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XXIX.
JEREMIAH’S CALLING

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.—Jeremiah xxiii. 5.

At the time when Jeremiah the prophet spoke those words to the Jews, nothing seemed more unlikely than that they would ever come true.  The whole Jewish nation was falling to pieces from its own sins.  Brutish and filthy idolatry in high and low—oppression, violence, and luxury among the court and the nobility—shame, and poverty, and ignorance among the lower classes—idleness and quackery among the priesthood—and as kings over all, one fool and profligate after another, set on the throne by a foreign conqueror, and pulled down again by him at his pleasure.  Ten out of the twelve tribes of Israel had been carried off captive, young and old, into a distant land.  The small portion of country which still remained inhabited round Jerusalem, had been overrun again and again by cruel armies of heathens.  Without Jerusalem was waste and ruins, bloodshed and wretchedness; within every kind of iniquity and lies, division and confusion.  If ever there was a miserable and contemptible people upon the face of the earth, it was the Jewish nation in Jeremiah’s time.  Jeremiah makes no secret of it.  His prophecies are full of it—full of lamentation and shame: “Oh that my head were a fountain of tears, to weep for the sins of my people!”  He feels that God has sent him to rebuke those sins, to warn and prophesy to his fellow-countrymen the certain ruin into which they are rushing headlong; and he speaks God’s message boldly.  From the poor idol-ridden labourer, offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven to coax her into sending him a good harvest, to the tyrant king who had built his palace of cedar and painted it with vermilion, he had a bitter word for every man.  The lying priest tried to silence him; and Jeremiah answered him, that his wife should be a harlot in the city, and his children sold for slaves.  The king tried to flatter him into being quiet; and he told him in return, that he should be buried with the burial of an ass, dragged out and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.  The luxurious queen, who made her nest in the cedars, would be ashamed and confounded, he said, for her wickedness.  The crown prince was a despised broken idol—a vessel in which was no pleasure; he should be cast out, he and his children, into slavery in a land which he knew not.  The whole royal family, he said, would perish; none of them should ever again prosper or sit upon the throne of David.  This was his message; shame and confusion, woe and ruin, to high and low; every human being he passed in the street was a doomed man.  For the day of the Lord was at hand, and who should be able to escape it?

A sad calling, truly, to have to work at; and all the more sad because Jeremiah had no pride, no steadfast opinion of his own excellence to keep him up.  He hates his calling of prophet.  At the very moment he is foretelling woe, he prays God that his prophecy may not come true; he tries every method to prevent its coming true, by entreating his countrymen to repent.  There runs through all his awful words a vein of tenderness, and pity, and love unspeakable, which to me is the one great mark of a true prophet; a sign that Jeremiah spoke by the Spirit of God; a sign that too many writers nowadays do not speak by the Spirit of God.  If they rebuke the rich and powerful, they do it generally in a very different spirit from Jeremiah’s—in a spirit of bitterness and insolence, not very easy to describe, but easy enough to perceive.  They seem to rejoice in evil, to delight in finding fault, to be sorry, and not glad, when their prophecies of evil turn out false; to try to set one class against another, one party against another, as if we were not miserably enough split up already by class interests and party spirit.  They are glad enough to rebuke the wicked great; but not to their face, not to their own danger and hurt like Jeremiah.  Their plan is to accuse the rich to the poor, on their own platform, or in their own newspaper, where they are safe; and, moreover, to make a very fair profit thereby; to say behind the back of authorities that which they dare not say to their face, and which they soon give up saying when they have worked their own way into office; and meanwhile take mighty credit to themselves for seeing that there is wrong and misery in the world; as if the spirits in hell should fancy themselves righteous, because they hated the devil!  No, my friends, Jeremiah was of a very different spirit from that.  If he ever was tempted to it when he was young, and began to fancy himself a very grand person, who had a right to look down on his neighbours, because God had called him and set him apart to be a prophet from his mother’s womb, and revealed to him the doom of nations, and the secrets of His providence—if he ever fancied that in his heart, God led him through such an education as took all the pride out of him, sternly and bitterly enough.  He was commissioned to go and speak terrible words, to curse kings and nobles in the name of the Lord: but he was taught, too, that it was not a pleasant calling, or one which was likely to pay him in this life.  His fellow-villagers plotted against his life.  His wife deserted him.  The nobles threw him into a dungeon, into a well full of mire, whence he had to be drawn up again with ropes to save his life.  He was beaten, all but starved, kept for years in prison.  He had neither child nor friend.  He had his share of all the miseries of the siege of Jerusalem, and all the horrors of its storm; and when he was set free by Nebuchadnezzar, and clung to his ruined home, to see if any good could still be done to the remnant of his countrymen, he was violently carried off into a heathen land, and at last stoned to death, by those very countrymen of his whom he had been trying for years to save.  In everything, and by everything, he was taught that he was still a Jew, a brother to his sinful brothers; that their sorrows were his sorrows, their shame his shame, their ruin his ruin.  In all their afflictions he was afflicted, even as his Lord was after him.

