S. THE OPENING OF THE EYES.

THE OPENING OF THE EYES.

Jesus said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? He answered and said, Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him? And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee. And he said, Lord, I believe, and he worshipped Him. — John 11:35-38.

There is always a deep fascination for us in seeing exactly how another person’s mind works. Some people are very attractive simply from a transparency which lets us look in perfectly upon their mental movements and see just how all their processes work out their conclusions, even if there is nothing remarkable in the processes themselves. And even with the other kind of attraction which belongs to very difficult and reserved people, whose mental action it is hard to follow, the secret of it is still the same; for what draws us to them is merely the desire to do what seems so hard, to catch some sound of the machinery which they conceal so well, and guess how it is working. We are unable to accept any result without supposing a process behind it. In all the outward works of men, in all that their bodies do, we see the process perfectly, and trace it perfectly to the result, and all is very satisfactory. We see the mason lay every brick, and so the house when it is done is perfectly accountable. At the other extreme all the highest workings, all God’s workings, we cannot trace. Results stand out alone. There we have miracles. Between the two, half -hidden, half-discoverable, always tempting us to discover more, there are men’s mental movements. Some part they will not tell us, other parts they cannot. We watch the processes by which our neighbors come to their conclusions; and they elude us like a stream that goes sliding along through thickets, only occasionally glistening out into a patch of sun-lit water, just frequent enough to let us keep the general bearing of its course. How Moses came to undertake the leadership of Israel, how David was led to offer himself against the giant, how Caesar came to cross the Rubicon, what made my friend give up his promising career and go into the army for his country, — I can see just enough of these to give me interest in them, an interest, that is, a real place inside such questions, just enough to tempt me always with the desire to know more. The way in which the workings of God’s mind are always represented to us in the Bible under the most familiar human representations, — repentance, jealousy, anger, patience, — those affections which must be so different from anything we can conceive of in their mightiness and their purity being identified with and expressed by the feeble human echoes of them of which we do know something, — this is the Bible’s effort to give men the same interest in the thoughts of God which they have in the thoughts of one another. It is a part of the same effort of which the Incarnation was the sum and crown. The book or story or lecture which by sympathetic insight lets us have this interesting view of how some mind is working, is always popular. If any one could perfectly describe how the poorest man in town came to do the simplest of his duties, if he could show how every wheel of motive was toothed and fitted into its task, and make it perfectly clear how each step led to every next one, he would fascinate any audience that listened to him. The books that do it most completely are not the subtle books of casuistry which set out to do it, but the simplest and most earnest books, — those which deal with men in their most earnest, which are always their simplest, moments. This description applies above all books to the Bible, and the Bible people do open their mental movements to us with a clearness which no other series of characters can rival. We see their thoughts grow; and we see more than we usually can of how the thought involves and necessitates the action. This is a large part of the charm of the Bible for those who have no deepest personal religious interest in it.

There is an illustration of this in the story from which I take this evening’s text. Jesus had given a blind man his sight. The Pharisee, associating the man with his Restorer, had made a captious quarrel with him, and finally excommunicated him. Jesus meets him, and it ends by his becoming the worshipping disciple of the Master. Here was a great change, and yet the whole story of it is told in one chapter. Everybody who reads the chapter feels that he knows the whole, understands just how the man became a Christian. It would not be possible to find a story through which you could more clearly trace the flow of a simple, candid mind from motive to conviction, from fountain to ocean, than we can this man’s.

If we can understand it so clearly, it must throw some light upon other religious experiences, — upon the ways in which some other men come to Christ, — which are not so clear; and this is why I want to make it the basis of a few words to-night. What I have to say will belong in part to each of the three speeches in the short dialogue which I read for the text: "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" "Who is He, that I might believe on Him?" "Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee." Then he worshipped Him.

