My Church

And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.—Matthew 16:18.

Christ had come very nearly to the close of His Galilean ministry. He had been preaching for about a year, and the twelve disciples had been accompanying Him, listening to His preaching, doing a little preaching themselves, and gradually learning the truth which He had come to proclaim. He had taken them apart by themselves for more close individual religious instruction. He pursued the Socratic method. He asked them to what conclusions they had come as the result of what they had seen and heard during this year’s companionship with Him. He asked, “Who do men say that I am?” And the Apostles reported various answers: “Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” Then He said unto them, “But who say ye that I am?” And Peter, who was never slow to speak, answered, perhaps as spokesman for the rest, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” To this Christ replied: “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

The whole passage from which these words are taken has been a battlefield for centuries between two irreconcilable conceptions of Christianity. Our Lord had put a question to His disciples, and it was no mere casual inquiry suggested by some chance turn in the conversation. It was really an investigation into the foundation of that world-wide kingdom He had come to establish.

I

The Rock Foundation of the Church

“Thou art Peter (Petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my church.”

1. The name of Peter is not bestowed here but interpreted. Christ does not say, “Thou shalt be,” but “Thou art”: and so presupposes the former conferring of the name. Unquestionably, the Apostle is the rock on which the Church is built. The efforts to avoid that conclusion would never have been heard of, but for the Roman Catholic controversy; but they are as unnecessary as unsuccessful. Is it credible that in the course of an address which is wholly occupied with conferring prerogatives on the Apostle a clause should come in which is concerned about an altogether different subject from the “thou” of the preceding and the “thee” of the following clauses, and which yet should take the very name of the Apostle, slightly modified, for that other subject? We do not interpret other books in that fashion. But it was not the “flesh and blood” Peter, but Peter as the recipient and faithful utterer of the Divine inspiration in his confession, who received these privileges. Therefore they are not his exclusive property, but belong to his faith, which grasped and confessed the Divine-human Lord; and wherever that faith is, there are these gifts, which are its results. They are the “natural” consequences of the true faith in Christ in that higher region where the supernatural is the natural. Peter’s grasp of Christ’s nature wrought upon his character, as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shifting impetuosity into rocklike firmness. So the same faith will tend to do in any man. It made him the chief instrument in the establishment of the Early Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith, and only on such, can Christ build His Church.

What Christ says, then, is not, “On you and your successors in ecclesiastical office I will build My Church”; not, “On what you have said I will build My Church”; but, “On you as a man transformed by the power of an indwelling Christ, on you as the type of a long line of humanity growing broader through the sweep and range of history, humanity transformed and changed by the indwelling of My own Messianic life, I will build My Church.” This is the interpretation of the text afforded by its setting. This is also Peter’s own interpretation. “Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and evil speakings, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.”

The change of person “on this rock,” instead of “upon thee,” is the natural result of the sudden transition from a direct to a metaphorical address; and is in exact accordance with our Lord’s manner on other occasions. He said not “Destroy Me” or “the temple of My body,” but “destroy this temple” (John 2:19). The change of gender from Petros to petra is the natural result of the change from a proper name to the work from which the proper name is derived. The French language alone, of all those into which the original has been translated, has been able entirely to preserve their identity. The Greek Petros, which for the sake of the masculine termination was necessarily used to express the name itself, was yet so rarely used in any other sense than a “stone” that the exigency of the language required an immediate return to the word petra, which, as in Greek generally, so also in the New Testament, is the almost invariable appellation of a “rock.” To speak of any confession or form of words, however sacred, as a foundation or rock, would be completely at variance with the living representation of the New Testament. It is not any doctrine concerning Christ, but Christ Himself, that is spoken of as being in the highest and strictest sense the foundation of the Church (1 Corinthians 3:11), and so whenever the same figure is used to express the lower and earthly instruments of the establishment of God’s Kingdom, it is not any teaching or system that is meant, but living human persons. Thus the Apostles are all of them called “foundations” of the Church in Ephesians 2:20; Revelation 21:14; and, by a nearly similar metaphor, Peter, James, and John are called “pillars” (Galatians 2:9), the faithful Christian a “pillar in the temple of God” (Revelation 3:12), and Timotheus, by a union of both metaphors, “the pillar and ground” of the “truth in the house of God.” 1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, 113.]

