SERMON VI.

"Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God."—1 Cor. x. 31.

HIS is one of those brief and wonder

TH

ful sentences of which God's word is full. Uttering the deepest things with the easiest and most familiar simplicity, they are passed over by too many as ordinary sayings, with little in them worthy of especial notice; whilst, in truth, that very simplicity is the mark of their divine original: they are often those hidden secrets of wisdom for which ages and generations have strained and pined in vain, but which are now, by God's teaching, put into the mouths very babes and sucklings.

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So is it here. In these few words, which charge us "to do all to the glory of God," there is that truth after which the best earthly philosophy was always reaching forth

in vain: there is the very pith and conclusion of the Gospel of Christ our Lord: there is the living practical end of its teaching to every one of us as reasonable beings: there is that which in as far as we realise and act out, we truly and indeed are Christians: for there is that living and practical revelation to us of our restoration to our due and proper place in God's world, without which life must be to us a riddle, and we ourselves a fruitless puzzle.

Let us then follow out this subject, and see, first, how it involves the solution of the dark mystery of our life and of ourselves. When, then, the most thoughtful men of old looked forth into the world around them, how lost and confounded were all their speculations! They saw every thing in broken lights and endless contradictions: good and evil, pain and pleasure, misery and joy, were so closely and so strangely mingled, that the whole constitution of things was hopelessly entangled. They knew not how a good God could permit or cause such misery, nor how an evil God should mingle so much blessing with his curses.

And if from others and without, they turned their thoughts and their examination inward on themselves, they found the darkness thicken over them: they themselves were to themselves the greatest puzzle and contradiction of all. There was such a mixture of what was great and what was small; of high desires and purposes, and of low and miserable aims and actions; of what was almost too bad even for this earth, and what was evidently fitted for, and aiming after, something far better than it, that they knew not how in any way to solve the perplexing enigma. They could not settle wherein their chief good lay; what was the true end and object of their lives; or whither time was bearing them. They knew not whether, as some taught, their bodily sensations alone, and things palpable, were realities; or whether, as others maintained, these were mere incumbrances, which they might, as their inclination lay, either despise and trample on, or indulge, as things foreign to themselves. But, above all, the voice of God within themselves haunted and dis

tracted them that unwritten living law, which they continually transgressed, tormented and embarrassed them. The clearer became this moral sense in any, the greater must become the strife; because the sense of sin, without the knowledge of an atonement, was the most distracting apprehension to man. So that "he walked" indeed "in a vain shadow, and disquieted himself in vain.' Dark shades were all around him, look which way he would; but the thickest darkness of all was within, when from others he looked into himself.

Now, on all this strife and confusion rose the blessed Gospel of Christ, as a healing and a harmonising light. Confused and blended forms severed themselves into their peculiar proportions; causes and conclusions were united; broken lights were gathered into one. In the world around might now be seen the work of a good and holy God, marred by the sin and wilfulness of His creatures. There was this clue to the continued entanglement, that He was even now working to bring good out of evil,