SERMONS AT RUGBY

By the Rt. Rev. JOHN PERCIVAL, D. D. , LORD BISHOP OF HEREFORDSOMETIME HEADMASTER OF RUGBY

JAMES NISBET AND CO. LTD. 21 BERNERS STREET, LONDON. 1905

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 INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This little group of Rugby Sermons is to be taken and read as beingnothing more than a few stray chips from the workshop of a busyschoolmaster, brought together by a kindly publisher, and arranged as hethought best. 

They represent no body of continuous doctrine. In one case the subjectmay have been suggested by the season of the Christian year; in anotherit was the meeting or the parting at the beginning or the end of a termthat suggested it; or more frequently some incident in the school life ofthe moment. 

Such, indeed, almost inevitably is the teaching of a schoolmaster, engrossed in the training of the boys committed to his charge and growingunder his hand towards the destiny of their endless life. 

To those boys, and to the masters, my colleagues, and to other fellow-labourers--some gone to their rest, some still doing their appointedwork--I dedicate this brief reminder of our common life in days of happyfellowship. 

J. HEREFORD. _July_ 1905. 

 I. RELIGIOUS PATRIOTISM. 

 "Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself. . . . O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good. "--PSALM cxxii. 3, 6-9. 

As we draw near to the end of our summer term, when so many are about totake leave of their school life, there is sure to rise up in many mindsthe thought of what this life has done for them or failed to do, and ofwhat the memory of it is likely to be in all their future years as theypass from youth to age. 

And it should be our aim and desire, as need hardly be said, that fromthe day when each one comes amongst us as a little boy to the day when heoffers his last prayer in this chapel before he goes out into the world, his life here should be of such a sort that its after taste may have noregrets, and no bitterness, and no shame in it, and the memories to becherished may be such as add to the happiness and strength of lateryears. And if, as we trust, this is your case, your feeling for yourschool is almost certain to be in some degree like that which isexpressed in this pilgrim psalm. Its language of intense patriotism, steeped in religious feeling, which is the peculiar inspiration of theOld Testament Jew, will seem somehow to express your own feelings forthat life in which you grew up from childhood to manhood. 

Indeed, the best evidence that your school life has not failed of itshigher objects is the growth of this same sort of earnest patrioticenthusiasm. Do you feel at all for your school as that unknown Jewishpilgrim who first sung this 122nd Psalm felt for the city of his fathersand the house of God? "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shallprosper that love thee. For my brethren and companions' sakes I willwish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God Iwill seek to do thee good. "

Experience shows us that those English schools have been the best inwhich this feeling has been strongest and most widely diffused; and thatthose are the best times in any school which train up and send forth thelargest proportion of men who continue to watch over its life, and topray for it in this spirit: "For my brethren and companions' sakes I willwish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God Iwill seek to do thee good. " On the other hand, if this feeling is weakin any school, or among the former members of it, or if it assumesdebased forms, as sometimes happens, we see there a sure sign ofdegeneration. He who, having grown up in any society like ours, ispossessed by no such love for it, and stirred by no enthusiasm for itsgood name, and no desire to do it good, and to see good growing in everypart of it, such an one has somehow missed the chief blessing that hismembership of his school should have brought to him. He may have beenunfortunate, or he may have proved unworthy. The atmosphere of hisschool life, and the associations amidst which he grew up, may have beensuch that the best thing he can do is to shake himself clear of them andforget them. To such an one his school time has been a grave andlifelong misfortune; and it is the condemnation of any society if thereare many such cases in it. 

It is, however, exceptional in English life for men who have grown up ina great school to be stirred by no glow of patriotic feeling for it. Whatever their own experience of it may have been, they are notaltogether blind to the things that constitute its greatness, and theylove to hear it well spoken of. 

But the quality of their patriotism will depend very much on the qualityof their own life; so that the task we have always before us is to beinfusing into our community such a spirit and purpose, as shall infecteach soul amongst us with those higher aims, and tastes, and motives, with that hatred of things mean or impure, and that love of things thatare manly, honest, and of good report, which distinguish all noblercharacters from the baser, and which are produced and fostered, and madeto work strongly in every society that has any claim to good influence. 

Seeing, then, that a man's patriotism is to a great extent the expressionof his personal life, how instructive is this picture of the patriotwhich the 122nd Psalm sets before us. We see thus first of all how hefeels the unity of his people--their one pervading life, and himself apart of it, though possibly far away--"Jerusalem is built as a city thatis at unity in itself: thither the tribes go up. " Those were times whenIsrael suffered from division of tribe against tribe, times when thepulse of common life hardly beat at all, times of isolation or ofjealousy; but the true patriot in Israel, as everywhere, was alwayspossessed by the intense feeling of the oneness of his people under oneLord; and whenever this feeling fails, we look in vain for the higherforms of common life. 

But we note, too, this Psalmist's passionate personal devotion to theobject of his patriotic love--"They shall prosper that love thee"--"Formy brethren and companions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity. " Who canread unmoved these noble and generous outpourings?

We see, moreover, how his feeling expresses itself, as true love alwaysdoes express itself in the desire to do good to its object, and, aboveall, how it breathes the spirit of moral and religious earnestness. "Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good. " Ifever you desire to test the sincerity and the worth of any love you bearto person, place, institution, or society, you have only to turn to thisPsalm, and see if these words fit your thoughts, desires, andendeavours--"They shall prosper that love thee--For my brethren andcompanions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity--Yea, because of the houseof the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good. " Here are the notes oftrue patriotic feeling--personal love, public spirit, sanctified by moraland religious purpose, desire to do good. These are the qualities whichare the salt of all societies, and it is by virtue of these that they wintheir good name, if they do win it. 

In the history of our own school we can point to abundant illustrationsof this truth. I will mention one only, familiar to those who know ourhistory. "I verily believe, " wrote a School-house boy to his friendfifty-three years ago--"I verily believe my whole being is soaked throughwith wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good, or, rather, to hinder it from falling in this critical time, so that all my cares, and affections, and conversation, thought, words, and deeds, look to thatinvoluntarily. "

Such was one of your predecessors as he sat here Sunday by Sunday, a boylike any of you. 

He was eager to follow those friends who had preceded him to Oxford asscholars of Balliol; he was keenly interested in all intellectualpursuits; he turned for his daily pleasure to literature or history; butalongside of it all, or rather through it all, underlying it all, givingearnestness and fervour, the true unselfish quality, to it all, there wasburning in his heart a consuming zeal for the good of his house andschool. "For my brethren and companions' sakes I will wish theeprosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek todo thee good. "

It was through the spirit and the lives of such as he, growing up here, and leavening all the life around them, and then going forth in the samespirit, to live the noble and earnest type of life elsewhere, that thename of Rugby School became honoured among schools, and this chapel cameto be looked upon as a sacred home of inspiring influences; and it isonly through an unfailing succession of such Rugbeians--growing up herein the same spirit, and going forth endowed with the same character andthe same purpose--that this honourable name, this tradition of goodinfluences, can be perpetuated. 

And, if we desire to see how close this is to the spirit and the work ofour Lord, how it is, in fact, one manifestation of that spirit which isthe saving influence in human life; we have only to turn from the textwith which I started to that with which I may conclude, from the Psalmistmeditating on the city and temple of his heart's affections, to theSaviour, as He drew near to the Cross, praying for His disciples--"Father, the hour is come. . . . I have glorified Thee on the earth: I havefinished the work Thou gavest Me to do. I have manifested Thy name untothe men whom Thou gavest me out of the world. " . . . "And for their sakesI sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified. Neither pray I forthese alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through theirword. "

The only change we see as we step from the Psalms to the Gospel, from theJewish pilgrim to the Saviour whom we worship, is that religiouspatriotism has expanded into the love of souls, the love of Him who laiddown His life to save us from the power of sin and death. 

It was for you and me that Christ was praying; and His prayer for us willbe answered so soon as it inspires us to follow in His footsteps, so thatwe too, as we kneel before God each morning, each night, and think of ourduty to those around us, may be able to say, in these words of His, whichare at once a prayer and a consecrating vow--"For their sakes I sanctifymyself, that they also may be sanctified. '"

 II. THE CHILD IN THE MIDST. 

 "And He took a child and set Him in the midst of them: and when He had taken him in His arms, He said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in My name, receiveth Me: and whosoever shall receive Me, receiveth not Me, but Him that sent Me. "--ST. MARK ix. 36, 37. 

It is one of the characteristics of our time, one of its most hopeful andmost encouraging signs, that men are awaking to higher and purerconceptions of the Christian life and what it is that constitutes such alife. We are beginning to feel, as it was not felt by formergenerations, that the only true religion, the only Christianity worthy ofthe name, is that which aims at embodying and reproducing the spirit, thethought, the ideas of the Saviour. 

Through and underneath all ecclesiastical and mediaeval revivals, and allvagaries of church tradition or of ritual, this feeling seems to begrowing with a steady growth, that the real test of a man's religion isthe evidence which his life affords of the Christ-like spirit. And thisgrowing feeling gives an ever-fresh interest to the words and thejudgment of the Lord on all matters of individual conduct and dailyintercourse; so that if we are possessed at all by it, the Saviour isbecoming more of a living person to us, and we ask ourselves morefrequently, more earnestly, with more of reality and more of practicalmeaning in the question, how He would judge this or that side of ourlife, whether our conduct is in harmony with His spirit, and whether thestandards of our life fit at all with His teaching and injunctions. 

And how full of new meaning every familiar chapter of the Gospel becomesto you, if you are once roused to this kind of feeling; if you arefeeling all the time, here is the spirit which should be dominating myown life and determining it, here are the thoughts, ideas, and views ofconduct which should be mine also. How does my common life fit with allthis? And it is with something like this feeling in your minds that Iwould ask you to consider the text I have just read to you. "Jesus tooka child and set him in the midst of them. He took him up in His arms andsaid, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in My name, receivethMe. " And while we are considering it, let us notice also that in St. Matthew's narrative there are two other very emphatic expressions. "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall notenter into the Kingdom of Heaven"; and "Whoso shall offend one of theselittle ones that believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstonewere hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. . . . Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I sayunto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of MyFather which is in heaven. "

Here, then, is the child taken up by Jesus and set in the midst; we knownothing more of him but this one thing, that he represents to us ourLord's Divine love of little children, and His high estimate ofchildhood, as the mysterious embodiment of that character and thosequalities which bring us close to the Divine life. 

But this is quite enough to make us listen to the lessons of thought andwarning and hope, which Jesus expounds to us as He stands with the childin His arms. His words may very well set every one of us thinking aboutour own life and conduct. We look at this scene--the disciples standinground, their hearts occupied, as ours are apt to be, with their ownambitions, rivalries, and jealousies, and Jesus in the midst with thelittle child; and we cannot mistake or misinterpret the lessons Heteaches us, the lessons which welled up in His heart whenever He saw, ormet, or took up in His arms, and blessed a little child. 

"Let every child you meet, " he clearly says to us, "remind you that ifyou desire to be My disciple and to win a place in My kingdom, you mustfling off selfishness, and put in its place the spirit of service andtenderness. " "He that would be first must be servant of all. " "You musthumble yourself as this little child. "

And then He adds the blessing and the warning:--"Whoso shall receive onesuch child in My name receiveth Me; but whosoever shall offend one ofthese little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hangedabout his neck, and he were cast into the sea. "

We may pause for a moment to consider what it is in childhood, what arethe gifts, qualities, characteristics of the child, that drew from ourLord this special love and care and these injunctions to His followers. We do well to bear them in mind, because He has declared with suchemphasis that we have no part in His kingdom unless we retain or recoverthese gifts. And we should bear them in mind, because of the blessingpromised to those who help to preserve these qualities in others. Receive, help, cherish, or protect a child, make the way of goodness easyto him, and shield him from evil, and Christ declares that inasmuch asyou have done it to the least of all His little ones, you have done itunto Him. 

On the other hand, offend any such child, that is to say, hinder, ormislead, spoil or degrade him in any way; do anything to rob a child ofany of these Divine gifts, rob him of his innocence, or trustfulness, orhis guileless heart, and sow the seeds of evil habits or tastes in theirplace, and you know the denunciation or curse which the Divine voice haslaid upon you for your evil deed. 

A child, then, is, as it were, a living symbol of that which draws to usthe love of Christ, and we cannot doubt that he is so by virtue of hisinnocence, his obedient spirit, his guilelessness, or simplicity ofcharacter, his trustfulness, and by all the untarnished and unspoiltpossibilities of goodness in him. 

It is in the blessed endowment of such gifts as these that the littlechild looks in the face of Christ, and is embraced in the arms of Hislove. 

 And these are, or they once were, your gifts. As you love the betterlife, and hope for good days, hold them fast and cherish them, or if anyof them be unhappily lost, let it be your endeavour to recover it. 

As we contemplate such a scene as this in our Lord's life with the littlechild in the midst, and listen to the Saviour's words, all the commandsand injunctions to keep innocency, to keep the spirit of obedience, tokeep a guileless and trusting and loving heart, gain a new force. Theyseem to speak to us with new voices; for if the true life, the life thathas in it the hope of union with Christ, must be a life endowed withthese gifts, whether in youth or age, what a blessed thing it will be foryou if you have never lost or squandered them. We cannot too soon learnthis lesson; for if under the influence of any wrong motives, orfollowing any wrong ideals, or misled by any bad example, you go astrayand rob your young life of these divine gifts, no man knows how, or when, or where you will recover them, and become again as a little child. 

And if we turn our thoughts from our own separate personal life, and lookfor a moment at our duty as members of a society, how this picture ofChrist embracing the little child, and blessing those who receive or helpone such, should stir us to new and keener interest in social duty! Doesit not carry in it, this example and teaching of the Lord, does it notcarry in it the condemnation of a great many of our traditional notionsabout our duty to the young? We see the Lord's tenderness and love andcare for the little child; we see how He values the childlike qualities;and how He enjoins the nursing and the cherishing of these. If, then, wehave really learnt the lesson which He thus presses upon us, we shallfeel something like reverence for every young life, as it begins itsperilous and uncertain course on the sea of man's experiences; and withthis feeling we shall be eager to help and protect such lives whenever wehave the chance of doing it, and we shall be very careful to do them nowrong. 

But when we turn from the Gospel and these thoughts which it stirs in usto our common life of every day, does it not rather seem sometimes as ifthis teaching of the Lord were all a dream and had no reality? And yetthere is hardly one of us but would confess that, having once seen thisrevelation of the Lord, we are put to shame if, as happens sometimes, ayoung soul comes amongst us endowed with these very gifts of innocence, and high purpose, and trust, and promise of all goodness, which so wonthe Saviour's heart, and is met, when he comes, in school or house, notby care, or sympathy, or guidance, or protection, as of an elderbrother's love, but by experiences of a very different sort. You wouldagree that it is a shame to us if such an one comes only to find themisleading influence of some thoughtless or bad companion, or to haveheld up before him some bad tradition as the law which should rule hislife here. 

 I have known--which of us in the course of years has not known?--suchcases in our school experience. A child has come from a refined andloving home, but only to meet with roughness or coarseness; and insteadof retaining those gifts and qualities of childhood, which are thegodlike qualities of life and meant to be permanent, he has been led togrow up utterly unchildlike, depraved, debased, hardened; and there is nosadder sight to see than a growth of this kind. And if you have everseen it; if you have ever noticed the falling away from childlikeinnocence to sin, from purity to coarseness, from the open, ingenuous, trusting spirit to sullen hardness, from happiness to gloom, you know howterribly in earnest the Saviour must have been when He denounced that woeon any one who causes such debasement of a young soul--"Whoso shalloffend one of these little ones, it had been better for him that amillstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth ofthe sea. "

 III. THE BREVITY OF LIFE. 

 "I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night cometh. "--ST. JOHN ix. 4. 

There are few things more commonly disregarded by us in our early yearsthan the brevity of our life through all its successive stages, and thefleeting nature of its opportunities. 

In childhood we are almost entirely unconscious of both thesecharacteristics of life. Indeed, it would hardly be natural if it wereotherwise. That reflective habit which dwells upon them is the result ofour experience, and comes later. It is enough for a child if he followspure and safe instincts, and lives without reflection a healthy, unperverted life, under wise guidance and good teaching. Growing in thisway, free from corrupting influences or the contagion of bad example, andpoisoned by no bad atmosphere, he develops naturally towards a manhoodwhich is rooted in healthy tastes, affections unspoilt, and in goodhabits. Thus you see what the very young have a right to claim at thehands of all their elders--that they should be careful not to misleadthem, and should see that they live in pure air, and feed their growinginstincts and activities in wholesome pastures. 

During the stage of earliest growth it would be a sign of unhealthyprecocity if a child were much occupied with the continuity of things, orthe close union of to-day with to-morrow, or of all our thoughts, acts, pleasures, and tastes, with the bent of character which is being silentlybut surely formed in us; and it would be equally unnatural if histhoughts were to dwell much on the essential shortness of our life, andthe flight of opportunity which does not come back to us. 

It is part of the happiness, or, I fear, it must be said sometimes, partof the pain of early life, that the time before it seems so long. Theday is long with its crowded novelty or intense enjoyment, or possiblywith its dreary and intolerable task-work; to-morrow, with all itsanticipations of things desired or to be endured, seems long; and thevista of years, as they stretch through boyhood and youth, manhood andage, seems to lose itself in the far distance of its length. So, viewedfrom its beginnings, life is long. 

But with the approach of manhood all this begins to change. As we growout of childhood our self-conscious and reflective life grows; and thusthere rises in us the feeling of moral responsibility never to be shakenoff again. Not, however, that we should leave all our childhood behindus. It hardly needs to be said that there are some characteristics ofour earliest years which every man should pray that he may retain to theend. Unless he retains them his life becomes a deteriorating life. 

And first among these is the reverential or filial habit. This deservesour careful attention, because we sometimes see an affectation of sillyand spurious manliness, which thinks it a fine thing to cast it off. Thisreverential or filial feeling, which is natural to the unspoilt andtruthful nature of the child, is preserved in every unspoilt manhood;only with a difference. 

It is raised from the unreflective, instinctive trust in a father'sguidance or a mother's love to that higher feeling which tells us that, as is the child in a well and wisely ordered home, so is each of us inthat great household of our heavenly Father. This spirit of true piety, which uplifts, refines, strengthens, and gives courage to manhood, asnothing else can do, is the natural outcome and successor of a child'strustfulness, as we rise through it to the feeling that we areencompassed by a Divine consciousness, and that our life moves in a holypresence. Or again, we pray that we may not lose that simplicity andfreshness of nature which is at once a special charm of childhood, and, wherever it is preserved, the chief blessing of a man's later years. 

