Sermons for the Times

SERMON X.  THE DOXOLOGY

Psalm viii. 1 and sqq.  O Lord our Governor, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth, Thou that hast set Thy glory above the heavens!

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

This is the text which I have chosen to-day, because I think it will help us to understand the end of the Lord’s Prayer, which tells us to say to our Father in Heaven, ‘Father, Thine is the kingdom; Father, Thine is the power; Father, Thine is the glory.’

The man who wrote this psalm had been looking up at the sky, spangled with countless stars, with the moon, as if she were the queen of them all, walking in her brightness.  He had been looking round, too, on this wonderful earth, with its countless beasts, and birds, and insects, trees, herbs, and flowers, each growing, and thriving, and breeding after their kind, according to the law which God had given to each of them, without any help of man.  And then he had thought of men, how small, weak, ignorant, foolish, sinful they were, and said to himself, ‘Why should God care for men more than for these beasts, and birds, and insects round?  Not because he is the largest and strongest thing in the world; for I will consider Thy heavens, even the work of Thy hands, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained, how much greater, more beautiful they are than poor human beings.  May not glorious beings, angels, be dwelling in them, compared to whom man is no better than a beast?’

And yet he says to himself, ‘I know that God, though He has put man lower than the angels, has crowned him with glory and honour.  I know that, whatever glorious creatures may live in the sun, and moon, and stars, God has given man the dominion and power here, on this world.  I know that even to babes and sucklings God has given a strength, because of His enemies—that He may silence the enemy and the avenger; and I know that by so doing, God has set His glory above the heavens, and has shown forth His glory more in these little children, to whom He gives strength and wisdom, than He has in sun, and moon, and stars.’

Now how is that?  The Catechism, I think, will tell us.  The Doxology, at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, will tell us, if we consider it.

If you will listen to me, I will try and show you what I mean.

Suppose I took one of your children, and showed him that large bright star, which you may see now every evening, shining in the south-west, and said to him, ‘My child, that star, which looks to you only a bright speck, is in reality a world—a world fourteen hundred times as big as our world.  We have but one moon to light our earth; that little speck has four moons, each of them larger than ours, which light it by night.  That little speck of a star seems to you to be standing still; in reality, it is travelling through the sky at the rate of 25,000 miles an hour.’  What do you think the child’s feeling would be?  If he were a dull child, he might only be astonished; but if he were a sensible and thoughtful child, do you not think that a feeling of awe, almost of fear, would come over him, when he thought how small and weak and helpless he was, in comparison of those mighty and glorious stars above his head?

And next, if I turned the child round, and bade him look at that comet or fiery star, which has appeared lately low down in the north-west, and said, ‘My child, that comet, which seems to you to hang just above the next parish, is really eighty millions of miles off from us.  That bright spot at the lower part of it is a fiery world as large as the moon,—that tail of fiery light which you see streaming up from it, and which looks a few feet long, is a stream of fiery vapour, stretching, most likely, hundreds of thousands of miles through the boundless space.  It seems to you to be sinking behind the trees, so slowly that you cannot see it move.  It is really rushing towards us now, with its vast train of light, at the rate of some eighty thousand miles an hour.’  And suppose then, if, to make the child more astonished than ever, I went on—‘Yes, my child, every single tiny star which is twinkling over your head is a sun, a sun as large, or larger than our own sun, perhaps with worlds moving round it, as our world moves round our sun, but so many millions of miles far off, that the strongest spy-glass cannot make these stars look any larger, or show us the worlds which we believe are moving round them.’

Do you not think that just in proportion to the child’s quickness and understanding, he would be awed, almost terrified?

And lastly, suppose that to puzzle and astonish him still more, I took a chance drop of water out of any standing pool, and showed him through a magnifying-glass, in that single drop of water, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of living creatures so small that it is impossible to see them with the naked eye, each of them of some beautiful and wonderful shape, unlike anything which you ever saw or dreamed of, but each of them alive, each of them moving, feeding, breeding, after its kind, each fulfilling the nature which God has given to them, and told him, ‘All the whole world, the air which you breathe, the leaves on the trees, the soil under your feet, ay, even often the food which you eat, and your own flesh and blood, are as full of wonderful things as that drop of water is.  You fancy that all the life in the world is made up of the men and women in it, and the few beasts, and birds, and insects, which you see about you in the fields.  But these living things which you do see are not a millionth part of the whole number of God’s creatures; and not one smallest plant or tiniest insect dies, but what it passes into a new life, and becomes food for other creatures, even smaller than, though just as wonderful as itself.  Every day fresh living creatures are being discovered, filling earth, and sea, and air, till men’s brains are weary with counting them, and dizzy with watching their unspeakable beauty, and strangeness, and fitness for the work which God has given each of them to do.’

