this anchor of your faith, "Watch and pray," constantly, and with all your hearts, the temptations may come, and the dangers too, from the right hand or the left, from your own hearts or your neighbours, from love or fear, and God, who allowed you, in His great mercy, to be brought to His blessed Baptism, and there made you members of Christ, His children, and inheritors of the kingdom of Heaven, will guard you and strengthen you, and keeping you safe yourselves, will make you a blessing to those that come after you.

E

SERMON III.

THE TEMPTATION OF JUDAS ISCARIOT.

ST. LUKE Xxii. 53.

"But this is your hour, and the power of darkness."

IN discoursing upon these words some time since, I took occasion to remark how solemn the hour was, of which our Lord thus pronounced, that it was the hour of His persecutors and the power of darkness; and to observe how much warning we might gather from remembering, that the most sacred evening ever spent upon this earth was the evening in which His own sacred heel was bruised, His Church wellnigh wrecked by the wreck and scattering of the Apostles; in which some were hardly saved, and one (as far as the sacred history enables us to speak) finally lost. I then proceeded to examine the temptation of St. Peter, regarding it as a

remarkable instance of the danger of indirect and unexpected temptation, and drew from it such practical warnings as seemed most suitable to our own particular situation and dangers.

I now proceed, in pursuance of the same design, to examine the more fatal temptation of Judas Iscariot, who, while all the twelve were sifted as wheat, insomuch that they all forsook their Master and fled, and while one, who was afterwards to have the duty of strengthening his brethren, fell so far as to be the denier of his Lord, yielded yet more fatally than any,yielded in such a manner, and to such a degree, that for him it seems there was no place left for saving repentance, though in bitter remorse and anguish he strove to disburden himself of the wages of his guilt, and threw away in despair the life which alone could have given him hope or opportunity of restoration.

When we look into the narrative of the New Testament for particulars of the previous behaviour and character of Judas, we find that there are but few instances in which his name is mentioned.

The first (omitting the mere enumeration of his name in the lists of the twelve Apostles) occurs in the sixth chapter of St. John. In that discourse (which, as you remember, is a

very remarkable one, as being the anticipation of the blessed sacrament of the Holy Communion) our Lord appears throughout to have been, if we may so speak, checked and interrupted in the full statement of the gracious doctrine which He was delivering, by the presence of some person or persons, even among his disciples, and not only in the crowd of the people of Capernaum, who believed not. Thus, in the earlier part of his discourse, He had digressed from the immediate subject of which He was speaking, to say, "No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto Me." And when the discourse was over, and the Jews, who had murmured against the first portion of it, and fought against the second, found the last part so hard that they could not hear it, and left Christ's teaching and company, Jesus turned to His disciples, knowing that some of them also murmured, and asked, "Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they

are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray Him. And He said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father" Here, then, Judas stands discovered. He it was who, from secret unbelief, had encouraged the open murmurs of the Jews, and caused his Master to warn the people, even in the midst of his Communion Sermon, that in order to receive his doctrine, they needed divine teaching from His Father's Spirit. He it was who, long before the time of his final discovery and ruin, had found the doctrine of the Holy Communion hard and unwelcome, yet had lived on in his Master's company, in the profession of faith and love, but with the secret reality of hypocrisy and unbelief,—a reality, perhaps, which he had never represented to himself, nor was expressly conscious of, but which, nevertheless, kept him out of the reach of blessing, even in the immediate company and intercourse of Christ.

And if this be so, it is not uninstructive to remark, that the Apostle whom the doctrine of the Holy Communion first tested and exposed

1 St. John vi. 44, 45. 61-65.