True Words for Brave Men: A Book for Soldiers' and Sailors' Libraries

Many heathen men have known that there was one eternal God, and that God is.  But they did not know that God Himself had said so; and that made them anxious, puzzled, almost desperate, so that the wiser they were, the unhappier they were.  For what use is it merely knowing that “God is”?  The question for poor human creatures is, “But what sort of a being is God?  Is He far off?  Millions of miles from this earth?  Does He care nothing about us?  Does He let the world go its own way right or wrong?  Is He proud and careless?  A self-glorifying Deity whose mercy is not over all His works, or even over any of them?  Or does He care for us?  Does He see us?  Will He speak to us?  Has He ever spoken to any one?  Has He ever told any one about Himself?”  There is the question—the question of all questions.  And if a man once begins thinking about his own soul, and this world, and God,—till he gets that question answered, he can have no comfort about himself or the world, or anything—till in fact he knows whether God has ever spoken to men or not.

And the glory of the Bible, the power of God revealed in the Bible, is, that it answers the question, and says, “God does care for men, God does see men, God is not far off from any one of us.”  Ay, God speaks to men—God spoke to Moses and said, not “God is” but “I AM.”  God in sundry times and in divers manners spoke to our fathers by the Prophets and said “I AM.”

But more—Moses said, “I AM hath sent me.”  God does not merely love us, and yet leave us to ourselves.  He sends after us.  He sends to us.  In old times He sent prophets and wise men one after the other to preach repentance and righteousness, and to teach men all that was good for them; and when men would not listen to them, but shut their ears to them and drove them out, killing some and beating some, God was so determined to send to men, so unwearied, so patient, so earnest, so loving still, that He said, “I will send now my own Son, surely they will hear Him.”

Yes, my friends, this is the I AM.  This is God—this is our God—this is our Heavenly Father; not a proud and selfish Being, who looks down haughtily from afar off on all the misery and ignorance of the world, but as a wise man of old said, “A most merciful God, a revealer of secrets, who showeth to man the things which he knew not.”  This is our God—not a tyrant, but a Deliverer—not a condemning God, but a saving God, who wills that none should perish, who sends to seek and to save those who are lost, who sends His sun to shine on the just and the unjust, and is good to the unthankful and the evil.  A God who so loved the world which He had made, in spite of all its sin and follies, that He spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for it.  A God who sits on His throne for ever judging right, and ministering true judgment among the people, who from His throne beholds all those who dwell upon the earth, and fashions the hearts of them, and understandeth all their works.  A God who comes out of His place to visit the wrong done on the earth, and be a refuge for the oppressed, and a help in time of trouble, to help the fatherless and poor unto their right, that the men of this world be no more exalted against them.

This is our God.  This is our Father—always condescending, always patient, always loving, always just.  And always active, always working to do good to all his creatures, like that exact pattern and copy of Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, who said, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”  (John v. 17).

But again: “I AM hath sent me unto you.”

Unto whom?  Who was Moses sent to?  To the Children of Israel in Egypt.  And what sort of people were they?  Were they wise and learned?  On the contrary they were stupid, ignorant, and brutish.  Were they pious and godly?  On the contrary they were worshipping the foolish idols of the Egyptians—so fond of idolatry that they must needs make a golden calf and worship it.  Were they respectable and cleanly livers?  Were they teachable and obedient?  On the contrary, they were profligate, stiff-necked, murmurers, disobedient, unwilling to trust God’s goodness, though He had shown them all those glorious signs and wonders for their sakes, and brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm.  Were they high-spirited and brave?  On the contrary, they were mean-spirited and cowards, murmuring against Moses and against God, if anything went wrong, for setting them free; ready to go back and be slaves to the Egyptians rather than face danger and fight; looking back and longing after the flesh-pots of Egypt, where they eat bread to the full, and willing to be slaves again and have all their men children drowned in the river, and themselves put to hard labour in the brick kilns, if they could only fill their stomachs.  And even at best when Moses had brought them to the very edge of that rich land of Canaan, which God had promised them, they were afraid to go into it, and win it for themselves; and God had to send them back again, to wander forty years in the wilderness, till all that cowardly, base, first generation, who came up out of Egypt was dead, and a new generation had grown up, made brave and hardy by their long training in the deserts, and taught to trust and obey God from their youth; and so able and willing to conquer the good land which God had promised them.