And then suppose I said to the child, ‘God cares for each of these tiny living creatures.  How do you know that He does not care for them as much as He does for you?  God made them for His own pleasure, that He might rejoice in the work of His own hands.  How do you know that He does not rejoice in them as much as in you?  Those mighty worlds and suns above your head, which you call stars, how do you know that they are not as much more glorious and precious in God’s sight than you are, as they are larger and more beautiful than you are?  And mind! all these things, from the tiniest insects in the water-drop, to the most vast star or comet in the sky, all obey God.  They have not fallen, as you have; they have not sinned, as you have; they have not broken the law, by which God intended them to live, as you have.  The Bible tells you so; and the discoveries of learned men prove that the Bible is right, when it declares that they all continue to this day according to His ordinance; for all things serve Him; that sun, and moon, and stars, and light are praising Him; that fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and storm, mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, worms and feathered fowl, are showing forth His glory day and night; because He has made them sure for ever and ever, each according to its kind, and given them a law which shall not be broken; for all His works praise Him, and show the glory of His kingdom, and the mightiness of His power, that His power, His glory, and the mightiness of His kingdom might be known unto the children of men.

And you!—They keep God’s ordinance, and you have broken it; they fulfil God’s word, you fulfil your own fancies.  They have a law which shall not be broken, you break God’s law daily.  Are not they better than you?  Is not, not merely sun and stars, but even the meanest gnat which hums in the air, better than man, more worthy of God’s love than man?  For man has sinned, and they have not.’

Do you not think that I should sadden, and terrify the child, and make him ready to cry out, ‘Whither shall I flee from the wrath of this great Almighty God; who has made this wondrous heaven and earth, and all of it obeys Him, except me—I a rebel against Him who made and rules all this?’

My friends, I only say, suppose that I spoke thus to your children.  For God forbid that I should speak thus to any human being, without having first taught him the Lord’s Prayer, without first having taught him to say, ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, Very God of Very God, who was born of the Virgin Mary, and took man’s nature on Him;’ without having taught him to say, ‘Our Father which art in heaven, Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.’  So it is, and so let it be: for so it is well, and so I am safe, sinner and rebel though I be.

I would not say it, unless I had taught him this; for then I should be speaking the Devil’s words, and doing the Devil’s work: for these are the thoughts of which he always takes advantage, whenever he finds them in men’s hearts; because he is the enemy who hates men, and the avenger who punishes them for their bad thoughts, by leading them on into dark and fearful deeds; because he is the Devil, the Slanderer, as his name means, and slanders God to men, and tries always to make them believe that God does not care for men, and grudges them blessings; in order that he may make men dread God, and shrink from Him into their own pride, or their own carnal lusts and fancies.

These are the thoughts of which the Devil took advantage in the heathen in old times, and tempted them to forget God—God, who had not left Himself without a witness, in that He gave them rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness—God, whose unseen glory, even His eternal power and Godhead, may be clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood from the things which are made—God, in whom, as St. Paul told the heathen, they lived and moved, and had their being, and were the offspring of God.  This—that man is the offspring of God, and has a Father in heaven—is the great truth which the Devil has been trying to hide from men in every age, and by a hundred different devices.  By making them forget this, he tempted them to worship the creature instead of the Creator; to pray to sun and moon and stars, to send them fair weather, good crops, prosperous fortune: to look up to the heaven above them, and down to the earth beneath their feet, in slavish dread and anxiety: and pray to the sun, not to blast them to the seas, not to sweep them away; to the rivers and springs, not to let them perish from drought; to earthquakes, not to swallow them up; ay, even to try to appease those dark fierce powers, with whom they thought the great awful world was filled, by cruel sacrifices of human beings; so that they offered their sons and their daughters to devils, and burned their own children in the fire to Moloch, the cruel angry Fire King, whom they fancied was lord of the earthquakes and the burning mountains.  So did the Canaanites of old, and so did the Jews after them; whensoever they had forgotten that God was their Father, who had bought them, and that the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, throughout heaven and earth, were His, then at once they began to be afraid of heaven and earth, and worshipped Baalim, and Astaroth, and the Host of Heaven, which were the sun and moon and stars, and Moloch the Fire King, and Thammuz the Lord of the Spring-time, and with forms of worship which showed plainly enough, either by their cruelty or their filthy profligacy, who was the author of them, and that man, when he forgets that heaven and earth belong to his Father, is in danger of becoming a slave to his own lowest lusts and passions.

