fore must be your obedience; and remember that to linger behind, or to follow afar off, is as if you should suffer your guide to outstrip you in the night-season. You hold your present knowledge on the tenure of obedience: to disobey it, is to dim its brightness, and yet to deepen your responsibility; for we shall answer even less heavily for what we still have than for what we have lost. These are fearful words: "They received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." But though for the most part your knowledge is great, there are some who feel or believe their own light to be small. It is not in the greatness of the light, but in the closeness with which we follow it, that we shall find safety. "Thy word is a light unto my feet, and a lantern to my path." The clear dictate of conscience, enlightened by even a single ray of truth, guiding the details of a Christian's daily life, will bring him to heaven. Therefore, once more, let us learn not to delay to follow with readiness the guidance of right knowledge. If it do but beckon or point you in the way of obedience, follow without linger 1 2 Thess. ii. 10-12. ing. The first penetrating conviction, and the kindled emotion, and the momentary willingness which raises the eyes of obedient hearts to higher and holier paths, and dislodges even a stubborn mind from its most settled purpose,-these are sent as the first impulses to launch you in an heavenward course. Do not slight them: beware how you stifle them. They are as fleeting as the be you have them now if lost, it may be you shall never have them again. SERMON X. OBEDIENCE THE ONLY REALITY. 1 ST. JOHN ii. 17. The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." It may seem perhaps a hard saying, that in this majestic and dazzling world there is only one imperishable reality, and that, a thing most hidden and despised-I mean, a will obedient to the will of God. Yet nothing is more certain. It is plain that nothing is truly real which is not eternal. In a certain sense, all things, the most shadowy and fleeting, the frosts, and dews, and mists of heaven, -are real; every light which falls from the upper air, every reflection of its brightness towards heaven again, is a reality. It is a creature of God; and is here, in His world, fulfilling His word. But these things we are wont to take as symbols and parables of unreality, and that because they are changeful and transitory. It is clear, then, that when we speak of realities, we K are not. mean things that have in them the germ of an abiding life. Things which pass away at last, how long soever they may seem to tarry with us, we call forms and appearances. They have no intrinsic being; for a time they are, and then they Their very being was an accident; they were shadows of a reality, cast for a time into the world, and then withdrawn. In strictness of speech, then, we can call nothing real which is not eternal. Now it is in this sense that I have said, the only reality in the world is a will obedient to the will of God and this truth we will consider more at large. 1. First of all, it is plain that the only reality in this visible world is man. "The earth, and all the works that are therein, shall be burned up. Whatsoever may lie hid in these awful words, it is clear that they declare this world to be transitory, and its end determined. Of all things that have life without a reasonable soul, we know no more than that they perish. All visible things are ever changing; material forms passing into new combinations, shifting their sameness with their shapes : all things around us, and above us, and beneath, are full of change; they heave, and mingle, and resolve, and pass off by some mysterious law of intercommunication, and by that law declare that they are not eternal. In like manner, all the 12 St. Pet. iii. 10. 991 works of men, all the arts of life, are no more than the impressions and characters left by the spirit of man, while subject to the conditions of an earthly state. Kingdoms, and polities, and laws, and armies, and mechanical powers, and the achievements of wisdom, and wit, and might, and the infinite maze of human action, from the beginning to the ending of the world's history,—what are they all, under the providence of God, but so many fleeting and broken shadows, cast from the evervarying postures of man's restless spirit? They are all in time and of time, and with time shall pass away, save only their accumulated results, of which we shall have to speak hereafter. Such, for instance, were the empires of Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar, of Persia and Greece; or let us take, as an example, the great empire of Rome. For well nigh two thousand years what a sleepless movement of human life swarmed round that wonderful centre of the world! how it expanded itself from a point to be the girdle of the whole earth! how that same teeming power of thought and action wrought itself inwardly into a wondrous polity of ordered and civilised life, and outwardly, through fleets and legions, into an irresistible force, breaking in pieces, and fusing, and recasting the world into its own mould! And so it wrought on from century to century, as if it would never wax |