Well, there are two lessons there, and the one is this--let us Christian people learn with what open hearts and hands we should welcome a penitent when he comes back. The other is,--let us learn who they are to whom Jesus Christ deigns to manifest Himself--not immaculate monsters, but men that, having fallen, have learned humility and caution, and by penitence have risen to a securer standing, and have turned even their transgressions into steps in the ladder that lifts them to Christ. It was something that the first to whom the risen Saviour appeared when He came victorious and calm from the grave, was the woman 'out of whom He had cast seven devils,' and the blessed truth which that teaches is the same as that which is to be drawn from this list of those whom He regarded, and whom we regard, as then constituting the true nucleus of His Church--a list which is headed by the blackest denier and the most obstinate and captious sceptic in the whole company. 'There were together Simon Peter and Thomas, which is called Didymus,' and the little group was glad to have them, and welcomed them, as it becomes us to welcome brethren who have fallen, and who come again saying, 'I repent.' Well, then, take the next: he was 'Nathanael, of Cana in Galilee'; a guileless 'Israelite indeed,' so swift to believe, so ready with his confession, so childlike in his wonder, so ardent in his love and faith. The only thing that Christ is recorded as having said to him is this: 'Because I said... believest thou? Thou shalt see greater things than these.' A promise of growing clearness of vision and growing fullness of manifestation was made to this man, who never appears anywhere else in Scripture but in these two scenes, and so may stand to us as the type of the opposite kind of Christian experience from that stormy one of the doubter and the denier--viz. that of persistent, quiet, continuous growth, which is marked by faithful use of the present amount of illumination, and is rewarded by a continual increase of the same. If the keynote to the two former lives is, that sin confessed helps a man to climb, the keynote to this man's is the other truth, that they are still more blessed who, with no interruptions, backslidings, inconsistencies, or denials, by patient continuousness in well-doing, widen the horizon of their Christian vision and purge their eyesight for daily larger knowledge. To these, as to the others, there is granted the vision of the risen Lord, and to them also is entrusted the care of His sheep and His lambs. We do not _need_ to go away into the depths and the darkness in order to realise the warmth and the blessedness of the light. There is no _necessity_ that any Christian man's career should be broken by denials like Peter's or by doubts like Thomas's, but we may 'grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.' 'So is the kingdom of heaven, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.'