Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/127

 No. 60.]

services appointed by the Church for this festival of St. Philip and St. James, turn our attention very particularly to the subject of personal love and devotion to our Lord. St. James was, in some sense, His brother. St. Philip seems, by what is related of him, to have had, in some respects, a more simple and uneducated mind than the other Apostles: and, accordingly, to have sought our Saviour with a faith not unlike that with which a pious untaught countryman may be supposed to seek Him now. Thus, when our Saviour had first called him, and he in his turn would persuade Nathanael to come to Him, and Nathanael made the objection, so obvious to a Jew, Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip did not pretend at all to argue the matter with him, but simply said, as a plain man might, "Come and see."

And again, it was of St. Philip that our Saviour, with a kind of cheerful condescension, made as if He would ask advice, when He was about to feed the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, and so to prefigure that Divine Feast, which He meant in due time to ordain for the spiritual food of the whole world. "Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?" The Apostle answered in a homely, straightforward way, as one having no suspicion that our Lord meant more than He said, "Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little." It would seem quite in unison with this sort of simple-mindedness, very sincere, but rather unreflecting, that St. Philip should take that part which the Gospel of the day records of him, in the farewell conversation between our Lord and His Apostles. When had said, He was the way, the truth, and the life: when He had assured them, that if they had known Him, they had known the Father; when He pointed out