identification with us in nature, and His temptations (ver. 18), and finally His mysterious suffering. So He came, He suffered, He was "perfected"--in respect of capacity to be our Redeemer--"through sufferings" (ver. 10). And now, incarnate, slain, and risen again, He, still our Brother, is "crowned with glory and honour" (ver. 9). He is our Leader (ver. 10). He is our High Priest, merciful and faithful (ver. 17). Thus the Epistle, on its way to recall its readers, at a crisis of confusion and temptation, to certainty, patience, and peace, leads them--not last but first--to Jesus Christ. It unfolds at once to them His glories of Person, His Wonder of Work and Love. It does not elaborately travel up to Him through general considerations. It sets out from Him. It makes Him the base and reason for all it has to say--and it has to say many things. Its first theme is not the community, but the Lord; not Church principles, not that great duty of cohesion about which it will speak, and speak urgently, further on, but the Lord, in His adorable personal greatness, in His unique and all-wonderful personal achievement. To that attitude of thought it recurs again and again in its later stages. In one way or another it is always bidding us look up from even the greatest related subjects and "consider HIM." Am I not right in saying that here is a message straight to the restless heart of our time, and not least to the special conditions of Christian life just now in our well-beloved Church? We must, of course we must, think about a hundred problems presented by the circumference of the life of the Christian and the life of the Church. At all times such problems, asking for attention and solution, emerge to every thoughtful disciple's sight. In our own time they seem to multiply upon one another with an importunate demand--problems doctrinal, ritual, governmental, social; the strife of principles and tendencies within the Church; all that is involved in the relations between the Church and the State, and again between the Church and the world, that is to say, human life indifferent or opposed to the living Christian creed and the spiritual Christian rule. Well, for these very reasons let us make here first this brief appeal, prompted by the opening paragraphs of the great Epistle. If you would deal aright with the circumference, earnest Christian of the English Church, live at the Centre. "Dwell deep." From the Church come back evermore to Jesus Christ, that from Jesus Christ you may the better go back to the Church, bearing the peace and the power of the Lord Himself upon you.