church is, "To pay tithes to your pastors." Often, too, it is a great kindness for us to accept some of your worldly riches, which otherwise would, perhaps, prevent your entry into heaven. We can do with the riches what the shepherd does with his wool: make clothes for the naked and destitute, exchange what we get for building and decorating God's church, and a hundred other things of which you, the sheep, and your children, the lambs of Christ's flock, will get the heavenly merit and the everlasting profit. {225} Oh! then, brethren, have faith, try always to cling to the priest as the good shepherd, so that at the last day we may call you all by name, and find that of the little flock of sheep and lambs not one is missing. Rev. Algernon A. Brown. -------------- Sermon LXV. _Christ suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps_. --1 St. Peter ii. 21. The holy church is not going to let us forget the cross, my brethren, even in this joyous Easter season. There is a prayer, or Commemoration of the Cross, which she orders to be said in the divine Office even more frequently now than during the rest of the year; and here in the Epistle of to-day she warns us that we all must take up our cross as our Lord took his, if we would have a share in the triumph which we now celebrate. "Christ," says St. Peter, "left us an example that we should follow in his steps." St. Peter had not forgotten those words which his Master after his resurrection spoke to him on the shore of the Sea of Galilee: "Do thou follow me." He tried to do it; and he did follow his Lord in a life of toil and suffering, ended by a painful death on the cross like to that which his Saviour had borne. He followed the example which had been set him; he believed what he says in this Epistle of his, and acted on it. How is it with us? {226} Many Christians seem to imagine that our Lord, by his resurrection, took away, or ought to have taken away, all trouble from the earth. They cannot understand how it is that in this redeemed world, whose sins his Blood has expiated, the cross still keeps coming down on them at every turn. They honor the cross, and are grateful for the redemption which it has brought them; but even when they kiss it on Good Friday they do not understand that they have got to take it, embrace it, and bear it themselves. And yet that is the fact. The cross is to free us from eternal suffering, but not from that which passes away. Our Lord did not suffer in order that we might have no suffering at all, but that we might be able to bear our sufferings better, and to bear greater ones than we could otherwise have borne. He might have redeemed us without suffering as he did; but one of the reasons why he did not choose to was that we, the guilty, to whom the cross belongs, may bear it cheerfully when we see Him who was innocent taking it on his shoulders.