My text is one of those which we are accustomed to carry in our heads without remembering the occasion upon which the utterance was made, and, partly for that reason, to hesitate about the precise meaning we should attach to it. It comes, actually, at the end of that great chapter, his thirteenth, in which St. Matthew has collected for us seven of our Lord’s parables, six of which, if not all seven, deal with the growth of his kingdom, the Church; the Sower, the cockle among the wheat, the mustard seed, the leaven the hidden treasure, the merchant seeking pearls, the net cast into the sea. And four are particularly concerned to point out to our Lord’s hearers that his kingdom was not, as some of them imagined, to be a clean sweep of all that went before it, a complete break-away from all human experience. It was not to be a millennium, in which all sin and suffering would have disappeared ; those who were partakers of it would not be all perfect souls, already confirmed in goodness and destined for eternal life. No, the new kingdom or ecclesia of Christ was to be in some ways like the old ecclesia, the old congregation of the Jews. There would still be tares among the wheat, worthless fish among the catch, side by side with the others.