+III. We are to withstand and cut off the first beginnings and occasions of sin.+--We say of arrant thieves they began to practise their wickedness in pins and points. For this cause, idleness, excessive eating, drinking and swilling, riot, and vanity in apparel are to be suppressed in every society as the breeder of many vices.--_Perkins._ Ver. 11. _The Perversion of Apostolic Preaching._--There are two attempts or resolves in constant operation as to the cross. One is man's, to accommodate to human liking and taste; the second is God's, to raise human liking and taste to it. +I. The aim of man.+--The following may be named as the principal exceptions taken to the cross by those who rejected it:-- 1. _It was an improbable medium of revelation._--Man can talk loudly how God should manifest Himself. Shall the cross be the oracle by which He will speak His deepest counsels to our race? 2. _It was a stigma on this religion which set it in disadvantageous contrast with every other._--It was unheard of that the vilest of all deaths should give its absolute character to religion, and that this religion of the cross should triumph over all. 3. _It was a violent disappointment of a general hope._--There was a desire of all nations. And was all that the earliest lay rehearsed, all that the highest wisdom enounced, only to be wrought out in the shameful cross? 4. _It was a humiliating test._--Ambition, selfishness, insincerity, licentiousness, ferocity, pride, felt that it was encircled with an atmosphere in which they were instantly interrupted and condemned. Man is desirous of doing this away as a wrongful and unnecessary impression. He would make the offence of the cross to cease: (1) By fixing it upon some extrinsic authority. (2) By torturing it into coalition with foreign principles. (3) By transforming the character of its religious instructions. (4) By applying it to inappropriate uses. (5) By excluding its proper connections. +II. The procedure of God.+--1. _It is necessary, if we would receive the proper influence of the cross, that we be prepared to hail it as a distinct revelation._ Science and the original ethics of our nature do not fall within the distinct province of what a revelation intends. Its strict purpose, its proper idea, is to make known that which is not known, and which could not be otherwise known. Not more directly did the elemental light proceed from God who called it out of darkness than did the making known to man of redemption by the blood of the cross.