Jesus said to him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? Consider the man’s position. He had been blind all his life; he was blind that morning; now, at night, he saw. The wonderful beauty of the world had burst upon him. The greatest luxury of sense that man enjoys was his, and he was revelling in its newfound enjoyment. And he was intensely grateful to the friend who had given it to him. He loved Him and thanked Him with his whole heart. And the blessing had cost him something, and was all the dearer for that. It had cost him his hereditary position in the national synagogue. One must almost be a Jew to know what a sacrifice it was to give that up; but he had been very brave and generous about it. He had stood by his benefactor. When they wanted to make him insult Jesus he had honored Him; and now when he saw Him coming, his whole heart leaped up with joy. All that he had suffered seemed as nothing. Here was his wonderful friend, and he could thank Him once again. He had found Him. He saw Him with the new, strange, beautiful sight which He Himself had given. And just then Jesus steps in and questions him; not, " Are you glad and grateful? " but " Dost thou believe on the Son of God? " It is a new thought, y a new view altogether. We can almost see the surprise and bewilderment creep over his glad face. He had been hurrying to thank a friend, and here he was stopped and thrown back to think and answer whether he " believed on the Son of God. "

"The Son of God." The name was not wholly strange to him. It had lurked throughout his welllearned national history. Angels in the Old Testament had been called God’s sons. Sometimes great, pure, and holy men had recognized their sonship to divinity, or had it recognized by others. That there was a God, and that they were His children, bearing some part of His nature, and loved with His fatherly tenderness, — all this he knew something about; but " The Son of God," — one in whom the hints and best promises of all these others were fulfilled, one who really brought the Deity with Him and stood as Mediator between the Father and the sons everywhere, between the beneficent divine and the needy human, — this bewildered him. It may have fascinated him, and filled him with that strange sort of longing which we all have after our highest dreams of whose reality we have no proof except the intensity with which we wish that they were true. It may have fascinated him, but it bewildered him first. It was not what he had expected. The ground where he had thought to lay the foundation of his little monument of gratitude had opened to infinite depths, and he must build so much deeper than he had thought. He had it on his lips to thank his friend, and lo! suddenly he was dealing with God and with the infinite relations between God and man.

It is a bewilderment which is always ready to fall, which often does fall, upon the superficialness of our ordinary life. There are always deep truths ready to open beneath us, and great unifying truths which are always waiting to close around and bind into a surprising unity the fragmentary lives we live. For we certainly do live very much in fragments. Our special blessings stand isolated, and are not grasped and gathered into one great pervading consciousness of a blessed life, — of a life brooded over and cared for and trained by God the Blesser. Health is a joy of the senses, a delight of full red blood and strong springy muscles, and a skin that tingles with joy in the cold or basks with joy in the sunshine. It has no strong, sufficient purpose. We are well and strong for nothing. Talent, skill, culture, do their little separate works. They have hardly more, in some ways they have less, associations in the unity of a plan of life than the instincts of the brutes. One paints his picture, another builds his house, another wins his fortune, and each achievement stands by itself and leaves the bystander asking, or at least sets the worker himself to asking, as he looks back on his life, " Well, what of it? " Power, as men get it and use it, is like the play of a crowd of children turned into a great factory and amusing themselves by whirling one this wheel, and one the other, with no single purpose controlling and no single result issuing from the whole. One rules his senate and another his society and another his family and another his club and, with all the power everywhere lavished, the whole goes largely unruled. Is not this the trouble? We live in such small detail. The world unfolds its riches more and more. We are turned loose among them. Blessing — opportunity, which is the great blessing — opens around us on every side; but in the midst of it all we seem to live such a baby-life. We are so like children in their nurseries, who know every toy and bit of furniture perfectly, but know no whole, — have no conception of the purpose of the nursery and its meaning. There are high impulses enough; there are patriotism and courage; men will die for friends and country, — but it all lacks spiritual unity. Where is the centre of it all?

Take any life. A boy has his dozen years of full boy’s pleasure, and every day’s enjoyment is a sort of rude, healthy, barbaric hymn of how good it is to live. Then comes the young man’s education, and that is good too, subtler, finer, more conscious, sweeter. Then comes manhood with its happy cares and incitements. That is good too. Business, public spirit, family life, â– — the great sum-total of all is a sense of gladness; but how blind it is, how it eddies in circles which come back on themselves, how it seems to lack drift and tendency and direction. How hard it is to think of it all as having been launched from the hand of any deliberate design, or as having an appointed end in any definite result. How easy it is to sit down by the side of the very richest and fullest and most successful life we ever knew, and in certain moods find ourselves saying of it, " Well, what of it after all? " That is not the great first feeling to be sure. The first feeling is a pure delight and thankfulness for our existence and its blessedness, even fragmentarily as we conceive of them; but, because we do conceive of them fragmentarily, that other feeling is always lurking underneath and any little convulsion may throw it any moment to the top.