Stier is suggestive upon this point: “The man is Simon Bar-jona the sinner: not upon him, therefore, is it to be built; but upon this Peter such as grace makes him; upon him because, and in as far as, he certainly corresponds to this name more than the others. Still for this very reason the co-ordinate stones and pillars are by no means excluded, and even the primacy of Peter rests at bottom only upon this, that he is called to begin the preaching of the Word as first among equals.” So wonderfully does the Lord vouchsafe to build up the eternal fabric of the Church out of human stones, Himself indeed the chief corner-stone, and the twelve Apostles the twelve foundations, St. Peter the great basal stone of the fabric, while thereon is built up, as that very St. Peter himself testifies, out of living stones, a spiritual house.1 [Note: A. Ritchie, Spiritual Studies in St. Matthew’s Gospel, ii. 33.]

2. Jesus builds His Church upon average human nature. Who was this man of whom Jesus said that he was a rock? He was the most unstable and shifting of the disciples, as little like a rock as a man could be. Jesus must have known this; Peter must have known it; and the fishermen with Peter must have known it also. He was quick to act and quick to reject. He was what the modern world calls a “quitter,” a man who could not stand the strain of disapproval or suspicion; a man who was more like sand than rock. Yet Jesus takes him just as he is, believes in him when he does not believe in himself, sees his underlying qualities of strength and leadership, and converts him into the rock which He would have him be. It was like the process of nature which tosses the sand up on the shore and then beats upon it and hardens it until it becomes converted into stone; and we call it, by what seems a contradiction in terms, sandstone. So Jesus takes this unstable character and says to it: “Thou shalt be a rock,” and by the hard friction and compression of experience Peter becomes that which Jesus saw that he could be.

Mr. Bernard Shaw (who asks not for a new kind of philosophy but for a new kind of man) cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 66.]

We are all familiar with the expression “a chip of the old block.” The quality of the chip bespeaks a block of like quality. The chip is a pattern or sample of the block. In the same way the evidently durable petra calls up the image of a petros of like quality, as that which would afford an unrivalled foundation upon which to build. Thus when our Lord to His first utterance, “I also say unto thee, that thou art Petros,” adds the words, “and upon this petra I will build my church,” it is like the farmer taking up the sample, and declaring, “With this corn will I sow my field,” or the woman viewing the pattern, and saying, “Of this stuff will I have a dress.” 2 [Note: F. G. Cholmondeley, in The Expositor, 2nd Ser., viii. 76.]

3. Although the metaphor here regards Jesus, not as the foundation, but as the Founder of the Church, yet in a real sense He is the Church’s “one foundation,” and Scripture generally speaks of Him as such. If you would seek a sufficient foundation for the Church, it can be found only in One who can give support and maintenance to all that the Church is; only in One who can uphold from the first and through the ages all that enters into the parts and thought and activities of the Church; only in One who Himself contains within Himself the substance which, when worked out by the power of living spirit, will become the manifold forms of the Church’s contents—her faith, her sacraments, her worship, her activities, her many kinds and forms of grace and goodness. And He only is such a One who said “Upon this rock I will build my church.” And so St. Paul says, “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Our Lord proclaimed Himself the Founder of a world-wide and imperishable Society. He did not propose to act powerfully upon the convictions and the characters of individual men, and then to leave to them, when they believed and felt alike, the liberty of voluntarily forming themselves into an association, with a view to reciprocal sympathy and united action. From the first, the formation of a society was not less an essential feature of Christ’s plan than was His redemptive action upon single souls. The society was not to be a school of thinkers, nor a self-associated company of enterprising fellow-workers; it was to be a Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, or, as it is also called, the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 101.]

II

The Structure Built upon the Rock

“I will build my church.”

