“The Illusiveness of Life” is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the deception of life’s promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows how our natural anticipations deceive us—every human life being a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections, he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. “Men’s affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan—the tents of a night—not permanent habitations, even for this life.” Where, he asks, are the charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of our own conceptions—our creative shaping intellect projected its own fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. “Life is an unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.” But there is another beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of life—as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of life’s promises: they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so.” Strangers—the very term implies a distant home. Pilgrims—the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress. Forgetting the things behind; rating at their true worth the things around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble’s devout lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:— “Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look When hearts are of each other sure; Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook, The haunt of all affections pure; Yet in the world even these abide, and we Above the world our calling boast: Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free: Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost.” _THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND._ PSALM xli. 9. The psalmist’s enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die, and his name perish? All that hated him were whispering together against him, and devising hurt. But this he could bear, on the part of declared foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against him. Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my bread,” receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his participating in the Last Supper—to say nothing of habitually sharing in previous and everyday meals.