, would be a sad waste of time. Yet some meaning, and that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle with the suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and compel belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and spiritual purpose, — miracles for miracles' sake; — second, doubts of his Messianic character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some ordeal at the risk of certain death; — third, to interpret his mission, as his countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and royalty; — these perhaps — but I am lost in doubt.
[Sermon on the Transfiguration]
Luke IX. 33.
I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
Rom. ix. 3.
St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse, — an impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and not completed by an act and confirmation of the will, — as a striking proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!' Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in Shakspeare — Hotspur's rapture-like reverie — so often ridiculed by shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden sense of the depth of its moral strength.