1. The word “church” was neither new nor doubtful in meaning to Jesus’ disciples. It was the rendering they found in that Greek Bible they had in their hands for one of the most sacred and significant terms of the Old Testament. The Greek word ecclesia is the translation of the Hebrew expression for “the congregation of the Lord.” Peter and his fellow-disciples could not fail to realize that Jesus was forming the little band who had companied with Him into a definite and organized religious community. They were no longer a company of men who formed the school of a Master. They were the church, the society, the congregation of Christ. That society was seen in those twelve men who looked up with wondering eyes and flushed faces to Him whom they had confessed. It was seen again in the Upper Room at the supper table. It was seen again in Jerusalem as, together with the women, they waited on God in prayer, and the number of the names was about an hundred and twenty. It was seen again when the believers met in the first Council at Jerusalem, and the apostles and elders came together to consider. It was seen also whenever men and women met for prayer and for service to Christ.

Ruskin has pointed out how the New Testament use of the word “church” emphasizes this simple and unecclesiastical meaning of the term. It can be seen to-day where two or three are gathered together in His name. To be gathered together in His name means for some purpose He has ordained which can be fulfilled through His Spirit, under a sense of His presence. “Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia.” Where Christ is, there is the Church. It is the organ through which the great truths He preached, those of God, of the meaning and worth of His words and life and passion and redemption, are declared. It is the witness to His resurrection, the evangelist of His message, the pillar and ground of His truth, the fold of His flock. Like every other society it must have its officers and its ceremonies. Like every other society it must have its functions and its services. These have been simply and fully described as “the word, sacraments, and prayer.” Whatever more men shall plead they may and should add to the form and fashion of the Church of Christ nothing more than this was understood by the men of Christ’s own time.1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 46.]

2. The Church, or assembly of God’s people, is represented as a house; not a temple so much as a beleaguered fortress, according to the figure frequently used by the prophets immediately before the Captivity, and naturally suggested by the actual position of the palace and Temple of Jerusalem on their impregnable hills. But this assembly or congregation, which up to this time had been understood only of the Jewish people, is here described as being built afresh; “built,” according to the significant meaning of that word, which, both in the Old and in the New Testament, always involves the idea of progress, creation, expansion, by Him who here, as so often elsewhere, appropriates to Himself what had up to that time been regarded as the incommunicable attribute of the Lord of Hosts. It is of this fortress, this “spiritual house,” to use the phrase in his own Epistle (1 Peter 2:5), that Peter is to be the foundation-rock. It was no longer to be reared on the literal rock of Zion, but on a living man, and that man not the high priest of Jerusalem but a despised fisherman of Galilee. He who had stepped forward with his great confession in this crisis had shown that he was indeed well fitted to become the stay and support of a congregation no less holy than that which had been with Moses in the wilderness, or with Solomon in the Temple.

We are to be careful as to where we build, and with what we build. The Eddystone Lighthouse was once demolished because it did not properly rest on the rock; and if we are not built on Christ—His doctrine, merit, fellowship, promise—we must be confounded. Let me be sure that I am morticed into the impregnable Rock! Careful with what we build! Eddystone Lighthouse perished once because it was built of wrong material—constructed of wood, it was burnt. How much often enters into the Christian creed that is not jewel or gold—fancies, speculations, notions, utterly worthless! How much often enters into the Christian life that is superficial, freakish, trivial, inferior, and inharmonious! Strange combinations of the true and the false, the precious and the paltry, the beautiful and the vulgar, the essential and the absurd! Lord, grant me grace to build on the granite—to build on Thee.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

3. Christ describes the Church lovingly as “My church.” If we read the Gospels carefully we shall see with what strictness of application our Lord used the word “My.” He never said, “My house,” “My lands,” “My books,” “My wife,” “My child.” He said, “My Father,” “My friends,” “My disciples.” When we think of it we shall see that His true possessions were His Father and His Church—“My Father,” “My Church.”