These qualities and characteristics of our infancy--trust, filialreverence, freshness, simplicity--are not qualities to be left behind, but the natural forecast of that religious spirit which is the highestgrowth of maturity, and our own safeguard against the hardening anddebasing influences of the world and the flesh. And this was theSaviour's meaning when He said, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdomof God as a little child shall in nowise enter therein. " And if there isone thing more than another that constitutes the special curse of anydepraved influence acting on young lives, it is that it robs the laterlife of these childlike qualities which are the gifts of God to bless usin youth and age. 

But assuming that we bear all this in mind, and hold fast to thesefundamental gifts, and so escape those lower and baser forms of lifewhich we meet all about in the world, spoiling the manhood andembittering the age of so many men, we cannot forget the essentialdifference between mature years and the years of early growth. 

As we grow towards manhood our life necessarily loses its childlike andunreflecting spontaneity in the ferment of thought, desire, and passion, and in the light of experience; and therefore it becomes a matter of noslight importance to estimate the value of that which we hold in ourhands to-day, the nature of the web which our conduct is weaving, and thefateful character of any mistake in the purposes, notions, ambitions, ortastes that are, as a matter of fact, fixing the drift and direction ofour life. But to do this amidst all the daily temptations of life is notalways an easy matter; and it is certain that we shall not do it if we donot fully recognise, while our life is still young and unhampered, theimportance of these two very obvious reflections, which, in fact, resolvethemselves into one, that our time is essentially short, and that ouropportunities are very fugitive. 

 In one sense, no doubt, there is a long stretch of time before most ofyou. As yet hope has more to say to you than memory. Some of you willlook back on these early days from the distant years of another century. Your life's journey may extend far away over the unexplored future, andmay in some cases be a very long one; but, although this is possible, weare not allowed to forget that it is always precarious--unexpected gravesare constantly reminding us how short may be the time of any one ofus--how the night cometh. 

But it is not merely of the literal shortness of our time, or thepossible nearness of death, that our Lord's words should set us thinking, when He warns us that the night cometh, and we must work while it is day. 

If we measure our life by the things we should accomplish in it, by thecharacter it should attain to, by the purposes that should be bearingfruit in it, and not by mere lapse of time, we soon come to feel how veryshort it is, and the sense of present duty grows imperative. It is thusthat the thoughtful man looks at his life; and he feels that there is nosuch thing as length of days which he can without blame live carelessly, because in these careless days critical opportunities will have slippedaway irrecoverably; he will have drifted in his carelessness past someturning-point which he will not see again, and have missed the so-calledchances that come no more. 

But even this is only a part of the considerations that make our presentlife so precious; for this is only the outer aspect of it. What makesour time so critically short, whether we consider its intellectual or itsmoral and spiritual uses, is that our nature is so very sensitive, soeasily marred by misuse, and spoilt irretrievably. The real brevity ofthe time at your disposal, whether for the training of your mind, or foryour growth into the character of good men, consists in this, thatdeterioration is standing always at the back of any neglect or waste. Deterioration is the inseparable shadow of every form of ignoble life. 

 "Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk with us still. "

Leave your faculties unused and they become blunted and dulled; leaveyour higher tastes uncultivated and they die; let your affections feed onanything unworthy and they become debased. 

To those who do this it may happen that whilst, so far as years go, theyare still in all the freshness of youth, they are already dying thatdeath to all higher capacity which is worse than any decay of ourphysical organism. Such an early death of higher tastes and faculties, and of hope for the future, is sometimes effected even before schooldaysare over. And the mere possibility of such a fate overhanging any of usshould stir us like a trumpet-call to take care that we do not surrenderour life to any mean influence, and that we are very zealous for all thatconcerns the safety of the young. 

"I send out my child, " I can imagine the parent of any one of you havingsaid, "to be trained for manhood; I send him to his school that hisintellect may be cultivated, his moral purpose made strong, and that allgood and pure tastes may be fostered in him; but it is dreadful to thinkthat instead of this he may, by his life and companionship there, behardened and debased, or even brutalised; he may become dead to thehigher life even before he becomes a man. " Seeing, then, that there isthis possibility of death even in the midst of life--a possibility, wewould fain hope, seldom realised in this school, but still apossibility--shall we not be very careful, men and boys alike, so to doour part in this society, so to shelter the young and strengthen theweak, and to keep the atmosphere of our life a pure atmosphere, thatevery sensitive soul which comes amongst us may grow up here through ahealthy and wholesome boyhood, and go out to the duties and the callingof his life, strong, unselfish, public-spirited, pure-hearted, andcourageous--a Christian gentleman. 

 IV. THE INFLUENCE OF TRADITION. 

 "Making the word of God of none effect through your traditions: and many such like things ye do. "--ST. MARK vii. 13. 

Such was our Lord's word to the Pharisees; and if we turn to our own lifeit is difficult if not impossible for us fully to estimate the influencewhich traditions exercise upon it. 

They are so woven into the web of thought and opinion, and daily habitsand practices, that none of us can claim to escape them. Moreover, asany institution or society grows older, this influence of the part whichis handed on from one generation to another tends to accumulate; so thatthe weight of it lies heavier on us in an old place than in a new one, and it is obvious that there is both loss and gain in this. 

A good tradition is a great help and support, giving a strength, orfirmness, or dignity to our life which it would not otherwise have had. 

We often see or feel the value of such a tradition as it acts upon themembers of a family, or of a college, or of a regiment, or of a school. 

And this influence of a tradition, inasmuch as it has become impersonal, and rooted in the general life, is apt to be very persistent, so that theman who establishes a good tradition anywhere begins a good work, whichmay go on producing its good results long after he himself is in hisgrave. 

Many of you must have felt the power of such an influence, handed on toyou as if it were a part of your inheritance, when thinking of a brother, or father, or other relative or ancestor, who by some distinction ofcharacter, or by some inspiring words or some brave or generous act, hasleft you a good example, which seems somehow to belong to you, and tostir you as with an authoritative call to show yourself worthy of it. 

Similarly in a society like this school you can hardly grow up withoutsometimes being stirred by the tradition of the noble lives that haveleft their mark upon its history. 

So a man's good deeds live after him, and become woven as threads of goldinto the traditions of the world. 

And we are equally familiar with traditions that are bad, and with theirpestilent influence; for we are constantly made to feel how much of thegood that men endeavour to do is thwarted, counteracted, or destroyed byinfluences of this sort, and how weak and imitative souls are entangledin the network of traditional influence as in a spider's web. Tradition, in fact, represents to us the accumulated power of past lives as it actsupon us from the outside, just as what men call heredity represents thissame influence in our own blood. 

And we have seen that this power may be, and often is, a real advantageand support to our life. We feel also that as the Divine light shinesstronger and steadier in human affairs the traditional influence of eachgeneration ought to become more and more helpful to those that follow. 

And yet, you observe, the Saviour gives us no encouragement to dependupon those helps that tradition might bring us. On the contrary, Hislanguage shows how dangerous He felt the influence of tradition to be. How are we to account for this? His strongest denunciations are reservedfor the Pharisaic party; and yet a historian would describe them as inmany respects the best elements of Jewish life. They were earnest, patriotic, religious, many of them wise and holy men; but their judgmentwas held in bondage by the influence of tradition, and in this lies thecardinal defect of their life. They had set up between their souls andthe spirit of God a sort of graven image of ritualistic observances, andtraditional usages and interpretations. They depended on externals, orwhat came to them from the past or from the outer world, and their eyeswere blinded, and their hearts hardened against every new revelation. 

Thus they stand before Christ, blocking His path, the very embodiment ofthat power which closes the soul against those inspiring and purifyinginfluences that come from direct communion with God. They block theSaviour's path, because this personal communion is just what Herepresents to us--the direct revelation of the Spirit of God in man. Hecomes to reveal the Father to each of us, and to make us feel thepresence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; andtill we feel this personal illumination we have not realised themanifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continualreference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, andelaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knowslittle or nothing of the personal illumination by the direct influence ofthe Spirit of God upon our spirit. Hence this absolute and fundamentalcontrast between Jesus and the Pharisees. They represent two opposingprinciples in life. And it is this that gives such intensity to thewords He addressed to them: "Ye have made the word of God of none effectthrough your traditions"; and it is a universal warning--never out ofdate. 

If the spirit of traditional usage and influence holds the citadel of aman's life, the spirit of Christian progress cannot gain an entrance. 

That is the lesson which the Saviour presses upon our attention by Hisdenunciation of the Pharisaic usage, habit, and attitude, and it ishardly possible to overestimate the importance of the lesson, becausethis same spirit of Pharisaic tradition is constantly laying its handupon every human institution, and it has contributed to every abuse orperversion that has taken possession of the Christian Church. 

Our life is, in fact, a continuous struggle between the two principleshere represented. Which is to prevail in it, and fix its character--traditional custom, or personal inspiration? Are we to follow the worldwith its conventions and laws, or to live in personal communion with God?The tendency of our life will be determined in one direction or the otheraccording as we surrender our will to the rule of traditional notions andusages, the power of the external world, or as we seek for directillumination of mind, conscience, and spirit at the Divine sources oftruth and light. 

Here, then, we have a principle to guide us in our relation to thetraditions amidst which we live. 

We do not expect to get away from them; we never dream of escaping fromthe influences of the external world, whether of the past or the present;but to move safely among them, we must have learnt and adopted thisprimal lesson, that no tradition, and no external practice or custom, hasany authoritative claim upon us, simply from being established as atradition or a custom. 

And as we stand amidst all the conventions and practices that have comedown to us, we should be able to say of every one of them--

"Every good tradition, and every wholesome and beneficent usage, I acceptthankfully as part of the inheritance which good, or wise, or brave menhave left as their legacy for my use and assistance; but it is my boundenduty to measure them all by the standard of God's unchanging law: by it Iwill prove them; I will use them or reject them according as they fit orfail in this measurement, and I will not be brought under the power ofany of them. "

Whether, then, we think of our separate personal life or of our life inits social relationships, we must think of it in this way if we are to bein any real sense followers of Christ. Each of you, as he steps into theworld, is not merely an inheritor of certain accumulations of life andtradition, which he should follow as a matter of course. He is not bornto tread a certain track of conduct or behaviour because others havetrodden it before him, following it without thought like the sheep on themountain, or like the ants as they travel from one ant-hill to another. 

Your estimate of your life should be fundamentally different from this. You are primarily a child of God, illumined by direct communion with theSpirit of God; and your first duty, therefore, whenever and in whateverplace or circumstances you may chance to be, is not to follow this orthat tradition or usage which may meet you; but to stand up and show thatyou are God's child, and therefore a judge of all traditions or customs, and not their slave. 

This is the revelation which Christ declares to us as the one firstrequisite of the Christian life. So you see the Christian man's attitudetowards all traditions or customs is that of independence; his thoughtand his judgment are as free in regard to them as if they were newlyborn. He is, in fact, bound to judge them according to their deserts;and no society can hope to prosper unless this is recognised, so thatevil customs may not corrupt the common life. It is the danger of suchcorruption that makes the Saviour denounce the traditional habit, andsummon His followers to live by the rule of close personal communion withGod. Thus the life that goes forward and rises to higher and yet higherlevels is always a life of new revelations, a life which is beingillumined and illumined afresh by those flashes of Divine insight, andstrength, and courage, which come to men only as they came to the LordHimself in the secret communion of prayer and meditation, and throughthat independence of spirit which arises from the sense of God's presenceto guide us and to uphold. 

Take your own case. If you are living here simply according totraditional rules, doing this or that because, as you may be told, everybody does it; accepting standards of conduct and rules of practice, because, as you understand, or, as some one undertakes to persuade you, they have always been so accepted, why, then, you are growing up to beone of that never-ending succession of men who are the Pharisees, theopponents of the Christ, in every generation, who live with tameconscience in any sort of company, and perpetuate the bad traditions ofthe world. 

But if you listen to the call of Christ, and have truly learned to feelthat the only real man's life is that which you live with the light ofGod's law shining upon it, then, as a matter of course, you will risesuperior to the influence of any tradition or custom, no matter what itsauthority may seem to be. 

And it will indeed be a happy thing for you if you grow up with that God-given strength of character and purpose which can treat all traditions, and all usages, or fashions, or customs as things that should besubordinated, and should not rule us, as things to be used by us if theyhelp us to a better life, but to be flung aside and rejected, if theycontradict the voice of God in our hearts. 

 V. VAIN HOPES. 

 "And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. But he said, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. "--ST. LUKE xvi. 30, 31. 

It is by no means uncommon for any one who is living a life which doesnot satisfy his own conscience to console himself with the fancy that ifonly such and such things were different around him he would be a newman, filled with a new spirit, and exhibiting a new character. But is itso very certain that this would be the case?

Such persons are apt to dream of some goodness or some virtue which underother circumstances they would make their own; and there are, in fact, few conditions more dangerous than that of this class of dreamers, whether among boys or men. To all who may be tempted in this way, ourLord's words in the parable come with a very significant warning: "Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they willrepent. But he said, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neitherwill they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. "

When insidious and delusive hope would draw us on and beguile us in anysinful way, whispering that God will some day send special gifts andmessengers of grace to inspire us with new life, this is his plainanswer: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they bepersuaded, though one rose from the dead. "

And hardly any one can say that he is altogether free from this tendencyto lean upon the future with vain hopes, and is in no need of the warningwhich this text conveys to us. 

In serious moments, when the mind is calm, and neither passion norappetite is stirring, we feel how good a thing it is to have crucifiedthe flesh and to be living close to Christ; but when we are within thefiery circle of trial or temptation, when sinful desires arise, orpassions are strong, or solicitations to evil are subtle and enticing, then we are only too ready to catch at any hopes about the vague future. To the unstable and incontinent, to those whose nature is weak whiletheir conscience is not dead, this hope is a dangerous temptation, beguiling them with the suggestion that some day there will open beforethem an easy path to that virtue or self-denial to which the way is toorough at present. "Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them fromthe dead, they will repent. " By-and-by, they say, as they dream aboutthe future, God will lay His hand upon them; the Holy Spirit will touchtheir souls with new life; they will receive in some inscrutable way newpower, and in the exercise of this power they will cast off the bondageof sin or weakness; but how and by what means this great and necessarychange is to be brought about they do not stop to think, and meanwhilethey yield to worldly or fleshly appetite, trusting vaguely to anuncertain future for some Divine gift. 

If you look into the thoughts and habits of your life, some of you may becompelled to acknowledge that this case is not unfamiliar to you. So mensometimes dally with a temptation, and linger beside it, courting itscompany, instead of flinging it away from them, as the snare of thedevil, because of some secret hope that by-and-by God will place them outof the way of it, or give them some new strength against it, which as yethas not been given. How easy it is for us to entice ourselves in thisway out of the narrow path of present duty into the tangled wilderness ofa weak and sinful life, from which escape becomes every day moredifficult. 

And this enticement along the ways of sin being so easy, it may behappening to some of you. You may feel that, judged even by your ownstandard, which is more likely to be too low than too high, your life issomehow unsatisfactory; your better instincts may be telling you that youwere born for something higher, purer, stronger than what you are or havebeen; and you are cherishing the hope that it will be different with yousome day; your circumstances, you think, or your occupation, or yourcompanionship will have changed, and so you fondly imagine that youyourself will be sure to change, as if your soul were just a weathercockthat answers to every changing breeze. So perhaps you hope that somehabit of self-indulgence or idleness will drop off, or some evil temperbe eradicated; and whilst all this vague and mischievous dreaming goes onyou yield very likely to some besetting sin, making no serious effort toget away from it now, and you yield all the more because of thismisleading hope that some day you will be touched by a supernatural hand, and will rise up to a regenerate life. And yet our reason tells us thatall this is the very essence of self-deceit, and that such dreams andhopes are the devil's most subtle temptation. This kind of vain hope isbased on a complete misconception of the nature of our conflict with sin, and the way to escape from it. To think thus of spiritual gifts and thegrowth of the spiritual life, is to follow a very dangerous delusion. Itwas just such a misunderstanding that is expressed in the hope of Divesabout his brethren: "If one went unto them from the dead, they willrepent. " Their ordinary daily teachings, he seems to say, the voice ofMoses and of the prophets, the examples of good men around them, thewarnings, the exhortations, these, being so familiar, may not havestartled them out of their sin; but if only one were to go to them fromthe dead, some messenger of strange voice and aspect, who had seen hell, and could paint its horrors, then surely the course of their life wouldbe checked and changed, and their spirit would wake up in them, and theywould sin no more. But to all this comes back the stern warning of theDivine answer: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither willthey be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. "

And we may profitably consider what this means in its application to ourown life. Such a warning is evidently meant to remind us that themystery of sin in human life is not to be got rid of by any such relianceon vague hopes. This mystery of sin in the heart and life, misleading, weakening, dragging us down, means in fact the subtle, poisonous, creeping power which evil inclinations exercise over a weak and depravedwill. Are we, then, to trust to some sudden visitation from above, forwhich we make no preparation, to break down or overthrow a power of thiskind? On the contrary, the words of this parable stand here to declareto us that it is nothing less than perversity and folly in any man to goon either defiling his nature, or degrading it, or even neglecting tostrengthen and support it, under this delusion that some day the breathof Heaven will sweep it clean or give it new vigour. And your ownexperience is in exact accordance with these parabolic warnings of theSaviour. You know that your moral and spiritual nature is now at thispresent time undergoing a process of continual and momentous change, thatevery day, or week, or month leaves its mark upon it; and that yoursoul's life means not waiting for some angel of God's providential graceto visit you and carry you up into a new air; but it means that you areweaving the web of your unchangeable destiny by your use or abuse of thegifts of God that are in your hands to-day. 

Born into the world with the taint of inherited corruption in us, as alsowith the germs of pure affection and high instinct and purpose, we haveto take care for ourselves and for each other that the taint does not eatout the good, by growing into sins of boyhood or of youth, or byhardening into depraved habits in our manhood. If we let our youth takean unhappy downward course, whether in taste or habit, every day putssalvation farther off from us, because every day any fault which isindulged or nursed tends to grow deeper and more inveterate; and yet, forgetting this, how many, while their early years are running to waste, nurse the vain hope that some day they will receive the sudden baptism ofa new birth. 

So, then, instead of vaguely trusting, any of us, to the hope of whatsome future call or help or happy visitation may do for us, let us obeythe Divine injunction, which, when rightly understood, is very pressing, urging us, as we hope to see good days, to be very jealous of our presentlife and its tendencies; let us do this, standing always firm andimmovable in the things that are pure and of good report. 

 However it may be in some other matters, in this matter of our moral andspiritual life, the greatest, the most important, the most serious thingof all, it is almost invariably true that the child is father of the man, and we feel that we have no right to expect it to be otherwise. In oureveryday consideration of life, we recognise all this: we speak of growthin character and formation of habit as facts which no one would ignore, and which cannot be overestimated. But to acknowledge these, and at thesame time to trust that God will hereafter arrest any stream of sinfultendency in us which we ourselves do not attempt to stop now, is to addpresumption to sin. 

