III.  Then still further, another modification of this figure is found in the frequent representations of Scripture, by which our Lord is the Breaker, going up before us in the sense that He is the Captain of our life’s march.

We have, in the words of my text, the image of the gladly-gathered people flocking after the Leader.  ’They have broken up, and have passed through the gate, and are gone out by it; and their King shall pass before them, and the Lord on the head of them.’  The Prophet knew not that the Lord their King, of whom it is enigmatically said that He too, as well as ‘the Breaker,’ is to go before them, was in mysterious fashion to dwell in that Breaker; and that those two, whom He sees separately, are yet in a deep and mysterious sense one.  The host of the captives, returning in triumphant march through the wilderness and to the promised land, is, in the Prophet’s words, headed both by the Breaker and by the Lord.  We know that the Breaker is the Lord, the Angel of the Covenant in whom is the name of Jehovah.

And so we connect with all these words of my text such words as designate our Saviour as the Captain of our salvation; such words as His own in which He says, ’When He putteth forth His sheep He goeth before them’—­such words as His Apostle used when he said, ’Leaving us an ensample that we should follow in His steps.’  And by all there is suggested this—­that Christ, who breaks the prison of our sins, and leads us forth on the path to God, marches at the head of our life’s journey, and is our Example and Commander; and Himself present with us through all life’s changes and its sorrows.

Here is the great blessing and peculiarity of Christian morals that they are all brought down to that sweet obligation:  ‘Do as I did.’  Here is the great blessing and strength for the Christian life in all its difficulties—­you can never go where you cannot see in the desert the footprints, haply spotted with blood, that your Master left there before you, and planting your trembling feet in the prints, as a child might imitate his father’s strides, may learn to recognise that all duty comes to this:  ‘Follow Me’; and that all sorrow is calmed, ennobled, made tolerable, and glorified, by the thought that He has borne it.

The Roman matron of the legend struck the knife into her bosom, and handed it to her husband with the words, ‘It is not painful!’ Christ has gone before us in all the dreary solitude, and in all the agony and pains of life.  He has hallowed them all, and has taken the bitterness and the pain out of each of them for them that love Him.  If we feel that the Breaker is before us, and that we are marching behind Him, then whithersoever He leads us we may follow, and whatsoever He has passed through we may pass through.  We carry In His life the all-sufficing pattern of duty.  We have in His companionship the all-strengthening consolation.  Let us leave the direction of our road in His hands, who never says ‘Go!’ but always ‘Come!’ This General marches in the midst of His battalions and sets His soldiers on no enterprises or forlorn hopes which He has not Himself dared and overcome.