The Church is the company, now indeed quite innumerable, of disciple-like souls who are for ever and ever learning of Him, some of them, the greater number, beholding His face, and serving Him day and night in His temple; the rest not seeing Him yet, but rejoicing in Him with joy unspeakable and full of glory. In a word, the Church is the faithful souls of every place and name known and unknown to whom His name is unutterably dear and His words are more precious than fine gold, who love Him with a love that is more than human, who trust Him with a trust that is stronger than life or death, whose eager desire is to obey Him and serve Him, and whose fervent prayer for ever and ever is to get His truth made known, His salvation proved, and His name lifted above every name, until at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. Upon all these, wherever they are, the Saviour looks down as with the joy of one who looks upon a noble possession, and He says, “They are My Church; and there is no other.”

It is not our Church; it is Christ’s Church, first and last and always. We cannot do in it what we please: we must do what Christ pleases. He is its Builder. We may use the term “Builder” of Him very much as we use it of an architect to-day. Jesus Christ is the Architect of the Christian Church, and we are all builders under Him—masons, carpenters, hodmen—and the business of these people, from the foreman of the works right downward, is to carry out the Architect’s plan.1 [Note: W. B. Selbie, in The British Congregationalist, March 23, 1911.]

A foundation must be hidden and out of sight unto all those that outwardly look upon the house. They cannot perceive it, though every part of the house doth rest upon it. And this hath occasioned many mistakes in the world. An unwise man coming to a great house, seeing the antics [wall decorations] and pictures [figures? pillars?] stand crouching under the windows and sides of the house, may haply think that they bear up the weight of the house, when indeed they are for the most part pargeted [painted] posts. They bear not the house: the house bears them. By their bowing and outward appearance, the man thinks the burden is on them, and supposes it would be an easy thing, at any time, by taking them away, to demolish the house itself. But when he sets himself to work, he finds these things of no value. There is a foundation in the bottom, which bears up the whole, that he thought not of. Men looking upon the Church do find that it is a fair fabric indeed, but cannot imagine how it should stand. A few supporters it seemeth to have in the world, like crouching antics [wall decorations] under the windows, that make some show of under-propping it; here you have a magistrate, there an army or so. Think the men of the world, “Can we but remove these people, the whole would quickly topple to the ground.” Yea, so foolish have I been myself, and so void of understanding before the Lord, as to take a view of some goodly appearing props of this building and to think, How shall the house be preserved if these be removed—when lo! suddenly some have been manifested to be held up by the house, and not to hold it up. I say then, Christ, as the foundation of this house, is hidden to the men of this world; they see it not, they believe it not. There is nothing more remote from their apprehension than that Christ should be at the bottom of them and their ways, whom they so much despise.2 [Note: John Owen.]

III

The Security of the Structure

“The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

1. The figure of the gates is one of the oldest and most familiar in Eastern life. At the gate of every city its elders sat in judg ment and in council, as Lot sat in the gates of Sodom. From the gates of the city there issued forth its armies of conquest. “The gates of Hades” is a picturesque and Oriental metaphor for the counsel and craft and force of evil. By the figure Jesus conjured up to the imagination of His disciples that underworld of spiritual evil from which there issued forth the powers of darkness. From these gates of hell Jesus saw down the centuries of the history of His Church, in which all the wisdom of this world, its cunning and cruelty and foul passion, would assail His society of believing men. He foresaw the long struggle when

Zion in her anguish

With Babylon must cope.

He foresaw those eras when the battle would seem to go against His Church. He saw His disciples before the Council. He saw His martyr saints witnessing with their lives when paganism sprung on them like a savage beast roused from its lair. He saw the subtler powers of darkness sapping the faith, corrupting the purities, and leavening the simplicities, of His people’s worship, and service. He saw the enemy sowing his tares among the wheat. But He saw His Church, in the power of its moral and spiritual energy, emerging from every conflict with a greater victory. He saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied.

