THE CHURCH. "Built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone."-Eph. ii. 20. JUNE, 1854. A LOOK FROM CHRIST. BY THE REV. OCTAVIUS WINSLOW, D.D. "The Lord turned, and looked upon Peter."-Luke xxii. 61. And who can fully interpret that look? Painters have often attempted to portray it, but the pencil has fallen despairingly from their hands. The Saviour was now standing face to face with Caiaphas-infinite purity confronting sin, infinite truth confounding error. It was to him a solemn and a critical moment. Pleading for his life, all his thoughts, and sympathies, and moments, might be supposed to concentrate wholly upon himself. But no! he heard a voice behind him, the tones of which were familiar, though startling to his ear. It was a voice to which he had often listened, as the ear listens to soft sounds; but dear and familiar as it was, it uttered words of appalling import. It was the voice of a loved disciple, a sworn friend, who, but a few hours before, had vowed, with all the solemnity and emphasis of an oath, attachment and fidelity unto death. And what was its affirmation ? "I know not the man! " His attention diverted from the trial, and his eye withdrawn from his accusers, the "Lord turned, and looked upon Peter." All thought and emotion seemed now to gather around one object, the Christ-denying disciple. His own personal case, now fraught with the deepest interest and peril; the tremendous responsibility which he that moment sustained, standing on the eve of accomplishing the eternal purpose of his Father in the redemption of his church; the woe through which he was about to pass lowering and darkening around him; yet all seemed for the moment to tremble in the balance, before the case of a now fallen apostle. "And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter." Peter met the glance. Not a word was uttered, not a syllable was breathed, not a finger was lifted by the Saviour; it was but a look; and yet it was such a look as pierced the heart of the sinning apostle. "Peter went out, and wept bitterly." Let us attempt its interpretation. The eye of Jesus is still upon us ; it has often reproved us in our waywardness and folly; it has often cheered us in our loneliness and sorrow; and it may often chide and gladden us again. What is its language? It was a look of injured love. Christ loved Peter; he loved him with an everlasting love. When he allured him from his lowly calling, summoned him to be a disciple, and ordained him to be an apostle and "a fisher of men," he loved him. Yes, and he loved him, too, at that moVOL. VIII. G ment. He was about to die—to die for Peter. He knew how false and treacherous he would prove; how, at a most critical period of his life, and amidst circumstances the most painful, he would deny that he knew him, confirming the disownment with an oath and a curse; yet he loved Peter, loved him with an affection that never faltered or cooled,-no, not even at the moment when the denial and the imprecation rose, fiend-like, from his lips. What, then, was the language of that look which Christ now bent upon Peter? It seemed to sav, "I am about to die for thee, Peter, and canst thou now deny me? What have I done, or what have I said, worthy of such requital!" And what, my reader, are all our backslidings, and falls, and unkind returns, but so many unjust injuries done to the deep, deathless love of Jesus? How do we forget, at the moment of excited feeling, that every step we take in departure from God, each temptation to which we yield assent, and each sin we voluntarily commit, is in the face of love inconceivably great and unutterably tender. Injured love! how reproving its glance! "I have died for thee," Jesus says; "for thee I poured out my heart's blood; and canst thou, in view of love like mine, thus grieve, and wound, and deny me?" It was a look of painful remembrance. "And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord." His Lord's solemn prediction of his sin he seemed quite to have forgotten. But when that look met his eye, it summoned back to memory the faded recollections of the faithful and tender admonitions that had forewarned him of his fall. There is a tendency in our fallen minds to forget our sinful departures from God. David's threefold backsliding seemed to have been lost in deep oblivion, until the Lord sent his prophet to recall it to his memory. Christ will bring our forgotten departures to view, not to upbraid of to condemn, but to humble us, and to bring us afresh to the blood of sprinkling. The heart searching look from Christ turns over each leaf in the book of memory; and sins and follies, inconsistencies and departures, there inscribed, but long forgotten, are read and reread, to the deep sin-loathing and self-abasement of our souls. Ah! let a look of forgiving love penetrate thy soul, illumining memory's dark cell, and how many things, and circumstances, and steps in thy past life, wilt thou recollect to thy deepest humiliation before God. And oh! how much do we need thus to be reminded of our admonitions, our warnings, and our falls, that we may in all our future spirit and conduct "walk humbly with God." The season of solitude and sorrow, suffering reader, is peculiarly favourable for this. It is a time of recollection. The past is recalled, the life is reviewed, principles, motives, and actions are examined, scrutinised, and weighed, and the result, if the process is fairly and honestly gone into, will be, "Lord! I do remember this day my sin and folly; pardon it, for thy name's sake, and do thou remember it no more for ever!" It was a look of gentle reproof. It seemed to convey that reproof in language like this: "I am now bearing thy sin and curse; I am about to drink the cup of woe for