governed from
home, and we give no submission to provincial authorities. Never mind
what people say about you, nor what may be the maxims and ways of men
around you. These are no guides for you. Public opinion (which only
means for most of us the hasty judgments of the half-dozen people who
happen to be nearest us), use and wont, the customs of our set, the
notions of the world about duty, with all these we have nothing to do.
The censures or the praise of men need not move us. We report to
headquarters, and subordinates' estimate need be nothing to us. Let us
then say, 'With me it is a very small matter that I should be judged of
men's judgment. He that judgeth me is the Lord.' When we may be
misunderstood or harshly dealt with, let us lift our eyes to the lofty
seat where the Emperor sits, and remove ourselves from men's sentences
by our 'appeal unto Caesar'; and, in all varieties of circumstances and
duty, let us take the Gospel which is the record of Christ's life,
death, and character, for our only law, and labour that, whatever others
may think of us, we 'may be well pleasing to Him.'

III. Further, our text bids the colonists fight for the advance of the
dominions of the City.

Like the armed colonists whom Russia and other empires had on their
frontier, who received their bits of land on condition of holding the
border against the enemy, and pushing it forward a league or two when
possible, Christian men are set down in their places to be 'wardens of
the marches,' citizen soldiers who hold their homesteads on a military
tenure, and are to 'strive together for the faith of the gospel.'

There is no space here and now to go into details of the exposition of
this part of our text. Enough to say in brief that we are here exhorted
to 'stand fast'; that is, as it were, the defensive side of our warfare,
maintaining our ground and repelling all assaults; that this successful
resistance is to be 'in one spirit,' inasmuch as all resistance depends
on our poor feeble spirits being ingrafted and rooted in God's Spirit,
in vital union with whom we may be knit together into a unity which
shall oppose a granite breakwater to the onrushing tide of opposition;
that in addition to the unmoved resistance which will not yield an inch
of the sacred soil to the enemy, we are to carry the war onwards, and,
not content with holding our own, are with one mind to strive together
for the faith of the gospel. There is to be discipline,