2. History has justified this promise. The gates of Hades have not prevailed. The Christian Church, on whose foundation in Himself He began to build with, as it were, but a single stone in His hand, has, beyond all other positive institutions, defied and surmounted destruction. Great changes have taken place since Jesus ventured the promise of this portion of Scripture to a poor fisherman, and threw into the air that challenge against fate. Numerous old customs have decayed. Whole systems of religion and philosophy have passed away. Famous cities have crumbled in the dust, and wild beasts have roamed, and birds of prey have screamed over their ruins. Races of men have been dispersed, or are even now in their last remnants thinly melting into the grave which this earth has for nations as well as for individuals. Yea, the very shores of the seas have begun to shift their places, and the everlasting hills have bowed their heads since Jesus spoke to Peter. But the gates of hell have not prevailed against His Church. Not only has it survived unhurt, as the promise implies, but it has flourished and increased; and under its various names, and with open doors, it still invites the sons of men at once to the shelter of its walls and through the opening of its aisles into paths of endless advancement.

In the middle of the last century all literary and philosophical people in this country were writing down the Church, saying its last days were come: when bishops like Butler were apologizing for Christianity, and historians like David Hume were predicting that by the end of the century it would be among the dead religions; it was just at that time that the great Evangelical revival of Wesley and Whitefield commenced, which carried a new wave, or rather a new fire, of religious fervour into every corner of the land. Again, towards the close of the century, when the French Encyclopædists, led by Voltaire, were saying that Jesus the Nazarene had at last been blotted out, and that Christian temples would be changed into halls of science—it was at that time that William Carey went out to India, and the great foreign missionary enterprise was renewed, if not commenced, which has carried the sign of the cross, and the light of it, into the darkest parts of the world. And the Church has always been surprising its enemies in that way by its wonderful resurrections, just as Jewish rulers were surprised when they found that the name of Jesus which they had crucified, and buried, and got rid of, was working greater miracles than ever.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modern Life, 116.]

We understand ourselves to be risking no new assertion, but simply reporting what is already the conviction of the greatest of our age, when we say,—that cheerfully recognizing, gratefully appropriating whatever Voltaire has proved, or any other man has proved, or shall prove, the Christian Religion, once here, cannot again pass away; that in one or the other form, it will endure through all time; that as in Scripture, so also in the heart of man, is written, “the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” Were the memory of this Faith never so obscured, as, indeed, in all times, the coarse passions and perceptions of the world do all but obliterate it in the hearts of most: yet in every pure soul, in every Poet and Wise Man, it finds a new Missionary, a new Martyr, till the great volume of Universal History is finally closed, and man’s destinies are fulfilled in this earth.2 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellanies, ii. 173 (Essay on Voltaire).]

3. The greatest hindrance to the victory of this society of Christ, and the supreme sorrow of all loyal hearts within it, has been the low standard of its Christian character, and the apostasy of those traitor hearts who have sometimes found a place among its leaders. The root of this low level of life, and the source of this treachery, has always been the failure to maintain the test of a personal experience. Wherever Christian teachers sanction membership on the ground of a proper age, a sufficient knowledge, a Christian training, or a due regard for religious observances, unworthy lives and heedless practices abound. So long as the winnowing fan of persecution blew away the chaff there was little but wheat in the garner of God and the society of Christ. When the cleansing fires of a searching poverty, a costly service, and an open outcastness, purged believers’ hearts of pride and ambition, Christ’s society was the ideal of a godly chivalry. But when the Church grew rich and powerful, and when title and rank became appanages of its leaders, and office in it became a coveted distinction, then this solemn test of a personal touch with God was evaded. Christ’s society was no longer a community and brotherhood of pure and lowly men. Whatever rank, or place, or authority any man has held in any church in Christendom, it is a simple certainty that Christ has not welcomed him in at all, if he has had no revelation from God.

