palpable.’  Some of you do, no doubt, for, in every hundred people, there are always some whose lives are foul and whose memories are stained and horrible; but the run of you are not like that.  And yet I ask you, has your will been bowed and broken, and your heart overcome and conquered by this mighty Prince, the Prince of Peace, the Prince of Life?  Unless it has, for all your righteousness and respectability, for all your outward religion and real religiousness of a sort, you are still hostile and rebellious, in your inmost hearts.  That is the basis of the representation of my text.

What else does it suggest?  It suggests the wonderful struggle and victory of weaponless love.  As was said about the first Christian emperor, so it may be said about the great Emperor in the heavens, ‘In hoc signo vinces!’ By this sign thou shalt conquer.  For His only weapon is the Cross of His Son, and He fights only by the manifestation of infinite love, sacrifice, suffering, and pity.  He conquers as the sun conquers the thick-ribbed ice by raying down its heat upon it, and melting it into sweet water.  So God in Christ fights against the mountains of man’s cold, hard sinfulness and alienation, and by the warmth of His own radiation turns them all into rivers that flow in love and praise.  He conquers simply by forbearance and pity and love.

And what more does this first part of my text say to us?  It tells us, too, of the true submission of the conquered captive; how we are conquered when we perceive and receive His love; how there is nothing else needed to win us all for Him except only that we shall recognise His great love to us.

This picture of the triumph comes with a solemn appeal and commandment to every one of us professing Christians.  Think of these men, dragged at the conqueror’s chariot-wheels, abject, with their weapons broken, with their resistance quelled, chained, yoked, haled away from their own land, dependant for life or death on the caprice of the general who rode before them there.  It is a picture of what you Christian men and women are bound to be if you believe that God in Christ has loved you as we have been saying that He does.  For abject submission, unconditional surrender, the yielding up of our whole will to Him, the yielding of all our possessions as His vassals—­these are the duties that are correspondent to the facts of the case.

If we are thus won by infinite love, and not our own, but bought with a price, no conquered king, dragged at an emperor’s chariot-wheels, was ever half as absolutely and abjectly bound to be his slave, and to live or die by his breath, as you are bound to your Master.  You are Christians in the measure in which you are the captives of His spear and of His bow; in the measure in which you hold your territories as vassal kings, in the measure in which you say, stretching out your willing hands for the fetters, ’Lord! here am I, do with me as Thou wilt.’