When we speak of Heaven and Hell, we have in our thoughts the vision ofthose ultimate points towards which the diverging courses of men's livesare slowly tending day by day. And the question rises: "On which ofthese lines is my life travelling at the present time, and towards whichside of the impassable gulf?"

At present we know that the way of Christ is still open before us, andthat He calls us with a voice which never grows weary; but we feelequally that the future is dark, if we waste or misuse the present, andwe do not know how long the heavenward path may be as open, or as easy, as it is to-day. For the question is not a question of God's untiringpatience or the never-failing love of Christ. It is not how long willHis Spirit continue to strive with us, as it has striven hitherto, through the care and love of parent or friend, through the exhortationsor efforts of a teacher, or the example of a companion, or in a thousandother ways. The question is rather whether it is not folly to expectthat God will send upon us some other more powerful regenerating andstrengthening influence, if we are now neglecting all this care and loveand patient striving on our behalf. "If they hear not Moses and theprophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. "

Consider these things while life is fresh, and good influences arepresent with you. Whatever our faults may be, they all come under thisone rule, that to-day is given us to win our freedom from their power--to-day and not to-morrow. The question which is pressed home through thewarning of this parable is thus a very plain one: "What is my future hopeor prospect, if I let this or that particular sin lurk and linger in myheart, feeding upon me every day, and growing stronger in consequence?What if I do not resist any fault that has a hold upon me? What if I donot pray to be delivered from it? What if I do not flee from it?"

If you hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will you be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. 

 VI. WHAT DOEST THOU HERE?

 "And, behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah?"--1 KINGS xix. 9. 

There is a sound of rebuke in these words. They seem to imply that thelonely mountain of Horeb was not the place in which God expected to findsuch a servant as Elijah, and that there should be no indefinitetarrying, no lingering without an aim in such a solitude. 

As you read the familiar history you see how the record of the prophet'sretirement and his vision in Horeb is a record, first of all, of reactionafter fierce conflict; it exhibits the picture of a strong man in amoment of weakness ready to give up the hopeless struggle, crying to God, "It is enough, now, O Lord, take away my life;" and then it shows us howGod dealt with him in that solitude; we hear the Divine voice pleading inhim again, bearing its Divine witness, putting its searching questions, teaching him the universal lesson that despondency, weakness, solitude, shrinking and retiring, if they have any place in our life, are only fora time, and must not be allowed to rule in it. 

That Divine vision which came to Elijah in the recesses of the mountainis, in fact, the voice of God summoning him back to the duties that werewaiting for him, and the renewal of his strength for the new work he hadto do. And the interest of such a vision never fails, because, likeElijah, all men come to times when they too lie under the juniper tree inthe wilderness longing to be set free from the burden which is too heavyfor them, be it the burden of some call, or work, or duty, or ofresistance to some temptation, or the struggle against sin or vice. Itcomes to all of us, and not once only, but many times over, this hour ofdarkness; and it will continue to come so long as the flesh is weak. Andit is at such moments that a man is the better for going with the prophetinto this Horeb, the mount of God, making Elijah's vision his own vision, and renewing his strength, at the same Divine source. How often ithappens to men, to boys, to all alike, that they flee into the desert, away from the post of present duty, away from the face of difficultieswhich they cannot or will not stand up against, away from the moments oftrial and discipline. And, seeing that our life is not and cannot be asolitary thing, seeing that the pulsations of each individual's life arecreating other pulsations which answer them back in other lives, we knownot where or how many, whenever we thus shrink away from our duty, whenwe turn our back upon it, or despond about it, when we become deaf to thehigher calls, we are, in fact, crying to God to be relieved of ourservice to Him and to our fellows. And it is a happy thing for our lifeif He does not answer us according to our cry, and let us go into thewilderness, and leave us alone there. 

This voice, following us with the question, "What doest them here?" isthe evidence that God has not abandoned us. 

"What doest thou here, Elijah?" How often must this voice have followedthe monk into his solitude, refusing to be silenced, piercing through allthe false notions about a man's relationship to his fellow-men, warningeach soul that it cannot separate itself from the great tide of universallife. 

And the voice comes to us, the same warning voice of God, whenever westand aloof and let the tide around us run on anyhow, as if we didn'tcare how it ran, or whenever in obedience to any impulse, whether ofselfishness or of timidity, we try to persuade ourselves that some dutymay be left alone. 

"What doest thou here, Elijah?" The quality of our life depends on theanswer we give to such spiritual questioning day by day; for the Divinevoices are never silent. 

"What doest thou here?" The voice cries to us when we linger in theneighbourhood of any sin, or when we waste our opportunities in some formof idleness, or when we stand by in cold or timid indifference, refusinghelp or consolation to any soul which seems to need it. 

"What doest thou here?" It is possible that some of us hardly like toshape our answer in plain words lest we might have to say: "I am herelingering in my present way of life, not because I feel it to be theright way, but because it is the easy way, and I cannot bring myself toface the harder and more manly course of duty. I hear the voice; Icannot get away from it; it haunts me with its inquiries, when my heartis hot within me, as it is sometimes, while yet I am burying the lightthat is in my soul. " If it should be so with any of you, consider, Ipray you, how by such hanging back you strengthen the force of evil inthe world and weaken the good. 

As the hour of reaction, weakness, flight, came to Elijah, so we mustexpect it to come to any of us; but the aim and purpose of our lifeshould be that in such an hour we may be able to answer our HeavenlyFather when He questions us, as Elijah was able to answer: "I have beenvery jealous for the Lord God of Hosts. " If we live as those who arejealous for God and His law, letting it be known and felt that we arethus jealous for His honour, not one of us could fail to make the lifearound us in some degree better, brighter, happier. 

It is in this way that he who is strong and true makes truth and honourand uprightness stronger in those beside him; it is in this way that hewho is industrious, as a duty, makes industry more prevalent; it is inthis way that he who shows his hatred of impurity makes the atmospherepure in his society. 

And in so far as any of you are acting in this way you are doing aprophet's work, and you, too, may claim to have been jealous for the LordGod of Hosts. So the youngest boy and the oldest man may become fellow-labourers--[Greek text]--fellow-labourers in the harvest-field of God, and it is a great privilege to claim. 

But the blessing of it is greater still. Very often, if you are known tobe thus jealous, even your presence will banish sin, silencing the eviltongue, strengthening the weaker brother, and making the sunshine of anew life to shine all round you. 

But what if sometimes you feel that you are not equal to all this? ifwhen the voice cries, "What doest thou here?" you have no answer to give?It is good for us in such a case to turn and see how God dealt with Hisprophet, how He made him come forth and stand on the mount before him. The Lord passed over him, revealing His presence in the wind, theearthquake, and the fire, revealing it yet more intimately in the soundof the still small voice. So He sent Him out again with a newcommission; and so we, too, may learn our lesson, if we care to learn it. And the lesson is this, that God renews our wavering strength, that Helifts up our drooping spirit, and opens our dull eyes and gives us afreshthe hearing ear, by communion with Himself. In the solitude of the mountof God, through the symbols of His power, and in the sound of the innervoices, in meditation, in prayer, we may find those refreshing influenceswhich give us new strength, new thoughts, new notions of God and duty, and send us out afresh to do His work in new service to Him. 

We may follow His teaching to Elijah a little further. The new messageto him began, "Return on thy way"--do such and such things. The newmessage is, in fact, just as always, a new call to old duties--"Return onthy way. " And so it is for you and me. After the vision of God comesthe plain and homely work to do, as we walk in old ways, and have to meetall our old dangers and difficulties. Has any one of us ever shrunk fromany post of duty in life, or strayed from any straight course? Then ifGod has in His mercy visited us with the warning call, "What doest thouhere?" or laid the call of a new message upon us, it is almost sure tohave been a call to return and take the straight path, or to take ourstand at the deserted post. And if it should ever happen to us that theduty which looks too hard is, as indeed it happens very often, some dutyof our social life, should we feel as if the world were against us, andwe were standing alone, let us not forget God's word of finalencouragement to his prophet, "Yet have I left me seven thousand inIsrael who have not bowed to Baal. "

It is a word for all time. If ever you are fighting for the good, andgrowing weary in the fight, the thought may rise in you that you seem tobe fighting alone, and that everything is against you, just because youcannot see the seven thousand who are in the same ranks, and on yourside. 

In the darkest hour of Israel's history we are thus told of an indefinitemultitude who had stood firm in the faith of their fathers, untouched anduntainted by adverse influence, and the recollection of it should serveto strengthen and encourage every individual who is really jealous forthat which is good. 

Let us, then, take the warning, and nurse it as a gift of God, and goforward where duty calls us, sometimes faint, it may be, and sometimesweary, but still pursuing. 

 VII. PRIVATE PRAYER, AND PUBLIC WORSHIP. 

 "And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. "--ST. LUKE iv. 16. 

 "He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed. "--ST. MARK i. 35. 

These two texts set before us our Saviour's habit in regard to public andprivate spiritual exercise; and they suggest to us the question, Whathave we, on our part, to say of these two elements in our own life? Thesetexts, we bear in mind, represent not something casual or intermittent inthe life of our Lord. They stand in the record of it as a typical, essential, inseparable part of His habitual practice. What we have toremember about them is that, whereas all men recognise in the life ofJesus the one unique example in human history of a life which is morallyperfect and immaculate, if we were to take these out of it, the customaryshare in all common worship, and the private, separate communing withGod, it would be an altogether different life--different in its attitudetowards the common life of ordinary men, and different in its own qualityand influence. 

We might still admire--nay, we could not but admire--all the beauty ofmoral qualities, the purity, the sympathy, the love and self-devotion ofit; but it would have lost its spiritual atmosphere. It would no longerbe for us the life of the Divine Son, recognising and ready to share inall our attempts at worshipping the Father, however poor they may be, andliving through the separate life in daily communion with Him. 

Here then is His practice, written for our guidance, given that we may bestirred by it to aim upwards, inviting us to set our own practice side byside with it, and see how it looks in such a juxtaposition. Let usglance for a moment at each of these texts separately. 

As regards the one which I have taken from St. Mark--"He went out, anddeparted into a solitary place, and there He prayed"--we have only toturn over the pages of this Gospel and note, as we go, the similarallusions, and we feel that we have here what is in fact an incidentalglimpse into the habitual practice of His secret and separate life. 

In this passage we read that He departed into a solitary place, and thereHe prayed; in another by-and-by that He departed into a mountain to pray;and then again that He spent the whole night in prayer; and we see allthis not in some crisis of His life, but as a part of that whichcorresponds to the common daily round in your life or mine. 

And the inference to be drawn, the lesson to be learnt from it, is, Ithink, sufficiently obvious. 

This secret separate devotional exercise of the soul was His habitualspiritual food. 

It was thus that He recruited His moral and spiritual forces, thoseforces of the spiritual life which constitute at once the beauty, theattraction, the power of His character, and His divine and awe-inspiringseparateness. 

 And as we read and consider, the thought must surely be pressed upon usthat if He needed these exercises, these secret and silent hours, whatshall we say of our own lives?

And what do we expect to make of our moral and spiritual character unlesswe too are careful to cherish under all circumstances some such recurringmoments in our round of life and occupation, at which we retire into thesanctuary of separate communion with God the Father?

You may take it as a moral certainty, proved by all experience, thatunless you hold to a fixed habit of thus bringing your life into thesecret and separate presence of God, in private prayer and thought, youincur the risk of sinking to any levels that happen to be the ordinarylevels, and of drifting with any currents that happen to prevail. 

If we turn now from this to the other text--that which refers to Hiscustomary attendance on public prayer and at the common meeting--"Hewent, as His custom was, into the synagogue"--the questions suggested arevery pertinent and practical. 

Just consider the circumstances under which, as we are told here, "Hewent, as His custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. " Theearlier part of the same chapter tells us of His fasting and temptationin the wilderness, of the commencement of His public mission, and hisreturn to Nazareth. And, on His return, this is what we are told ofhim--"He went, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day. "

Thus we see Him, fresh from the great crisis of His early manhood; thelong, protracted struggle of His soul in the lonely wilderness; thesubtle voices of manifold temptation; the hardly won victory and theministering angels; all this we must suppose to be still flashing acrossHis vision, as the scenes of any such crisis must always continue toflash through the quivering and responsive organism of the soul. 

If ever any man might have claimed to need no longer the customaryworship of common men, it was surely Jesus, as we see Him here on thisoccasion, with the breath of His own heart-searching worship still uponHim, and the light of new revelation burning in His thoughts. 

Among all the significant and instructive parts of the Saviour's examplethis is not the least instructive; that on this occasion, as on allothers, he went as a matter of regular custom into the synagogue on theSabbath day, thus putting the seal and stamp of His own practice for allof us who believe in His name upon the duty of joining in habitual andstated spiritual exercises. 

Had the Lord's example been different in this respect, how easy it wouldhave seemed to set up a string of what we should have called sufficientreasons. 

The old-fashioned routine, it might have been said, of synagogue worship, with its mechanical dulness and its mistaken interpretations of God'sword, its shallow and superficial and tedious traditional commentaries, its formalism and vain repetitions; all this, whatever might have beenits value for the ordinary unenlightened Jew, how could it have beennecessary and what profit could there have been in it for the divinelygifted Son of man?

So it might have been argued; so indeed it would seem men who considerthemselves enlightened sometimes argue in support of their own neglect ofthe religious life. 

But it may well make us more than doubtful as to the issue of any suchneglect, when we see the mind of Christ thus exemplified in His habitualobservance. 

We all recognise His moral and spiritual superiority. Whether His spirithas taken possession of our spirit or not, He stands out as ourundisputed guide to the practice of a good life. 

In vision, in insight, in purity, in stainlessness, in all that wereverence in human life and that good men strive to attain, we have nomodel to set beside His example. All the more, then, this fact deservesour notice, and calls us to follow Him, that we find Him, as His customwas, in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He was there Sabbath afterSabbath listening to the provincial teacher, worshipping with the villagelabourer, praying with the ignorant and the foolish, there as a matter oflife custom and for His soul's benefit. 

I have said that it deserves our notice; but more than this--it should begraven on the minds of the young, so that they may never lose theimpression of it, so that it go with them through all their years ofmanhood, to preserve in them the devotional and reverent habit. 

It is indeed good for all of us to think of Him there in that primitiveand unattractive house of God, listening to the rude Galilean accents, and bowing His head in the habitual worship of that obscure community. 

I do not think it is possible for us, unless we are quite indifferentabout our moral and spiritual condition--unless, that is, we have lownotions about our life, a low aim and a low standard--to be unaffected inour practice by this example of the Lord. We can hardly believe thatthose exercises of the spirit which were so fruitful in His life willfail to bear their fruit in ours also. 

What have we to say as we picture Him with all the great thoughts of Hisnew work swelling up in His soul, the divinely appointed teacher of newwisdom and new faith, the bringer of new light among men, the voice of anew world, and yet, being all this, at the same time, and as a means forworking out His mission more completely, a regular and devout worshipperin a village house of prayer?

If it should ever happen to any of us that we come to fancy we do notneed such common prayer, or that because of defects in public worship wedo not profit by it, does not this example of the Saviour rise up andrebuke us? Yes, you may rest assured, if that day ever comes to you, that you are in danger of drifting away from the great saving tides ofthe human spirit into some shallow or artificial stream of your own timeand generation. But, on the other hand, it is a happy thing for our lifeif, growing up in the habitual use of time-honoured spiritual exercises, we have truly learnt to know by our own experience, as by the example ofthe Saviour set before us in the Gospel, that they are the support andsafeguard of all that is highest and purest and best in us, if only weare careful to use them with sincerity and reverence. 

 VIII. AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION. 

 "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one. "--JOB xiv. 4. 

This is one of those simple questions which, by their very simplicity anddirectness, set us thinking about the importance of our personal life. 

"Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?" But all our common lifeis somehow the outcome of our separate individual lives--of your life andmine. Therefore how important it is in the common interest that each ofus should look above all things to his own life and its character, forthis will determine his contribution to the life of his society. 

Nearly all men are keen about the reputation of their society, about thename it bears, about the way in which men think and speak of it. 

Thus you are no doubt sensitive, almost every one of you, about the goodreputation of your school or your house, or any society with which youmay happen to be closely connected or identified. 

And this is a healthy and praiseworthy feeling. It would indeed be a badsign if such a feeling were wanting or weak in any society. 

But I am not sure that we keep it before us--all of us--as clearly as weought to do, that this reputation of the society is simply the outcome ofour separate lives and habits. 

The reputation is the reflex of the life; hardly ever, perhaps, an exactreflex, very often a distorted reflex with this or that featureexaggerated; but yet always a reflex. 

The reputation you bear is the impression made by your common life on theminds of those who see it from the outside, or who hear men's talk aboutit. 

 And we do well to be sensitive on such a subject; but we do still betterif we bear in mind that this common life is what comes out of our ownlife, and is the result of its contact with that of our neighbour. 

And with this thought in our minds we feel how searching and how directlypersonal is this primitive and childlike question, Who can bring a cleanthing out of an unclean?

Societies, especially young societies, are very impressible, and theircharacter--the quality, that is, of their life--is fixed by prevailinginfluences, which show themselves in fashions, habits, and tendencies, inthe common types of thought, or taste, or behaviour, or conduct. 

This is obvious enough to every one; but what we do not seem always toconsider is the extent to which these influences or fashions have theirorigin, so far as our own society is concerned, in our own lives. Theyare, in fact, in the main the general outcome of our separate lives. 

 Do you, then, think of yourselves--this is the practical question towhich these considerations lead up--as sources or centres of suchinfluence, contributing your personal share to this common life?

It may make an immense difference to all your thoughts about your commonhabits, and your standards of daily conduct and duty, if you rememberthis ancient saying, that no man can bring a clean thing out of anunclean. And so I have to ask you to consider a little how the commonlife of this society is dependent upon your life. 

Every individual acts upon the life of the community around him as apower or influence in it. This seems so obvious when mentioned as hardlyto deserve the mentioning, and yet in practice we are very apt tooverlook it. 

You and I, all of us, without any exception, are endowed with some shareof this power. 

In this respect, as in other ways, there is, of course, every possibledifference in degree between one and another, between the strong and theweak, between those who are conspicuous and those who are obscure; butthere is no other difference. 

Every one of you possesses some share of this mysterious, and undefined, and immeasurable gift of influencing his neighbour's life. Every sinthat may have a root in your heart is acting, though you may not think ofit or intend it, as a pestilent influence outside your own life; everyvirtue you exercise may be causing similar virtues to take root and growin some one near to you. 

The tone of the society or life around you is, in fact, just the sum andexpression of such individual influences as these. 