thee; to take thee, a poor, lost, condemned sinner, into my very bleeding heart; and dost thou deny that thou didst ever know me ? Canst thou inflict another and a deeper wound? Canst thou add another and a keener pang to those now falling, like a storm, upon me from my enemies, deriding, and scorning, and rejecting me?" Oh, what a reproof was that look! It was, indeed, tender; but its very tenderness made it all the more keen. Blessed Jesus! we love thee for all the reproofs of thine eye,-reproofs most deserved, most searching. We have met thy look in secret; in solitude and in sorrow it has spoken to us, revealing our sin and thy displeasure; and we bless thee for the look. It was a look of full forgiveness. Who can doubt but that, at this moment, Jesus, by his blessed Spirit, did secretly write upon the heart of his backsliding disciple the free pardon of his sin? And such is ever the look of Christ to us. Be it a look expressive of wounded love; be it a look of mournful remembrance; or be it a look of searching reproof; it yet is always a look of most free and full forgiveness. "I have pardoned," is its language. And this is the meaning of Christ's look now penetrating the dark cloud of your heart's grief, suffering believer. It may revive the recollection of past offences; it may search, and rebuke, and alarm; yet beware of interpreting it all of displeasure; it is a look of loving forgiveness. The sharpest reproof the look of Christ ever conveyed to a believer spake of pardoned sin. It must be so, since the covenant of peace provides, and the atonement of Jesus secures, the entire cancelling of all his sin. Meet the eye of Jesus, then, with confidence and love. There may be self-reproach in your conscience; there is no harsh reproach in his look. The uplifted glance of your eye may be sinrepenting; the downward beaming of his is sin-forgiving. Oh! press to your heart the consolation and joy of this truth, the glance of Jesus falling upon his accepted child ever speaks of pardoned sin. Chastened, sorrowful, and secluded you may be, yet your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake. Oh! I know not a truth more calculated to light up the gloom of a lone chamber, to lift up the drooping spirit of a heart-sick child of God, than the announcement that God, for Christ's sake, has pardoned all his transgressions and his sins, and stands to him in the relation of a reconciled Father. Suffering child of God! with this divine .declaration would I come to you in your sorrow and seclusion:-"0 Israel! thou shalt not be forgotten of me. I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins. Return unto me; for I have redeemed thee." Oh, that the Spirit, the Comforter, may sweeten your solitude and cheer your gloom, and give you this song to sing in the night season of your grief:-"Bless the Lord, O my soul! and forget not all his benefits; who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, and crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies." Forget not that the look of Christ is ever, to his saints, a look of pardoning love! The posture of Jesus, when he looked upon his sinning disciple, was most expressive. "The Lord turned." Here was the first step of recovery taken on the part of Christ. And what has all the restoring conduct of our Lord been towards us, but just this turning to us, when we had turned from him? We have wandered, he has gone after us; we have departed, he has pursued us; we have stumbled, he has upheld us; we have fallen, he has raised us up again; we have turned from him, he has turned to us. Oh, the wonderful love and long-suffering patience of Christ! And what is still his language, speaking to us in that look? "Return unto me, for I have redeemed thee." And what should be the response of our hearts? "Behold, we come unto thee, for thou art the Lord our God." Then "let us search and try our ways, and turn AGAIN unto the Lord." Yes, my reader, again. What! after all my backslidings and recoveries, my departures and returns, may I turn again to the Lord? Yes, with confidence we say it, "Turn AGAIN unto the Lord!" That look of love beaming from the eye of Jesus invites you, woos you to return AGAIN; yes, this once more, to the shelter of his pierced side, to the home of his wounded heart. And, oh, how acute the sorrow awakened by a look from Christ. "Peter went out and wept bitterly." How melting is the look of wounded love! A father's eye, beaming with tenderness upon a rebellious, wan dering child, inviting, welcoming his return,-what adamant can resist it? Peter's sorrow, too, was solitary. He went out from the high priest's hall, and sought some lone place to weep. Ah! the deepest, bitterest, truest grief for sin is felt and expressed beneath God's eye alone. When the wakeful pillow of midnight is moistened, when the heart unveils in secret to the eye of Jesus, when the chamber of privacy witnesses to the confidential confessions, and moanings, and pleadings of a wandering heart, there is then felt and expressed a sorrow for sin, so genuine, so delicate, and so touching, as cannot but draw down upon the soul a look from Christ, the most tender in its expression, and the most forgiving in its language. And what, my reader, shall be the one practical lesson we draw from this subject? Even this-Let us always endeavour to realise the loving eye of Jesus resting upon us. In public and in private, in our temporal and spiritual callings, in prosperity and in adversity, in all places, and on all occasions, and under all circumstances, oh! let us live as beneath its focal power. When our Lord gave this look to Peter, his eyes were dim with grief; but now that he is in heaven, they are as "a flame of fire." To his saints not a burning, withering, consuming flame, but a flame of inextinguishable love. Deem not yourself, then, secluded believer, a banished and an exiled one, lost to all sight. Other eyes may be withdrawn and closed, distance intercepting their view, or death darkening their vision; but the eye of Jesus, your Lord, rests upon you ever, in ineffable delight, and with unslumbering affection. "I will guide thee with mine eye," is the gracious promise of your God. Be ever and intently gazing on that Eye, "looking unto Jesus." He is the Fountain of Light; and in the light radiating from his eye, you shall, in the gloomiest hour of your life, see light upon your onward way. "By his light I walked through darkness." "Bend not thy light-desiring eyes below; There thy own shadow waits upon thee ever; But raise thy looks to Heaven,—and lo! The shadeless sun rewards thy weak endeavour. 