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VAIN THOUGHTS.

By worldly thoughts, therefore, we would understand all speculations whatever which minister, in the most distant degree, to either of these three characteristic evils of a worldly, that is, a sensual, irreligious, and unspiritual mind.

Of the first, or carnal and unclean thoughts, it is wise to say but little; except that any presentation to the mind, or any cherishing, however squeamishly, any image or recollection that goes to the indulgence or excitement of the lust of the flesh, is irreligious and vain, and in direct opposition to the authority of God and the best interests of the soul. The secret meditations of many a person of decent external behaviour stand, in this respect, unequivocally condemned in the sight of God.

The next class is covetous thoughts, or all those restless cogitations which connect with the lust of the eye; and indicate a mind more occupied with the external trifles and baubles of this present world, than with the things which are not seen and which are eternal. In a world like this, a certain measure of attention must be given to visible things; but the evil of which we speak is where the mind goes forth with such eagerness for the additional possession, or additional finery, or so occupies itself about the arrangements supposed necessary to make these things satisfactory, that evidently eternal things become a secondary matter; and while the services of religion degenerate into a form, the heart is gone after its covetousness. How many are there who might learn even from the wanderings of their mind in the house of God, how strongly the tide of thought sets in, in favour of the lust of the eye. We have taken the lowest view of the evil,

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the occupancy of the mind with matters of mere outward decoration,but how dreadfully the evil of covetous thought is aggravated, when it issues in repining, and envying, and coveting, and dishonest plotting for gratification.

The last class of worldly thoughts is, thoughts of pride and personal vanity;-all that savours of the pride of life. And, in this respect, what a disgraceful scene would the faithful, unreserved disclosure of one heart exhibit. How unholy and unchristian are the speculations in which men indulge, on their mental superiority to others; and the respect due from others to their talents, their situations, and their personal attainments. And how sadly melancholy is the waste of hours, lavishly bestowed by many a woman before her glass, upon the air, the attitude, the studied smile, the becoming attire,—and the almost perpetual occupation of the mind in the contrivance for attraction, till life itself becomes a continued artifice, and the face habitually a hypocrite. We speak not of personal vanity in men : there is abundance of it; but wherever it exists, it is thoroughly contemptible; it goes to degrade a man below the notice of his fellows. But it is melancholy to think of the precious hours of retirement which domestic life affords, being devoted by any one to meditation and contrivance how to produce impression, in the few delightful hours of public exhibition. The closet will bear a fearful witness against the vain thoughts of many. Men are tried by the grosser and more direct temptations of life; but these things are the tests of character applied to the comparatively spotless lives of our wives and our daughters.

Lastly, we must enunciate idle

thoughts. The Saviour has said, "Of every idle word that man shall speak, he shall give account thereof at the day of judgment." And by an idle word, He means an useless word, spoken to no good effect-having no beneficial influence on himself or others. It is the same with thoughts. Such useless, unproductive thoughts are vain indeed. We are the creatures of a day. Our life is as a vapour which vanisheth away. Yet a contingency of unspeakable importance is before us. We have already incurred God's anger for our sin;-His mercy offers us the means of escape, and now we may be lost or saved. Surely, in such circumstances, all those idle or frivolous speculations about matters of mere amusement and dissipation, and that dreamy expenditure of time in which some indulge, must, to say the least of it, be vain. But when we consider that this listless indolence lays the mind open to the temptations of the devil, the world, and the flesh, -and that nevertheless this mere vanity is evidently preferred to occupying the mind with God, it assumes the darker character of criminality, as it shews an unholy preference of the merest trifles of a sensual existence to the substantial realities of an everlasting world.

Thoughts, then, of all these various kinds are vain thoughts. They branch off into a variety of particulars; they assume very different colours and shades; but still, in whatever degree, they savour of ungodliness and practical atheism, of unrighteousness and falsehood—of impurity, covetousness, self-conceit, or hypocrisy-of idleness or uselessness,-they come within the range of that vanity, that earthliness and destitution of good influence, and opposition to the law of God, which