We may not be able to trace all the various and multitudinous germs orseeds of such influence as they flow out from us in our daily round ofcommon life; but we are conscious that each and every single soul, allthrough its earthly course, in the family and in the outer world, fromyouth to age, is, in fact, a sower scattering these germs of good or evilunceasingly. We know, also, that when they are once scattered theycannot be gathered up again. They are yours to scatter--these seeds thatyou are adding to the common life--and you are responsible for the fruitthey bear; but having sown them, you are powerless afterwards to preventthem from bearing fruit after their kind in other lives. Once launchedin the air around you, they spread their contagion of evil or theirstimulus to good, their savour of life or death. 

The mere suspicion of this undefined power over other lives which isinherent in our own life should surely make us very careful about it. 

It gives a new sense of personal responsibility; it lays its hand upon usto check us in any vice, or folly, or sin; and it is a stimulus to everyvirtue and to all good purposes. 

But the thing which of all others it is perhaps of most importance for usto remember about it is that this stream of our personal influence whichflows out of our life is a double stream. It is of two kinds. One partof it flows unconsciously, whether we think of it or not; it streams outfrom our personality as sunlight from the sun. 

The other is that which we exercise by some conscious effort of the will, and with some deliberate purpose or intention. 

Now, in the case of most of us, this tide of unconscious influenceflowing from us without any deliberate or set purpose on our part, ourinvoluntary contribution to the common life, is far more powerful forgood or for evil than anything which we ever do by way of active purposeto influence another's life, and this because our unconscious influenceis the reflex on the outer world of what we are in ourselves; it is theprojection, or shall we say the radiation, of our own life, its tastes, tempers, habits, and character, upon the lives around us. 

What we do or intend to do, what influence we endeavour to exercise, isvery likely to be at the best intermittent, but this door of involuntarycommunication between every man's life and his neighbour's life is alwaysstanding open; and so it comes about that your life, whether public orprivate, is of more importance to others than anything else about you. 

At a time when so many things contribute to fix men's thoughts onexternals, and we are all tempted to think more about our work than aboutour life, more about what we are doing or intending to do, than of whatwe are in ourselves, these considerations assume an unusual importance. 

Moreover, in a society like this, where you live so close to one another, and so much in public, there is a special reason for giving to suchconsiderations some special attention; and the thought suggested by thisworld-old inquiry--Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?--becomesa very direct warning to look well to our separate life, and take carewhat sort of unconscious influences it is spreading around it. 

A moment's reflection will remind you how quick and strong suchinfluences may easily prove, independent of all intention or desire onour part, or even in spite of our deliberate wishes or hopes. One man iscareless or irreligious, and his weaker neighbours catch the infection ofhis example; another indulges in some bad habits of language or conduct, or he is addicted to some low taste, or he lives by some low standard, and this or that companion is drawn down to his level; and so the evil ofhis life takes fresh root in another life, and it gets into the air, andit is impossible to predict the limit of its influence. 

Or, on the other hand, one man is intellectual or refined in his tastes, and by merely living in a society he creates an atmosphere of intellector of refinement around him; or, it may be, he is earnest and courageous, and others are drawn to admire and imitate, and so he proves a centre ofcourage and earnestness. Such is the solidarity of your life, as mencall it, and there is no escape from it, or from the responsibilitieswhich it lays upon you. 

 As the tree is known by its fruits, as men do not gather grapes ofthorns, as the same fountain does not send forth sweet water and bitter, so we have to remember, when we think of the tides of unconsciousinfluence that are continually streaming out from us, that they arewholesome, or the reverse, according to the character of our secret andseparate life. 

Through them any one of us may become to his neighbour or his friend asavour of life unto life, or of death unto death. 

There are sure to be many in such a congregation as this who have visionsof the good they hope to do; and there is a spirit of native generosityin almost all which makes them shrink from the thought of doing harm toanother soul. 

Well, then, in this thought of your influence, conscious and unconscious, your first and constant prayer will surely be: "Create in me a cleanheart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. "

The effective servant of God is always the man who has been prepared andpurified by the vision of God in his own soul. 

If, then, we desire to contribute some good to our society and no evil, we must take care to keep our hearts open to the cleansing influences ofthe spirit of holiness, so that no habit of sin shall cast its darkshadow around us, or vitiate that atmosphere which is inseparable fromour personal life. 

 IX. SOWING BESIDE ALL WATERS. 

 "Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters. "--ISAIAH xxxii. 20. 

These words form part of a great prophetic vision. The prophet isstanding among his countrymen like a watchman on the walls of Jerusalem. And far away, as he looks, the distant horizon of his stormy sky isbright with Messianic hopes, but around him the shadows lie dark andheavy. 

It was his destiny to speak to a people whose ears were dull of hearingand their hearts without understanding; but he never lost the convictionthat the holy seed of God's spirit was alive in them. Amidst all presentdiscouragement he lived in the hope of a brighter and better day, whenthe eyes of those around him would be opened, and their hearts changed, and a new spirit would take hold of them, and righteousness, peace, prosperity, and gladness would prevail. And no man's life is worth muchwhich is not inspired by some such hope. 

What Isaiah saw immediately around him was sin and moral blindness. Whathe saw immediately in front of him was the consequence of these in woeand desolation. "Year upon year, " he cries, "shall ye be troubled, yecareless ones: thorns and briers shall come upon the land of my people:until the spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness shallbecome a planted field. " But in the day of that outpouring, the heart ofthe people would turn and be uplifted, renewed, and purified, thewilderness would become a planted field. And this thought brings him tothe final outburst of the text I have just read to you, which is ablessing on those true Israelites who realised the high calling of God'speople, and were inspired to fulfil it, sowing everywhere and always theseeds of Divine influence. The whole vision is highly instructive, forit is the vision of what occurs again and again in all human history; butit is of this blessing with which it closes that I desire to say a wordor two to-day. 

Amidst all the threatening and discouraging symptoms of the nationallife, Isaiah turned to the bright vision of those servants of God whosefaith should never fail, and in whom there should be no variableness, andno wavering. "Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters. " Sow your seedof good influence, he seems to say to them, in good times, in bad times;sow it in this place, and in every place, sow it in the wastes of themoral wilderness, sow it in the face of every enemy, sow it in faith andhope and without fear. It is on them he depends to prepare for thathappier season when the wilderness of the spiritual life around himshould become as a planted field; and with prophetic insight he perceivesthat it is on such as these that the Divine blessing always rests. "Blessed are they that sow beside all waters. " It is a text to be takenwith us whenever any change comes over the circumstances of our life. Ifwe are changing from a life of rule or discipline to a life of freechoice, from school to home, from boyhood to manhood, this blessingdeclares that there should be no change in the attitude and purpose andaim of life. 

It is another way of saying that the laws which should guide our conduct, and the principles which should inspire and direct us, are of universalapplication; that they know no difference of time or place, and that ifthey bind you here they should bind you everywhere. And simple andobvious as this may seem, it is not altogether an easy truth to carryinto practice. "Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters. " Your seedfield is not here or there only; it lies on every side of you, and in allplaces; it spreads into the future farther than your eye can travel, andit will extend itself before you as you go; and the reality and vigour ofgood purpose in you will be determined by your recognition of this truth. 

 Let us consider it with reference to our own case at such a time asthis. 

There are always growing up here in every generation those who feel apride in their school, and in the spirit of it, who strive honestly andearnestly to sow in their society the seeds of manliness, andtruthfulness, and good tone, and purity. It would soon go very ill withthis or any other society if it were not so. And those who grow up inthis way are continually leaving us in their turn, and they will rememberwith affection the place of their high purposes and earnest and manlyefforts. They go out into a new world, and travel along other streams;and blessed are they, if they continue faithful, sowing still beside allwaters. 

But every change brings with it some element of risk. There is nearlyalways something of surprise to us in the new forces that confront us inany society which we enter as strangers; and the first feeling that risesis sometimes a feeling of our own weakness or insignificance. 

 In such a case it is well if we have realised beforehand that our lawsof conduct should not vary, and that the call of God, which we haverecognised once, is a call which never ceases, and which no circumstancesshould make inaudible. 

When we approach any change we all need this kind of warning; becausethere are so many things in our life which we are apt to allow ourcircumstances to regulate for us. Experience tells us only too plainlyhow much we depend upon the influences that are around us, and how oftenwe fail to carry with us the strength we have gained in one field when wepass over to the next. With the holy we learn in some degree to beourselves holy; with a perfect man we too are able to walk perfectly; buton the other hand, in our imitative way, as the scene changes, wesometimes find ourselves learning frowardness with the froward, practising indifference with the indifferent, if not actually slippingwith the vicious into some vicious way. There is always some risk ofsuch changes; and it is always well for us to be taking care that ourbetter life has its root in our own heart and spirit, and that we do notwear it as a garment suited to the society in which we happen to be, andchange it for the worse, if there comes any corresponding change inoutward influences. 

Hence it is that at these times, when we are about to separate, thesewords of Isaiah come to us with a very appropriate reminder: "Blessed areye that sow beside all waters. "

To those who are leaving our society to begin a new life elsewhere, as tothose of us who go in the hope of returning by-and-by, they are chargedwith the same lesson. They bid us all alike take care and see that whatis good in our present life has become our own personal and permanentpossession, independent of surroundings; that it has sunk in some degreeinto the fibre of our character; that it is settled in us by convictionand principle, to guide and direct us everywhere, and is not merely acircumstantial garment, a sort of livery of this or that particularplace, which will slip off us as we leave it. 

Many of you have learnt, I feel sure of it, to feel during these yourschool days, the satisfaction of living here a true and worthy life; youhave tasted of that pleasure which the careless, the indifferent, and thesinful hardly taste at all, the pleasure that dwells with theconsciousness of earnest effort and sincere striving after the bestthings within us. The love of Christ may have taken hold upon you; theassociations of your school and its inheritance of great and goodexamples, or the sense of honour may have stirred you; the feeling ofyour closeness in life to those around you, and of the strong currents ofmutual influence, may have opened your eyes to what you owe to yourneighbour and to the claims of social duty. Some one of these causes, orit may be some other cause, may have given you strength and power to walkamongst us in the narrow way of good habit and good influence. Andwherever this is so, we thank God. But the question to-day is, Whatassurance do you feel that this will continue? When we go elsewhere, what habits, what tendencies, what fixed bent of spirit and charactershall we exhibit? Knowing as we do how strongly the forces of the outerworld will act upon us, it is never a useless warning which bids us takecare that in new spheres we do not forget our old principles, or layaside any good habits. "Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters. "

We have learnt to look upon certain laws of conduct and feeling, certainduties, certain standards of life, as beyond dispute, and fundamental. Ifso, they are also of universal application; and we should hold them asthings which are altogether independent of the customs, traditions, ortone of any society into which we may go. 

It is probable that some of you may find this doctrine not altogetherfree from difficulties before many weeks are over. You may findyourselves young and apparently uninfluential members of some society inwhich the standards of life are low, and you may be tempted to think, under the pressure of surrounding opinion, that you are not called uponto set up or display any standard of your own; and there is always achorus of voices ready enough to echo any such tempting suggestions. 

But if ever you are tempted thus to let slip the things you have learntand accepted, the voice of Isaiah should prove a help and a safeguard. And its exhortation is supported by the respect and admiration you feelfor any one who has the courage to stand alone in such a case, true tohis rooted convictions. 

Another word may be added. We met, a great many of us, this morning atthat table to which men do not come unless they entertain the purpose oftreading in the footsteps of Christ, and of nursing His Holy Spirit intheir hearts. As we lifted up our hearts there, as we ate of that breadand drank of that cup, as we prayed to be kept safe from the sins thatmost easily beset us, as we sealed in each other's presence theresolutions which are to direct our steps in safe paths, it was not ofcircumstances or places that we were thinking--it was the vision ofChrist our Saviour that was before our eyes, and we pray that this visionmay remain with us. When we think of all our diverging paths as weseparate just now, and of the uncertainty how many of us may meet againin that far horizon, and how many may have wandered out of the way in thewilderness, we do not doubt that we shall often need the strengtheninginfluence of this vision of Christ, if we, too, hope to inherit theblessing which is reserved for those who are faithful under allcircumstances, and who sow beside all waters. 

 X. THE PRESENCE OF GOD. 

 "And Jacob awakened out of his sleep and said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. "--GENESIS xxviii. 16. 

These words indicate the beginning of a new life in the patriarch Jacob. They tell us of the moment when, as it would appear, his soul awoke inhim. And they surprise us in some degree, as such awakenings ofspiritual capacity often do; for Jacob's recorded antecedents were notexactly such as to lead us to expect the dream and the vision, and theawakening which are described in this passage. 

He had cheated his brother out of his father's blessing; he was leavinghis father's house in consequence, to avoid this brother's threatenedvengeance; and as he slept at Bethel he dreamed his dream of the ladderset up on earth and reaching to heaven; and he saw the angels ascendingand descending, and the Lord standing above it, and he heard the Divinevoice charged with promise and with blessing: "I am with thee, and willkeep thee in all places whither thou goest. " This, taking it in all itsparts, is a very surprising narrative; and the point in it on which Idesire to fix your attention for a moment is this, that this visionstartled him into a new consciousness--"Surely the Lord is in this place;and I knew it not. " It was the beginning of a new life. 

That vision, we may be sure, never entirely faded. He was neverafterwards the same man he had been before it. It had awakened thedivine capacity in him; and it remained with him as a constant reminderof the presence of God in his life, to protect and to inspire him--"I amwith thee, and I will keep thee in all places whither thou goest. " Sucha voice as this in a man's heart gives his life a new quality; it putshim in a new relation to all common things. 

 We may well believe that it was this more than anything else which drewJacob apart from the common heathen life around him, from that dayonwards. It was this which, in spite of all his weaknesses, defects, andfailures in life and character, gradually raised him to a differentlevel. 

It was this which finally culminated in transforming him from Jacob thesupplanter to Israel the prince of God. 

So far as appears, he had gone out from his home, as so many go forth inall ages, a dull soul, though with latent capacities, his thoughts benton securing his personal safety and his worldly success. But he woke inthe desert after that vision, with the seeds of the new life rooted andgrowing in him. 

It is this moment of awakening on which I desire to fix yourthoughts--this moment of his transfiguration; when he saw and felt aheaven above him, and yet very close, with its ladder of angeliccommunication, which he had not _so_ seen or felt before; the moment whena new consciousness flashed through his soul, and illumined unsuspectedchambers in it, stirring new thoughts and new aspirations. He woke up tobe a new man henceforth, moving in a new presence, and having always inhis ears the voice of a Divine call. 

Do you ask why I dwell on this familiar history, or desire that youshould contemplate and realise this change in the young man Jacob? It isbecause there is just the same soul, the same capacity of higher life inevery one of us: in some it is awake already and transfiguring theirlife; in others still latent, sleeping, undiscovered. 

I dwell on it because it makes and will make all the difference in theworld to your life whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not. This, then, is what I have to postulate as giving a value beyond thepower of words to describe to every soul amongst us. 

It bids us recognise and keep always before us that in every common life, of child or man, even in the most worldly or the hardest, the mostfrivolous, the most cynical, the most sensual, or the most degraded, there is latent, it may be altogether unfelt and disregarded through longyears, giving no sign of its presence, it may be, it often is, overlaid, trodden down, even at the point of death, but still there, this livingsoul with all its possibilities. It is within every one of us, stampedwith the image of God, and charged with unimagined possibilities. 

And it must be obvious that the whole difference between any two lives, between your life and your neighbour's life, may depend on this awakeningof the soul in one of you and its not awakening in the other. 

Of the two brothers, Esau and Jacob, I suppose we are all drawn at theoutset to Esau; our heart goes out to him, as we read, the impulsive, theimpetuous, the affectionate, and we feel a corresponding dislike ofJacob's craft and cunning, and selfish calculations. There can be nodoubt, we say, which was the meaner character to begin with. 

 But neither is there any doubt why it was that it came to be written, "Jacob I have loved, but Esau have I hated. " The one was just the childof the world around him, yielding to its temptations, living by itsstandards. The soul in him never awoke, so as to transfigure histhoughts and purposes. The other is a man of Divine visions, inspiredwith the sense of a Divine presence and a Divine purpose directing him. 

Nowhere do we see more clearly than in this narrative how great a changemay come to any of us, if the unawakened capacities of our soul aretouched by the breath of some uplifting inspiration. 

As we read of this contrast between Esau and Jacob, and their destinies, we feel--and we feel it all the more because Jacob to begin with seems tobe made of such common clay--we feel what a transforming power in a man'slife this awaking of the soul may be. 

A life which is without the inspiration that takes possession of us inthe moments of this awakening, and is consequently without these visionsthat flash before the soul as it awakens, a life that is not deeplystirred by spiritual hopes or Divine thought, or the call to new duty, remains in one man a selfish and worldly life, in another a frivolous, ina third a sensual life. But the very same life--and here is thepractical value to us, here is the hopefulness of such considerations--thevery same life, when the breath of God's spirit or His penetrating voicehas stirred and roused the soul in it, is felt to be transformed. Theman is born anew. 

"There is nothing finer, " some one has said, "than to see a soul rise upin men, which amazes the very men in whom it rises. " They are surprisedto find that these new capacities were in them, unnoticed through theircareless days, yet in them all the time. This birth of the new life, with all its promise of new tastes, new ambitions, new thoughts, newpurposes, may indeed come to you without your feeling all at once howgreat a thing it is. At first it may be nothing more than some vision ofthe possibilities of your life, or some electric flash of newconsciousness that runs through you, or the sharp pang of remorse forsome sin or some neglect, or the flush of shame or repulsion as you thinkof something or other in your life, or the glow of some good resolutionto begin some new life or new duty, or take some new turn, or pursue somenew aim. You hardly think perhaps of this as the awakening of your soul. It may never have occurred to you to think of it as being just as sacreda thing as was Jacob's vision at Bethel, as being indeed the work of thesame Divine spirit. 

But let us consider it a little further. Whatever it is that is thusstirring in your heart, it comes and it comes again; it lingers in yourthoughts and feelings; it haunts, it impresses and awes you; it risesbefore you suddenly and stops you from some sin, or, if it fails to stopyou, it turns the pleasure for which you craved into wretchedness; or itencourages and consoles you in some hour of weakness or sorrow. Isuppose there is hardly one of you who has not had some such experienceas this. And if you ask. What is it? It is, I repeat, the awakening ofthe soul in you--nothing less than this--and happy is it for you, if yourecognise that it is the soul striving to win its proper place in theregulation of your life. 

When Moses saw the vision of the burning bush, and suddenly felt himselfon holy ground; when Elijah heard the still, small voice calling, "Whatdoest thou here, Elijah?" when Saul, on his way to Damascus, fell to theground conscience-smitten, crushed, blinded, rebuked; when the childSamuel heard the Divine voice calling to him in the darkness of thenight;--in each case it was the awakening or the reawakening of thesoul--the uprising of the spiritual capacities, the vision of the higherlife--and so exactly with all of _you_. Are you not sometimes consciousof the uprisings in you of a spirit calling upon you to recognise theangels' ladder that connects _your_ life also with the heaven above us?

