True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue.  But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait.  Nominalism, and that “Sensationalism” which has sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort:  after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges:  and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn.  Only wait.  When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother’s love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the Emotions and the Will, {0a} then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.

Only wait:  and fret not yourselves; else shall you be moved to do evil.  Remember the saying of the wise man—­“Go not after the world.  She turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough, she will turn round to thee.”

SERMON I. THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS.  A GOOD FRIDAY SERMON.

PHILIPPIANS II. 5-8.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:  who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:  but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a slave, and was made in the likeness of men:  and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.

The second Lesson for this morning’s service, and the chapter which follows it, describe the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, both God and Man.  They give us the facts, in language most awful from its perfect calmness, most pathetic from its perfect simplicity.  But the passage of St Paul which I have chosen for my text gives us an explanation of those facts which is utterly amazing.  That He who stooped to die upon the Cross is Very God of Very God, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, is a thought so overwhelming, whenever we try to comprehend even a part of it in our small imaginations, that it is no wonder if, in all ages, many a pious soul, as it contemplated the Cross of Christ, has been rapt itself into a passion of gratitude, an ecstasy of wonder and of love, which is beautiful, honourable, just, and in the deepest sense most rational, whenever it is spontaneous and natural.

But there have been thousands, as there may be many here to-day, of colder temperament; who would distrust in themselves, even while they respected in others, any violence of religious emotion:  yet they too have found, and you too may find, in contemplating the Passion of Christ, a satisfaction deeper than that of any emotion; a satisfaction not to the heart, still less to the brain, but to that far deeper and diviner faculty within us all—­our moral sense; that God-given instinct which makes us discern and sympathise with all that is beautiful and true and good.