He struggled, we find, again and again against this strange and sad calling of a prophet.  He cried out in bitter agony that God had deceived him; had induced him to become a prophet, and then repaid him for speaking God’s message with nothing but disappointment and misery.  And yet he felt he must speak; God, he said, was stronger than he was, and forced him to it.  He said: “I will speak no more words in His name; but the Word of the Lord was as fire within his bones, and would not let him rest;” and so, in spite of himself, he told the truth, and suffered for it; and hated to have to tell it, and pitied and loved the very country which he rebuked till he cursed “the day in which he saw the light, and the hour in which it was said to his father, there is a man-child born.”  You who fancy that it is a fine thing, and a paying profession, to be a preacher of righteousness and a rebuker of sin, look at Jeremiah, and judge!  For as surely as you or any other man is sent by God to do Jeremiah’s work, so surely he must expect Jeremiah’s wages.

Do you think, then, that Jeremiah was a man only to be pitied?  Pitiable he was indeed, and sad.  There was One hung on a cross eighteen hundred years ago, more pitiable still: and yet He is the Lord of heaven and earth.  Yes; Jeremiah had a sad life to live, and a sad task to work out; and yet, my friends, was not that a cheap price to pay for the honour and glory of being taught by God’s Spirit, and of speaking God’s words?  I do not mean the mere honour of having his fame and name spread over all Christ’s kingdom; the honour of having his writings read and respected by the wisest and the holiest to the end of time; that mere earthly fame is but a slight matter.  I mean the real honour, the real glory, of knowing what was utterly right and true, and therefore of knowing Him who is utterly right and true; of knowing God; of knowing what God’s character is: that he is a living God, and not a dead one; a God who is near and not absent at all, loving and merciful, just and righteous, strong and mighty to save.  Ay, my friends, this is the lesson which God taught Jeremiah; to know the Lord of heaven and earth, and to see His hand, His rule, in all that was happening to his fellow-countrymen, and himself; to know that from the beginning the Lord, the Saviour-God, Jehovah, the messenger of the covenant, He who brought up the Jews out of Egypt, was the wise and just and loving King of the Jews, and of all the nations upon earth; and that some day or other He must and would conquer all the sinfulness, and misery, and tyranny, and idolatry in the world, and show Himself openly to men, and fulfil all the piteous longings after a just and good king which poor wretches had ever felt, and all the glorious promises of a just and good king which God had made to the wise men of old time; and, therefore, in the midst of shame and persecution, despair and ruin, Jeremiah could rejoice.  Jehoiakim, the wicked king, and all his royal house, might be driven out into slavery; Jerusalem might become a heap of ruins and corpses; the fair land of Judæa, and the village where he was bred, might become thorns, and thistles, and heaps of stones; the vineyard which he loved, the little estate at Anathoth which had belonged to him, might be trodden down by the stranger, and he himself die in a foreign land; around him might be nothing but sin and decay, before him nothing but despair and ruin: yet still there was hope, joy, everlasting certainty for that poor, childless, captive old man; for he had found out that the Lord still lived, the Lord still reigned.  He could not lie; he could not forget his people.  Could a mother forget her sucking child?  No.  When the Jews turned to Him, He would still have mercy.  His punishment of them was a sign that he still cared for them.  If He had forgotten them, He would have let them go on triumphant in their iniquity.  No.  All these afflictions were meant to chasten them, teach them, bring them back to Him.  It would be good for them, an actual blessing to them, to be taken away into captivity in Babylon.  It might be hard to believe, but it must be true.  The Lord of Israel, the Saviour-God, who had been caring for them so long, rising up early and sending His prophets to them, pleading with them as a father with his child, He would have mercy; He would teach them, in sorrow and slavery, the lesson they were too rebellious and hard-hearted to learn in prosperity and freedom: that the Lord was their righteousness, and that there was no other name under heaven which could save them from the plague, and from the famine, from the swords of the Chaldeans, or from the division, and oppression, and brutishness, and manifold wickedness, which was their ruin.  And then Jeremiah saw and felt—how we cannot tell—but there his words, the words of this text, stand to this day, to show that he did see and feel it, that some day or other, in God’s good time, the Jews would have a true King—a very different king from Jehoiakim the tyrant—a son of David in a very different sense from what Jehoiakim was; that He would come, and must come, sooner or later, The unseen King, who had all along been governing Jews and heathens, and telling his prophets that Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, the Chaldee and the Persian, were his servants as well as they, and that all the nations of the earth could do but what he chose.  “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute justice and judgment on the earth.”