 If so, there is this further thing to note about such moments ofexperience. 

This feeling of some spiritual capacity in you, this call to some higherview of life and duty, this uprising of the moral sense and the repulsiontowards the lower forms of life which comes with it--this is God'spersonal gift to us, and we pray that you may possess it early; for it isnot only a new consciousness, it is itself a new power in your life. 

You cannot have it, feeling its presence and hearing its suggestions, anddebase your life in any way, as you might have done, but for itspresence. It is so very true that, in the life of the Spirit, looking upmeans lifting up. As the plant turns to the sun, it grows towards thesun; as it looks up to the light, it grows towards the light; so it iswith us. We feel that we are sons of God, and we tend to become so. Through some influence or other, we awake to a vivid consciousness thatGod has created us in His image, endowed us with Divine capacities, andthis consciousness becomes a purifying and inspiring force in our life, and it is a new life in consequence. 

Pray that such influences may prevail around you here, and that you mayhold them fast until they have blessed your life. 

 XI. "MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER. "

 "So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. "--ROMANS xii. 5. 

There are some moral and spiritual truths which it seems to be almostimpossible to impress upon the practical life of the world, although theymeet with a sort of universal acceptance. 

Men agree with them, they re-echo them, they applaud them; they doeverything, in fact, but exhibit them as the moving, inspiring, andguiding truths of their daily practice. 

And among these I fear we must still class that one which is expressed inthe text I have just read, a text which sets forth the fundamental factthat whatever else Christianity may teach, it teaches as one of its firstand principal lessons that a Christian man has to live in Christ for hisneighbours. 

 If such a text means anything, it means that Christianity is essentiallya religion of society, that it sets before us social claims as standingbefore all other claims; that, starting from the Divine Sacrifice as thecentral fact of human life, it was intended to root out of our hearts thenoxious weed of selfishness by the power of the Divine love, and to buildup the organisation of men in their common relationships upon this newbasis. 

It may sound somewhat strange to speak at this time of day of whatChristianity is intended to do, rather than what it has done already. 

But it is even more strange to read the teaching of the Sermon on theMount, and all the other words of the Lord; all the lessons of His lifeand His sacrifice; the history of the first generation of Christians; thedescent of the Spirit upon them; and the teaching of the apostolicbrotherhood--to remember that all this is our accepted faith; that it hasbeen the faith of one generation after another for eighteen hundredyears; that we grow up in this faith, live in it, and die in it; and atthe same time to contemplate side by side with it all the elements of thecommon life, all the rules and customs of society, all the standards ofconduct which ordinary men take as their measure of daily duty andpurpose. 

Thus, whilst on the one hand Christian influences, and all the changes inthe world's life which are due to them, fill us with wonder andgratitude, the failures of Christianity are scarcely less impressive. 

When we consider the ordinary run of men's lives, so different for themost part in spirit, and in aim and guiding rules, from that type whichthe New Testament sets before us, it would almost seem as if to themajority their religion was not a ruling and dominating principle, pervading this present life, but only an _ideal_, shedding around us aglow of indefinite hopes and possibilities, an ideal hardly to berealised, laid up somewhere in the heavens--[Greek text]. Thesecontrasts between the revelation of the Gospel and the standards of theChristian world have always troubled the most earnest spirits in everygeneration. Some of you remember, no doubt, how this contrast betweenChristian profession and the life of selfish sin and waste flashed intofierce poetry in one such spirit of the last generation, who grew up inthis school. 

 "Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I passed, With fiercer heat than flamed above my head My heart was hot within me, till at last My brain was lightened when my tongue had said Christ is not risen. "

And men who are truly in earnest about faith and life, and who areperplexed and distressed by the contradictions and insincerities thatmeet them, must often be moved as he was. 

And yet, when we look closer, and consider that the battle of spiritualprogress has this peculiarity attached to it, that it has to be foughtover again, in every generation, and in every separate individual soul, the result is less surprising. Remembering this, we do not expect thevictory of the last generation to save us from defeat or failure. 

 And this has to be borne in mind equally in regard to the continuouslife of societies and to our own separate lives. Thus in such a societyas this, if our predecessors uplifted the standards of conduct, inculcated high principles, and inspired their generation with a strongpervading spirit, this should make it easier for us to do likewise; butit does not insure our doing it. All this higher life will die in ourhands if the same regenerating spirit is not alive and working in ourhearts also. So, again, your individual victory over sin in the power ofthe Spirit in you, does not save my life from having to fight the battlefor itself and win its own victories. 

So that, however perplexing the phenomena of life may seem whilst we lookat them in the mass or from the outside, if we read the Gospel of Christas a message to our own souls a great deal of the perplexity disappears. And it was with this personal message that Christ came, and there is nohope of our understanding His mission, or of living in the light of Histransforming spirit, if we think of it in any other way than this. 

The purpose of His revelation is to crucify the selfish instinct in us, and to rouse us to the life of self-devotion, to the idea of consecratedenergies; and this being so, all Christian life is of the nature of awarfare; and a warfare which begins afresh with each generation of men;because selfishness, with all its tribe of attendant appetites andpassions, springs afresh in every single soul, and is nurtured, strengthened, cultivated, by so many of the conditions of life. 

If, then, the Spirit of Christ is really to prevail in our life, it mustbe by effecting our emancipation from selfish instincts, and rousing inus the spirit of devotion to the good of other lives. 

In proportion as you diminish selfishness in your own life or in anyother, by fostering generous affections and cultivating the spirit ofsocial duty and religious aspiration, by walking in the footsteps ofChrist and living in the light of His presence, you are laying the onlypossible foundation of any lasting progress, you are following the onetrue method by which the mystery of sin is to be overcome. 

We may wonder that this should be so difficult; for of selfishness weshould say that we all dislike it. In its grosser forms we repudiate it. The very word is one which we articulate with a certain accent ofcontempt. 

But when we come to its refined and subtle workings in our nature, whenwe think of its Proteus-like changeableness, its power of assuming thevarious guises even of duty or religion; when we reflect how it canclothe itself in the choicest garb of art, or science, or divinephilosophy, we find very likely that we are always in danger of beingenslaved by it. 

And we do well to pray in all sincerity that grace may expel ourselfishness; for indeed the influence of true religion is to be gauged bythe extent to which this prayer is being fulfilled in us. The fulfilmentof it is what we mean by the regenerate life. 

 I need not ask you how you feel in the presence of any character whichyou recognise as cleansed from all taint of selfishness, a character, softened, refined, purified, inspired, consecrated. I would rather askwhether you know of any personal influence to be compared with that ofsuch a character. 

And if, as I anticipate, you would answer that there is none like it, Iwould ask you to bear in mind that this influence may be yours. You areinvited by all the highest calls within and around you to make it yours. "What is the aim and purpose of his life?" is a question which men arejustified in asking about us; and they are justified in passing theirverdict upon us by the answer which our life gives. 

Does he live for himself, they will ask, for his own pleasures, his owndelights, be they coarse or refined, his own indulgence, his ownparticular interest? Is there anything of the spirit or enthusiasm ofsacrifice visible in the ordinary tenor of his actions?

 The world, this Christian world, is full of those concerning whom theanswer to such questions can only be a distinct negative; and yet we knowthat in all such characters, whether in youth or age, Christianity is afailure. 

Therefore we shall accept it as our primary duty, the purpose of ourexistence as a Christian school, to train up men who shall be penetratedby the spirit of unselfishness, possessed by the feeling that their livesare to be consecrated to the common good. 

Societies differ very widely in the type of character they impress. 

Here and there we see a society, here and there a school, which hassomehow acquired the power to stamp on those who go out from it a certainimpress of nobility. 

They go forth like the knights of our famous English legend--imperfect nodoubt and erring, but each one of them inspired with the consciousnessthat his life is a holy quest. 

There are other societies and schools among them which seem to possesseverything but this one power. 

What, then, are we to say of our hopes? What is to be the mission of ourgeneration here? Shall we contribute anything to raise the common type?Or shall we drift on as the world drifts, a little better, or a littleworse?

Shall we not rather pray and hope as we begin once more to weave the webof mutual influence, that you may grow up here not altogether like theherd of common men, but emancipated early from the life of selfishdesire, feeling the spirit of Christ within you, remembering yourbaptismal vows, with eyes open to heavenly visions, and not disobedientunto them?

 XII. THE SOWER AND THE SEED. 

 "A sower went out to sow his seed. "--ST. LUKE viii. 5. 

It is significant that the first of the Saviour's parables is the parableof the sower, that the first thing to which He likens His own work isthat of the sower of seed, the first lesson He has to impress upon us byany kind of comparison is that the word of God is a seed sown in ourhearts, a something which contains in it the germ of a new life. 

It is no less significant that He returns so often to this same kind ofcomparison for the purpose of impressing us always with the primary fact, that our relationship to God, the Father of Spirits, in other words ourspiritual condition at the present moment, our hope for the time to come, does not depend upon some body of doctrine, but on our having receivedinto the secret places of the heart the seeds of a new life. 

This is suggestive of a great many considerations which touch our lifevery closely; but I will not turn aside to them at this moment, as mydesire is to fix your thoughts for the present on this one fundamentalthing, that the principle of moral and spiritual life in you is a seed, and as such it is endowed with a power of independent separate growth; itwas intended to grow in you. 

The sower casts his seed upon the earth and goes his way, and, once sown, it springs up and grows, as Jesus said in another parable, "he knowethnot how. " This, then, is the truth which He is impressing on ourattention, when He speaks of His revelation as a seed, a seed to be sownby hands which have no control over it except to sow it. The soul ofeach and every one of us is a seed-field, and the seeds of new life andpurpose should be growing in it. 

As we recall the other parable of the seed growing secretly, recorded inSt. Mark's Gospel, we feel even more strongly how the essence of all ourlife is in seeds of influence. "So is the Kingdom of Heaven as if a manshould cast seed upon the earth, and the seed should spring up and grow, he knoweth not how. " It grows in us mysteriously we know not how. 

And I am not sure that we all, indeed I think it likely that we do notall, take it home to our thoughts with sufficient seriousness that thismysterious growth in the thing sown implies a mysterious vital power orforce which is inherent in it. 

I call it a mysterious vital power, because all life is a mystery to us. The very thought of life lands us in mystery, in mystery which defiesanalysis. We know that all the life in us and around us follows certainlaws, as we call them, the life of plants, the life of animals, the lifeof man, each following its own laws after its kind, and that is all weknow about it. We can observe its action, its uniformities, itssequences, and variations, but beyond this we cannot penetrate itssecret. It grows mysteriously, we know not how. 

But this much we know, that no life is spontaneously generated. Thescience of our day has demonstrated it, as we believe, beyond dispute, that you cannot create life out of dead matter. All life comes from someantecedent life. Wherever you see life of any kind, you know that theremust have been before it some form of life which was its parent. 

Yet again, the scientific investigator points out another suggestivefact, that the lower creature does not of its own lower nature expandinto the higher, but that life is lifted up and grows by the infusion ofsomething higher than itself. So, too, we believe that the Spirit of Godtouches with its mysterious power the dead souls of men; it transformsthem, it uplifts them, they are born again. They are roused and stirredto new capacity by the touch and inspiration of this Divine life. Thisis what is meant when it is said that if any man be in Christ he is a newcreature. He has received into his nature this mysterious gift, orrather this seed of the new life. 

Such is the Christian doctrine of the new birth, or of the life-givingbreath of the Spirit, or of the sowing the seed of Divine life in us. Youmay describe it how you please, if only you take due note of this, thatin proportion as you realise or accept this truth as in any wayintimately connected with your own personal life and conduct, all thecommon things around you acquire a new importance, and I might even saysome touch of sacredness, because they are felt to be strewn with theseseeds of influence which God is sowing around us, with a hand that neverrests, through all our years, in uncounted ways. 

This seed of new life which is to save you from the power of sin and theflesh and give you new aspirations, purer tastes, stronger purposes, needI remind you how it is sown, in what manifold and various ways? It mustbe within the personal experience of some of you to testify how yourmeetings in this chapel every morning may sow it. One day it falls onyour heart in some word of some hymn or prayer, or in some thought orfeeling which flashes through you, or some pricking of conscience for noother knows what sin or fault, or in some new resolve. 

 Sometimes it is found that a passing word of a preacher sows it (it isin this hope I preach to you), or again it is sown in the common ways ofdaily life, by the reading of some book, or by the word or example of afriend, or by some casual sight or experience. We remember how the seedof an unresting and beneficent life, a life devoted to the good of thepoor and the suffering, was sown in Lord Shaftesbury by the shockingsight of a pauper funeral when he was a boy at Harrow. So it may be sownin your hearts you know not beforehand when or where, to grow up and bearfruit an hundred fold. 

The wind bloweth where it listeth--so is every one that is born of theSpirit. You never know what Divine seed it may deposit in your heart atany moment; but this you do know, that if the word of Christ be true, whenever this gift of life comes to you it is a new birth. 

And there is all the more mystery and sacredness about our common lifejust because we never know how or when these seeds may fall upon our lifeto bless it, and because men are often altogether unconscious of thebeginnings of their growth in them. Some seed of good influence fallsinto the soil of their heart, and seems to lie there buried in the winterof neglect or waste. 

Thus some men may carry the seeds long and far, not knowing the power orthe potency of the life that is in them; but some day they strike rootand grow and bear fruit in new convictions, or in new desires andpurposes; and this may be the case with any one amongst us, and hence itis natural that we should press the question on ourselves and on eachother--What are you making of those seeds of higher life which have beensown in you by your mother's love, by your father's words, by all thelessons and influences of such a place as this, seeds which are fallingaround you continually, and may possibly be trodden down or overlaid?

As we look at these parables of the Lord telling of this sowing and thisgrowth of seeds, they bring it home to us very forcibly that the onlytrue test of life in Christ is growth in Christian graces. And thisbrings us to a consideration of grave practical importance. It bids usbe very careful to distinguish between seeds of life taking root in theheart and springing up into new activities, and mere waves of impression. The seed springs up and grows in you, the wave merely flows over you, lifting and moving you for a moment, and then leaving you as before. Thus, and it is a warning which is not unneeded in our day, a day of muchemotional religion, there is all the difference in the world between areligion of moods and a religion of growth. The one is the plaything ofthe winds, the other is rooted in Christ. 

Thus I am brought to two reflections, one on the function and aim of thepreacher, the other the duty of the hearer of God's word. Thepreacher--and the same might be said of every master in such a society asthis--the preacher has to think of himself primarily and chiefly as aservant of Christ charged with the duty of sowing the seeds of spirituallife in your hearts. And the thought that the Saviour has revealed to usseeds of life which have this regenerating power in them, and that in Himwe see what possibilities of growth there are in these seeds--this is ourconstant encouragement. 

The sower's hand may be feeble, and his sowing may be awkward, orhalting, or uncertain, but there is a Divine force or possibility in allseeds of truth, or purity, or right feeling which he scatters among you, independent of his sowing, and he never knows in what soul some seed maylodge and germinate and grow up and bear fruit here and hereafter, evento the endless life. 

So we believe that every work of good influence, whether of man or boy, will prosper, because we remember it as a part of God's providential law, that His seed if sown grows of itself, mysteriously. And we need notwonder at the mystery, for it is the Spirit of God which is in the seed;and it is ready to swell and grow and bear new fruits as it lodges inyour heart. 

 Through and in that seed of good influence it is God Himself who isworking in you. 

Such, as we learn from the word of Christ, such, as we see it exemplifiedin His person, is the mystery of the Divine life in the hearts of men--notin some other lives, but in your life and mine. 

But this only leads us to another vital question--a question which Ileave with you for the present, and to which we may return anotherday--What is your share of active duty in regard to these seeds of goodinfluence and good purpose that are sown in you; what are you doing, andwhat are you intending to do, to secure that they shall be bearing somefruit in your own daily life?

 XIII. THE LENTEN FAST. 

 "This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer. "--ST. MARK ix. 29. 

You remember the narrative from which I have taken this verse. Jesus, aswe read, had just come down from the Mount of Transfiguration, and whenHe was come to the multitude, a certain man besought him saying, "Havemercy on my son, for he is lunatic and sore vexed, and I brought him toThy disciples, but they could not cure him. " Then Jesus rebuked thedevil, and the child was cured from that hour. Thereupon His disciplescame to Him with this inquiry--"Why could not we cast him out? And Hesaid to them, Because of your little faith. This kind can come forth bynothing, but by prayer;" or, as our Authorised Version has it, "by prayerand fasting. "

 Here, then, we have set before us a very striking and significantcontrast: the contrast between the spiritual power of Jesus fresh fromthe Mount of Transfiguration, and the want of such power in Hisdisciples, who represent to us the common life of the multitude and theplain. His reply to their question was clearly intended to suggest tothem the cause of their spiritual feebleness. Do you wonder at your lackof power over the diseases of the soul? "This kind can come forth bynothing, but by prayer. " Now, this suggestive answer is very appropriatefor our consideration at the present time when we are approaching theseason of Lent, which has been observed century after century as aspecial season of fasting, prayer, and penitence for sin, through all theChristian Church. 

When we think of these weeks, it is reasonable to believe that suchobservance, so universal, so long continued, must have satisfied somedeep need of the heart, especially as it is not based on any particulardogma. And this incident in the Saviour's life, and these emphatic wordsof His, may help us to a clearer understanding of the value of suchtimes. They declare to us the principle of the spiritual harvest, that, in the spiritual life as in all else, we reap as we sow. They areintended to convey to us this plain lesson, that if any of us give littlethought, attention, or effort to that side of our life which we speak ofas the spiritual, if there is in our daily habit and practice little realprayer or self-denial, or devotion, little communing with God, littleendeavour to live in the spirit of Christ, and if, this being so, we findourselves weak or vacillating in our struggle against sin or evil, whether in our own life or in society, there is nothing surprising insuch a result. 

It is in our religious life just as in everything else--spiritualcarelessness or neglect must mean spiritual weakness. In all othermatters we look for results in some proportion to our efforts. As we sowwe expect to reap. 

Here, for instance, in your daily life, if you wish to excel in anyparticular game or pursuit, you practise it with diligence. You knowthat, without such practice or concentration of effort upon it, anyexpectation of excellence is simply foolish. 

In your school work you recognise the same conditions. Intellectualgrowth may seem sometimes to come slowly, in spite of all your efforts;but it comes with certainty if you persevere, and it is equally certainthat it hardly ever comes at all to those who use no effort. 

If, then, you look for progress or distinction, you know that you mustfix your thoughts upon your work, and practise industry, and, above all, that you must cultivate a love of learning, so that your mind lingersover it with some sense of enjoyment. 

