1 Peter ii. 11.
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Asia Minor, addressed the urgent appeal that as strangers—strangers and pilgrims—they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: “If you were citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade” with the men of this world, “and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures, nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a stranger imports.”
The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly. As again in his comment on the psalmist’s profession of being a stranger with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often put up that request with David, “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me.” What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life, but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? “And certainly he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that word gives him his heart’s desire.”
Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality of the soul, Leighton expatiates on the fact that this is not our rest, that we have no place of residence here below: “it is the region of fleas and gnats; and while we search for happiness among these mean and perishing things, we are not only sure to be disappointed, but also not to escape those miseries which, in great numbers, continually beset us; so that we may apply to ourselves the saying of the famous artist confined in the island of Crete, and truly say,—
“‘Nec tellus nostræ, nec patet unda fugæ,
Restat iter cœli, cœlo tentabimus ire.’”
(“The earth and the sea are shut up against us, and neither of them can favour our escape; the way to heaven is alone open, and this way we will strive to go.”)
Incidentally, it adds to the interest of every such passage in Leighton’s writings to remember a noteworthy circumstance respecting his death. He had been used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an inn—for that would look so like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world was all as an inn. It was his opinion, also, as we read in the memoir of him by Aikman, that “the officious tenderness and care of friends was an entanglement to a dying man, and that the unconcerned attendance of those who could be procured in such a place would give less disturbance.” He had his wish. At the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, Robert Leighton, in his seventy-fourth year, stranger and pilgrim, drew his last breath.
“An inn receives me, where, unknown,