This was the blessed knowledge which God gave Jeremiah in return for all the misery he had to endure in warning his countrymen of their sins.  And this same blessed knowledge, the knowledge that the earth is the Lord’s, that to Jesus Christ is given, as He said Himself, all power in heaven and earth, and that He is reigning, and must reign, and conquer, and triumph till He has put all His enemies under His feet, God will surely give to everyone, high or low, who follows Jeremiah’s example, who boldly and faithfully warns the sinner of his way, who rebukes the wickedness which he sees around him: only he must do it in the spirit of Jeremiah.  He must not be insolent to the insolent, or proud to the proud.  He must not be puffed up, and fancy that because he sees the evil of sin, and the certain ruin which is the fruit of it, that he is therefore to keep apart from his fellow-countrymen, and despise them in Pharisaic pride.  No.  The truly Christian man, the man who, like Jeremiah, has the Spirit of God in him, will feel the most intense pity and tenderness of sinners.  He will not only rebuke the sins of his people, but mourn for them; he will be afflicted in all their affliction.  However harshly he may have to speak, he will never forget that they are his countrymen, his brothers, children of the same Father, to be judged by the same Lord.  He will feel with shame and fear that he has in himself the root of the very same sins which he sees working death around him—that if others are covetous, he might be so too—if they be profligate, and deceitful, and hypocritical, without God in the world, he might be so too.  And he must feel not only that he might be as bad as his neighbours, but that he actually would be, if God withdrew His Spirit from him for a moment, and allowed him to forget the only faith which saves him from sin, loyalty to his unseen Saviour, the righteous King of kings.  Therefore he will not only rebuke his sinful neighbours; but he will tell them, as Jeremiah told his countrymen, that all their sin and misery proceed from this one thing, that they have forgotten that the Lord is their King.  He will pray daily for them, that the Lord their King may show Himself to their hearts and thoughts, and teach them all that He has done for them, and is doing for them; and may convert them to Himself that they may be truly His people, and His way may be known upon earth, His saving health among all nations.

XXX.
THE PERFECT KING

Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh to thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.—Matthew xxi. 5.

You all know that this Sunday is called the First Sunday in Advent.  You all know, I hope, that Advent means coming, and that these four Sundays before Christmas, as I have often told you, are called Advent Sundays, because upon them we are called to consider the coming of our King and Saviour Jesus Christ.  If you will look at the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for these next four Sundays, you will see at once that they all bear upon our Lord’s coming.  The Gospels tell us of the prophecies about Christ which He fulfilled when He came.  The Epistles tell us what sort of men we ought to be, both clergy and people, because He has come and will come again.  The Collects pray that the Spirit of God would make us fit to live and die in a world into which Christ has come, and in which He is ruling now, and to which He will come again.  The text which I have taken this morning, you just heard in this Sunday’s Gospel.  St. Matthew tells you that Jesus Christ fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem in state upon an ass’s colt; and St. Matthew surely speaks truth.  Let us consider what the prophecy is, and how Jesus Christ fulfilled it.  Then we shall see and believe from the Epistle what effect the knowledge of it ought to have upon our own souls, and hearts, and daily conduct.