You do not expect a harvest where you have not sown. And it is just thissame law which you recognise and accept in other matters that our Lord ishere declaring to us as the law of spiritual power. 

Do we desire to cast any evil influence or any weakness out of our life?Do we ask despairingly how it is that we have not been able to cast itout? Our Lord's answer comes to us in these emphatic words--"This kindcan come forth by nothing, but by prayer. "

In other words, if we really desire that our soul shall be cleansed andstrengthened, we must surrender it to Him in prayer and self-denial, inspiritual exercises and communion, that He may cure it of its sin or itsweakness, and inspire us with new life. 

Prayer and fasting are in this word of His the symbol of all specialexercises of the spirit, as it strives to get free from the burden of theflesh and to come nearer to God; and without such exercises, He pressesit on us if we stand in need of such reminders, we cannot hope for anyharvest of spiritual strength. 

And we can hardly have failed to notice how His own practice correspondswith His warnings and injunctions. 

Before He began His ministry we read of His forty days' fast in thewilderness; and at every turn, in the course of it, we read again andagain incidentally of His constant withdrawals into privacy with God. 

 His short life on earth was a life of spiritual ministry. All thecommon things of life were to Him so many illustrations of some spirituallesson of the Father's love and care, or of man's dependence on Him. Inevery voice of the world there was the undertone of some spiritualsuggestion. So that we might say--Surely His days were one unbrokencourse of spiritual work and communion, and He could need no specialseasons or exercises; but His example teaches us a different lesson. 

As if to bring it home to us beyond all possibility of doubt or question, that the most devoted, the most active, and most powerful spiritualcharacters, will always be those whose communion with God in privateprayer and exercise is most constant and intense, He Himself wascontinually withdrawing for such communion; and there are no moresuggestive passages in the Gospels for our guidance than those incidentalreferences which tell us, as if by chance, giving us passing glimpsesinto the unrecorded portions of His life, how on one occasion He retiredinto a mountain apart to pray, or how on another he spent the whole nightapart in prayer, or how he was in a desert place apart in prayer. 

These withdrawals of Jesus into the solitude of the desert or themountain, these hours in which He was alone with the Father, are butanother name for those exercises of prayer, fasting, meditation, communion with God, without which, as He tells His followers in the textI have read to you, it is not possible to eradicate from the soul thoseinfluences of sin which destroy its harmony and undermine its strength. 

These withdrawals were His times of spiritual refreshment; and by Hispractice He declares to us His need of them. And if in His case theywere necessary, much more are they necessary for you and me, entangled aswe are amidst all the varied influences of our common life, and withnatures prone to sin. 

Hence it is that the Church has set apart this season of Lent to comeround to us year by year as a season of special thought and prayer andself-denial. Many other times and seasons come to us laden with the samespiritual influences, and to be used by us as times of reflection, inspiration, purification, and strengthening. This is the purpose whichthe quiet of these recurring Sundays should be fulfilling in our lives, or our gatherings for Holy Communion. 

And once and again there comes to us in the course of life some time orseason which is sure to make its impression upon our soul as havingbrought us in a special sense into the presence of God, and within theovershadowing influences of His Spirit. 

So it may happen to us that some family bereavement, the death of fatheror mother, of brother or sister, or child of our affections, draws usaway from the world into a closer communion with our Father in Heaven, acommunion which is never entirely lost again or forgotten. So, too, comes the season of confirmation, as to many of you just now, with allits thoughts, feelings, prayers, and resolutions. 

And it is a happy thing for our life when any of these seasons leave anindelible mark upon our memory and our spirit. 

But as we think of these words of Jesus, "This kind goeth not out but byprayer and fasting"--the question for each of us here to-day is, whatpractical daily meaning we hope to give to this season of Lent which isto begin on Wednesday. 

Let us not fancy that we can allow such seasons to come and go, year byyear, giving them no thought or attention, without some correspondingloss. 

The voice of humanity, and the experience of centuries, the practice ofholy men, and the example and the words of Christ Himself, have alltestified to the need there is for the spiritual observance of suchtimes, if men are to keep their soul alive in them--and who are we thatwe should venture to set ourselves against such overpowering testimony?

Let us rather address ourselves seriously to making these weeks a time ofsome special exercise or discipline such as our life may need. 

 There is hardly one of us but will confess, if he thinks of the matterat all, that the world is too much with us; that its influence is toostrong upon us; that we are too ready to conform to its ways and followits indulgences. And such a confession is equivalent to anacknowledgment that we need these Lenten seasons. And if with thisfeeling in our hearts we use the coming weeks with any definite purpose, praying to be rid of some temptation or weakness, or to be endowed withsome strength, or to be supported in some good purpose, we are sure torecognise with thankfulness, when the time is over, that it has indeedproved a time of some dislodgment, that some temptation or habit hasfallen away from us and left us free, so that some new spirit or purposehas begun to grow in us. 

We shall, in fact, be conscious, as the weeks go on, that a new life ofnew tastes and new satisfactions has sprung up, as the first fruits ofour prayer. If we doubt the need of such exhortations as these, let usreflect for a moment--Does it not sometimes happen to us that our soulsare only too like the soul of that sick child in the Gospel?

Good instincts, and intentions, and tendencies, are clearly felt andrecognised, but they are fitful, weak, and intermittent. Another spiritseems to lay hold of us and carry us whither it will. 

If in any sense this can be said to be your case, then remember, thatjust what the Saviour's healing word was to that child, sick andpossessed, as He met it on His way from the Hill of Transfiguration, andbreathed over it the spirit of the higher life, reducing the chaos of thesoul to harmony, and bringing reason out of madness, and freedom out ofdemoniac possession, these holy seasons of time-honoured observance maybe to your soul, if you use them reverently, and as God's appointed meansfor your growth in the Spirit. 

 XIV. GOD'S CURSE ON SIN. 

 "Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. "--EZEKIEL xviii. 30. 

These words of Ezekiel may be understood as expressing in the prophet'slanguage what the Book of Deuteronomy expresses in such denunciations asthose which were read to us the other day in the Commination Service. 

They correspond also to the warning of St. Paul when he says--"Be notdeceived; God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he alsoreap. He that soweth to the flesh shall reap corruption; and he thatsoweth to the spirit shall reap everlasting life. " Or again theycorrespond to that question which is put to us in the Epistle to theHebrews--"If every transgression and disobedience received a justrecompense and reward, how shall we escape?"

Thus we find in the Pentateuch, in Ezekiel, and in the apostolic writingsthe representatives of three very different stages of religiousenlightenment, all teaching us in effect the same lesson, to remember therecompense that sin never fails to bring upon him who commits it. As welisten to the curses of Deuteronomy on one sin and on another, and thenread the language of Ezekiel or St. Paul, we are conscious of adifference in the modes of thought and expression. The thought of theapostle is separated from that of the lawgiver or the prophet of the OldTestament by the new revelation and the sacrifice of Jesus; but yetunderneath all differences their judgment on every sinful act or habitremains spiritually the same. They all alike bid us, when we think ofour sins, to think also of the inevitable punishment which rises behindthem like their shadow; and to bear in mind that the root of the wholematter is the one incontrovertible and never-changing fact of human lifethat as you sow you must expect to reap--he that soweth to the fleshshall of the flesh reap corruption. 

Now, inasmuch as your early years are the seed-time of your life, thesestern reminders that if you sow any sin in your soul you will some dayreap its curse, that God will judge you every one according to his ways, all this is very appropriate for your consideration. And you are likelyto be all the more serious about your present life and its habits, tastes, and purposes if this thought really takes possession of you, thatthere is in fact a very close analogy between the life of the soul andlife around us in the outer world, and that every seed we sow in it growsafter its own kind. 

In the region of animal or vegetable life you see and recognise this lawon every side. You trace it sometimes as the law of improvement byculture, sometimes as the law of degeneration. 

You cultivate and tend a garden or a field, sowing, planting, eradicating, and the growths of flower or fruit improve in proportion toyour care; but leave it to itself and the weeds choke it, and the veryfruit degenerates; your rose becomes a dog-rose--it reverts, as men say, to a lower type. 

So exactly is it with your own life; so long as it is grafted into a lifehigher than your own, so long as good purposes are being sown in it andgood habits cultivated, and the bad weeded out and the Spirit of Godbreathes through it, it is growing nearer to the Divine type; but neglectit, or follow sinful impulse or low taste, and it becomes like the gardenof weeds; degeneracy begins at once, it is changing to something worse, it is reverting to a lower type. 

This is a way of expressing it which is sufficiently familiar to you. Butthis is only our modern way of looking at those facts of life which wereeloquent to men of earlier times as the curse of God. 

As, then, it is undoubtedly true that--

 "Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk with us still, "

these stern warnings which our Lenten services hold up before us are ofthe greatest value. 

Keeping before us this law that in every region of life it is thetendency of everything to bear fruit after its kind, we shall feel thatwe can hardly impress it too deeply upon our minds that there is no sinwhich we commit but will assuredly return upon our own heads. TheIsraelites in the Old Testament saw the hand of God thus visiting theirsins upon them in many ways. They thought of Him as smiting them fortheir sins with consumption or with fever, with plague or mildew, or thesword of the oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learntthat it is not with such visitations that God punishes us for our sinfulindulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may beless obvious but is often more ruinous than these. 

Neglect the opportunities of good with which He strews your path in earlylife, let some sin strike its roots in your heart and take possession ofit, and the curse of God for that neglect or that sin will overtake you, no doubt of it; coming not perhaps as the Israelite on Mount Ebalexpected it to come for any sin of his, but coming, you hardly know how, as the change for the worse, the sinking to lower levels of thought, andtaste, and aim, and practice, the reversion to lower types, which is theend of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the powerof sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. Sothe curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible andunchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows notold, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally inthe language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery:"Sow neglect, " it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, andyou will reap corruption. "

This vision of the ultimate results of evil is a very ugly one, put it inwhatever shape you will, and we are naturally somewhat loth to look it inthe face. We would rather not think of any sin of ours as entailing suchconsequences. This conception of Divine justice or retribution embodiedin the action of unbending laws and declaring that death is the fruit ofsin, and that death must come of it, this is no doubt a conception whichinspires awe. We shrink from it; we hardly dare to say Amen! to itsdread utterances. We should like, it may be, to shut our eyes to thefact and dwell rather on the thought that our God is long-suffering andof great kindness and of tender mercy. It is more soothing to think oflove than of retribution, or of the arm that shelters or upholds us thanof the hand that smites; but the real question should be--"Is it true, this declaration that as we sow we reap, that the wages of sin is death, death of faculty, death of hope?" It is foolish to blink the sterneraspects of life. The fruit of such blinking and turning aside is veryoften the very thing we do not like to think of--indulgence and itsretribution. Divine love and goodness and long-suffering cannot occupytoo much of our thoughts and prayers; for it is through these that theheart is touched, and the spirit is fostered in us, and we awake to thenew life in Christ. 

But if we shrink from contemplating that law of Divine retribution, whichworks in men's lives side by side with the law of mercy and love, it istime for us to ask ourselves--"How is it that I thus shrink from thethought of these penalties?"

There is indeed one sense in which we naturally shrink from the thoughtthat the wages of sin is death, even while we acknowledge that it is so. It is inexpressibly sad to dwell on the infinite mass of sin which isdaily bearing its bitter and deadly fruit in the world, and propagatingitself after its kind; to think of the untold number of darkened ormisguided souls that have sown to the flesh, and are going in consequencedown to failure and death, blighted, corrupted, ruined. From thisthought we naturally turn to the thought of God's mercy, and pray that Hemay yet sow the seeds of new hope in the dismal waste of such lives. 

 But it happens to us, I fear sometimes, that this thought of God's curseon sin sends a chill through the heart, and we shrink away from it, because of our own unregenerate life, because of the fascination whichsinful impulse or habit exercises over us. 

If the warning voice of our Lenten Commination Service has convicted anyone of us of this motive for shrinking from its stern sentence, it hascome to us as a true messenger of the God who has no pleasure in thedeath of him that dieth. We need the voice of these threatenings, because the heart has such a great power of self-deception in it. Menfind it so easy to thrust away into the dim background of their thoughtsall the dark but sure consequences of present sins, treating them as adebt which will come up no doubt for payment some day, but may be putaside just now. 

And one virtue of our stern plain-speaking Lenten services is this, thatthey will not allow us to forget that fated reckoning day--they put us, whether we like it or not, face to face with the sure consequences ofsin; and they compel us to listen to the question--"What is the choice ofthy life?"

For you will bear in mind that we read all these decrees of Divine lawwith our eye fixed on our own life and not on our neighbour. They aremeant to help us to judge ourselves, and not some other person; they leadus to penitence and not to criticism, so that our readiness or ourunwillingness to meet and to weigh them, and to respond to them withdefinite prayer and penitence, may be taken as an index of our religioussincerity, and of our readiness to consecrate our lives to the service ofour Saviour Christ. 

And it is well for us that we should ask ourselves these questions; forif indeed it is true that every transgression and disobedience shallreceive its just recompense and reward, how else shall we escape?

 XV. THE CONFLICT WITH EVIL. 

 "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. "--ST. MATTHEW vi. 13. 

It is good for us sometimes to stand still for a moment and consider ouruse of very familiar words. And this petition may appropriatelyillustrate our need of such an exercise. 

It is on your lips every day. Every Sunday you offer it you hardly knowhow many times, in private and in public prayer: "Lead us not intotemptation, but deliver us from evil. " And the moment you stop to thinkabout it you feel--who does not?--that it is a very solemn and movingpetition if you offer it before God in sincerity, and with an honestdesire to be kept out of the way of sin; but it becomes a fearful mockeryif it is offered with unclean lips, or by one who is living in any sortof sinful practice, either secret or open. 

And yet, as we all know, it is possible to do this, making the prayermere lip service, under the influence of daily custom. This, then, isthe question it suggests to us whenever we stop to think about it: Howfar are we endeavouring to keep our lives in accordance with the spiritof such a petition? "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us fromevil. " Most of you, I can well believe, would not voluntarily ordeliberately step out of your way to meet a temptation, or to seek anyevil course of life. You would not do it of your own free choice, or incold blood, as we say. This, at any rate, is your own feeling about sin, whether the feeling is consistent with your life or not. As youcontemplate any low form of life in another, you recognise its uglinessand its degrading character, and you call it very likely by the name itdeserves. If, then, you find yourself involved in any sin, in spite ofthese feelings, and although you take this daily prayer upon your lips, how comes it to be so? How comes it that you remain in this pitiablecondition?

Your answer is, perhaps, that temptation comes upon you unawares, andthat it takes you by surprise; or it seems to watch for some moment offorgetfulness or weakness; or you fight against a temptation, but stillit clings to you as if it had a life of its own and were independent ofyou; or you are drawn into sin you scarcely know how; or you are driveninto it by some one whom you fear although you despise him; or it seemsto you to be in the very air you breathe. And although such answersexplanatory of a life of sin or waste are no real excuse for it, they arevery often quite true. If it were not so, the devil would not be thedangerous enemy that he assuredly is to our spiritual life; our risk offailure in our battle with sin would not be so great as experience showsit to be. We must therefore expect that temptations to sin willsometimes come upon us quite by surprise and at unlocked for moments, andthat some temptations will linger and cling to us with a hatefulpersistence; you must be prepared also to find that some companion maydraw you towards a sin, or a bully may endeavour to drive you into it. Your life is a happy one if it is free from all such risks, but youcannot count upon such freedom. So that, if any one begins his lifethinking that his conflict with evil and its manifold temptations isgoing to be an easy one, he begins under a dangerous delusion, and he islikely to end in some disastrous failure. 

You desire, let us hope, to keep your soul unstained by evil ways. If, then, you remember that to secure such a stainless and unpolluted lifeyou have not only to fight with some external enemy now and then, butagainst dark and insidious powers of evil which seem to start up aroundyou and in the very citadel of your heart unawares, and that exceptthrough a constant sense of God's presence in your life you cannot hopeto keep free from their influence, this feeling should give reality andearnestness to our daily prayer to be delivered from the evil. 

And, indeed, this feeling that our life is set in the midst of many andgreat dangers is one of the first requisites for its moral safety. Itstands beside us with its warning, whenever a temptation to some sinbesets us, reminding us that, no matter how pleasant or attractive thetemptation may seem to be, or how trifling the sin that it suggests, itis in fact an outpost of a great army, whose name is legion, and that weshould hold no parleyings and have no dealings with it, for it breathescorruption, and it brings degradation and death behind it. 

"_Obsta principiis_" may indeed be said to be a warning specially neededby us in regard to every kind of temptation. But we may go further thanthis. Our safety from particular sins depends very often and verylargely, at a critical moment, upon our general attitude and feelingtowards sin in every shape. 

It must be acknowledged, I think, that most sins which lay their holdupon us and master us, or struggle long and hard for the mastery, maketheir first entrance into the soul so easily, because they find it sweptand garnished for their reception, and its doors wide open. Withreference to this you have only to reflect on some chapter of your ownexperience. Has it never happened that, when some wrong or sinful act orthought or speech was first presented to you, it stirred a feeling ofshrinking, or strong dislike, or fear, or uneasiness, or, it may be, disgust; but instead of listening to that warning voice, and spurning thetemptation utterly, as your feeling bade you do, you were attractedsomehow to turn and gaze upon it. You knew it to be sin, but you felt norepulsion. Your soul was not garrisoned and defended by any strong senseof the hatefulness and deadly influence of all sin as such; so if youfled from it it was with a backward look; and then you allowed yourselfto think of it in others, or you lived on friendly and familiar termswith those who were stained by it; possibly you even jested about it; youlet your thoughts feed upon it; you expressed no stern disapproval of it;you allowed the atmosphere of your life to be tainted by it; and at lastyour adversary the devil, having rejoiced to see his wiles thus gatheringround you, saw you slip or plunge into the sin, and go one great stepnearer to becoming his bondslave--just as some foolish bird, flutteringthis way and that instead of spreading its wings for a heavenward flightinto the pure and safe upper air, might plunge into the snares of thefowler. And yet all the while, although you were living this weak andvacillating life, which is the seed-field of sin, you were praying to Godevery day--"Lead us not into temptation. "

If we remember any such experience we may at least gather from it somelessons of safety and strength for the time to come. It reminds us firstof all how vitally important is our general attitude towards every formof sin and its allurements. On this attitude it very often dependswhether your life is to be comparatively free from pitfalls, or whetherit is to be beset with dangers at every turning. If by your attitude andbehaviour you cause it to be felt that sin is hateful to you, and thatyou are sincere when you pray that God may keep you from all evil, agreat many of the temptations that would otherwise make your lifedifficult and dangerous will shrink away abashed; or if the tempterventures to assail you, he will do it half-heartedly when he sees thatyou repel him with a whole-hearted repugnance. It is this attitude evenmore than individual acts which fixes the tone of a society. 

