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and dead in the end of the world. regard He had said, I judge no man; seeing He first came not to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved."

Isaac Williams paraphrases the Lord's words thus: "If ye were blind indeed it would be an excuse for you; or if ye were blind and would confess your blindness, it should on your prayer be removed from you. But as it is, ye have neither excuse nor pardon. He shows, says St. Chrysostom, that what they most prided themselves on would turn to their punishment. Awful words, yet no doubt true, not only of individuals, but of whole nations, and religious sects and Churches. Ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth. They had no desire to be relieved of their blindness, because they were not sensible of it: for to be sensible of blindness, and to ask of Him, is to receive sight; and so requisite is this in things spiritual, that, as it were in sign and symbol of it, our Lord distinctly puts the question to the blind: What will ye that I shall do unto you? Lord that our eyes may be opened. And on another occasion, the blind men came unto Him; and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? And why are these thus spoken to, but that the blind in soul might feel their blindness and come to Him. There is therefore a seeming knowledge

which with God is blindness: and there is an absence of such knowledge accompanied with a feeling sense of blindness which arises from divine light in the soul, which shall burn more and more clearly until night itself is lost in the fulness of perfect day."

Trench comments as follows: "I am come, He would say, to reveal every man's innermost state; I, as the highest revelation of God, must bring out men's love and their hatred of what is divine as none other can; I am the touchstone; much that seemed true shall at my touch be proved false, to be merely dross; much that for its little sightliness was nothing accounted of, shall prove true metal. Many, whom men esteemed to be seeing, such as the spiritual chiefs of this nation, shall be shown to be blind; many, whom men counted altogether unenlightened, shall, when my light touches them, be shown to have powers of spiritual vision undreamt of before. Christ was the King of truth, and therefore His setting up of His banner in the world was at once and of necessity a ranging of men in their true ranks, as lovers of truth or lovers of a lie. So Augustine says: "That day had made division between light and darkness.'"

Stier says: "We are by nature spiritually born blind, and to know and confess this our

blindness is our first and sole seeing: out of this the grace of the Lord can bring a full restoration of sight. . . . The being made blind, however, as happening to those who are essentially blind already, is partly an ironical expression for remaining blind, and partly points to the further truth that unbelief tends to increasing blindness and hardening."

First Thought.-Our Lord Christ declares that He is come into the world for judgment, that is, literally, to separate truth and falsehood, right doing and wrong doing, the one from the other. How does He do this? By the force of His personality. He alone is perfect Truth, therefore He alone can impart truth. If we acknowledge our ignorance and blindness, our utter need of light concerning the things of God, and turn to Him seeking light, we shall not be disappointed. But there must be unreserved self-surrender, we must give ourselves up to Him in fullest obedience. Of what sort is this obedience? We may not understand everything He would have us do, but nothing is plainer in the Scripture than that He gave His Church authority to speak and to act in His name. He is still in the world through her, and there must be on our part the most hearty purpose of accepting every

thing just so soon as it is shown to be a part of her teaching. Here we are to seek the cure for doubt and discouragement: those who follow the Church's system in simple faith find that the spiritual things become wonderfully clear, and very satisfying to the soul; such souls learn to see.

On the other hand those who think they already see, that they understand the true religion, and their whole duty, are not ready, in most cases to admit that they have anything further to learn of the Church. From their standpoint there are many things in her teaching which are both impracticable and undesirable, as the doctrine of childlikeness, of the non-resistance of evil, of shunning wealth, of practising bodily hardness and fasting—all of this the believer who prides himself on his worldly wisdom puts aside. It is thus that those who see become blind, all unconsciously to themselves.

The danger is one to which the bestinstructed Christians are the most exposed; we are in grievous peril when we fancy that we have already learned the whole doctrine of God, and need not any longer go to school at the feet of mother Church in devout obedience, and constant effort to carry out more perfectly all the

precepts of Christ's religion as she sets them forth.

Second Thought.-The same thing is most true in the matter of self-knowledge. Most of us know ourselves very imperfectly indeed. We do not see our faults, we do not realize what great spiritual flaws exist in our Christian character even though we be rarely guilty of direct acts of sin. Our Lord has come into the world and taken His place, as it were in our midst, in order that He may make clear for us the distinction between true holiness and that false holiness which men are often wont to pride themselves upon, persuading themselves that it is the real thing.

We see not our sins, we understand not our failings. Then let us learn to see and to understand by obeying heartily and simply the Master's precepts. We often fancy that we would like to see ourselves as others see us, but that is generally because we hope for their admiration, or would learn to avoid those things which provoke their criticism or their derision; we would be thought well of. But the important thing is to see ourselves as God sees us, that is, as we truly are in our inner selves, in the life which we hide from our fellows in most cases, and which we would often treat as unreal.

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