SERMON IV. PHILIPPIANS iii. 8. I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. ANY man who can say this with sincerity, and has acted and is acting upon it, deserves to be considered one of the happiest of human creatures; and every man who cannot say it is very miserable; not that he always feels his misery, for then he would try to escape from it; but he is miserable in reality, because he is going on in the sure road to destruction; and his being blind to his own danger, only makes his case the more shocking, and places him more beyond the reach of any assistance. The Scripture, in one or two places, speaks of double-minded men-of men who try to serve God and Mammon-men who are halting between two opinions. This is the character which may be given to half the world; they do not count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus their Lord; but they think that the knowledge of Christ is a great gain to them, and that other things are a great gain to them also; but which to prefer they have never once for all decided. So sometimes they follow Christ, and sometimes the world; and in this state of things, the world is sure to gain some advantage over us every day, and Christ gradually to lose it, till, at last, they who would not count other things but loss for Christ's sake, come to consider the Gospel as but loss for their own pleasure's sake, and soon do not give themselves the trouble of thinking at all about it. "The knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord;" that is, the knowledge of our wants, and of the means by which those wants may be most fully satisfied; the knowledge of sin and of salvation. Men's eyes in general are equally closed against both; for as none but Christians have any thing like a true notion of their own evil, so also none but Christians have looked forward with any lively hope to the glory that shall be revealed hereafter. I mean none but Christians, when speaking of ourselves in this country; for it may be that men, under a false religion, may fix their hopes very eagerly on the blessings that are falsely promised them but with us, if a man is not a Christian, he is generally of no religion at all; and although some of this sort will say that they hope, through the mercy of God, to be eternally happy; yet, in fact, no instances I believe are known, of such men being strongly moved by what they pretend to hope for, or of their making their hope the ruling : principle of their conduct. Indeed, those who are Christians in name only, are themselves very little better;-they say that they hope to go to heaven, but their hope is so tame, that one cannot see how it can yield them comfort, or how their happiness would be disturbed, if they were told that there was no such place as heaven in the universe. We may remark, that when our Lord was foretelling the state of the world in after times, he more than once declared to his disciples that his Gospel would only in a small degree overcome the wickedness of the world. "When the Son of man cometh," he says, "shall he find faith upon the earth?" And he says again, that "as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man; that as before the flood men ate and drank, bought and sold, planted and builded, and thought nothing of God, till his judgments burst upon them, and destroyed them all: that so it should be at the time1 when the Son of Man should be revealed." Now how is it that so many 1 Those persons who expect that there will be a final triumph, not only of the name, but of the Spirit of Christ throughout the earth, and that the glorious pictures of the Prophecies will be realized in this life, understand our Lord's coming, spoken of in these passages, in its subordinate sense, of his coming to destroy Jerusalem; but experience has shown us, that whatever may be the state of things at his second coming, his words are at least applicable to every period of his Church that has hitherto elapsed, and were scarcely ever more applicable than at present. amongst us are living exactly in the manner which Christ has described ? Let us just consider the way in which the early part of life is generally passed, and we shall soon cease to wonder that it leads so often to an unchristian state of manhood. Within a To begin with the earliest infancy. few days or weeks of its birth, the parents wish to have their child baptized. The wish arises many times from mere custom: all children are christened, and ours must not be different from those of our neighbours. There is sometimes, too, a little superstition; a notion that baptism is a sort of charm which will preserve an infant from all mischief if it should die; and there is, thirdly, the thought of getting friends together, and enjoying the festivities of what is called a christening. Whilst the child is taken to be baptized with such feelings on the part of his parents, they are provoking God to withhold his blessing from the sacrament which they thus profane; nay, I had almost said, they are provoking him to send a curse upon them, and not a blessing. It is very curious to observe the different extremes in which men err with regard to the two sacraments. We know that many persons never can be prevailed upon to come to the Lord's Supper at all, because they are afraid of eating and drinking unworthily; yet we never hear of any who feel scruples about the sacrament of Baptism, or who are afraid of offering their child to receive the seal of the Christian covenant unworthily. Yet. there can be no doubt that it is as great a sin to profane one of these ordinances as to profane the other; and a man who brings his child to be baptized, without any proper feeling of the blessings communicated in that sacrament, and of his own duties as connected with it, does, in fact, profane it as much as he who eats and drinks at the Lord's table with an unrepentant and uncharitable heart. But let us go on and see what is done with a child after baptism: he is suffered, very often, to live in complete ignorance of every thing that concerns his salvation. I have known boys of eight or nine years old, who did not so much as know what would happen to them after their death, but thought that after they were once put in the ground they would lie there for ever, and should never feel anything any more either of good or evil. But even where this is not the case, the knowledge of heavenly things is too often taught as a lesson, and no pains are taken to make it seize hold upon the heart, and to influence the conduct. Time passes on, and the child is sent to school, or is wanted to assist his parents in their work, or to do something for his own maintenance. At school he finds himself placed among other children, most of whom have had as little Christian instruction as himself; and instead of meeting with anything |