And do not fancy, my friends, that because you and I are not likely to worship sun and moon and stars as the old heathen did, that therefore we cannot commit the same sin as they did.

My friends, I believe that we are in more danger of committing it in England just now than ever we were; that learned men especially are in danger of so doing, because they know so far more of the wonders and the vastness of God’s creation than the heathens of old knew.

But you are not learned, you will say: you are plain people, who know nothing about these wonderful discoveries which men make by telescopes and magnifying-glasses, but use your own eyes in a plain way to get your daily bread, and you feel no such temptations.  You believe, of course, that the kingdom and power and glory of all we see is God’s.

Yes; but do you believe too that He whom people are too apt to call God, just because they have no other name to call Him, is your Father?  That it is your Father’s will which governs the weather, which makes the earth bear fruit and gladden the heart of man with good and fruitful seasons?

Alas, my friends, if we will open our eyes, see things in their true light, and call things by their true name, we shall see many a man in England now honouring the creature more than the Creator; trusting in the seasons and the soil more than he does in God, and so sinning in just the same way as the heathen of old.

When people say to themselves, ‘I must get land, I must get money, by any means; honestly if I can, if not, dishonestly; for have it I must;’ what are they doing then but denying that the kingdom, the power, and the glory of this earth belong to the Righteous God, and that He, and not the lying Devil, gives them to whomsoever He will?

When people say to themselves (as who does not at moments?) ‘To be rich is to be safe; a man’s life does consist in the abundance of what he possesses;’ what are they doing but saying that man does not live by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God, but by what he can get for himself and keep for himself?  When they are fretful and anxious about their crops, when they even repine and complain of Providence, as I have known men do because they do not prosper as they wish, what are they doing but saying in their hearts, ‘The weather and the seasons are the lords and masters of my good fortune, or bad fortune.  I depend on them, and not on God, for comfort and for wealth, and my Heavenly Father does not know what I have need of?’  When parents send their girls out to field-work, without any care about whom they talk with, to have their minds corrupted by hearing filthiness and seeing immodest behaviour, what are they doing but offering their daughters in sacrifice, not even to Moloch, but to Mammon; saying to themselves, ‘My daughter’s modesty, my daughter’s virtue, is not of as much value as the paltry money which I can earn by leaving her alone to learn wickedness, instead of keeping watch over her, if she does work, that she may be none the worse for her day’s labour.’

I might go on and give you a thousand instances more, but they all come alike to this; that whensoever you fancy that you cannot earn your daily bread without doing wrong yourself, or leaving your children to learn wrong, then you do not believe that the kingdom, the power, and the glory of this earth on which you work is your Heavenly Father’s.  For if you did, you would be certain that gains, large or small, got by breaking the least of His commandments, could never prosper you, but must bring a curse and a punishment with them; and you would be sure also, that because God is your Father, and this earth and all herein is His, that He would feed you with food sufficient for you, if you do but seek first His kingdom—that is, try to learn His laws; and seek first His righteousness—that is, strive and pray day by day to become righteous even as He is righteous.

