stand by the word; but it means all positive blessings, both spiritual and temporal. It is the common salutation in the East, and it was the usual benediction of our LORD, "Peace be unto you." And so Jerusalem, which is the type of heaven, is by interpretation the vision of peace; and Melchizedek, its king, who was thus the king of peace, foreshadowed Him Who is the Prince of Peace; "Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty GOD, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace"; and the highest and fullest of all Christian well-wishing, and the amplest of all the Church's blessings, is that the peace of GOD, which passeth all understanding, may be upon us and rest upon us for ever. It is, in short, that universal harmony in the relations between GOD and His creation which it has been the blessed work of CHRIST's Incarnation to cause the reconcilement of all things that are in heaven and in earth. It is the fruit of the passion of CHRIST, for "He is our peace," as the Apostle says; the object of His teaching, as it is written; "And came and preached peace," even the peace of the propitiated GOD with His erring and wayward children.1

¶ What is peace? It is the most potent and forceful thing in all the world. It is infinitely alive. It is life at its highest and its best.2

¶ Bishop Perowne's comment on Psalm lxxxv. 8, "He will speak peace to his people," is-"Peace: that is God's great word, which in fact sums up and comprises all else." 3

¶ Peace, which is the sovereign good.

2. Thus Peace is great enough to be treated as one of the great Christian doctrines. And its range is wide enough.

It is the usual salutation in the Old Testament, and covers all the good that one can desire for one's friends. It is also common in the New Testament, though with a meaning that is at once restricted and deepened. Christ used the word both as greeting and as farewell. The Apostles used it in their letters.

Then there is the peace of God" which passeth understanding"; and there is the peace of Christ-" My peace," He called it-which He gave to His disciples before He left them. There is the peace of the Holy Spirit which is ministered to those who have been

1 Bishop A. P. Forbes, The Peace of God, 158.

P. C. Ainsworth, The Blessed Life, 145.

J. J. Stewart Perowne, The Book of Psalms, ii. 107.

4 Pascal.

justified by faith, and which is found as peace of conscience, peace of character, and peace of confidence. The peace of character is the peace of progress: it is won through struggle; it is sometimes victory and sometimes defeat.

In another way, peace is peace with God, peace with self, peace with other men. And peace with men includes peace with nations. Thus the doctrine of peace is the doctrine of war, and we have to consider from the Christian point of view the use of force, Christ's teaching on non-resistance, and the whole subject of the necessity of war, its advantages and disadvantages, and the prospect of its passing away for ever.

It is a great subject: will it be as interesting as it is important? That depends on several things. It depends partly on what we mean by interest. And it depends partly on what we are. When Professor Seeley, the author of Ecce Homo, was closing his lectures at Cambridge on The Expansion of England, he said: "I am often told by those who, like myself, study the question how history should be taught, Oh, you must before all things make it interesting! I agree with them in a certain sense, but I give a different sense to the word interesting—a sense which after all is the original and proper one. By interesting they mean romantic, poetical, surprising; I do not try to make history interesting in this sense, because I have found that it cannot be done without adulterating history and mixing it with falsehood. But the word interesting does not properly mean romantic. That is interesting in the proper sense which affects our interests, which closely concerns us and is deeply important to us. I have tried to show you that the history of modern England from the beginning of the eighteenth century is interesting in this sense, because it is pregnant with great results which will affect the lives of ourselves and our children and the future greatness of our country. Make history interesting indeed! I cannot make history more interesting than it is, except by falsifying it. And therefore when I meet a person who does not find history interesting, it does not occur to me to alter history-I try to alter him."

II.

THE USES OF THE WORD.

Let us see how the word "peace" is used in the Bible.

1. In the Old Testament.-The Hebrew word is shalōm, with which we may be said to be familiar, for we have turned its Arabic equivalent into "Salaam " and use it as an English word. Only three times is any other word in the Old Testament translated peace" (Dan. viii. 25, xi. 21, 24), and the Revisers have changed peace" into "security" each time.

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But shālōm is a wider word than the English word "peace." Its fundamental sense is well-being. It sums up the ideas of inward and outward good, and may in any particular case have a more loose or more definite meaning, according to the mind of him who uses it. The common inquiry, "Is he well?" (lit. "Is there shālōm to him?”) was answered by the one word "Well" (shālōm). When David asked what progress the war was making, the Hebrew is "David asked for the shalōm of the war.'

But in countries often ravaged, and among people often ruined, by war, every blessing of life was found in peace. Thus the incidental meaning of the word has permanently displaced the original; and we translate it by an expression which never suggests to us the idea of completeness, but only that of tranquillity or rest.

