and thrust aside to make way for others.  We should be willing to put others in the way of doing that which we might have got reputation for by doing ourselves.  This was the temper of our Master—­this is the meek and the quiet spirit, and this is the temper of the humble with whom the High and Lofty One dwells.

The other class of those who are truly great are the contrite in spirit.  At first sight it might be supposed that there must ever be a vast distinction between the innocent and the penitent.  It was so that the elder son in the parable thought when he saw his brother restored to his father’s favour.  He was surprised and hurt.  He had served his father these many years—­his brother had wasted his substance in riotous living.  But in this passage God makes no distinction.  He places the humble consistent follower and the broken-hearted sinner on a level.  He dwells with both, with Him that is contrite, and with him that is humble.  He sheds around them both the grandeur of His own presence, and the annals of Church history are full of exemplifications of this marvel of God’s grace.  By the transforming grace of Christ men, who have done the very work of Satan, have become as conspicuous in the service of heaven, as they were once conspicuous in the career of guilt.

So indisputably has this been so, that men have drawn from such instances the perverted conclusion, that if a man is ever to be a great saint, he must first be a great sinner.  God forbid brethren, that we should ever make such an inference.  But this we infer for our own encouragement, that past sin does not necessarily preclude from high attainments.  We must “forget the things that are behind.”  We must not mourn over past years of folly as if they made saintliness impossible.  Deep as we may have been once in earthliness, so deep we may also be in penitence, and so high we may become in spirituality.

We have so many years the fewer to do our work in.  Well brethren, let us try to do it so much the faster.  Christ can crowd the work of years into hours.  He did it with the dying thief.  If the man who has set out early may take his time, it certainly cannot be so with us who have lost our time.  If we have lost God’s bright and happy presence by our wilfulness, what then?  Unrelieved sadness?  Nay, brethren, calmness, purity, may have gone from our heart; but all is not gone yet.  Just as sweetness comes from the bark of the cinnamon when it is bruised, so can the spirit of the Cross of Christ bring beauty and holiness and peace out of the bruised and broken heart.  God dwells with the contrite as much as with the humble.

And now brethren, to conclude, the first inference we collect from this subject, is the danger of coming into collision with such a God as our God.  Day by day we commit sins of thought and word of which the dull eye of man takes no cognisance.  He