Thoreau spoke of men whose pretence to be Christian was ridiculous, for they had no genius for it. Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley that he had “a genius for godliness.” But nothing can be more misleading than to use such terms as these. They are a distinct denial of Christ’s great truth that God’s revelation of grace is made not to the wise and prudent, but to babes. There have been men of a real genius for morality, but there is no such thing as a genius for religion. The most reckless and godless wretch, whose name has been a synonym for coarse and blatant atheism, about whom Thoreau and Matthew Arnold would say that he had a genius for devilry, has become a splendid and glorious saint. Wherever there is a soul there is a genius for godliness. But that soul must have come nakedly and openly under the power of God. Then and not till then does it pass into Christ’s society.1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 49.]

If Augustin guessed from this upheaval of his whole frame how close at hand was the heavenly visitation, all he felt at the moment was a great need to weep, and he wanted solitude to weep freely. He went down into the garden. Alypius, feeling uneasy, followed at a distance, and in silence sat down beside him on the bench where he had paused. Augustin did not even notice that his friend was there. His agony of spirit began again. All his faults, all his old stains came once more to his mind, and he grew furious against his cowardly feebleness as he felt how much he still clung to them. Oh, to tear himself free from all these miseries—to finish with them once for all!… Suddenly he sprang up. It was as if a gust of the tempest had struck him. He rushed to the end of the garden, flung himself on his knees under a fig-tree, and with his forehead pressed against the earth he burst into tears. Even as the olive-tree at Jerusalem which sheltered the last watch of the Divine Master, the fig-tree of Milan saw fall upon its roots a sweat of blood. Augustin, breathless in the victorious embrace of Grace, panted: “How long, how long? To-morrow and to-morrow? Why not now? Why not this hour make an end of my vileness?”

Now, at this very moment a child’s voice from the neighbouring house began repeating in a kind of chant: “Take and read, take and read.” Augustin shuddered. What was this refrain? Was it a nursery-rhyme that the little children of the countryside used to sing? He could not recollect it; he had never heard it before. Immediately, as upon a Divine command, he rose to his feet and ran back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for he had left St. Paul’s Epistles lying there. He opened the book, and the passage on which his eyes first fell was this: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.” The flesh! The sacred text aimed at him directly—at him, Augustin, still so full of lust! This command was the answer from on high.

He put his finger between the leaves, closed the volume. His frenzy had passed away. A great peace was shed upon him—it was all over. With a calm face he told Alypius what had happened, and without lingering he went into his mother’s room to tell her also. Monnica was not surprised. It was long now since she had been told, “Where I am, there shalt thou be also.” But she gave way to an outburst of joy. Her mission was done. Now she might sing her canticle of thanksgiving and enter into God’s peace.1 [Note: Louis Bertrand, Saint Augustin (trans. by V. O’Sullivan), 206.]

My Church

Literature

Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 157.

Adeney (W. F.), in Men of the New Testament, 109.

Book (W. H.), The Columbus Tabernacle Sermons, 142.

Brown (C. R.), The Young Man’s Affairs, 139.

Burrell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 296.

Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 42.

Dewhurst (F. E.), The Investment of Truth, 191.

Goulburn (E. M.), The Holy Catholic Church, 1.

Gray (W. H.), Old Creeds and New Beliefs, 232.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 105.

Holland (H. S.), Creed and Character, 37.

Horton (R. F.), The Teaching of Jesus, 125.

Jones (J. C.), Studies in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, 255.

Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 109.

Newman (J. H.), Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 263.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 113.

Owen (J. W.), Some Australian Sermons, 167.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 33.

Sanderson (T.), Unfulfilled Designs, 141.

Shepherd (A.), Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 219.

Stanley (A. P.), Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, 76.

British Congregationalist, March 23, 1911 (W. B. Selbie); Sept. 21, 1911 (J. Warschauer).

Christian World Pulpit, xxxiv. 207 (C. Garrett); lviii. 243 (J. A. Brinkworth).

Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Peter, St. James, xv. 36 (C. Hardwick).

Contemporary Review, xcvii. (1910) 165 (G. Whitelock).

Expositor, 2nd Ser., vii. 311 (J. A. Beet).

Homiletic Review, New Ser., xliv. 239 (F. R. Hiel).