In the security of our modern travel we scarcely realize how much uneasiness was caused, in days when there were too many whose hand was against every man, when a company of travellers descried the approach of another band. It would be an anxious question, Are these friends or enemies? Does their coming mean war or peace? And the salutation of peace was a welcome relief of well-grounded apprehensions. It is in this way that we can explain most of the Old Testament passages where this salutation is found. Thus, when Joseph's brethren timidly accosted Joseph's steward, with excuses for an incident of their former visit which, they feared, exposed them to suspicion, how reassuring was his answer, "Peace be unto you." So, again, when there came to David in the hold men from Benjamin and Judah, who, he feared, had come to betray him into the hands of his enemies, much needed

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was their answer of peace: "Thine are we, David, peace, peace unto thee; peace be to thy helpers, for God helpeth thee." But, most of all was reassurance necessary when men felt themselves closely brought into the presence of God, who, their consciences told them, was justly displeased for their sins. Thus an angelic vision caused Gideon only alarm, and he cried: "Alas! O Lord God, because I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face"; but the Lord said: "Peace be unto thee, fear not; thou shalt not die." And the same reassuring salutation, "Peace be unto thee; fear not," was given to Daniel when he fainted at an angelic visitation.

2. In the New Testament.-Just as in the Old Testament so in the New there is one word which pre-eminently stands for peace. It is the word eirēnē: we see it in the English "eirenicon." Now we should have expected that this word would generally mean either peace as opposed to war (which is the common meaning of the word in classical Greek), or else welfare, prosperity, its chief meaning in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament. But it is not so. Certainly it is used a few times for peace as against war, and oftener (though chiefly in salutations) for welfare. Its commonest meaning by far, however, is the peace which flows from reconciliation with God, "the tranquil state of a soul assured of its salvation through Christ, and so fearing nothing from God, and content with its earthly lot, whatever that is "—as Thayer puts it. Nothing could more strikingly illustrate the inwardness of Christianity, says Findlay. More than that, nothing could show more clearly that Christianity is the religion of the Cross.

But we must be careful that we do not misinterpret the word. After the resurrection Christ appeared to the disciples and said, "Peace be unto you." Let us take these words and consider what meanings they might possibly have.

(1) Let us suppose that the word "peace" carries with it the Old Testament idea of thriving or prospering. A man has peace, it has been well said, when things are with him as they should be; and peace then is the absence of causes which would disturb the well-being of a society or of a man. It is that well-being conceived of as undisturbed. Such a word naturally fills a great place in the 1 Single-vol. Dictionary of the Bible, 696.

history of civil society, of nations. Peace in the political sense of the term means pre-eminently the absence of war. "The peace," in the language of Englishmen, still means the state of things which followed upon the close of the great struggle with the first Napoleon at Waterloo. Peace in this political or civil sense has its place and recognition in the Bible, as, to take a single instance, when we are told that there was peace between Hiram and Solomon, so that Solomon had peace all round about him. Such peace of the nation, resulting from freedom from invasion and from war, is again and again referred to in the Hebrew psalmists and prophets as one of God's best blessings; and it has always been prayed for by the Christian Church. Many beautiful collects to this effect were composed in the dark days when the old Roman Empire was breaking up beneath the repeated and successful assaults of savage races, when it seemed as if all that was strong and stable in human society and life had well-nigh come to an end. And of a like character and spirit are the versicles adapted in the Prayer Book from the Old Testament: "Give peace in our time, O Lord, because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God"; or the comparatively modern prayers that peace and happiness, as well as truth and justice, may be established among us by the consultations of Parliament, under the blessing of God, or that the King may study to preserve the people committed to his charge, in peace, as well as in wealth and godliness. Certainly these are prayers which cannot, especially since the Great War and in the present state of Europe and the world, be said too earnestly by any man who believes that God really does govern the world, and that war is among the most dreadful scourges that can afflict the human race.

(2) But the peace which Christ breathed on the Apostles was that which is needed by a spiritual society. And this peace might mean, first of all, freedom from interference on the part of those who did not belong to it. No doubt as they listened to the sounds of the Jewish mob out in the street, resting as they were in their upper chamber on that Easter evening, the Apostles thought of this sense of the blessing. It was for them an insurance against rough handling-against persecution. Certainly it was no part of the design of our Lord that Christians should be at constant war even with Pagan or Jewish society. On the contrary, the worshippers of Christ were to do what they could to live in social harmony with those who did