Yes, my friends, this is one meaning, though only one, of St. John’s words, ‘This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith.’  We all see the world full of pleasant things, for which we long; of necessary things, too, without which we should starve and die.  And then the temptation comes to us to snatch at these things for ourselves by any means in our power, right or wrong; like the dumb animals who break out of their owners’ field into the next, if they do but see better pasturage there, or fight and quarrel between themselves for food, each trying to get the most for himself and rob his neighbour.  So live the beasts, and so you and I, and every human being shall be tempted to live, if we follow our natures, if we forget that we are God’s children, in God’s kingdom, under the laws of a Heavenly Father, who has shown forth His own love and justice, His own kingdom, and power, and glory, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.  But if we remember that, if we remember daily that the kingdom, and power, and glory is our Father’s, then we shall neither fear storms and blights, bad crops, or anything else which is of the earth earthly.  We shall fear nothing of that kind, which can only kill the body, but only fear the evil Devil, lest, by making us distrust and disobey our Heavenly Father, he should, after he has killed, destroy both body and soul in hell.  And as long as we fear him, as long as we renounce him, as long as we trust utterly in our Heavenly Father’s love and justice, and in the love and justice of His dear Son, the Man Christ Jesus, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth—then out of the youngest child among us will God’s praise be perfected; for the youngest child among us, by faith in God his Father, may look upon all heaven and earth, and say, ‘Great, and wonderful, and awful as this earth and skies may be, I am more precious in the sight of God than sun, and moon, and stars; for they are things: but I am a person, a spirit, an immortal soul, made in the likeness of God, redeemed into the likeness of God, sanctified into the likeness of God.  This great earth was here thousands and thousands of years before I was born, and it will be here perhaps millions and millions of years after I am dead; but it cannot harm me; it cannot kill me.  When earth, and sun, and stars are past away, I shall live for ever; for I am the immortal child of an Immortal Father, the child of the everlasting God.  These things He only made: but me He begot unto everlasting life, in Jesus Christ my Lord.  I seem to depend on this earth for food, for clothing, for comfort, for life itself: and yet I do not do so in reality; for man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God my Father.  In Him I have eternal life: a life which this earth did not give, and cannot take away; a life which, by the mercy of my Father in heaven, I trust and hope to be living when sun and earth, stars and comets, are returned again to their dust, and blotted from the face of heaven.  For the kingdom, the glory, and the power of this world, and all other worlds, past, present, and to come, belong to Him who spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us, and will with Him freely give us all things.’

And thus, my friends, may God’s praise be perfected out of the mouth of any Christian child, when He declares that God put man a little lower than the angels only to crown him with the glory and worship of having the only-begotten Son of God take man’s nature upon Him, and walk this earth as a man, and live, and die, and rise again as a man, that so He might raise fallen man again to the glory and honour which God appointed for men from the beginning, when He said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and the beast of the earth; and be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.

SERMON XI.  AHAB AND NABOTH

1 Kings xxi. 2, 3.  And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house: and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.  And Naboth said unto Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.

You heard to-day read for the first lesson, the story of Naboth and King Ahab.  Most of you know it well.  Naboth’s vineyard has passed into a proverb for something which we covet.

It is good that it should be so.  We cannot know our Bible too well; we cannot have Bible words and Bible thoughts too much worked into our ways of talking and thinking about everyday matters.  As far as I can see, the best days of England, the best days of every Christian country of which I ever read, have been days when men were not ashamed of their Bibles; when they were ready to live by their Bibles; to ask advice of their Bibles about buying and selling, about making war and peace, about all the business of life; and were not ashamed to quote texts of Scripture in the parliament, and in the market, and in the battle-field, as God’s law, God’s rule, God’s word about the matter in hand, which was, therefore, sure to be the right word and the right rule.  People are grown ashamed of doing so now-a-days; but that does not alter the matter one jot.  We may deny God, but He cannot deny Himself.  His laws are everlasting, and He is ruling and judging us by them now, all day long, just as much as He ruled and judged those Jews by them of old.  The God of Abraham is our God; the God of Moses is our God; the God of Ahab and Naboth is our God; neither He nor His government are altered in the least since their time, and they never will alter for ever, and ever, and ever; and if we do not choose to believe that now in this life, we shall be made to believe it by some very ugly and painful schooling in the life to come.

What laws of God, now, can we learn from this story?

First, we may learn what a sacred thing property is.  That a man’s possessions (if they be justly come by) belong to him, in the sight of God as well as in the sight of man, and that God will uphold and avenge the man’s right.