What can save us? Suppose this. Suppose that. Meaning to thank God for the fulness of your life, — for health, wealth, power, for love, for friendship, for all this beautiful world with all that it is full of, — you are suddenly met with this question, " Dost thou believe on the Son of God? " At first it seems so unmeaning. What does it mean? It means this: Are you glad and grateful for these things as little separate sensations of pleasure? That amounts to nothing. Or are you thankful for them as manifestations of the divine life to yours, as tokens of that fatherhood of God which found its great utterance, including all others, in the Incarnation of His Son? That is everything. No wonder that such a question brings surprise. It is so much more than you expected. It is like the poor Neapolitan peasant who struck his spade into the soil to dig a well, and the spade went through into free space and he had discovered all the hidden wealth of Herculaneuin. No wonder there is surprise at first; but afterward you see that in the belief in a manifested Son of God, if you could gain it, you would have just the principle of spiritual unity in which your life is wanting, and the lack of which makes so much of its very best so valueless. If you could believe in one great utterance of God, one incarnate word, the manifested pity of God, and the illustrated possibility of man at once, — then, with such a central point, there could be no more fragmentariness anywhere. All must fall into its relation to it, to Him, and so the unity of life show forth. Blessings of every sort are reflections of that great blessing. Powers of every sort are glimpses of that possible manhood which was manifest in Him. Love of every kind is God’s love. The centre once set, the circle builds itself. The manifestation of the Son of God, of Christ, gives all other blessings a place and meaning, just as the sun in heaven accounts for and rescues from fragmentariness every little light of the innumerable host which, in every hue and brilliancy, sparkle and flash and glow from every point of our sun-lit world. This is the importance of the question. "True," you say, " but the eye may enjoy the sparkle of a diamond or the color of a rose even if it does not know that both are borrowed from the sun and belong to it; and so one may delight in many a joy of life without any conscious reference of it to that spiritual purpose of it all which Christ illustrated. " I know he may; but on the whole that wearying sense of a lack of unity and purpose must come in; and the pleasure and the culture which come by spiritual treatments unconsciously experienced are always deepened and richened when one consciously and cordially submits to a training that is clearly understood.

Superficialness and fragmentariness go together. The more profoundly you get into the heart of things the more simple they become, and the more their unity comes out. This question, then, is a demand for more profoundness, and appeals from the surface to the heart of things.

If one could get the ear of modern enterprise and progress, what question would he want to ask of this wonderful giant that is conquering the earth? What but this? " Dost thou believe in the Son of God? " Ask it of the business that fills our streets, of the science that discovers, of the philosophy that thinks, of the labor that creates, of the invention that devises. Ask it of education which is the atmosphere, and politics which is the electricity, and home-life which is the sunshine of the days men live. Ask it of art, ask it of philanthropy; ask it at the doors of schools and counting rooms and state-houses and city halls and museums and homes. " Dost thou believe in the Son of God? " Have you faith in a spiritual purpose behind, under, through and through all that you are doing, — the soul by which it lives? Do you believe in and are you inspired by a pure, clear faith in God’s love and in man’s destiny as all gathered and summed up in the redemption of the God-Man, Jesus Christ? "Dost thou believe in the Son of God? " A strange question for such places; but if they could answer it, what a new life would be in them all! And then if we could ask the question of separate men in their separate lives. Your blessings are heaped up; your powers tempt and fascinate you; your associations are so many fountains, each pouring in its special joy upon your soul, — tell me, do you believe in the Soii of God? Do not turn away and say the question is impertinent, that it means nothing to you. It means this. Is there any controlling present sense of a manifested and ever-manifesting God that gives a unity to your family, your occupation, your pleasure, in the certainty of a divine Fatherhood and Brotherhood. Do you have any understanding of what this means: " He that spared not His own Son but freely gave Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things, " — any understanding such that when " all things " come they are immediately recognized as given in Him, so that they are no longer unaccountable fragments, — these many blessings, — but the pledges of the great spiritual heritage of holiness, of perfect life, which belongs to you as a child, an heir of God, a joint heir with Christ the Son of God? Do you believe in the Son of God like this? If you do, not the bread on your table, not the joy of the sunshine, not your balance in the bank, no blessing is too common or vulgar to fall into its due place in the structural unity of the new life which is faith in Christ. Every gift excites gratitude to Him as the Giver, and grows sacred in its necessary dedication to Him as the Lord. Our whole thanksgiving is pitched in too low a key; we come with gratitude for opened eyes, and the Saviour meets us with, "Dost thou believe in the Son of God? " If so, thank God for that faith, for that includes every blessing. So much of Christ’s question. Now what was the man’s answer? " Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" "Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him?" "I do not know, " he seems to say, " I did not mean anything like that; I did not seem to believe, but yet I have not evidently exhausted or fathomed my own thought. There is something below that I have not realized. Perhaps I do believe. At any rate I should like to. The vague notion attracts me. I will believe if I can." "Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him? " The simplicity and frankness, the guilelessness and openness of the man makes us like him more than ever. There is evidently for him a chance, nay, a certainty, that he will be greater, fuller, better than he is.

