And if any one say,—­But you must mistake the meaning of the text.  It must be understood spiritually.  The meek and gentle Jesus, who is nothing but love and mercy, cannot be such an awful and destroying being as you would make Him out to be.  Then I must answer—­That our Lord was meek and gentle when on earth, and therefore is meek and gentle for ever and ever, there can be no doubt.  “I am meek and lowly of heart,” He said of Himself.  But with that meekness and lowliness, and not in contradiction to it, there was, when He was upon earth, and therefore there is now and for ever, a burning indignation against all wrong and falsehood; and especially against that worst form of falsehood—­hypocrisy; and that worst form of hypocrisy—­covetousness which shelters itself under religion.

When our Lord saw men buying and selling in the temple, He made a scourge of cords, and drove them out, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and said,—­“It is written, my Father’s house is a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

When He faced the Pharisees, who were covetous, He had no meek and gentle words for them:  but, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”

And because His character is perfect and eternal:  because He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, we are bound by the Christian faith to believe that He has now, and will have for ever, the same Divine indignation against wrong, the same determination to put it down:  and to cast out of His kingdom, which is simply the whole universe, all that offends, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

And if any say, as some say now-a-days—­“Ah, but you cannot suppose that our Lord would propagate His Gospel by the sword, or wish Christians to do so.”  My friends, this chapter and this sermon has nothing to do with the propagation of the Gospel, in the popular sense; nothing to do with converting heathens or others to Christianity.  It has to do with that awful government of the world, of which the Bible preaches from beginning to end; that moral and providential kingdom of God, which rules over the destiny of every kingdom, every nation, every tribe, every family, nay, over the destiny of each human being; ay, of each horde of Tartars on the furthest Siberian steppe, and each group of savages in the furthest island of the Pacific; rendering to each man according to his works, rewarding the good, punishing the bad, and exterminating evildoers, even wholesale and seemingly without discrimination, when the measure of their iniquity is full.  Christ’s herald in this noble chapter calls men, not to repentance, but to inevitable doom.  His angel—­His messenger—­stands in the sun, the source of light and life; above this petty planet, its fashions, its politics, its sentimentalities, its notions of how the universe ought to have been made and managed; and calls to whom?—­to all the fowl that fly in the firmament of heaven—­“Come and gather yourselves together, to the feast of the great God, that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and of captains, and of mighty men; and the flesh of horses and of them that sit on them; and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.”