66 Who sees the dark, is dark; but turn towards the light, "We all, with open face, beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." THE SOLDIERS' PAY; OR, THE WAGES OF SIN. BY THE REV. EDWARD WHITE. "So they took the money, and did as they were taught."-Matt. xxviii. 15. This statement, so cutting in its simplicity, is made respecting soldiers; a class of persons to whom the world owes some of its highest temporal blessings, but many more of its worst and most permanent curses. The evil which they have done has generally been describable in these terms, "They took the money, and did as they were taught." A well-disciplined army is a vast body, whose soul resides only in its officers. Its business is not to think; but to act, to destroy, and to obey. Like a great revolving saw, its work is to cut to pieces everything brought into contact with its terrible edge. If the soldiers all over the world were to begin to think and to feel, the earth would soon present a very different scene. Then the despotic "destroyers of the earth" would find it impossible to lead myriads of marauders in uniform against the possessions of their neighbours, or to induce death-bearing legions to trample down at the word of command the lives and the liberties of prostrate nations. But they take the money, and do as they are taught. " The soldiers here spoken of the Roman guard at the sepulchre of the Prince of Life-carried the habit of obedience to their superiors into the business of dealing with the resurrection of Christ. They were accustomed to be paid for watching and for fighting; now they are paid for lying, and they obey. This leads us to remark how grievously the bulk of the lower and less instructed classes of mankind, in all countries, are misled and misgoverned by their superiors. There are many noble exceptions of individual grandees and persons of honour, devoting themselves to the advancement of the interests of the people: our own country offers some signal illustrations of the very highest working hard through life for the good of the very lowest : but, generally speaking, the lower ranks have been sacrificed in millions for the behoof of their "betters;" they have been led like flocks of sheep to the slaughter, by their "false prophets' and "kings," their deceivers and destroyers. Two strong sentiments in the bosom of mankind conspire to facilitate such a result-the confidence of the populace in the decisions of an intelligence which they suppose to be superior to their own, and loyalty to established authority. Wielding the influence derived from an appeal to these two sentiments, the ruling classes have commonly deceived the inferior in religion, and sacrificed them in politics. Interest and fear have rivetted the chains thus thrown around them; and mankind at large have yielded themselves servants to obey the "basest of men," under the supreme generalship of the god of this world, the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience. Out of the countless multitudes of our fellow-creatures, how few are the thinkers! How very few those who appear to comprehend that the head was as certainly made for thinking as the feet for walking; how very few those who seem to have the capacity or the desire of reflecting upon their conduct, or of acting counter to the behests of established authority when conscience dictates an opposite course. That is to say, most men are governed by the great thought-destroying spirit of evil, and not by the authority within, which is superior to all external authority of earthly governments, because it is the authority of God. What a happy change there will be when the masses of mankind will be governed from within by invisible wisdom and goodness; when both the throne and the altar will become the sanctuary of the poor, the Supreme Power at once their instructor and their king,-one who will neither deceive nor degrade them, neither rob them of their liberties nor spoil them of their goods. Meanwhile, let us be thankful that the throne of the universe is occupied by one who was once a working man. "The carpenter on earth has become our high-priest in the heavens; and He "in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead," turns downward a compassionate eye on the millions for whose speedy deliverance he is ROW girding himself with zeal as a cloak. To return, however, to the soldiers. They had never been set to keep such a watch before. Perhaps they had kept watch in former years among the forests and morasses of Britain, on the mountain sides of Spain, in the fortresses on the German or Numidian borders, or even amidst the splendid structures of Rome itself. But now they were placed at night as guards at the tomb of the Conqueror of Death; set to watch that no power broke in upon its repose. They might ward off the approach of any such force from without; but what could they do to prevent the |