Westminster Sermons | Page 9

each other.
But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when
those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our
standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the
temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too
high-minded to care for popularity themselves.
True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those
Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy
cannot be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I
believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has
sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to
me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring
round its revenges: and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds,

may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative
philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor
Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the Emotions
and the Will, {0a} then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an
older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic
explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a
hearing.
Only wait: and fret not yourselves; else shall you be moved to do evil.
Remember the saying of the wise man--"Go not after the world. She
turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough, she will turn
round to thee."

SERMON I. THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS. A GOOD FRIDAY
SERMON.
PHILIPPIANS II. 5-8.
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in
the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made
Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a slave, and
was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man,
He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death
of the Cross.
The second Lesson for this morning's service, and the chapter which
follows it, describe the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, both God and
Man. They give us the facts, in language most awful from its perfect
calmness, most pathetic from its perfect simplicity. But the passage of
St Paul which I have chosen for my text gives us an explanation of
those facts which is utterly amazing. That He who stooped to die upon
the Cross is Very God of Very God, the Creator and Sustainer of the
Universe, is a thought so overwhelming, whenever we try to
comprehend even a part of it in our small imaginations, that it is no
wonder if, in all ages, many a pious soul, as it contemplated the Cross
of Christ, has been rapt itself into a passion of gratitude, an ecstasy of

wonder and of love, which is beautiful, honourable, just, and in the
deepest sense most rational, whenever it is spontaneous and natural.
But there have been thousands, as there may be many here to-day, of
colder temperament; who would distrust in themselves, even while they
respected in others, any violence of religious emotion: yet they too
have found, and you too may find, in contemplating the Passion of
Christ, a satisfaction deeper than that of any emotion; a satisfaction not
to the heart, still less to the brain, but to that far deeper and diviner
faculty within us all--our moral sense; that God-given instinct which
makes us discern and sympathise with all that is beautiful and true and
good.
And so it has befallen, for eighteen hundred years, that thousands who
have thought earnestly and carefully on God and on the character of
God, on man and on the universe, and on their relation to Him who
made them both, have found in the Incarnation and the Passion of the
Son of God the perfect satisfaction of their moral wants; the surest key
to the facts of the spiritual world; the complete assurance that, in spite
of all seeming difficulties and contradictions, the Maker of the world
was a Righteous Being, who had founded the world in righteousness;
that the Father of Spirits was a perfect Father, who in His only-begotten
Son had shewn forth His perfectness, in such a shape and by such acts
that men might not only adore it, but sympathise with it; not only thank
Him for it, but copy it; and become, though at an infinite distance,
perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, and full of grace and truth,
like that Son who is the brightness of His Father's glory, and the
express image of His person. Such a satisfaction have they found in
looking upon