O brethren, may those to whom God has given a better and a nobler Sabbath, which commemorates God's rest in the risen Son of Man and Son of God, never forget the truth which He taught the Jewish people respecting their Sabbath, or repeat the Jewish sin by making it a mere legal day instead of His day! DISCOURSE XII. THE SON DOING THE FATHER'S WORK. [Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Easter, April 20, 1856.] ST. JOHN V. 43. _I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive._ I spoke to you last week upon these words,--'_Therefore the Jews sought to kill Jesus, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God_.' I tried to ascertain what connexion there was in their minds between these two offences; I tried also to show you how their feelings respecting the Sabbath-day were involved in their general feelings respecting the Law and respecting the dominion of angels. If there was a Son who was higher than angels, who could express the very mind of God--if that Son was actually in the nature of man--all their thoughts of God and of man must be changed; they must regard Him whom they worshipped as something else than a mere lawgiver, removed to an immeasurable distance from His creatures, only holding occasional intercourse with them through beings of a different order from their own. They must look upon human beings,--that is to say, not only upon themselves, but upon publicans and heathens, upon those whom they regarded as utterly cut off from God,--as standing in a very near and close relation with Him. This, therefore, was the most horrible of all conceptions to them, one which struck at the root of their pride, of that which they called their faith. They might suspect Jesus before, they might despise Him; but the moment He called God His Father, suspicion and contempt gave way to hatred. It was clear enough why He was setting institutions at nought; it was clear enough why He claimed to heal sick men, whom the ministrations of angels could not heal. By His words and His acts He was bringing God and man into the most dangerous proximity. He, '_being a man, was making Himself equal with God_.'