What he was, we are. Ambition, self-seeking, self-confidence, have throughout the history of Christendom been the most serious defects of the strongest characters. Sometimes these vices have been displayed upon a grand scale, oftener their scope has been petty and mean. The sins of the Catholic Church, as painted by a Bernard or a Catherine of Siena, are to be found in many a little Bethel in the Protestant England of our day. Simony is not unknown amongst the ministers of Christ, even in the ranks of Non-conformity. Not unfrequently these sinful tendencies are to be found allied with a true and earnest desire to serve the Master. All the same, they are a serious hindrance, not only to Christian character, but to the effect of Christian service; the spirit in which a man does his work has the profoundest influence upon the good result of that work. Where a man is sincere in his wish to do good, and yet at the same time in any degree the victim of his own self-confidence or self-seeking, he is sooner or later brought to the point where he must choose between his wish and his practice. In nearly every case the necessity for this choice is revealed to him by a sharp discipline. Peter's case is repeated again and again in the lives of the servants of God. It is hard to dislodge self from its vantage-ground in the region of human motives. It would be hard to find a church in which selfishness or jealousy had neither place nor influence, and it is uncommonly difficult, even for a good and true man, not to feel elated by admiration or depressed by being surpassed. But surely the cure for this kind of feeling is included in the very nature of Christian service. There is absolutely no relation between moral excellence and worldly recognition of it. We have conceded something to the world when we stop to think of its applause as an object of desire. It is easier to go without such applause and to labour in obscurity than it is to remain unaffected by it once it has been bestowed. Still harder is it for a man to retire from a position and a duty in which he has done nobly and well, and then to see his bishopric taken by another. Sooner or later this experience falls to the lot of most of God's heroes; it were well, therefore, that they should recognise it in advance, count the cost, know their own minds, and render unnecessary the sharp discipline which accompanies self-discovery. When God means to use us, as He meant to use Peter, He never spares us. Jesus could not afford to allow Peter to go his own way, and therefore it was that the prince of the Apostles became an instrument for good, yet so as by fire. X. A New Commission.