‘All things are yours, Paul, Apollos, Cephas.’  These three teachers were all lights kindled at the central Light, and therefore shining.  They were fragments of His wisdom, of Him that spoke; varying, but yet harmonious, and mutually complementary aspects of the one infinite Truth had been committed to them.  Each was but a part of the mighty whole, a little segment of the circle

  ’They are but broken lights of Thee,
  And Thou, O Lord! art more than they.’

And in the measure, therefore, in which men adhere to Christ, and have taken Him for theirs; in that measure are they delivered from all undue dependence on, still more from all slavish submission to, any single individual teacher or aspect of truth.  To have Christ for ours, and to be His, which are only the opposite sides of the same thing, mean, in brief, to take Jesus Christ for the source of all knowledge of moral and religious truth.  His Word is the Christian’s creed, His Person and the truths that lie in Him, are the fountains of all our knowledge of God and man.  To be Christ’s is to take Him as the master who has absolute authority over conduct and practice.  His commandment is the Christian’s duty; His pattern the Christian’s all-sufficient example; His smile the Christian’s reward.  To be Christ’s is to take Him for the home of our hearts, in whose gracious and sweet love we find all sufficiency and a rest for our seeking affections.  And so, if ye are His, Paul, Apollos, Cephas, all men are yours; in the sense that you are delivered from all undue dependence upon them; and in the sense that they subserve your highest good.

So the true democracy of Christianity, which abjures swearing by the words of any teacher, is simply the result of loyal adherence to the teaching of Jesus Christ.  And that proud independence which some of you seek to cultivate, and on the strength of which you declare that no man is your master upon earth, is an unwholesome and dangerous independence, unless it be conjoined with the bowing down of the whole nature, in loyal submission, to the absolute authority of the only lips that ever spoke truth, truth only, and truth always.  If Christ be our Master, if we take our creed from Him, if we accept His words and His revelation of the Father as our faith and our objective religion, then all the slavery to favourite names, all the taking of truth second-hand from the lips that we honour, all the partisanship for one against another which has been the shame and the ruin of the Christian Church, and is working untold mischiefs in it to-day, are ended at once.  ‘One is your Master, even Christ.’  ’Call no man Rabbi! upon earth; but bow before Him, the Incarnate and the Personal Truth.’

And in like manner they who are Christ’s are delivered from all temptations to make men’s maxims and practices and approbation the law of their conduct.  Society presses upon each of us; what we call public opinion, which is generally the clatter of the half-dozen people that happen to stand nearest us, rules us; and it needs to be said very emphatically to all Christian men and women—­Take your law of conduct from His lips, and from nobody else’s.