addressed to him to whom the first had just been spoken. The Lord had
praised him. Peter grew self-sufficient, even to the rebuking of him whose
praise had so uplifted him. But it is ever so. A man will gain a great
moral victory: glad first, then uplifted, he will fall before a paltry
temptation. I have sometimes wondered, too, whether his denial of our Lord
had anything to do with his satisfaction with himself for making that
onslaught upon the high priest's servant. It was a brave thing and a
faithful to draw a single sword against a multitude. In his fiery eagerness
and inexperience, the blow, well meant to cleave Malchus's head, missed,
and only cut off his ear; but Peter had herein justified his confident
saying that he would not deny him. He was not one to deny his Lord who had
been the first to confess him! Yet ere the cock had crowed, ere the morning
had dawned, the vulgar grandeur of the palace of the high priest (for let
it be art itself, it was vulgar grandeur beside that grandeur which it
caused Peter to deny), and the accusing tone of a maid-servant, were enough
to make him quail whom the crowd with lanterns, and torches, and weapons,
had only roused to fight. True, he was excited then, and now he was cold in
the middle of the night, with Jesus gone from his sight a prisoner, and for
the faces of friends that had there surrounded him and strengthened him
with their sympathy, now only the faces of those who were, or whom at least
Peter thought to be on the other side, looking at him curiously, as a
strange intruder into their domains. Alas, that the courage which led him
to follow the Lord should have thus led him, not to deny him, but into the
denial of him! Yet why should I say _alas?_ If the denial of our Lord
lay in his heart a possible thing, only prevented by his being kept in
favourable circumstances for confessing him, it was a thousand times better
that he should deny him, and thus know what a poor weak thing that heart of
his was, trust it no more, and give it up to the Master to make it strong,
and pure, and grand. For such an end the Lord was willing to bear all the
pain of Peter's denial. O, the love of that Son of Man, who in the midst of