible itself teaches us that true light lightens every man when it comes into the world; the Bible itself teaches us that God has not left any man without a witness; it teaches that God is not far from any one of all His creatures. We do not need to believe that God has neglected or forsaken the other nations, but what we say is this: that every sign of God's presence in the other nations, every divine truth that Mohammedans, or Greeks, or Hindoos have ol tained possession of by the grace and favor of God, is not something that enables them to do without the Bible; it is something that enables them to appreciate the Bible when it comes. They know what light is, and when light comes they welcome it as the supreme gift of God.

I once heard Dr. Gibson of Swatow, who has worked in China for more than thirty years now, say that he never went to preach the gospel anywhere without finding that God had been there before him. We must believe that it is God and God's truth that is found in some measure in all these searchings of the human mind in all nations after Him. But remember, also, that these glimmering lights are there not to make us disparage the Christ, but to enable these great nations to welcome the great revelation when it comes. And if there is anything that will counteract the leaven of the Sadducees in ourselves, it is the missionary spirit, the spirit that longs to impart the true light to those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death; and those who are trying to make the true revelation known in all its fullness and splendor will have no misgivings at all about the attempts of some people to drag it down to the level of the common lights that belong to the rest of the world. No doubt there are great intellectual difficulties in forming a true conception of the world's history and making a distinct idea in our minds of how the true light shines dimly here and not quite

so dimly there, and suddenly shines in all its brilliance and fullness along one particular line in this little nation of Israel. I say we may never be able to make it clear to ourselves how the Bible stands out in high relief against all other sacred books and all common illuminations of God, but whether we can construe it intellectually or not, we can feel how really it is the fact that that is so, and to keep the sense of revelation and of the worth of it alive in our minds is something we must do if we are not to be overcome by the leaven of the Sadducees. Ah, surely, it will help us to do it if we remember how Jesus always heard the voice of the Father in the Old Testament. If God spoke to Him out of these sacred pages, shall God not speak to us? If He saw His own likeness, foreshadowings and adumbrations of the coming of His work in that Old Testament, shall we not see them, too, and feel that for His sake and in Him it has a value that belongs to nothing else in the world?

And the third point about the Sadducees is this: they denied immortality; they said there was no resurrection, no angel, no spirit, no life, or judgment to come. Now it is in this connection that in the gospels they principally come in contact with Jesus. You will remember how in the twelfth chapter of Mark and the parallel chapters of Matthew and Luke, the Sadducees come to Jesus with the tempting question about immortality, the question about the woman who married seven times and whose husbands all died before her, and the puzzle was whose wife was she to be in the resurrection. It was an imaginary case that the Sadducees had invented, and no doubt they had polished it up again and again to make it perfectly puzzling, and no doubt also in many a controversy that story had brought the laugh on to the Sadducean side. But the laugh is not much to have on your side if you are talking about such great things as God and the soul and immortality; in other words, God and the soul and what God will do for the soul that puts its trust in Him. I say the laugh is not much to get on your side, and the man who tries to raise a laugh in talking about things like this is a man standing on ground from which it is perfectly impossible to see anything of the truth at all.

And when Jesus dealt with this question He not only expressed His dissent from the Sadducean view; He expressed also His resentment. He began His answer by saying, "Are ye not therefore misled because of your ignorance of the Scriptures and the power of God?" and the very last words with which He closed His answer after He had finished His argument were, "You are far, far astray" (Mark xii. 27), an indigrant repudiation of Sadducean thoughts as well as a calm dissent from them.

Now what was the Sadducean crror due to according to Jesus? Why were they mistaken about immortality? He says, "You err because ye know not the Scriptures, neither the power of God." 1 hey erred because they did not know the Scriptures. Now what does that imply? Surely it implies that the Scriptures contain a revelation of immortality; it implies that the Old Testament, which was all the Scripture there was in the world then, contains a revelation of immortality to those who are able to read it with the eyes of Jesus. Now we know that a great many people do not believe that. We know that many people think there is no intimation of immortality in the Old Testament, and certainly the Old Testament contains many things that seem to look the other way. For example, we find passages like this in the eighty-eighth Psalm :

"Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall they that are deceased arise and praise thee?

Shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave?

Or thy faithfulness in destruction?"

Or again, in Isaiah xxxviii. 18, in the psalm of Hezekiah, we find things like these:

"For death cannot praise thee,

Death cannot celebrate thee:
They that go down into the pit
Cannot hope for thy truth."

Why are there things like that in the Bible and what do they mean? I suppose the reason of that is that everything is in the Bible.

All the experiences of the human spirit in its life toward God are in the Bible, and therefore we have words like these, that represent the conflict and the agony and the despair and the defeat of faith, as well as words that express the triumph of faith. But Jesus sees in the Old Testament