 When there is no prevalent sense that there are those present whomaintain this attitude of hatred and contempt for sin and everything thatbreeds or fosters it, the tone, as men say, becomes low, or lax, the airbecomes corrupt, and life in such surroundings becomes full of peril. Ifthe good are timid, shrinking, showing no positive fervour, no zeal forvirtue, and no moral indignation against evil influence, then the bad intheir society will lift up their heads and walk boldly. But when, on theother hand, they who are in their hearts convinced of the sinfulness ofsin, and of the infinite mischief that may arise out of any form of it, are not ashamed to show it by their attitude, they cause the base to hideitself in its proper darkness, and they create an atmosphere around themin which temptations lose a great deal of their force and strength. 

Let this, then, be your feeling about your life--that when it is assailedby any sin, that sin is not something isolated or insignificant; it isnot something which may be indulged or accepted, as if it had no relationwith other sins; it is a part of an infinite brood of evil; and that ifyou admit it within the circle of your life, or tolerate it in the airyou breathe, you never know where its pestilent germs may fall, andbreed, and multiply, and what mischief may come of it. 

It is this feeling of the mysterious vitality of sin, and the subtlekinship of one form of sin with other forms, and its destructiveness whenit seizes on a life or poisons an atmosphere, that helps us more thananything else to feel the force and the intensity of the Saviour's prayerfor us: "Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hastgiven Me. I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, butthat Thou shouldest keep them from evil. " It is this same feeling of thespreading, insidious, infectious and destructive nature of sin that makesus echo this as our first and most earnest prayer for all we love, thatGod may keep them from evil; and it is this that makes us value so highlyand recognise with thankful hearts every example of a pure and stronglife, which gives inspiration and strength to those around it. 

 XVI. SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS. 

 "As it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear. "--ROMANS xi. 8. 

 "Blindness in part is happened to Israel. "--ROMANS xi. 25. 

It is a sad and painful reflection, and one which is continually forcedupon us as we read the New Testament, that the long training andpreparation of the Jews brought them at the last not to the acceptancebut to the rejection of Jesus. 

They had been taught, generation after generation, that they were thecalled and chosen people of God. Psalmists and prophets had enrichedtheir life with the outpouring of their moral and spiritual revelations, and fired their hopes with promises. They lived in the expectation ofthe Messiah who was to complete these revelations of the God who had ledthem and taught them ever since the days of their Egyptian bondage. 

Yet, when this crowning revelation came to them, they could not evenrecognise it. The Son of God "came unto His own and His own received Himnot. " As St. Paul expresses it in my text, while grieving for them withall the intensity of his fervid affection, their life was overgrown witha sort of spiritual dulness. They were suffering from a sort ofossification of the spirit, so that the last and greatest revelation ofGod could make no impression upon them. 

But this picture of the Jews rejecting and crucifying their Saviour, andunable to appreciate or to receive the gift of new life which was offeredto them, blind to its beauty, unattracted by its charm, is not only oneof the saddest sights in history, it is very instructive for every one ofus, because it is charged with warnings that are never out of date. Forthere is no individual life, and no society, that is not liable to driftinto a similar dulness of vision, and so to reject or disregard what Godgives for its enlightenment. The great critical events in the world'shistory, the events that make epochs in the consciousness of men, are notdifferent in kind from those of our own obscure lives. They are, as itwere, our own familiar experience, written prophetically and writtenlarge. 

So the blindness that happened to Israel, and arrested their spiritualgrowth, may be happening no less to any of us. As God gave them thespirit of slumber, so it may be with our lives. 

And the very thought of our possible risks in this respect is valuable tous. 

To be conscious that in regard to any of the higher and better things oflife our eyes may possibly be growing dim, and our ears dull of hearing, and that God may be pressing upon us gifts of great price which we aretoo dull to see or to accept--if our soul is sufficiently awake to feelthis, then the very feeling may of itself be the germ of new life in us. 

 And it is very certain, on the other hand, that if we are altogetherwithout any such feelings there is a risk, which even amounts to aprobability, that the hardening or deadening influences of custom andtradition will sooner or later degrade our life. And if it should beasked, --How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulnessof spirit and of general habit?--we have to reply that it is because ofthe sensitiveness of the human soul to surrounding influences. 

It is because our souls are so receptive, so imitative, and inconsequence so easily perverted, darkened, blinded, or misled. I supposewe are all of us conscious of this sensitiveness of the moral andspiritual nature; we should all say, if questioned, that we are quiteaware of it, and that no one would dispute it. The soul of every childor man, we should say, is a fine and delicate and sensitive instrument, with the possibilities in it of we know not what Divine harmonies, buteasily spoilt. 

 And yet, when we look at all the common and traditional ordering ofdaily life, whether in our educating of the young or in the influencesthat we allow to prevail among young and old, it would seem sometimes asif this thought of the soul's sensitiveness had never dawned upon us. When we once really grasp this thought, or, let us rather say, when thisthought has once really fastened upon our mind, and fixed itself there, so that it remains with us, and goes about with us; and when, inconsequence, we come to feel how easily any soul may be perverted, orrendered hard or dull; in one word, how easily it may be degraded; thenit follows that we look with new eyes on many things, many customs, manyinfluences which the unthinking hardly notice, or notice only tomisjudge. 

In the light of this feeling of the soul's sensitiveness, the thoughtfulman is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of littlemoment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye ofthe soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, inconsequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spuriousconsecration, or the world in its blindness may have come to honour them, they are in fact laden with mischief to the general life. 

It was the thought of this sensitiveness of the soul to externalinfluences, and of the ease with which any bad influence, or bad customor practice or fashion, perverts common lives, and of the untold mischiefwhich is consequently latent in it, that winged the words of a well-knownwriter when she protested, some years ago, against what she designated asdebasing the moral currency. 

That writer was thinking primarily of vulgar jesting on great subjects, which should stir us to admiration and reverence, and so debasing men'stastes. She had in her mind the class of persons who have the art ofspoiling things that are noble or beautiful by their vulgar handling ofthem; and of the mischief which is done by such persons to public tasteand tone and character. 

 But we may widen the reference. Whosoever, in anything that concernsthe conduct of life, spreads low notions, or drags down men's opinion ortaste, thus helping to pervert ordinary minds from those higher aims andmotives and those reverent views of character and life which should becherished for our common use and service, is debasing the moral currency. 

Here, then, we have a very practical question for our consideration andanswering. "Is there anything in my life"--so the question comes to usin our self-examination--"which could be so described? any influence, spreading from my conduct, of which men might truly say that it also ishelping to debase the moral currency? Is there to be seen in it anythingthat tends towards the lowering of common standards? any misuse of thingssacred or holy? any foolish or vulgar estimate of the higher things oflife?" And if we are in any doubt how to put these questions in aconcrete and practical shape, we have only to remember how any one whohelps to lower any standard of taste or conduct is debasing the moralcurrency of life; how, for instance, all those are debasing it whosubstitute any wrong notion of honour for right notions of honour, or whoput roughness and coarseness in place of manliness, or who set thefashion of cynical judgments on good and bad characters. 

Or we might take an illustration from what is, unhappily, a very commonelement in English life: the habit of gambling sport. Wherever thishabit spreads, in any class of society, from the highest to the lowest, its effect is invariable; it undermines integrity, it hardens the heartand debases taste, and is the willing handmaid of other vices. Moraldegradation is its inseparable companion. Therefore, if you mix in it, or share in it, or give any adhesion or countenance to it, which helps, as men say, to make it respectable, and so to spread its influence, youare debasing the moral currency. 

Or take another common case. You are familiar with the poet'sdescription, "And thus he bore without abuse the grand old name ofgentleman. " That is a noble thing for any man or boy to have said ofhim; and there is not one among you who does not desire always to be ableto claim that name as his own. 

But, wherever we go in the world, how many men there are who claim it andyet debase it by ignoble use! They help to spread the notion that a manmay be a man of low morality and still a gentleman; that hisgentlemanliness may be a mere varnish of culture and manners, a thinveneering having underneath it only meanness, or coarseness, orcorruption; and that, notwithstanding this, he may still claim to becalled a gentleman. Those who spread such doctrines are debasing themoral currency of English life. And it should be the mission of schoolslike this, and of those who grow up in them, to pour upon all suchpersons the contempt which they deserve, and to restore the currency ofcommon life to something of Christian purity. 

 Remembering, then, how sensitive the soul is, and how easily by example, or conduct, or fashion it may be so perverted as to lose its clear visionand higher aims, its pure tastes and ennobling emotions, we have to makeit our ambition and endeavour that our life may be kept free from suchdebasement. 

But, if we are to succeed in this, we must make it our daily prayer thatthe God of our Lord Jesus Christ will enlighten the eyes of ourunderstanding, and give unto us the spirit of wisdom and revelation inthe knowledge and love of Him. 

 XVII. A NEW HEART. 

 "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you. "--EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26. 

In the beautiful and suggestive dream of Solomon, which is recorded inthe third chapter of the First Book of Kings, God appears to him, saying, "Ask what I shall give thee"; and Solomon's answer is, "O Lord, I am buta child set over this great people, give me, I pray Thee, a hearingheart. " And God said to him, "Because thou hast asked this thing, andhast not asked for thyself long life, nor riches; behold, I have doneaccording to thy words. I have given thee a wise and understandingheart, and I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, bothriches and honour. " And the record of this vision was clearly meant toindicate that the supreme gift of the wisest of men was the hearing orunderstanding heart. On the other hand, there is nothing against whichour Lord in the Gospels utters stronger warnings than that dulness ordeadness of spirit which is described as having eyes that see not, andears that are dull of hearing, and hearts that do not understand. And inillustration of this we read how, while the crowds throng or press uponJesus, it is the stricken woman who, with soul sensitive to Hisinfluence, feels the virtue come out of Him though she only touches thehem of His garment. 

Thus we are warned to beware lest that should come upon us which was theruin of the Jews, dulness or deadness of spiritual faculty; and we areexhorted to pray for and to cherish the hearing heart, the soul that seesand feels spiritual influences, and is sensitive to every high call. Andif your soul is thus open and receptive, it is marvellous how full theworld becomes to you of Divine voices. They come upon you unexpected, unsought, sending through your heart some illuminating flash of surprise, so that you wonder at your previous dulness; they strike you with thesudden shock of some new knowledge or insight, and make you feel, asnever before, the true nature of your daily conduct or your duty and yourrelation to other men; or they come as the unresting presence of some newthought, which, once roused, haunts and troubles you with questions whichyou cannot answer, or feelings which you cannot get rid of. 

When the soul is roused in this way we see and feel the hatefulness ofany sin that may have tempted or beset us; or we contrast our own lifewith that of those whose lot is so much harder than ours, and we arestruck with shame at our selfishness, or waste, or our indifference tothe privation, and sin, and suffering that are all around us in theworld. 

Or sometimes these Divine voices in our ears bring it home to us how muchwe are losing out of our life's higher possibilities, if from sinful orselfish habit, from dulness of spirit or lack of sympathy, we cutourselves off in thought and feeling and interest from the great needs, the great sorrows, the great pulsations of the larger world. 

But why, you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these arethe true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out ofnarrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to makeus feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of alow type, and to stir us with social and religious interests andenthusiasms. 

These calls that come to you, whether invited or not, and that stir yourheart, speaking to you out of the multitudinous life of the time you livein, are like the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem, which never holdtheir peace day nor night. 

This ferment of higher life within us and around us, these voices of theSpirit in us, as it struggles to lift us out of the region of fleshlyinfluences, is renewed in every generation and in every single life. Ifyou hear no such voices, if the phenomena of life make no such impressionupon you, if you are deaf to all these calls, and care for none of thesethings, then it is clear that your soul is not yet awake in you; you areliving with a dull or darkened heart. It is a sort of cave life, orsubterranean life, you lead in such a case, a life of lower rank andlesser hopes. 

Yet these voices from above, that come as the witness of the DivineSpirit with our spirit that we are the children of God, never fail us. They do not belong only to times far off. We are not to think of themmerely as enshrined in the Bible and peculiar to it; but as living voicesthat are speaking to us to-day out of the depths of the Divine life, inwhich our life is sustained. 

But we have always to bear this in mind, that the Divine voices speak tomen with most stirring effect in every generation when they speak to themthrough the pressing needs of their own day. To the Jews the voice ofGod came in the inspired language of their deliverers and prophets--intheir unceasing warnings, and their impassioned appeals, and theirrevelations of new truth. To the first generation of Christians thesesame voices came in the shape of strong Advent hopes. Many thingscontributed to lift the Apostles and their followers nearer to God thanmen of ordinary times. They had seen the Lord; they had lived in Hispresence; they had gone through much tribulation; the tongue of fire hadrested on them; the Spirit had taken full possession of them; but wecannot read the New Testament without feeling that the most stirring, themost regenerative influence in their society was the vividness andintensity of their Advent hope. Their expectation of the Lord's returnlifted them out of the temptations of the world and above the trials ofit. It took hold of their active powers, and made them new men. 

Their Advent expectation was not the vague, half mystic, half sentimentalmovement of the heart, which just touches the lives of so many Christiansduring our Advent seasons, while it does not really alter any of theirearthly concerns. 

Christ was very near to the Apostolic Christians. As the eastern skybrightened every morning they felt that it might be the light of Hiscoming; they thought of Him as only hidden from them by the neighbouringcloud. They looked for Him to return at midnight, or at thecock-crowing, or in the noonday, and none could say how soon. And so itcame to pass that this expectation made those first believers, thosehumble followers of Christ, those Galilean fishermen, those obscureprovincials, instinct with that great life which lifts men above theworld, and constitutes them a new power in it. 

Our lives are largely influenced by the thought of slow development; butwe miss a great deal of the secret of all higher life if we forget thiswonderful exaltation of the poor and ignorant and obscure by this gift ofthe Spirit and the inspiration of Divine hope. It was not by any methodwhich we could have forecast that those men found out this charm whichtakes the heart captive and regenerates the life. In their presence wefeel the force of the prophet's words, "Not by might nor by power, but byMy spirit, saith the Lord. "

 But then there rises the question, How are these Divine influences tobecome powerful in us also?

On the one hand, we are conscious that as we live involved or entangledin the worldly life, or in any form of external life around us, thespiritual part of us slumbers or is overlaid. It loses its practicalpower over our thought, our feeling, and our conduct--our lamp goes out. Whilst on the other hand we are conscious that the special form of Adventexpectation which inspired and possessed the first generation ofChristians is gone from us past recovery. We see clearly enough as weread the New Testament what that first generation expected, and how theexpectation transformed their lives; but we see also that they weremistaken in their hope, and that God's providential plan proved to be fargreater than their human conception of it. What, then, are our Adventhopes?

There are two things which we should keep clear in our minds concerningthem. One, that they must be based upon our feeling of the livinginfluence of Christ and the working of the Holy Spirit; and the other isthat the voices of the Spirit must come to us out of the needs of our ownlife and of the time we live in if they are to lead us to practicalissues. When we look out upon the world and its life we feel that Adventhopes must take some new form if they are to preserve reality and to befulfilled. 

We see decaying faith in some quarters, and selfishness growing wherefaith decays; we see ignorance and want and all their crop of sin andmisery deep-rooted in the life of every city; and the prospect whichthese things suggest, the problems that meet us as we think of them, might well fill us with misgiving. And they would indeed do so were itnot for the fact that the revelation of such things brings with itanother revelation also; it seizes on men's souls and stirs them as witha Divine summons. And thus we have these hopeful signs for the futurerising around us, even where things look darkest, that the great problemsof humanity are felt in our day to be above all things its social andreligious problems. And seeing that the aspirations of the time--thefeelings, the purposes, the aims, and hopes that lift men--grow out ofthe needs of the time and the problems of its life, we look forward--wehave good ground for looking forward--to a generation of men who shall bedistinguished by religious earnestness and by social enthusiasm. 

But if this be so, what will your share be in this coming life? TheSpirit of God, as we now understand it, comes to us with calls of thiskind. 

If you would hasten the Advent of Christ in your own soul and in thesouls of others, you must discard selfishness, you must rise above self-indulgence, you must prepare to merge yourself in the social life, forthe social good; seeing that the growth of this good is the only sure andcertain sign of the coming of the Lord. So, then, the Angel of theAdvent is thus calling us. The future before you is big with social andreligious issues, and the Spirit of Christ is brooding over it, and youand such as you are to be His chosen instruments in helping forward theseissues. 

 XVIII. SPIRITUAL POWER. 

 "And behold I send _the promise of My Father upon you_; but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be _endued with power from on high_. "--ST. LUKE xxiv. 49. 

 "Ye shall receive _power_, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you. "--ACTS i. 8. 

To-day we are celebrating the last of the series of historical festivalswhich mark the springtime of our Christian year. And without this onethe rest would leave us with a sense of incompleteness; for we should bewithout its gift of the abiding and indwelling Spirit, and the fulfilmentof the last promise. 

What, then, are we learning of its practical lessons, and gathering intoour life? We have read the Pentecostal narrative, and others thatillustrate it. We have sung Pentecostal hymns. We have joined inspecial prayer for the light of the Holy Spirit to shine in our hearts, giving us a right judgment; and if we are led to ask, "To what purpose isall this?" the answer is to be seen in the texts I have just read to you, the burden of which is the gift of power from on high. Do we notrecognise this as the end of the New Testament revelation? And do we notacknowledge that this revelation fails, so far as we are concerned, if itgives us no such _power_? It is, indeed, in considering this power ofthe Spirit that we touch to the quick the real influence of religion inthe practical life of men; for experience shows that it is possible for aman to be endowed with almost every other gift and yet to lack thisone--this indwelling gift of the Holy Ghost the Comforter. 

Our life is filled with almost everything we could ask or require toenlighten us or to guide and direct, and yet it fails sometimes. 

It may be failing in some of us here to-day, just from want of thisDivine spark, this influence of a Spirit from above taking up His abodein us, burning and shining in our hearts so as to purge our affectionsfrom sinful taint and purify our tastes, lifting up and enlarging ourcapacities, and rousing our energies--in one word, fusing all our lifeinto a new form with its refining power. 

And the question of all questions for each of us to consider is, "How amI to make my life the home and embodiment of this power from above?" Ifwe turn to our Lord's own example, or to the life of Paul or any other ofHis followers, or to any life we have known and felt to breathe around itthis same power of the Spirit, some things become at once very obviousand clear to us. 

That supreme example and those lives declare that whoever desires to havehis soul purified and invigorated, to be charged with this Divineelectric influence, must have something of separateness and independencein his life; he must feel himself as not merely one of a crowd moved bythe desires, aims, hopes, tastes, and ambitions which may chance toprevail around him, but as a separate soul in direct communion with theSpirit of God. 