Some natures are inclusive; some are exclusive. Some men seem to be always asking, " How much can I take in," and some are always asking, "How much can I shut out? " You see it in men’s affections. Some men from boyhood up are eager for objects to love. They crave new currents of affection as the ocean craves the rivers. They will love anything or anybody that gives them a chance. They will fasten like vines about any most shapeless thing which will simply stand still and let them. They do not need response. Other men are chary of their love. Their ingenuity seems to run the other way. They will find something in the most perfect character that can release them from the unwelcome duty of admiration and regard. They seem to be always saying, " Tell me something about him that can lessen my love, that can show me that I need not love him. " And so it is in matters of action too. Some minds are quick to find the practicability and usefulness of things, and devise how they can do them; other minds are quick to see the impossibilities and the hindrances of things, and discover why they need not do them. Some men seek tasks, and some men shirk them. And so it is peculiarly of faith. One man wants to believe; he welcomes evidence. He asks, "Who is He, that I may believe on Him? " Another man seems to dread to believe; he has ingenuity in discovering the flaws of proof. If he asks for more information, it is because he is sure that some objection or discrepancy will appear which will release him from the unwelcome duty of believing. He says, " Show me more of Him, of what He is, and I will surely find some reason why I should not believe Him. " We see the two tendencies, all of us, in people that we know. Carried to their extremes, they develop on one side the superstitious and on the other side the sceptical spirit.

Different ages swing to one side or the other. There is one view of our own time which sees in it the embodiment of the sceptical tendency; certainly its critical spirit is very manifest. It asks with a loud voice how it may escape believing. I believe the other spirit, though quiet in its operations, is very active all the while down below. I believe that what passes for the spirit of doubt is very often the spirit of belief misunderstood, sometimes misunderstanding itself; but certainly the tendency to avoid believing unless one is absolutely forced to it is very strong and very common. Any one can see it. But speculations on the character of our own time as a whole are good for very little. How is it with us ourselves? Do we not share in this spirit of unwillingness to believe? It is an educated temper which often has become so set in us that we do not recognize it for what it is; we do not know that there is any other temper. But there is another. There is a large healthy hunger after belief which is as different from the morbid appetite of superstition, as health always is different from disease. There are men who want to believe, — who would rather believe than not, — when some great spiritual theory of the universe is offered them to account for its bewilderments and to help its troubles. The secret of their life seems to be this, that they are men deeply impressed with the infiniteness of life. Does that seem vague and transcendental? They are men who are always conscious of the spiritual and unseen underneath the visible and material, — men who are always sure that there is a great region of unknown truth which they ought to know, and who are restless after it. To such men all that they see presupposes things which they do not see.