Naboth, you see, stands simply on his right to his own property.  ‘The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.’  I do not think that he meant that God had actually forbidden him: it seems to have been only some sort of oath which he used.  He may certainly have had reasons for thinking it wrong to part with his lands; hurtful, perhaps, to his family after him.  Yet, as Ahab had promised him a better vineyard for it, or its worth in money, I cannot help thinking that Naboth’s reason was the one which shows on the face of his words.  It was the inheritance of his fathers, this vineyard.  They had all worked in it, generation after generation; perhaps, according to the Jewish custom, they were buried somewhere in it; at least, it had been theirs and now was his; he had worked in it, and played in it—perhaps since he was a child—and he loved it; it was part and parcel of his father’s house to him, a sacred spot.

And so it should be.  It is a holy feeling which makes a man cling to the bit of land which he has inherited from his parents, even to the cottage, though it be only a hired one, where he has lived for many a year, and where he has planted and tilled, perhaps with some that he loved, who are now dead and gone, or grown up and gone out into the world, till the little old cottage-garden is full of remembrances to him of past joys and past sorrows.  The feeling which makes a man cling to his home and to his own land is a good feeling, and breeds good in the man.  It makes him respect himself; it keeps him from being reckless and unsettled.  It is a feeling which should not be broken through.  It is seldom pleasant to see land change hands; it is seldom pleasant to see people turned out of their cottages.  It must often be so, but let it be as seldom as possible.  One likes to see a family take root in a place, and grow and thrive there, one generation after another; and you will find, my friends, that families do take root and thrive in a place just in proportion as they fear God and do righteousness.  The Psalms tell you, again and again, that the way to abide in the land, and prosper in it, is to trust in the Lord and be doing good; and that the wicked are soon rooted out, and their names perish out of the land.  One sees that come true daily.

But to return to Naboth.  He loved his own land, and therefore he had a right to keep it.  We may say it was but a fancy of his, if he could have a better vineyard, or the worth of it in money.  Remember, at least, that God respected that fancy of his, and justified it, and avenged it.  When (after Naboth’s death) Elijah accused Ahab, in God’s name, he put two counts into the indictment; for Ahab had committed two sins.  ‘Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?’  Killing was one sin; taking possession was another.

And so Ahab learnt two weighty and bitter lessons.  He learnt that God’s Law stands for ever, though man’s law be broken or be forgotten by disuse.  For you must understand, that these Jews were a free people, even as we are.  They were not like the nations round about them, or as the Russians are now—slaves to their king, and holding their property only at his will.  The law of Moses had made them a free people, who held their property each man from God, by God’s Law, which had said, ‘Thou shalt not steal.  Thou shalt not covet.  Cursed is he who removes his neighbour’s landmark.’  And their kings were bound to govern by Moses’ law, just as our kings and rulers are bound to govern by the old constitutions of England, and to do equal justice by rich and poor.  But the wicked kings of Israel were trying to break through that law, and make themselves tyrants and despots, such as the Czar of Russia is now.  First, Jeroboam began by trying to wean his people from Moses’ law, by preventing their going up to worship at Jerusalem, and making them worship instead the golden calves at Dan and at Bethel.  For he knew that if he could make idolaters of them, he should soon make slaves of them; and he succeeded; and the kingdom of Israel grew more miserable year by year; and now Ahab, his wicked successor, was breaking down the laws of property and wrongfully taking away his subjects’ lands.  Perhaps he said in his heart, ‘I am king; there is no law stronger than I.  I have a right to do what I like.’  If he did so, he found that he was mistaken.  He found that though he forgot Moses’ law, God had not; that the law stood there still, because it was founded on eternal justice, which proceeds for ever out of the mouth of God; and by the Law, which he had chosen to forget, he was judged; by the Law of God, which deals equal justice to rich and poor, which is, like God Himself, no acceptor of persons; but says, ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ to the king upon his throne as sternly as to the beggar on the dunghill.

And that Law stands still, my friends, doubt it not.  Thanks to the wisdom and justice of our forefathers who built the laws of England on those old Ten Commandments, which hang for a sign thereof in every church to this day.  Thanks to them, I say, and to God, the root of the law of England is, equal justice between man and man, be he high or low; and it is a thing to bless God for every day of our lives, that here the poor man’s little is as safe as the rich man’s wealth: but there is many a sin of oppression, many a sin of covetousness, my friends, which no law of man can touch.  Make laws as artfully as you will, bad men can always slip through them, and escape the spirit of them, while they obey the letter: and I suppose it will be so to the world’s end; and that, let the laws be as perfect as they may, if any man wishes to cheat or oppress his neighbour, he will surely be able to work his wicked will in some way or other.  Well then, my friends, if man’s law is weak, God’s is not;—if man’s law has flaws and gaps in it, through which covetousness can creep, God’s has none;—even if (which God forbid) man’s law died out, and sinners were left to sin without fear of punishment, still God’s Law stands sure, and the eye of the living God slumbers not, and the hand of the living God never grows weary, and out of the everlasting heaven His voice is saying, day and night, for ever, ‘I endure for ever.  I sit on the throne judging right; a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of My kingdom.  I judge the world in justice, and minister true judgment unto the people.  I also will be a refuge for the oppressed, even a refuge in due time of trouble.’

