find a lesson in that picture in the Temple, of Simeon with the
Infant Christ in his arms.

II. Further, we have here the slave recognising and submitting to
his Owner.

Now the word which is here employed for 'Lord' is one that very
seldom occurs in the New Testament in reference to God; only some
four or five times in all. And it is the harshest and hardest word
that can be picked out. If you clip the Greek termination off it, it
is the English word 'despot,' and it conveys all that that word
conveys to us, not only a lord in the sense of a constitutional
monarch, not only a lord in the polite sense of a superior in
dignity, but a despot in the sense of being the absolute owner of a
man who has no rights against the owner, and is a slave. For the
word 'slave' is what logicians call the correlative of this word
'despot,' and as the latter asserts absolute ownership and
authority, the former declares abject submission. So Simeon takes
these two words to express his relation and feeling towards God.
'Thou art the Owner, the Despot, and I am Thy slave.' That relation
of owner and slave, wicked as it is, when subsisting between two
men--an atrocious crime, 'the sum of all villainies,' as the good
old English emancipators used to call it--is the sum of all
blessings when regarded as existing between man and God. For what
does it imply? The right to command and the duty to obey, the
sovereign will that is supreme over all, and the blessed attitude of
yielding up one's will wholly, without reserve, without reluctance,
to that infinitely mighty, and--blessed be God!--infinitely loving
Will Absolute authority calls for abject submission.