could not say to a group of men filled to the eyes with pride and selfish ambition: "This is my body which is broken for you. Feed upon me in your hearts by faith and be thankful. Love one another as I have loved you." The words would have stuck in his throat. He must first wash the dust from their feet and wash the conceit out of their minds.

When he came to Peter, the man drew back. "Never!" he said. "Thou shalt never wash my feet." Then at a word from Christ, he melted down into a desire for a still closer intimacy. "Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head!" He wanted a regular bath.

That same night, there was a tragic scene in the life of this impulsive man. When Jesus saw arrest and crucifixion awaiting him there in the dark, he told his disciples that, in all probability, they would forsake him. Peter felt very sure of himself. "Though all men should forsake thee, I never will."

But what a sorry showing the man made before the cock crew! He was standing at the fire warming himself after Jesus had been arrested. People

were discussing the matter and a servant-girl said, pointing to Peter: "Here is one of them! He is a follower of the Galilean." Peter replied, "I never knew him."

His accent, however, was Galilean and a man remarked, "His speech betrayeth him-he is one of them." Again Peter denied, "I tell you, I never knew him.”

Then a number of people said all at once, "We have seen this man following Him." Then there came an ugly oath and the third denial of his Lord. Jesus heard the oath "and he turned and looked at Peter." Not a word of reproach, but a look of infinite disappointment! The look was all there was, but it was enough and to spare. This impulsive man broke down and cried like a child-"he went out and wept bitterly."

What a strange combination of courage and cowardice, of rugged strength and instability! It goes with the impulsive temperament. Such men are always striking twelve either in some high noon of glorious action or in some midnight of dismal failure. It is never nine o'clock in the

morning or three o'clock in the afternoon with them-they are at one extreme or the other. "There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune." Take them at high tide, and you may count on something splendid. Omitted, all the voyage of those lives may be bound in shallows and in miseries. The ebb-tide brings defeat.

We have to take people as we find them, the rough with the smooth. It has not pleased God to make them all alike. One glory of the sun and another glory of the moon-and the moon is not always full, a glorious round disk of silvery light. There are times when the moon is dark.

Your own boy may be as impulsive as Peter was. You need not break your heart over him nor worry the life out of him because he is not like Philip the Prudent, or John Stuart Mill, or Calvin Coolidge. The President of the United States is about as impulsive as the Washington Monument. Take the boy as you find him, watching with patient sympathy the weakness which goes with that impulsive nature, but rejoicing openly in the strength and promise of it when it is directed aright!

There is steam in that boiler-any amount of it, rightly controlled, it will show splendid results.

Here is another instance of Peter's fickleness! When he went forth to preach the gospel, he had a vision. He saw a lot of four-footed beasts and fowls and creeping things. He heard a voice saying, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat."

He answered, "No! I never have! I never have eaten anything common or unclean."

Then the voice came again, "What God hath cleansed, call not thou common." And when Peter came to think upon his vision, he realized that this wiping out of artificial distinctions between the various animals, whose flesh is good for food, would apply also to men. Jews or Gentiles, Barbarians or Scythians, bond or free, he was not to call any man common or unclean on the ground of race difference. This was a big, long step ahead to be taken by a man who had been brought up in a narrow creed.

Peter took that step. When Cornelius, a Roman centurion, asked him to come to his house, Peter went. He stood there in the home of that Roman

official saying: "Ye know that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to come unto one of another nation. But God hath shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean. God is no respecter of persons, for in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted of him. Therefore I came as soon as I

was sent for."

This was good, broad, Christian doctrine, and Peter was ready at that time to act upon it. When the Holy Spirit came upon those who heard his words, he baptized them as Christians. At Antioch also, Peter ate with Gentile Christians and gave them the right hand of fellowship.

But when some of the stricter party (Fundamentalists, they were) came down from Jerusalem, they told Peter that he was letting down the bars altogether too fast. Then he drew back. He would not associate with Gentile Christians any

more.

Paul, the Apostle of Christian liberty, at once rebuked him. "I withstood him to his face," he said, "I straightened him out, because he was to be blamed." That was the weakness of this im