may gain hereafter.”  Now this is but prudence after all—­it is but magnified selfishness, carried on into eternity,—­none the more noble for being eternal selfishness.  In opposition to all such sentiments as these, thus speaks the Gospel—­“Be ye perfect.”  Why?  “Because your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”  Do right, because it is Godlike and right so to do.  Here however, let us be understood.  We do not mean to say that the Gospel ignores altogether the personal results of doing right.  This would be unnatural—­because God has linked together well-doing and blessedness.  But we do say that this blessedness is not the motive which the Gospel gives us.  It is true the Gospel says—­“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth; blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy; blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”  But when these are made our motives—­when we become meek in order that we may inherit here—­then the promised enjoyment will not come.  If we are merciful merely that we may ourselves obtain mercy, we shall not have that in-dwelling love of God which is the result and token of His forgiveness.  Such was the law and such the example of our Lord and Master.

True it is that in the prosecution of the great work of redemption He had “respect to the recompense of reward.”  True it is He was conscious—­how could He but be conscious—­that when His work was completed He should be “glorified with that glory which He had with the Father before the world began;” but we deny that this was the motive which induced Him to undertake that work; and that man has a very mistaken idea of the character of the Redeemer, and understands but little of His spirit, who has so mean an opinion of Him as to suppose that it was any consideration of personal happiness and blessedness which led the Son of God to die.  “For this end was He born, and for this end came He into the world to bear witness unto the Truth,” and “to finish the work which was given Him to do.”

If we were asked, Can you select one text in which more than in any other this unselfish, disinterested feature comes forth, it should be this, “Love ye your enemies, do good and lend, hoping for nothing again.”  This is the true spirit of Christianity—­doing right disinterestedly, not from the hope of any personal advantage or reward, either temporal or spiritual, but entirely forgetting self, “hoping for nothing again.”  When that glorious philanthropist, whose whole life had been spent in procuring the abolition of the slave-trade, was demanded of by some systematic theologian, whether in his ardour in this great cause he had not been neglecting his personal prospects, and endangering his own soul, this was his magnanimous reply—­one of those which show the light of truth breaking through like an inspiration.  He said, “I did not think about my own soul, I had no time to think about