Matthew the publican.
Matthew the publican
I. The power, and grace of the divine call. Power is measured by the amount or degree of resistance which it is able to overcome. There were three chief obstacles in the way of this man’s conversion.
1. His business exposed hint constantly to temptations which were well nigh irresistible.
2. The standard of morality recognized by his associates was proverbially low.
3. He had no character to sustain.
II. A sinner’s conversion is a cause of joy.
III. Converted souls desire to promote the conversion others.
IV. Matthew’s chief characteristic was humility. (W. F. Bishop.)
The tax-collector who became a bishop
St. Matthew’s example led to one of the holiest lives recorded in the annals of the early Church. One of the most able and useful men of the North African Church was the Bishop Nulgertius. He had originally been receiver of taxes, but it one day occurred to him: “May I not be like Matthew, become from a tax-gatherer a preacher of the gospel.” He accordingly left his worldly employment, became an ecclesiastic, and was ultimately a most useful bishop.
A humble acknowledger of an unworthy past
We read the histories of such persons with vast interest and pleasure; and there is one circumstance which you generally meet with, and which always peculiarly engages our attention, and that is, the remembrance which these men had in their elevation of the poverty and obscurity from which they had been raised. You will commonly find that they had kept about them some memento of the insignificance of their origin, as though they felt a pride in reminding others and themselves how little they owed to the achievements of ancestors. In the splendid halls in which their latter days were spent, they have delighted to hang pictures of the hovels in which they were born: so that the stranger passing through the magnificent scene, after admiring a thousand gorgeous works of art, and confessing the grandeur and taste of their owner, might come suddenly on the representation of a lowly cottage, and learning that this cottage was the home of the parents of the man who had possessed himself of all this glory, might have a feeling of far higher reverence and wonder, than if there had been spread before him the evidences of a most illustrious pedigree. And it is very curious to observe how the biographers of such a man will labour to throw some “kind of lustre around his origin, as though they could not bear that their hero should be deficient in aught to which the world attaches worth. (H. Melvill.)