O hear those words, my friends! hear and obey, if you love life, and wish to see good days; and never, never say a thing is right, simply because the law cannot punish you for it.  Never say in your hearts when you are tempted to be hard, cruel, covetous, over-reaching, ‘What harm?  I break no law by it.’  There is a law, whether you see it or not; you break a law, whether you confess it or not; a law which is as a wall of iron clothed with thunder, though man’s law be but a flimsy net of thread; and that law, and not any Acts of Parliament, shall judge you in the day when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, and every man shall receive the due reward of the deeds done in the body, not according as they were allowed or not by the Statute Book, but according as they were good or evil.

Another lesson we may learn from this story: that if we give way to our passions, we give way to the Devil also.  Ahab gave way to his passion; he knew that he was wrong; for when Naboth refused to sell him the vineyard, he did not dare openly to rob him of it; he went to his house heavy of heart, and fretted, like a spoilt child, because he could not get what he wanted.  It was but a little thing, and he might have been content to go without it.  He was king of all Israel, and what was one small vineyard more or less to him?  But prosperity had spoilt him; he must needs have every toy on which he set his heart, and he was weak enough to fret that he could not get more, when he had too much already.  But he knew that he could not get it; that, king as he was, Naboth’s property was his own, and that God’s everlasting Law stood between him and the thing he coveted.  Well for him if he had been contented with fretting.  But, my friends—and be you rich or poor, take heed to my words—whenever any man gives way to selfishness, and self-seeking, to a proud, covetous, envious, peevish temper, the Devil is sure to glide up and whisper in his ear thoughts which will make him worse—worse, ay, than he ever dreamt of being.  First comes the flesh, and then the Devil; and if the flesh opens the door of the heart, the Devil steps in quickly enough.  First comes the flesh: fleshly, carnal pride at being thwarted; fleshly, carnal longing for a thing, which longs all the more for it because one cannot have it; fleshly, carnal peevishness and ill-temper, at not having just the pleasant thing one happens to like.  That is a state of mind which is a bird-call for all the devils; and when they see a man in that temper, they flock to him, I believe, as crows do to carrion.  It is astonishing, humbling, awful, my friends, what horrible thoughts will cross one’s mind if once one gives way to that selfish, proud, angry, longing temper; thoughts of which we are ashamed the next moment; temptations to sin at which we shudder, they seem so unlike ourselves, not parts of ourselves at all.  When the dark fit is past, one can hardly believe that such wicked thoughts ever crossed one’s mind.  I don’t think that they are part of ourselves; I believe them to be the whispers of the Devil himself; and when they pass away, I believe that it is the Lord Jesus Christ who drives them away.  But if any man gives way to them, determines to keep his sullenness, and so gives place to the Devil; then those thoughts do not pass; they take hold of a man, possess him, as the Bible calls it, and make him in his madness do things which—alas! who has not done things in his day, of which he has repented all his life after?—things for which he would gladly cut off his right hand for the sake of being able to say, ‘I never did that?’  But the thing is done—done to all eternity: he has given place to the Devil, and the Devil has made him do in five minutes work which he could not undo in five thousand years; and all that is left is, when he comes to himself, to cast himself on God’s boundless mercy, and Christ’s boundless atonement, and cry, ‘My sins are like scarlet, Thou alone canst make them whiter than snow: my sin is ever before me; only let it not be ever before Thee, O God!  Punish me, if thou seest fit; but oh forgive, for there is mercy with Thee, and infinite redemption!’  And, thanks be to God’s great love, he will not cry in vain.  Yet, oh, my friends, do not give place to the Devil, unless you wish, forgiven or not, to repent of it to the latest day you live.