There comes great happiness to them. That happiness is perfectly hollow unless there is a meaning behind it, unless it tells of intentions somewhere, unless it means love. They know that "Eat, drink, and be merry," is not the end of it all. To love some one who is loving them, that is what they want to do. " Oh, that I could find Him! Oh, that I could find Him I " is their cry. Great sorrow comes. But to them sorrow cannot rest in broken limbs or lost fortunes. Those again are only symbols. The essential thing lies deeper. The meaning once more must be personal. Some hand — of friend or enemy — hath done this. Whose hand? And immediately the eager eye is searching among spiritual and eternal things. What has God had to do with it all? The sorrow rolls over the soul with stronger forces than its own weight could carry. They are sure they do not know the whole about it. They crave something more to believe. Or sin comes, great sin, — for to such a mind no sin seems small. What is sin? The broken law, the disordered order, seem but outside things. Somewhere there must be a centre and a source of law, a soul of order. Somewhere there must be one to whom the sinful heart can cry, "Against Thee have I sinned," in the deep satisfaction of confession; to whom it can appeal, " Be merciful to me a sinner, " in mighty supplication for forgiveness. Until it finds Him, it carries its load; and no pardon from fellow-man, no repair of consequences can take it off. So everywhere the nature that is conscious of the infiniteness of life longs to believe in a manifested God. Its whole disposition is toward faith; and then if any glimpse is offered of a Son of God, a manifestation of the Invisible Deity who sends happiness and sorrow and who can forgive sin, there is no tendency to disbelieve, there is the hunger of the heart leaping with fearful hope, there is the stretching out of the arms as when they told Bartimeus, "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by;" and the soul cries out, " Who is He that I may believe on Him."

More than we think, far more, depends upon this first attitude of the whole nature, — upon whether we want to believe or want to disbelieve. To one who wants to disbelieve, objections, difficulties, spring from every page of the Bible, from every word of Christ. To one who finds the forces of this life sufficient, an incarnation, a supernatural salvation is incredible. To one who, looking deeper, knows there must be some infinite force which it has not found yet, — some loving, living force of Emanuel, of God with man, — the Son of God is waiting on the threshold and will immediately come. Christ supposes an element of incompleteness everywhere, making a hungry world, — preparing the whole man not to reject as useless and incredible, but to accept as just what it needs and expects, a mysterious, a supernatural, divine Redemption, preparing the mental nature for faith, and the moral nature for repentance, and the spiritual nature for guidance. To this readiness alone can Christ come. You remember that there were cities where Jesus could do no mighty works because of their unbelief. You remember Jerusalem: "Oh how often would I have gathered thy children together and ye would not." This seems to me part of what Christ means when He tells us that, "xcept we become as little children we cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." The little children are ready for every revelation that may come to them. This strange new world is very big, is infinite to them; and no force seems too mighty, too infinite to fill it. You tell them of a Son of God, and it seems most natural to them, — the whole story of Bethlehem and Calvary; they cry, "Who is He that we may believe in Him? " This is what Wordsworth sings in his great ode, —

"Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,

Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized.
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
those first affections.

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day."

These are what make the little children blessed, these Teachings back and down into the darkness for the hand of the God whom they have just left, and whom they still expect, and in whom they easily believe.

Go asking for a Son of God, seeing how life is empty and sad and inexplicable without Him, ready and wanting to believe in Him, and He shall surely come; for He must come to every soul to which He can come. And if He seems to delay His coming, it is only that He may come more deeply and more richly.