But if we are to realise this in our own life, it means that our times ofdaily prayer, whether in private or in public, are times at which we layopen our secret life to the Divine presence and influence; it means thatwe give some real thought and meditation to this presence of God in ourlife, and that we thus feed our souls continually on wholesome spiritualfood. It is in this way that men's lives become in a real sense thetemples of the Holy Spirit, and the influences of sin fall away fromthem. 

But the hindrances that are always acting to undermine or destroy anysuch spiritual power in us are manifold, and seldom far away from ourlife. 

The world outside is always with us and acting in this way, distractingthought, setting up its own standards, drawing us into its channels, anddeadening the Spirit in us. This is one of the inevitable conditions oflife as you will have to live it, and the man who is in earnestrecognises it as a paramount reason why he should never drop out of hispersonal practice the habit of separate prayer and communion with God. Oragain, we may, and often do, let these hindrances grow up within usthrough our own fault, and quite apart from any active influences of theouter world. 

We contract a dulness of spirit, so that spiritual things have nointerest and faith has no living power in the heart; and all this veryoften not because any person, or anything outside of us, can be said tohave led us away and entangled us, but simply because we have taken nopains to keep our life within the range of spiritual influences; we havelet prayer slip out of it; we have lived in no spiritual companionship;we have done nothing to keep our soul alive in us. This is how menchoose the lower life, and surrender their birthright out of pureinertia, so that they lose their spiritual capacity. 

But worst of all hindrances to the indwelling of God's Holy Spirit in anylife is the harbouring of sensual appetite or craving, passion, orindulgence. No man can expect the Holy Spirit of God to make its home insuch unclean company. It is on this account that there is nothing whichso soon grows to depraved habit, to God-abandoned state, as sensualappetite; nothing which so rapidly dulls the higher affections in theheart and saps all the finer elements of life. 

Therefore, when we are thinking of God's gift of the Holy Ghost, and ofspiritual power as the saving and uplifting influence in our soul, we dowell to reflect a little on those hindrances which will be fatal to allsuch power in us, if they are allowed to take possession of our life andto prevail in it. 

 We do well to reflect in this way, because such reflection will make usvery careful against harbouring or encouraging any of these fatalhindrances, and careful also against any other form of spiritual waste. 

There is no surer guide to a right use of all liberty than thisreflection upon the power of the indwelling spirit in us, and the thingsthat add to it or destroy it. 

Recognising that this Spirit, which, in the language of your confirmationprayer, is the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counseland ghostly strength, the Spirit of knowledge and true godliness and ofholy fear; recognising that this Spirit, with its sevenfold gifts, is thesaving element in all free life, you begin to look with fresh feelings onall your leisure hours, on all your hours of liberty, when you arereleased from task work or supervision, when your life is what youyourselves are making it, and you begin to consider whether these times, as you spend them, are indeed times of growth or, it may be, of waste, times of genuine freedom or of slavery to some form of lower life. Whenyou think of this Holy Spirit of God as a power in every good life, itbecomes a very real question what and of what sort is the _power_ that isholding sway over you in your leisure hours. 

This is indeed a question which never sleeps, and to-day we ask, What isyour Whitsuntide answer to it?

If there be any one to whom such a question is not yet a matter of livingconcern, it is the purpose of this Pentecostal festival to rouse him tonew thoughts about it. 

If there be any older person in this congregation who lets his years slipfrom him, not caring or forgetting the importance of it, and not strivingto leaven all his hours of work or leisure with the thought of thisindwelling Spirit from above; or if there should be any young boy who, inutter thoughtlessness, or from perversity or coarseness, or any induceddepravity of taste, allows any evil spirit to bear rule in his life, ourprayer for such an one to-day is that the baptism of fire may descendupon his soul, and the power of a new spirit be felt in it. 

And indeed there is not one of us but needs to come at such a time withthis same prayer for his own life; for our own experience is too oftenvery like the vision of Ezekiel. Under the influences that come betweenus and the Spirit of the living God, our soul is in continual danger ofbeing like the prophet's valley of dry bones, which lay lifeless, unmoved, till the breath of the Lord breathed over them, and the breathcame into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, anexceeding great army. 

So we pray that our life may prove responsive to these influences of thePentecostal season. And the first response it gives is when it rises upin the consciousness of the Spirit of God as a living power in the heart, a power to drive out evil, and to inspire and strengthen us for what isgood. 

And if, under the inspiring associations of this historic and holy day, you feel your soul touched with a new spirit or consciousness rising upin you from the grave of its own dead self to new desires and newthoughts, and a new sense of the living nearness of the Holy Ghost theComforter, then you know--and you need no prophet to tell you--that thePentecostal gift has not failed, and there is good hope that you will notspoil either your youth or your manhood with any form of ignoble life. 

 XIX. SANCTIFIED FOR SERVICE. 

 "We are labourers together with God; ye are God's husbandry; ye are God's building. "--1 COR. Iii. 9. 

In this passage St. Paul is rebuking the Corinthians for that spirit ofparty which was dividing them into followers of this or that teacher andso destroying their unity in Christ. You do not belong, he says, to Paulor to Apollos; _we_ have no claim upon you; ye are not to be called by_our_ name: you are _God's_ husbandry, and _God's_ building, not ours; weare but labourers in His service and ministers for your good. Therefore, see to it that you live as one society in Christ Jesus, discarding alldivisions, factions, and party passions and watchwords, imbued with onespirit. It is a noble exhortation to unity of life and purpose; but wemay notice in it more than this. 

 As Paul himself disclaims all personal merit--as he presses it on theirattention that neither is he that planteth anything nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase, he is unconsciously exhibiting to us anexample of that rare humility which is characteristic of all the greatestand most effective workers; whilst in the vivid and expressive metaphorsof my text--ye are God's husbandry, God's building--he makes us to feelthe value and the dignity of each human soul. 

It would be interesting to dwell on these calls to unity of life inChrist, and the close connection between such unity and the spirit ofhumility; in fact, we might say, the absolute necessity of the spirit ofhumility and self-forgetfulness in individuals if there is to be unity inthe society. And we might apply the thoughts with much profit to our ownsocial relations, for they are never out of date; but I desire to turn to-day to that which is suggested by these descriptive metaphors, the valueand dignity of each human life. 

 St. Paul pressed it on these Corinthians that their souls were nothingless than the seed-field of which God Himself was the Husbandman, or thetemple built by His hand; and they could hardly have listened to suchlanguage without being stirred to take care how they sowed in that field, or without feeling the consequent value of their life in the sight ofGod. 

If they were thus the objects of the Divine care they could not bethought of as insignificant units in a crowded city; or as living anobscure life which was of no particular importance, as they mightotherwise have been tempted to fancy, as we are still sometimes temptedto think about an individual life. This picture of each life amongst usin its relation to God, as His seed-field or His temple, is a continualreminder that where a human soul is concerned there is no such thing asinsignificance or obscurity. 

As St. Paul thought of that little company--a company small and obscureto the outward eye--what he saw in them was the temple of the Holy Ghost, and the spiritual life that was breathing there was a Divine life; andthis intense conviction of the value of each soul and each society andits consequent sanctity was a never-failing inspiration to him. 

Through it he saw in every one who listened to his words, as he went fromcity to city, a man created and endowed with a Divine mission and Divinecapacity, if they could only be roused. 

It transformed every soul that crossed his path, so that he looked onlife with new eyes. The common crowd had a new interest for him, thesuffering poor, the downtrodden slave, the heathen in his blindness, thedegraded sinner. 

And it has been so with all the great servants of God; out of thisfeeling the love of souls has grown in men. 

But this feeling of the value of each individual life, because of theDivine element and presence in it, is a peculiar gift of the Christianrevelation. 

In the ancient pagan world a man's life was of little account; it is outof the Bible that this new thought has come that every soul has in it anindefinite element of Divine possibilities, and is therefore of value inthe sight of God. It is by virtue of this contribution to our thoughtthat the Bible is truly described as the Great Charter of human rights, and as the source of the great stream of charity and self-sacrifice, ofthat enthusiasm of humanity which more than all else separates anddistinguishes our life from that of heathen antiquity. 

It would indeed be difficult to point to any one single thing which makesso great a difference between the quality of one man's life and another'sas the presence or absence of this feeling about the value, thepossibilities, the sanctity of each individual soul. 

"Let man estimate himself, " said Pascal, "let him estimate himself at histrue value, honour himself in his capacities, and despise himself in hisneglect of those capacities. " Yes, if a man is once brought to thiscondition that he feels the greatness of the ends for which God has madehim, and that he estimates his life by the possibilities of growth thatare in it, and by the thought of the Divine influences that work in it;and if he despises himself for neglect of these capacities orpossibilities and of these influences, he has awoke to a sense of thefirst word of Christ and His Apostles. 

Your soul is God's seed-field, God's building; we are labourers togetherwith God. Such a description of each individual life is very significanteverywhere, and not least in such a society as ours. 

To us who are here in this society as masters they are just a parable ofour own life; setting forth to each of us what should be his estimate ofhis own work and aim and purpose, exhibiting to him his field of workwith the Divine light on it, and interpreting to him his own endeavoursas a fellow-labourer with God, hoping to contribute in some degreetowards the filling in and completing that Divine plan, that idealpicture of the life of every one of you which is in the heavens, andwhich in imagination he sees as a thing some day to be realised, and therealisation of which, or its failure, may largely depend on his own sharein our life and work. It is this feeling that every heart contains thegerm of some perfection that makes our life so profoundly interesting, and, it may be added, our responsibilities for the cultivation or neglectof any such germ or capacity so serious and engrossing. 

But to you, too, these apostolic suggestions about the Divine influencesat work in each heart, and the value of each life in God's sight, and theDivine voices claiming to be heard in it, should be quite as stimulativeas they are to us. 

They have in them the germ of all striving after purity and goodness, andof all hatred of sin, and enthusiasm for the uplifting of social life. 

The words of Paul to his Corinthian converts may furnish you with newinterpretations of your own daily life and duty. 

 If they were God's husbandry, or God's building, are not you? If theSpirit of God dwelt in them, how does He not dwell likewise in you?striving for your growth in holiness and good purpose, and for yoursalvation from sin and its defilements, as he strove for theirs?

And if it was good for every man in that Corinthian community to bewarned how he built upon the foundation of life that had been laid inChrist; if it was good for them to be reminded that every man's workwould be made manifest, and that the fire would try it, of what sort itwas; it is good also for us, masters and boys alike, to remember that weare living under the same law, and that we should take care lest haply webe found to be working against God. 

That Epistle of St. Paul's was written in pain and anguish of heart. Theseeds of Christian life which he had sown among them, the purifyinginfluences of the Holy Spirit which were working among them through himand his fellow-labourers, all these ought to have produced fruits easilydescribed, such as peace and love, and purity, and good works; butinstead of these, and threatening their destruction, there had sprung updissension and strife, party spirit, self-conceit, and gross sins which Ineed not name. 

In all this there was grief, disappointment, bitterness; for did they notprove that his work was threatened with failure?

Yet in all that storm of feeling his chief exhortation is this reminderof the dignity of their calling. In the midst of all their sin andfailure, though he does not spare rebuke and warning, he always aims atinspiring them by uplifting. And we know that this is the true method, because there is nothing which exercises an influence so strong to upliftand purify as the feeling of our kinship with the life above us, and thatwe are degrading our life when we forget this or ignore it. And hereinis the value of this word of his that God is dwelling and working in us. "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, that the Holy Ghost dwellethin you, and that God's temple is holy? and if any man destroy the templeof God, him shall God destroy. "

Let us then begin again our common life with a determination to bear inmind the possibilities and the sanctity of each separate soul that comesamongst us. 

Living in crowds, we are apt to forget this; and, forgetting it, sometreat their own souls as if they were of no value, and some the souls ofothers, and so the work of sin and waste goes on from generation togeneration. 

But in our best moments, in our times of serious thought, if we have beenonce enlightened, we can never again cease to feel the dignity and thevalue of each human life. 

When we think of God's care for us we feel it; when we think of thepossibilities He has ordained for us we feel it; when we think of theendless life that lies before us we feel it; above all, we never fail tofeel it when our thoughts revert to any life that has been snatched awayfrom us. Some of you are thinking to-day of the master whose home isdarkened by the presence of the angel of death. You think of her whomGod has taken, who was moving among you not so long ago, as your tender, considerate, and helpful friend. It may be that you were notuninfluenced by her self-devotion and holiness. 

When you think of such an one you feel no doubt about the value and thesanctity of each human life. 

Well, then, transfer this feeling to your own life, or to the life of theboy who sits beside you, or who lives as your companion. In the purposeof our common Father, your lives also are destined for holy uses. 

To remember this may be a safeguard against temptation or sinful habit;it may inspire you with a new feeling of the value of _all_ the livesaround you, and a new sense of the duty you owe to the good life of thissociety in which God has placed you, that you may prove a vessel ofhonour sanctified for His service. 

 XX. HE THAT OVERCOMETH. 

 "He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be My son. "--REVELATION xxi. 7. 

Year by year as at this time, when the week of our Saviour's Passion andDeath is just in front of us, and the shadow of His Cross is falling overus, one generation after another of the boys of this school gather here, and in the face of the congregation, young and old, they take upon themthe vows of a Christian life. So we met last Thursday, and your vow isstill fresh upon a great many of you, as indeed it can hardly fail to befresh in the memory of every one in this congregation who has ever takenit. Let us pause for a moment and repeat its plain words. You havedeclared your faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the HolyGhost, the Father, the Redeemer, the Sanctifier of your life. You havevowed that you renounce the devil and his works, that you renouncecovetous desires, that you renounce the carnal desires of the flesh, sothat you will not follow nor be led by them. And you have vowed that youwill keep God's holy will and commandments, and walk in them all the daysof your life. And you take this upon you, let us hope, in sincerity andhonesty of purpose. 

And, if so, the text I have read to you declares God's promise, if youpersevere, just as another text in the same chapter declares that intothe City of God there shall not enter anything that defileth or workethabomination or maketh a lie. This, then, is the promise--"He thatovercometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shallbe My son. " But as we think of this and look forward, we have toremember that this life to which you are dedicated is not an easy matter. If you are to succeed in it, you have to think of it always as a lifeunder a vow, as in fact a consecrated life, consecrated by your ownpromise and profession. And this is a great safeguard if you bear italways in mind. 

It is indeed the first condition of safety from the attacks and theimpulses of sin, this consciousness which you will carry about with you, that you are self-dedicated--that there was a day on which you said "Iwill"--so that if you are to be true to your profession and declaredpurpose, you will strive to keep near to God in the spirit, and you willhave no dealings with the devil and his works, and you will resist allthe degrading solicitations of the flesh, and will live in the atmosphereof things that are pure and of good report. 

To have conceived such a purpose as this, to have opened your heart toits influence, to have lived in it even for a little while, to have feltits purifying and strengthening breath upon your soul even for a fewweeks, may be enough, as some of you know very well, to lift your life upto a new level, so that it becomes and is felt by you to be a quitedifferent life from what you lived before--a life of new thoughts, of newnotions about what is good or what is evil, about the degrading characterof sin and the misery and hatefulness of it, as also about the happinessof a life that is inspired by good aims and purposes, and is free from asense of God's wrath upon you for some low standard of conduct, or somesinful appetite or passion. If you have once felt the influence of thischange in your heart, you know the difference henceforth between thehigher life and the lower, the life that is clinging to God, howeverfeebly, and is in the way of salvation, and the life of sin which willinevitably end in degradation and in death. 

But this life in Christ to which you are dedicated is not an easy one;let us not suppose it. It is a noble life, and every one who strives tolive it is doing something to ennoble his society; but it is not an easylife. It is never so represented to us in the Bible. There is a senseno doubt in which our Lord invites us to see how easy is His yokecompared with the yoke of sin--but He Himself calls upon every believerto take up his cross and follow Him. That call may bring to any of usnot peace but a sword. St. Paul sets the Christian life before us as arace to be run with patience; as a conflict which will sometimes be veryhard. In St. James we see it as the discipline of sore temptation, andin St. Peter it is the fiery trial that is to try us. 

And again, in the Revelation of St. John, we have this picture ofblessing only to those that endure, and to those who have not defiledtheir garments, and those who have come through great tribulation. 

And all our personal experience confirms this language of Holy Scripture, reminding us, as it does, how hard it is for an individual to keep in thenarrow way of the spotless Christian life, and how it is still harder tostamp the mark of Christian purpose upon a society. 

Yet these are the two things to which God is calling us. These you havein fact vowed that you will strive after; and if you are unfaithful ineither respect, if you give up your effort for an easy, drifting life, you are letting go your confirmation vows; and whereas you were intendedto be the salt of your society, your salt will lose its savour. Toconsider this just now may save some of you from discouragement and somefrom waste and failure. 

Men are stronger to meet their difficulties if they know that they haveto meet them or else to fail and sink. And so it will be with you. Youwill be more likely to go forward strong in earnest purpose, strong inthe strength which God supplies, if you bear it in mind that, as St. Paulwould have expressed it, we are appointed unto these trials; and that asoldier of Christ must expect to have to endure hardness; and in factthat it is a law of our spiritual life that one of the chief roots of allgrowth in strength and goodness is suffering. We grow through trial andsuffering to true manhood in Christ. 

So, if you look at your own life and experience, you will find that somesuffer through a sore struggle with their own temptations, or their ownweaknesses--their desires, their appetites, their fears, or the habitsthey have contracted, and their struggle may be so hard that it needs allthe grace of God to keep them firm in their purpose. Some again suffernot from internal but from external hindrances. Companions may beagainst them, or a low public opinion may be against them, and they mayfeel as if they could hardly stand firm in isolation, or under suspicion, or mockery, or enmity; and some may suffer because the conscience aroundthem is depraved, and they feel too weak to fight against it, though theyknow and acknowledge its depravity. But however hard may be the fightthere should be no discouragement, if only you are able still to say inall honesty that you are holding fast to the good purpose which youuttered in your confirmation vows. Two quite simple warnings maysometimes do us great service--one, is that we are very apt to exaggeratethe forces against us. They seem very strong when we are feeling weak;but they sometimes break up and disappear if they are met with a littlecourage. And the other warning is this, that we sometimes let ourselvessink and drift into sinful ways or moral cowardice, by neglecting thehelps which God gives us for the strengthening of a good life in us. 

Thus if we neglect real prayer, or do not seek the support of goodcompanionship, if we take no pains to live in a good atmosphere andamidst good surroundings, if there is little of devout thought orhabitual worship in our life and still less of Holy Communion, if we thusallow ourselves to drift out of the range of the higher moral andspiritual influences, our vows are forgotten and our good purposes fadeaway, our will becomes weak, and the world with all its temptations isvery likely to overcome us. 

Feeling the infinite issues that hang on such considerations as these, let us carry about with us the inspiring and invigorating call and thepromise contained in the text with which I began this sermon--"He thatovercometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shallbe My son. "