God grant that we may all so humble ourselves under his mighty hand,
whenever that hand lies heavy upon us, that he may raise us up in
due time, changed into his divine likeness, from glory to glory;
till we come to the measure of Christ, and to the stature of perfect
men, renewed into the image of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ our
Lord! Amen.
SERMON XVIII. ST. PETER
Matt. xvi. 18. Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my
Church.
This is St. Peter's day. It will be well worth our while to think a
little over St. Peter, and what kind of man he was. For St. Peter
was certainly one of the most important and most famous men who ever
lived in the whole world. You just heard what our Lord said to him
in the text. And certainly, from those words, and from many other
things which are told of St. Peter, he was the chief of the
apostles--at least till St. Paul arose.
St. Paul says himself, that he had as much authority as St. Peter,
and that he was not a whit behind the very chiefest of the apostles:
but St. Peter, for some time after our Lord's death, seems to have
been looked up to, by the rest of the apostles and the disciples, as
their leader, the man of most weight and authority among them. It
was to St. Peter especially that our Lord looked to strengthen the
other apostles, after he had been converted himself.
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