How will He come? We go back to our story and read the third speech of the dialogue: "Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him?" "Thou fiast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee." The teaching that seems to me to be here for us, is this, — that when Christ "comes," as we say, to a human soul, it is only to the consciousness of the soul that He is introduced, not to the soul itself; He has been at the doors of that from its very beginning. We lose this out of our Christianity; but really it ought not only to be in our Christianity, it ought to be our Christianity, — this certainty of an ever-present, ever-active Christ. We live in a redeemed world, — a world full of the Holy Ghost forever doing His work, forever taking of the things of Christ and showing them to us. That Christ so shown is the most real, most present power in this new Christian world. Men see Him, men talk with Him continually. They do not recognize Him; they do not know what lofty converse they are holding; but some day when, in some of the ways we have been talking of to-night, a man has become really earnest and wants to believe in the Son of God, and is asking, " Who is He that I may believe on Him? " then that Son of God comes to him, — not as a new guest from the lofty heaven, but as the familiar and slighted friend who has waited and watched at the doorstep, who has already from the very first filled the soul’s house with such measure of His influence as the soul’s obstinacy of indifference would allow, and who now, as He steps in at the soul’s eager call to take complete and final possession of its life, does not proclaim His coming in awful, new, unfamiliar words, but says in tones which the soul recognizes and wonders that it has not known long before, " Thou hast seen me. I have talked with thee. " This is Christ’s conversion of a soul. " Say not in thine heart. Who shall ascend into Heaven? (that is, to bring down Christ from above): or. Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead). But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. " , To open the eyes and find a Christ beside us, — not to go long journeys to discover a Christ with whom before we have had nothing to do, — this is the Christian conversion. To this every man who is living the new life at all will bear his witness. How did the Saviour first prove himself to you? Was it not by the past which suddenly or gradually became full of Him, so that you recognized that He had been busy on you when you did not know it, that He had been leading you when you thought you had been wandering, so that you saw your past thoughts grow luminous as His inspirations, your past dreams as the contagions of His presence and the prophecies of His touch? Was not this His answer when you called Him? Not, " I am coming, " away off in the distance, but "Here I am," spoken right out of the very soul and centre of your life?

I am not speaking merely of that general, beautiful, wonderful presence of the supernatural in and under and through the natural courses of human life of which all men are more or less aware, and which every now and then breaks forth, — which always gives the great ground swell of mystery to human existence. I do not wish to lose in vagueness the personal, clear, dear Christ. I mean that close to every man from his birth the Redeemer stands by His spirit with the great purposes of His redemption; that He brings those purposes to bear upon the soul from the very first; and that when a man awakes up to know his need and calls for a Son of God, and then when he opens his eyes and sees the Christ beside him, the dearest part of it all ia that it is not a Christ newly come, but the Christ who has cared for him from the beginning, ever since, nay, long before, he was born. " Thou hast both seen me, and it is I that talked with thee. "

"Thou hast both seen me." How touching in this special story is the allusion to the light which the Lord had given only that day. Jesus reminds him of the lower mercy that He may assure him of the higher. " Thou hast seen Him with the eyes that I have opened. Let that be a pledge and earnest to thee that I can and will open yet other eyes, and thou shalt see Him more completely, more profoundly, in wonderful new ways. " Still, you see, it is as the Saviour of the past life that He offers Himself for the future.

I love to think of this, that where men to-day are most unconscious of His presence, Christ is laying foundations for His future work. Here is a perfectly worldly man who cares nothing for Christ or Christianity, but yet Christ’s touches are on him. He is surrounded with blessings; he is pressed upon with sorrows; he is led through apparently meaningless experiences; and all that some day, when he is really moved to cry out for a Son of God, Christ may be able to come to him, not new and strange, but with the strong claim of years of care and thought and unthanked mercy. It makes the world very solemn to think how much of this work Christ must be doing everywhere. It makes our own lives very sacred to think how much of it He may be doing in us.

There have been great creative moments in the history of the world, as all history and science seem to show, — moments when after long, silent preparation suddenly the old order broke and a new, as if by magic, came into its place. So it has been in physical and social and political history. But in neither was there any magic. The same force which was in the last changing conviction had been in all the preparation. The flower is but the ripening of the same juices that built the stem. So it is with conversion to the very last. The Christ who in eternity opens the last concealment, and lays His comfort and life close to the deepest needs of the poor, needy, human heart, is the same Christ that first laid hands upon the blind eyes, and made them see the sky and flowers.

It is a wondrous revelation of the Saviour. He comes to us by showing that He has been always with us. He finds the material of the Christian life in us, and builds it by His touch. Does this seem to lessen and depreciate His work? Does it take from its absolute importance? Do you ask what is the fate of the material if it is not used? That He has answered Himself in the Parable of the Talents. In words full of solemnity, Jesus summed up His whole impression of the story which we have been studying to-night. He declared the critical character which He brought into the world, — that men are tested by how they are affected by Him. How wonderfully deep His words are. "For judgement I am come into the world, that they which see not might see, and they which see might be made blind." May we first know how blind we are, and then come to Him for sight, and then out of past mercy always win new trust, and so go on until at last we come unto the perfect Light.