The Apostle lays down no rule respecting worldly amusements. He 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 cannot 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."

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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. The 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 splendour 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 labourer 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 measure of worldliness. Christianity forbids our condemning others; men may buy and possess. Christianity prescribes no law for dress, its colour, 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 valleys of existence. He wears all this on the outside, carelessly, and could say, "My all was not laid there."

How

In conclusion, let there be no censoriousness. 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, (3 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. 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

Sin may

that his spirit should have no other heaven but in these things, happy if they could but last for ever, 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.

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

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND SECULAR

KNOWLEDGE.

HE particular occasion of this chapter was a controversy

THE

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.

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 cannot 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,