the Scripture so pointedly condemns. And let not any one suppose that there can be but little sin in mere thoughts. They can have looked very superficially at human nature who have not discovered that the thoughts of the heart are the strongest proof of the character of the man. When God looked down to judge of the world, where did He look?-to the imagination of the thoughts of men's hearts, and He found them only evil continually. And where should the Maker of man look, but to the inmost recess of the heart that He has made,where the secret thought, that his fellows cannot discover, stands disclosed and naked to the eye of Omnipotence? And what should go more directly to determine the case of a creature before his Omniscent Judge, than those secret speculations which are independent of external temptations, and which precisely indicate the actings of his own will, the goings forth of his own unprompted choice, the voluntary bubbling up of the pas sions of his own heart? Set before your mind a rational moral being, gifted with unnumbered blessings from the God of his life, apparently amiable, and certainly not driven by the controlling force of circumstances into temptation, and yet with all thisyes, and with all the advantages of religious instruction, with a right knowledge of what is sin, and a right appreciation of the offered help in the Gospel; yet, having his heart full of vain thoughts, of ungodly, unrighteous, worldly, or idle thoughts,-in fact, having the soul so intensely occupied in its retired meditation, with evil in some form or other, that the serious thought of God is actually shut out from the heart; and that all the riches of the invitation of mercy fail in win

VAIN THOUGHTS.

ning his attention, or of exhibiting to him the God of all grace, as worthy of his regard. Take the lowest style of sin, the beggarly speculation of personal vanity, and can there be a more awful proof of alienation from God, than that a man should occupy himself in admiring his own outward or inward accomplishments, to the exclusion of the living God from his heart, and to the trifling away of the opportunity of salvation? It is not to be wondered at that the Searcher of hearts should judge a different judgment from man, and that many who to us appear amiable, and decent, and respectable people, should be hateful in His sight; because He who sees through the shades of night and through the mystification of the most practised hypocrisy, discovers unquestionably that the heart is not His own, that it is joined to idols; nay, that in many cases that idol is the man's own contemptible self.

We come in the second place to notice the remedy for vain thoughts. God has graciously provided such a remedy, and it is open to our application. We know from the Word of God that vain thoughts stand directly opposed to the love of God's law. Whatever therefore would be effectual to the planting the love of that law in the heart, would be in principle the remedy of the evil. In proportion as that love became predominant, the salutary influence of the remedy would be felt; and whenever conformity to that law was entirely obtained, the victory over vanity would be complete.

Now God has taken a very bold and striking means for restoring to the alienated hearts of His creatures, the love of His law. Sin is the great source of vanity. It is because men

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are naturally sinful, and alienate d from God by sin, that they put anything in the place of God, and prefer any human rule or opinion to God's law. The measures then best calculated to deliver men from the thraldrom of sin, would be the best also to lead them to love Him. And God has done this by the manifestation of His own Eternal Son in the flesh, as the atonement for sin, as the effectual mode of reconciling and restoring a guilty world. Jesus Christ has for ever put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. He has by one propitiatory offering for ever perfected them that are sanctified. And the removal of guilt is the first step to the removal of enmity. It is the conquest of the alienated heart, by the unexpected manifestation of Divine compassion. It is a victory obtained not by power and authority, but by love. It is wrought by the declaration of this truth, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "God commendeth his love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." And that this remedy for the renewal of obedience in man's heart, might be entirely effectual, God has sent forth His own Holy Spirit to exhibit the things of Christ to the soul, and by that means to enlighten the understanding and convert the heart. left to take our own unassisted view of the provision of mercy, but the mind is guided, enlightened, convinced, and animated. It receives again, through the atonement, that principle of holy life, which by sin we had forfeited; and consequently returns again to that love of holiness in which the human heart was first

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created, that is, as St. Paul says, "The love of God is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us."

But now to return to our immediate object. How does this spiritual knowledge of God's way of salvation operate as a remedy against vain thoughts? In the first place, the gift itself is of a purifying nature. This salvation by grace, through faith, is the way which God has taken to deliver His creatures from the power and pollution of sin. Christ gave Himself for us, to cleanse us from sin and to redeem us from our iniquity. And the direct influence therefore of a saving knowledge of Christ is to make us holy, to create in us a clean heart, and to renew a right spirit within us. He that hath this hope in God purifieth himself, i.e. the principle of this hope is as a well of purifying water, springing up in the heart, to cleanse it from its former habits of defilement. And they that are Christ's will find a conflict maintained within them by the spiritual weapon of the Gospel, against every high thought and every vain imagination, till they are brought in captivity to the obedience of Christ.