Now this prophecy, “Behold, thy king cometh unto thee,” etc., you will find in your Bibles, in the ninth verse of the ninth chapter of the book of Zechariah.  But I do not think that Zechariah wrote it.  St. Matthew does not say he wrote it; he merely calls it that which was spoken by the prophet, without mentioning his name.  Provided it is an inspired word from God, which it is, it perhaps does not matter to us so much who wrote it: but I think it was written by the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps in the beginning of the reign of the good king Josiah; for the chapter in which this text is, and the two or three chapters which follow, are not at all like the rest of Zechariah’s writings, but exactly like Jeremiah’s.  They certainly seem to speak of things which did not happen in Zechariah’s time, but in the time of Jeremiah, nearly ninety years before.  And, above all, St. Matthew himself seems plainly to have thought that some part, at least, of those chapters was Jeremiah’s writing; for in the twenty-seventh chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and in the ninth verse, you will find a prophecy about the potter’s field, which St. Matthew says was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet.  Now, those words are not in the book of Jeremiah as it stands in our Bibles: but they are in the book of Zechariah, in the eleventh chapter, twelfth and thirteenth verses, coming shortly after my text, and making a part of the same prophecy.  This has puzzled Christians very much, because it seemed as if St. Matthew has made a mistake, and miscalled Zechariah Jeremiah.  But I believe firmly that, as we are bound to expect, St. Matthew made no mistake whatsoever, and that Jeremiah did write that prophecy as St. Matthew said, and the two chapters before it, and perhaps the two after it, and that they were probably kept and preserved by Zechariah during the troublous times of the Babylonish captivity, and at last copied by Nehemiah into Zechariah’s book of prophecy, where they stand now; and I think it is a comfort to know this, and to find that the evangelist St. Matthew has not made a mistake, but knew the Scriptures better than we do.

But I think Jeremiah having written this prophecy in my text, which I believe he did, is also very important, because it will show us what the prophet meant when he spoke it, and how it was fulfilled in his time; and the better we understand that, the better we shall understand how our blessed Lord fulfilled it afterwards.

Now, when Jeremiah was a young man, the Jews and their king Amon were in a state of most abominable wickedness.  They were worshipping every sort of idol and false god.  And the Bible, the book of God’s law, was utterly unknown amongst them; so that Josiah the king, who succeeded Amon, had never seen or heard the book of the law of Moses, which makes part of our Old Testament, till he had reigned eighteen years, as you will find if you refer to 2 Kings xxii. 3.  But this Josiah was a gentle and just prince, and finding the book of the law of God, and seeing the abominable forgetfulness and idolatry into which his people had fallen, utterly breaking the covenant which God had made with their forefathers when he brought them up out of Egypt—when he found the book of the law, I say, and all that he and his people should have done and had not done, and the awful curses which God threatened in that book against those who broke His law, “he humbled himself before God, because his heart was tender, and turned to the Lord, as no king before him had ever turned,” says the scripture, “with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might; so that there was no such king before him, or either after him.”  The history of the great reformation which this great and good king worked, you may read at length in 2 Kings xxii. xxiii. and 2 Chron. xxxiv. xxxv. which I advise you all to read.

And it appears to me that this prophecy in the text first applies to the gentle and holy king Josiah, the first true and good king the Jews had had for years, and the best they were ever to have till Christ came Himself; and that it speaks of Josiah coming to Jerusalem to restore the worship of God, not with pomp and show, like the wicked kings both before and after him, but in meekness and humbleness of heart, for all the sins of his people, as the prophetess said of him in 2 Kings xxii. 19, “that his heart was tender and humble before the Lord;” neither coming with chariots and guards, like a king and conqueror, but riding upon an ass’s colt; for that was, in those countries, the ancient sign of a man’s being a man of peace, and not of war; a magistrate and lawgiver, and not a soldier and a conqueror.  Various places of holy scripture show us that this was the meaning of riding upon an ass in Judæa, just as it is in Eastern countries now.

