The governor of a Crown Colony may attach some importance to colonial opinion, but he reports home; and it is what the people in Downing Street will say that he thinks about.  We have to report home; and it is the King whom we serve, to whom we have to give an account.  The gladiator, down in the arena, did not much mind whether the thumbs of the populace were up or down, though the one was the signal for his life and the other for his death.  He looked to the place where, between the purple curtains and the flashing axes of the lictors, the emperor sate.  Our Emperor once was down on the sand Himself, and although we are ‘compassed about with a cloud of witnesses,’ we look to the Christ, the supreme Arbiter, and take acquittal or condemnation, life or death, from Him.

That judgment, persistent all through each of our lives, is preliminary to the future tribunal and sentence.  The Apostle employs in this context two distinct words, both of which are translated in our version ‘judge.’  The one which is used in these three clauses, on which I have been commenting, means a preliminary examination, and the one which is used in the next verse means a final decisive trial and sentence.  So, dear brethren, Christ is gathering materials for His final sentence; and you and I are writing the depositions which will be adduced in evidence.  Oh! how little all that the world may have said about a man will matter then!  Think of a man standing before that great white throne, and saying, ’I held a very high place in the estimation of my neighbours.  The newspapers and the reviews blew my trumpet assiduously.  My name was carved upon the plinth of a marble statue, that my fellow-citizens set up in honour of my many virtues,’—­and the name was illegible centuries before the statue was burned in the last fire!

Brother! seek for the praise from Him, which is praise indeed.  If He says, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ it matters little what censures men may pass on us.  If He says, ‘I never knew you,’ all their praises will not avail.  ’Wherefore we labour that, whether present or absent, we may be well-pleasing to Him.’

THE FESTAL LIFE

   ’Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old
   leaven ... but with the unleavened bread of
   sincerity and truth.’—­1 COR. v. 8.

There had been hideous immorality in the Corinthian Church.  Paul had struck at it with heat and force, sternly commanding the exclusion of the sinner.  He did so on the ground of the diabolical power of infection possessed by evil, and illustrated that by the very obvious metaphor of leaven, a morsel of which, as he says, ’will leaven the whole lump,’ or, as we say, ‘batch.’  But the word ‘leaven’ drew up from the depths of his memory a host of sacred associations connected with the Jewish Passover.  He remembered the sedulous hunting in every Jewish house for every scrap of leavened