Again. This spiritual knowledge of God in Christ, gives the mind superior and more worthy subjects of contemplation than any that had previously come before it. The subjects of thought in the unchristian mind are at best earthly-limited by the interests of this present life; and so scanty and unsatisfactory are they, that men fly to sin almost for very weariness. But what splendid views have opened before the believing mind. How expanded, how fathomless, the subjects to which revelation leads. This is one of the strong reasons that renders the society of irre

ligious men so vapid and uninteresting to those who truly believe the Gospel, that the one is dealing exclusively with the petty and uncertain interests of a day; the other is sensible that he is surrounded and conversant with infinities, and has in them an interest of unspeakable value.

Again. The knowledge of God in Christ operates as a remedy against evil thoughts, because it sets before the mind the true character of God. It is because we have not known God that we presume to live in sin. It is because God is not always sufficiently before our eyes that we now indulge a vain unholy thought. Now the great feature of the christian religion is the manifestation of the unseen God. God was manifest in the flesh. And the great feature of a saving knowledge of Christ is the new or spiritual manifestation of God to the mind. Through Christ we know Him and have fellowship with Him. God is revealed to the mind through Christ, in His true character. It is shewn to us, that the holiness, purity, and justice of God are so inflexible as to appoint His own Son, under the imputation of guilt, to an accursed death; and yet that His benevolence towards our lost race was such, that in order to deliver sinners He was pleased even to adopt this extreme remedy, and to lay upon His beloved Son, the iniquity and the curse of us all; that the Son Himself was willing to be under the imputation and the curse of human guilt, in order that God might be just, and at the same time exercise the boundless fulness of His compassion in justifying the sin

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I do this great wickedness, and sin liation, and death of the same blessed Saviour. These are the suggestions which arise in the mind when we have been brought to a saving belief in the Gospel of Christ; and if such are our practical views of Christ's atoning death, and of the guilt of the sin for which He died, it soon occurs to the mind, that it would be the basest ingratitude to live in the midst of christian knowledge and hope, and in the supposed enjoyment of them, while the imagination was indulged in anything bordering on ungodly, unrighteous, worldly, or idle thoughts and speculations. And thus it is, that the mode which God has taken by the incarnation and death of His Son, to bring us back to Himself, operates in several ways most powerfully to crush, even in the heart of the believer, the risings of that speculative evil, which in the conduct of others, has rushed onward to its results, and has deluged the world with crime and misery.

Once more. The spiritual knowledge of God through Christ operates a remedy against evil thoughts, because it gives such an awful view of the heinousness of sin. It is only in the cross of Christ, that we ever see sin as we ought. It is then only we can measure its demerits. The first sin of our race was about a trifle; the eating of an apple. Its heinousness lay in this, that it was disobedience against such a God in such a trifle. Its consequences, however, upon the whole race, soon shewed something of the evil. From the blood of Abel, downward, the evil of disobedience has been abundantly developed in the history of mankind; but dreadful as have been its accumulated proofs, never was the extent of the evil so awfully exhibited as in the value of that blood which must be shed for the atonement,―the blood of the Son of God. Let the mind then get fairly occupied with this thought, and with all the courses which branch out of it, and how fearful must the guilt of human transgression appear. And then, instead of the first act of sin, the eating forbidden fruit, let any one substitute the feeding of the imagination, in his own case, on one improper image, and you then bring the weight of all the solemn considerations that arise out of the crucifixion of Christ to bear upon the guilt of one vain thought; and then one instant's indulgence of personal vanity, or any other corruption, will be seen to have in it the essential character of enmity to God, and that if it had been the first sin, it would have ruined a whole world; and for its removal, even if it stood alone, would call for the incarnation, humi

We must conclude, briefly, in the third place, with some short notices how we may know, in our own case, that the remedy has been effectually applied to, that we have actually gone to the Gospel, and found it effectual as a way of delivery from evil and vain thoughts. And here the first step is very plain. The Psalmist says, “I hate vain thoughts;" if we have really applied to the remedy, we shall hate them too. They will be subjects of disgust, aversion, dread, and lamentation. But how, some will say, How can I know that I hate them, when I find them still unwittingly rising in me? Let us go a step further. The Psalmist says, "I hate vain thoughts: but thy law do I love;" and St. Paul, in the same way,-"I find then a law, that, when I would do good,

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