But some may say, How then is this a prophecy?  It merely tells us what good king Josiah was, and what every king ought to be.  Well, my friends, that is just what makes it a prophecy.  If it tells you what ought to be, it tells you what will be.  Yes, never forget that; whatever ought to be, surely will be; as surely as this is God’s earth and Christ’s kingdom, and not the devil’s.

Now, it does not matter in the least whether the prophet, when he spoke these words, knew that they would apply to the Lord Jesus Christ.  We have no need whatsoever to suppose that he did: for scripture gives us no hint or warrant that he did; and if we have any real or honest reverence for scripture, we shall be careful to let it tell its own story, and believe that it contains all things necessary for salvation, without our patching our own notions into it over and above.  Wise men are generally agreed that those old prophets did not, for the most part, comprehend the full meaning of their own words.  Not that they were mere puppets and mouthpieces, speaking what to them was nonsense—God forbid!—But that just because they did thoroughly understand what was going on round them, and see things as God saw them, just because they had God’s Eternal Spirit with them, therefore they spoke great and eternal words, which will be true for ever, and will go on for ever fulfilling themselves for more and more.  For in proportion as any man’s words are true, and wide, and deep, they are truer, and wider, and deeper than that man thinks, and will apply to a thousand matters of which he never dreamt.  And so in all true and righteous speech, as in the speeches of the prophets of old, the glory is not man’s who speaks them, but God’s who reveals them, and who fulfils them again and again.

It is true, then, that this text describes what every king should be—gentle and humble, a merciful and righteous lawgiver, not a self-willed and capricious tyrant.  But Josiah could not fulfil that.  He was a good king: but he could not be a perfect one; for he was but a poor, sinful, weak, and inconsistent man, as we are.  But those words being inspired by the Holy Spirit, must be fulfilled.  There ought to be a perfect king, perfectly gentle and humble, having a perfect salvation, a perfect lawgiver; and therefore there must be such a king; and therefore St. Matthew tells us there came at last a perfect king—one who fulfilled perfectly the prophet’s words—one who was not made king of Jerusalem, but was her King from the beginning; for that is the full meaning of “Thy King cometh to thee.”  To Jerusalem He came, riding on the ass’s colt, like the peaceful and fatherly judges of old time, for a sign to the poor souls round Him, who had no lawgivers but the proud and fierce Scribes and Pharisees, no king but the cruel and godless Cæsar, and his oppressive and extortionate officers and troops.  Meek and lowly He came; and for once the people saw that He was the true Son of David—a man and king, like him, after God’s own heart.  For once they felt that He had come in the name of the Lord the old Deliverer who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and made them into a nation, and loved and pitied them still, in spite of all their sins, and remembered His covenant, which they had forgotten.  And before that humble man, the Son of the village maiden, they cried: “Hosanna to the Son of David.  Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna in the Highest.”

And do you think He came, the true and perfect King, only to go away again and leave this world as it was before, without a law, a ruler, a heavenly kingdom?  God forbid!  Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.  What He was then, when He rode in triumph into Jerusalem, that is He now to us this day—a king, meek and lowly, and having salvation; the head and founder of a kingdom which can never be moved, a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.  To that kingdom this land of England now belongs.  Into it we, as Englishmen, have been christened.  And the unchristened, though they know not of it, belong to it as well.  What God’s will, what Christ’s mercies may be to them, we know not.  That He has mercy for them, if their ignorance is not their own fault, we doubt not; perhaps, even if their ignorance be their own fault, we need not doubt that He has mercy for them, considering the mercy which He has shown to us, who deserved no more than they.  But His will to us we do know; and His will is this—our holiness.  For He came not only to assert His own power, to redeem his own world, but to set His people, the children of men, an example, that they should follow in His steps.  Herein, too, He is the perfect king.  He leads His subjects, He sets a perfect example to His subjects, and more, He inspires them with the power of following that example, as, if you will think, a perfect ruler ought to be able to do.  Josiah set the Jews an example, but he could not make them follow it.  They turned to God at the bidding of their good king, with their lips, in their outward conduct; but their hearts were still far from Him.  Jeremiah complains bitterly of this in the beginning of his prophecies.  He complains that Josiah’s reformation was after all empty, hollow, hypocritical, a change on the surface only, while the wicked root was left.  They had healed, he said, the hurt of the daughter of his people slightly, crying, “Peace, peace, when there was no peace.”  But Jesus, the perfect King, is King of men’s spirits as well as of their bodies.  He can turn the heart, He can renew the soul.  None so ignorant, none so sinful, none so crushed down with evil habits, but the Lord will and can forgive him, raise him up, enlighten him, strengthen him, if he will but claim his share in his King’s mercy, his citizenship in the heavenly kingdom, and so put himself in tune again with himself, and with heaven, and earth, and all therein.

