I prayed to our God to grant me the honour of speaking a true word to them all; which honour I thought I was right in asking, because the Lord reproached the Pharisees for not seeking the honour that cometh from God.  Perhaps I may have put a wrong interpretation on the passage.  It is, however, a joy to think that He will not give you a stone, even if you should take it for a loaf, and ask for it as such.  Nor is He, like the scribes, lying in wait to catch poor erring men in their words or their prayers, however mistaken they may be.

I took my text from the Sermon on the Mount.  And as the magazine for which these Annals were first written was intended chiefly for Sunday reading, I wrote my sermon just as if I were preaching it to my unseen readers as I spoke it to my present parishioners.  And here it is now: 

The Gospel according to St Matthew, the sixth chapter, and part of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth verses:—­

“’Ye cannot serve god and mammon.  Therefore I say to you, take no thought for your life.’

“When the Child whose birth we celebrate with glad hearts this day, grew up to be a man, He said this.  Did He mean it?—­He never said what He did not mean.  Did He mean it wholly?—­He meant it far beyond what the words could convey.  He meant it altogether and entirely.  When people do not understand what the Lord says, when it seems to them that His advice is impracticable, instead of searching deeper for a meaning which will be evidently true and wise, they comfort themselves by thinking He could not have meant it altogether, and so leave it.  Or they think that if He did mean it, He could not expect them to carry it out.  And in the fact that they could not do it perfectly if they were to try, they take refuge from the duty of trying to do it at all; or, oftener, they do not think about it at all as anything that in the least concerns them.  The Son of our Father in heaven may have become a child, may have led the one life which belongs to every man to lead, may have suffered because we are sinners, may have died for our sakes, doing the will of His Father in heaven, and yet we have nothing to do with the words He spoke out of the midst of His true, perfect knowledge, feeling, and action!  Is it not strange that it should be so?  Let it not be so with us this day.  Let us seek to find out what our Lord means, that we may do it; trying and failing and trying again—­verily to be victorious at last—­what matter when, so long as we are trying, and so coming nearer to our end!