'_But all these things will they do to you for my name's sake, because they know not Him that sent me. If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin. He that hateth me, hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now_ _have they both seen and hated both me and my Father. But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, They hated me without a cause._' These are, perhaps, the most terrible words in the Old or New Testament. No descriptions of divine punishment which are written anywhere, can come the least into comparison with them for awfulness and horror. This gratuitous hatred--this hatred of Christ by men because they hate God, this hatred of God because He has manifested and proved Himself to be love--is something which passes all our conceptions, and yet which would not mean anything to us if our consciences did not bear witness that the possibility of it lies in ourselves. And do not let us put away that thought, brethren, or the other which is closely akin to it, that such hatred is only possible in a nation which, like the Jewish, is full of religious knowledge and of religious profession. There, our Lord tells us Himself, was a hatred of Him and of His Father which could be found nowhere else,--there, among scribes, and Pharisees, and chief priests. Let us ask God, that none of us may say of his brother, 'This crime may be committed by thee;' but each of himself: 'God be merciful to me a sinner. Keep me by Thy love, abiding in Thy love. Help me to keep Christ's commandment of loving my brother as well as Thee; else, if I am left to myself, I may sink into such a hell of hatred, as would be worse than all other hells that men have ever feared to think of.'