Keeping in mind these things, that Jesus, because He is our perfect King, is both the example and the inspirer of our souls and characters, we may look without fear at the epistle for the day, where it calls on us to be very different persons from what we are, and declares to us our duty as subjects of Him who is meek and lowly, just and having salvation.  It is no superstitious, slavish message, saying: “You have lost Christ’s mercy and Christ’s kingdom; you must buy it back again by sacrifices, and tears, and hard penances, or great alms-deeds and works of mercy.”  No.  It simply says: “You belong to Christ already, give up your hearts to Him and follow His example.  If He is perfect, His is the example to follow; if he is perfect, His commandments must be perfect, fit for all places, all times, all employments; if He is the King of heaven and earth, His commandments must be in tune with heaven and earth, with the laws of nature, the true laws of society and trade, with the constitution, and business, and duty, and happiness of all mankind, and for ever obey Him.”

Owe no man anything save love, for He owed no man anything.  He gave up all, even His own rights, for a time, for His subjects.  Will you pretend to follow Him while you hold back from your brothers and fellow-servants their just due?  One debt you must always owe; one debt will grow the more you pay it, and become more delightful to owe, the greater and heavier you feel it to be, and that is love; love to all around you, for all around you are your brothers and sisters; all around you are the beloved subjects of your King and Saviour.  Love them as you love yourself, and then you cannot harm them, you cannot tyrannise over them, you cannot wish to rise by scrambling up on their shoulders, taking the bread out of their mouths, making your profit out of their weakness and their need.  This, St. Paul says, was the duty of men in his time, because the night of heathendom was far spent, the day of Christianity and the Church was at hand.  Much more is it our duty now—our duty, who have been born in the full sunshine of Christianity, christened into His church as children, we and our fathers before us, for generations, of the kingdom of God.  Ay, my friends, these words, that kingdom, that King, witness this day against this land of England.  Not merely against popery, the mote which we are trying to take out of the foreigner’s eye, but against Mammon, the beam which we are overlooking in our own.  Owe no man anything save love.  “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”  That is the law of your King, who loved not Himself or His own profit, His own glory, but gave Himself even to death for those who had forgotten Him and rebelled against Him.  That law witnesses against selfishness and idleness in rich and poor.  It witnesses against the employer who grinds down his workmen; who, as the world tells him he has a right to do, takes advantage of their numbers, their ignorance, their low and reckless habits, to rise upon their fall, and grow rich out of their poverty.  It witnesses against the tradesman who tries to draw away his neighbour’s custom.  It witnesses against the working man who spends in the alehouse the wages which might support and raise his children, and then falls back recklessly and dishonestly on the parish rates and the alms of the charitable.  Against them all this law witnesses.  These things are unfit for the kingdom of Christ, contrary to the laws and constitution thereof, hateful to the King thereof; and if a nation will not amend these abominations, the King will arise out of His place, and with sore judgments and terrible He will visit His land and purify His temple, saying: “My Father’s house should be a house of prayer, and ye have made it a den of thieves.”  Ay, woe to any soul, or to any nation, which, instead of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ, copying His example, obeying His laws, and living worthy of His kingdom, not only in the church, but in the market, the shop, the senate, or the palace, give themselves up to covetousness, which is idolatry; and care only to make provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.  Woe to them; for, let them be what they will, their King cannot change.  He is still meek and lowly; He is still just and having salvation; and He will purge out of His kingdom all that is not like Himself, the unchaste and the idle, the unjust and the unmerciful, and the covetous man, who is an idolater, says the scripture, though he may call himself seven times a Protestant, and rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies greediness and tyranny by glib words about the necessities of business and the laws of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called, which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish.  Such a man loves and makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send him to his own place.