ments.

The apostle lays down no rule respecting worldly amuseHe does not say, You must avoid this or that, but he lays down broad principles. People often come to ministers and ask them to draw a boundary line within which they may safely walk. There is none. It is at our peril that we attempt to define where God has not defined.

We can

not say, This amusement is right, and that is wrong." And herein is the greater responsibility laid upon all, for we have to live out principles rather than maxims; and the principle here is, be unworldly.

But remember, if the enjoyments which you permit yourselves are such, that the thought of passing Time and coming Eternity presents itself as an intrusive thought, which has no business there, which is out of place, and incongruous; if you become secularized, excited, and artificial; if there is left behind a craving for excitement which can only be slaked by more and more intense excitement: then it is at your own peril that you say, All is left open to me, and permitted. Unworldly you must become-or die. Dare not to say, This is only a matter of opinion: it is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of conscience; and to God you must give account for the way in which you have been dealing with your soul.

The fourth case is unworldliness in the acquisition of property. "They that buy, as though they possessed not.”

The

Unworldliness is not measured by what you possess, but by the spirit in which you possess it. It is not said, "Do not buy," but rather "Buy-possess." You may be a large merchant, an extensive landed proprietor, a thriving tradesman, if only your heart be separate from the love of these earthly things, with God's love paramount within. amount of property you possess does not affect the question; it is purely a relative consideration. You go into a regal or ducal palace, and perhaps, unaccustomed to the splendor which you see, you say, "All this is worldliness. But the poor man comes to your house; your dress, simple as it is, seems magnificent to him; your day's expenditure would keep his family for half a year. He sees round him expensively bound books, costly furniture, pictures, silver, and china-a profusion certainly beyond what is absolutely necessary; and to him this seems worldliness too. If the monarch is to live as you live, why should not you live as the laborer lives? If what you call the necessaries of life be the measure of the rich man's worldliness, why should not the poor man's test gauge yours?

No! we must take another test than property as the meas

ure of worldliness. Christianity forbids our condemning others; men may buy and possess. Christianity prescribes no law for dress, its color, its fashion, or its cost; none for expenditure, none for possessions: it fixes great principles, and requires you to be unaffected, unenslaved by earthly things; to possess them as though you possessed them not. The Christian is one who, if a shipwreck or a fire were to take all luxury away, could descend, without being crushed, into the vallies of existence. He wears all this on the outside, carelessly, and could say, "My all was not laid there."

In conclusion, let there be no censoriousness. How others live, and what they permit themselves, may be a matter for Christian charity, but it is no matter for Christian severity. To his own master each must stand or fall. Judge not. It is work enough for any one of us to save his own soul.

Let there be no self-deception. The way in which I have expounded this subject gives large latitude, and any one may abuse it if he will-any one may take comfort to himself, and say, "Thank God, there are no hard restrictions in Christianity." Remember, however, that worldliness is a more decisive test of a man's spiritual state than even sin. Sin may be sudden, the result of temptation, without premeditation, yet afterwards hated-repented of repudiated -forsaken. But if a man be at home in the world's pleasure and pursuits, content that his spirit should have no other heaven but in these things, happy if they could but last forever, is not his state, genealogy, and character clearly stamped?

Therefore does St. John draw the distinction-" If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father;" but "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

LECTURE XVII.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND SECULAR

KNOWLEDGE.

1 CORINTHIANS viii. 1-7. January 18, 1852.

THE particular occasion of this chapter was a controversy going on in the Church of Corinth respecting a Christian's right to eat meat which had been sacrificed to idols. Now the question was this: It was customary, when an animal was sacrificed or consecrated to a heathen god, to reserve one

portion for the priest and another for the worshipper. These were either used in the feasts or sold like common meat in the shambles. Now among the Corinthian converts some had been Jews and some heathens: those who had been Jews would naturally shrink from eating this meat, their previous training being so strongly opposed to idolatry, while those who had been heathen would be still more apt to shrink from the use of this meat than were the Jews; for it is proverbial that none are so bitter against a system as those who have left it, perhaps for the simple reason that none know so well as they the errors of the system they have left. There was another reason which made the heathen converts shrink from eating this meat, and this was, that they were unable to divest themselves of the idea that the deities they had once adored were living entities; they had ceased to bow before them, but long habit had made them seem living personalities; they looked on them as demons. Hence the meat of an animal consecrated while living to an idol appeared to them polluted, accursed, contaminated-a thing only fit to be burnt, and utterly unfit for food.

