upon your brows. Your bodies are His holy temple, your hearts the altar on which He has kindled the fire of His love. You hear His word, you receive His sacraments. You are called by His high calling to be holy and pure. The glory of your adoption, the inestimable price paid for your redemption, the ennobling mystery of sanctification, have made you more sacred than a dedicated thing. There is nothing high, there is nothing noble, there is nothing godlike to which you are not clearly summoned, for which you are not naturally fit. And shall you descend voluntarily into the defilement and pollution of sin? Nay, reverence1 yourselves, for you are greater than you know. Oh surely when you think of the high and holy men, the household and city of God on earth; or when, yet passing upwards, you mingle in thought with the spirits and souls of the righteous, in those "Solemn choirs and sweet societies That sing, and singing in their glory move ; or when, soaring yet higher on the wings of solemn and consecrated thought, you fix your 1 Many readers will recognize in these words an echo of the noble language on this subject which is to be found in more than one mighty page of Milton's prose works. contemplations on the Father who created you, on the Spirit who sheds His light abroad in your hearts, on the great High Priest ̧who stands to intercede for you by the throne of the Majesty on high;—surely in the light of such thoughts, the philosophy which jests at sin, and the worldly wisdom which bids you descend from the sunlight of holy communion to fill your belly with the husks that the swine do eat,-surely, I say, in the light of such contemplations, the rank theories of the worldling and the sensualist become hideous and revolting then. So may they ever seem, not for the condemnation of others, but for the ennoblement of ourselves. So may they ever seem to us, till our lives are worthy of the holy name whereby we are called. Wholly worthy in this life they cannot be; but by God's grace they shall be hereafter, when in that city, into which can enter no evil, no abominable thing, He who hath loved us, and purchased us to Himself with His own blood, clothe our sinful souls in the white robe of His own righteousness, and confess our names before His Father, and before the angels. II. THE LAW OF DEATH; AND THE MEANS OF (Preached before the University of Cambridge, March 8, 1868.) GENESIS ii. 17.-"In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." IT was the first voice of warning uttered by God to man, the earliest prohibition rendered awful by the denunciation of the earliest and extremest penalty. Yet almost as soon as the voice which uttered it had died away into silence the command was broken, and the penalty enforced. It is the same solemn and humiliating lesson which reappears in the history of Moses. The tablets of stone, inscribed by God's own finger, were shattered even before their laws were promulgated; and while around the riven hills yet wreathed the enfolding fire, and thick darkness which hid the Presence, the people "sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play." It is ever so, alas! in the history of man. All the imaginations of the thoughts of his heart are only evil continually, and by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in God's sight. And the one main cause of this fatal history is Disbelief. God strives to sway our hearts by the two most powerful of motives-Love and Fear. But as sin and self-will allure us, we first doubt, then disbelieve, then deliberately and determinately forget, until that forgetfulness has become a penal blindness. If it be well to startle that forgetfulness-if the thoughts once realized, of death, judgment, and eternity, be always potent to arrest the most headlong course, let us humbly pause to-day for a few moments on our path of life, and consider whether we are walking in wickedness, and, if so, to what goal that path is leading us. Last Sunday, in the record of Adam's fall, we strove to learn from the growth of sin some lessons for our instruction; to-day with the same guidance let us strive to learn something from its consequences. Here too, if I mistake not, we shall find an infinite truthfulness in that simple story of the forbidden fruit; a story the form of which the critic and the man of science may explain as they will, but which to our faith as Christians has a divine inmutable lesson, of which we can neither improve the significance, nor exhaust the depth. But to learn that lesson we must learn humility. It is a gloomy lesson, it is a monotonous lesson, it is a displeasing lesson, it is a lesson absolutely revolting to our intellectual and spiritual pride. My brethren, were I seeking to please or to flatter, were I mindful of you or of man's judgment1, assuredly I should not choose it; but I ask only, is it needful, and is it true? and, I see, in answer, that it is needful, because the present disbelief of it is pregnant with disaster; and it is true, for not only from the first page of the Bible to the last, but also from the highest realm of Nature to the lowest, in the necessities of physical life, in the developments of history, in the workings of the soul, we see that sin and punishment are riveted together by an indissoluble link. The fact that they are so, is as much God's revelation as the record that they have been, and the prophecy that they shall be so; and the fact is too often wilfully ignored, because the 1 I Cor. iv. 3. Ἐμοὶ δὲ εἰς ἐλάχιστόν ἐστιν ἵνα ἀνακριθῷ, ὑφ' ὑμῶν ἢ ὑπὸ ἀνθρωπίνης ἡμέρας. 2 Plato, Phad. ΙΧ. Ὥσπερ ἐκ μιᾶς κορυφῆς συνημμένω δύ ̓ ὄντε. Isocr. Or. ad Demonic. p. 20. Εὐθὺς αἱ λύπαι ταῖς ἡδοναῖς παραπεπήγασιν. |