them the spirit of slumber, eyes
that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear."--ROMANS
xi. 8.

"Blindness in part is happened to Israel."--ROMANS xi. 25.

It is a sad and painful reflection, and one which is continually forced
upon us as we read the New Testament, that the long training and
preparation of the Jews brought them at the last not to the acceptance
but to the rejection of Jesus.

They had been taught, generation after generation, that they were the
called and chosen people of God. Psalmists and prophets had enriched
their life with the outpouring of their moral and spiritual revelations,
and fired their hopes with promises. They lived in the expectation of
the Messiah who was to complete these revelations of the God who had led
them and taught them ever since the days of their Egyptian bondage.

Yet, when this crowning revelation came to them, they could not even
recognise it. The Son of God "came unto His own and His own received Him
not." As St. Paul expresses it in my text, while grieving for them with
all the intensity of his fervid affection, their life was overgrown with
a sort of spiritual dulness. They were suffering from a sort of
ossification of the spirit, so that the last and greatest revelation of
God could make no impression upon them.

But this picture of the Jews rejecting and crucifying their Saviour, and
unable to appreciate or to receive the gift of new life which was offered
to them, blind to its beauty, unattracted by its charm, is not only one
of the saddest sights in history, it is very instructive for every one of
us, because it is charged with warnings that are never out of date. For
there is no individual life, and no society, that is not liable to drift
into a similar dulness of vision, and so to reject or disregard what God
gives for its enlightenment. The great critical events in the world's
history, the events that make epochs in the consciousness of men, are not
different in kind from those of our own obscure lives. They are, as it
were, our own familiar experience, written prophetically and written
large.

So the blindness that happened to Israel, and arrested their spiritual
growth, may be happening no less to any of us. As God gave them the
spirit of slumber, so it may be with our lives.

And the very thought of our possible risks in this respect is valuable to
us.

To be conscious that in regard to any of the higher and better th