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This state of feeling may be illustrated by the modern state of belief with reference to apparitions. Science has banished an express faith in their existence, yet we should probably be surprised did we know how much credulity on this subject still remains. The statute book is purged from the sentences on witchcraft, and yet a lingering feeling remains that it may still exist in power. Christianity had done the same for the heathen deities. They were dethroned as gods, but they still existed to the imagination as beings of a lower order as demons who were malicious to men and enemies to God. Hence, meat offered to them was regarded as abominable, as unfit for a Christian man to eat; he was said to have compromised his Christianity by doing so. On the other hand, there were men of clearer views who maintained, in the language quoted by St. Paul, "An idol is nothing in the world"-a nonentity, a name, a phantom of the imagination; it can not pollute the meat, since it is nothing, and has no reality. Therefore they derided the scruple of the weaker brethren, and said, "We will eat." Now all this gave rise to the enunciation of a great principle by the Apostle Paul. In laying it down, he draws a sharp distinction between Secular and Christian knowledge, and also unfolds the law of Christian conscience.

It is to the first of these that I shall claim your attention to-day.

A great controversy is going on at the present time in the

matter of education. One partly extols the value of instruction, the other insists loudly that secular education without religion is worse than useless. By secular education is meant instruction in such branches as arithmetic, geography, grammar, and history; and by religious education, instruction in the Bible and the catechism. But you will see at once that the knowledge of which St. Paul spoke slightingly was much higher than any or all of these. He spoke of instruction not merely in history, geography, or grammar, but also of instruction in the Bible, the catechism, and the Articles, as worthless, without training in humility and charity. This was the secular knowledge he speaks of, for you will perceive that he treats knowledge of very important religious matters as secular, and rates it very low indeed. He said, Mere knowledge is worth little; but then by knowledge he meant not merely knowledge without Christian doctrine, but knowledge without love.

Many a person now zealous on this point of education would be content if only the Bible, without note or comment, were taught. But St. Paul would not have been content; he would have calmly looked on and said, This also is secular knowledge. This, too, is the knowledge which puffeth up; but Christian knowledge is the charity which alone. buildeth up a heavenly spirit. Let me try to describe more fully this secular knowledge.

It is knowledge without humility. For it is not so much. the department of knowledge, as it is the spirit in which it is acquired which makes the difference between secular and Christian knowledge. It is not so much the thing known as the way of knowing it. "If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know." "As he ought to know." That single word "as" is the point of the sentence; for it is not what to know, but how to know, which includes all real knowledge.

The greatest of modern philosophers, and the greatest of modern historians, Humboldt and Niebuhr, were both eminently humble men. So, too, you will find that real talent among mechanics is generally united to great humility. Whereas the persons you would select as puffed up by knowledge are those who have a few religious maxims and a few shallow religious doctrines. There are two ways, therefore, of knowing all things. One is that of the man who loves to calculate how far he is advanced beyond others; the other that of the man who feels how infinite knowledge is, how little he knows, and how deep the darkness of those who know even less than he; who says, not as a cant phrase, but in un

affected sincerity, "I know nothing, and do go into the grave." That knowledge will never puff up.

Again, it is liberty without reverence. These men to whom the apostle writes in rebuke were free from many superstitions. An idol, they said, was nothing in the world. But although freed from the worship of false gods, they had not therefore adored the true God. For it is not merely freedom from superstition which is worship of God, but it is loving dependence on Him; the surrender of self. "If any man love God, the same is known of Him." Observe, it is not said, "He shall know God," but "shall be known of Him;" that is, God shall acknowledge the likeness and the identity of spirit, and "will come unto him and make His abode with him."

There is much of the spirit of these Corinthians existing now. Men throw off what they call the trammels of education, false systems, and superstitions, and then call themselves free: they think it a grand thing to reverence nothing; all seems to them either kingcraft or priestcraft, and to some it is a matter of rejoicing that they have nothing left either to respect or worship. There is a recent work in which the writer has tried to overthrow belief in God, the soul, and immortality, and proclaims this liberty as if it were a gospel for the race! My brother-men, this is not high knowledge. It is a great thing to be free from mental slavery, but suppose you are still a slave to your passions? It is a great thing to be emancipated from superstition, but suppose you have no religion? From all these bonds of the spirit Christianity has freed us, says St. Paul; but then it has not left us merely free from these, it has bound us to God. "Though there be gods many, yet to us there is but one God." The true freedom from superstition is free service to religion: the real emancipation from false gods is reverence for the true God. For high knowledge is not negative, but positive; it is to be freed from the fear of the many in order to adore and love the one. And not merely is this the only real knowledge, but no other knowledge "buildeth up" the soul. It is all well so long as elasticity of youth and health remain. Then the pride of intellect sustains us strongly; but a time comes when we feel terribly that the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life. Our souls without God and Christ enter deeper and deeper into the hollowness and darkness, the coldness and the death, of a spirit separate from love. "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Separate from love, the more we know, the profounder the mystery of life becomes; the more dreary and the more horrible becomes ex