Altogether the Children of Israel, to whom God sent Moses, were plainly an ignorant, brutish, cowardly set of people, fallen lower far than the negroes of South America, fit to be slaves and nothing better.

Then why did God take such trouble for them?  Why did God care for them, and help them, and work wonders for them?  Why?  Exactly because they were so bad.  He that hath ears to hear let him hear, and understand by this example of all examples what manner of God our God is.  Just because they were so bad, His goodness yearned over them all the more, and longed to make them good.  Just because they were so unclean and brutish His holiness longed all the more to cleanse them.  Because they were so stupid and ignorant, His wisdom longed to make them wise.  Because they were so miserable, His pity yearned over them, as a father over a child fallen into danger.  Because they were sick, they had all the more need of a physician.  Because they were lost, there was all the more reason for seeking and saving them.  Because they were utterly weak, God desired all the more to put His strength into them, that His strength might be made perfect in weakness.

True, God’s goodness seemed of little use to too many of them.  Their history during the next forty years was a very sad one.  With many of them God was not well pleased, the Bible tells us, and their carcases fell in the Wilderness.  A sad forty years they were for Moses also, as he says in that sad and glorious Psalm of his (Ps. xc. 7, 8): “We consume away in thy displeasure, and are afraid of thy wrathful indignation.  Thou hast set our misdeeds before us, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance, for when Thou art angry our days are gone: we bring our years to an end as a tale that is told.”

But that was all their own fault.  God never left them for all those forty years.  He fed them with manna in the wilderness, and the angel of His presence preserved them.

And now, my friends, remember what I have said of God in this text, “I AM hath sent me unto you,” and see how it preaches to you an almighty, unchangeable Father, whose mercy is over all His works, full of love and care for all, longing and labouring for ever by His Son Jesus Christ to raise us from the death of sin (which is the only death we need to be afraid of) to the life of righteousness—the only life worth living here, the only life which we can live beyond the grave!  A just God, a merciful God, a patient God, a generous God, a gracious God; a God whose glory is to save—a God who is utterly worthy of our love and respect—a God whom we can trust—a God whom it is worth while to obey—a God who deserves our thanks from our cradle to our grave—a God to whom we ought honestly, and from the bottom of our hearts to say, now and for ever:

“We worship Thee, we bless Thee, we praise Thee, we magnify Thee, we give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory, oh! Lord God, Heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.”

VI. THE ENGLISHMAN TRAINED BY TOIL

“All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers.  And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.  And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live. . . . Thou shall also consider in thine heart that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee.”

    —Deut. viii. 1, 2, 3, 5.

As God led the Jews through the wilderness, so He leads us through the journey of life.  As God called on the Jews to rejoice in Him, and to bless Him for going with them, and teaching and training them by dangers and sorrows; so He calls on us to lift up our hearts and bless Him for teaching and training us in the battle of life.

But some of you may say, “Why do you ask us to thank God for lessons which we have bought by labour and sorrow?  Are not our sorrows more than our joys?  Our labour far heavier than our rest can be sweet?  You tell us to be joyful and thank God for His mercies; but why all this toil?  Why must we work on, and on, and on, all our days, in weariness and anxiety?  Why must we only toil, toil, till we die, and lie down, fairly conquered and worn out, on that stern mother earth, from whom we have been wringing our paltry livelihood from our boyhood to our grave?  What is our life but labour and sorrow?”

Are not some of you thinking in this way to-day?  Have I not guessed the hearts of some of you at least?  And is not this a strange way of making you joyful to remind you of these thoughts?

My friends, be sure I only remind you of these sad thoughts, because they are true thoughts, because God meant you to bear them and face them like men; because you must have these thoughts, and let them make you sad, and make up your minds to face them again and again, before even you can thank God really like redeemed, immortal Christian men and women.  And believe me, I would not mention these sad thoughts, if I had not a remedy for them.  If I had not a message to you from the living God, and Christ the King of the earth, whereby I tell you now to rejoice and give thanks to Him in spite of all your labour and sorrow.  Ay more, I say, Rejoice and give thanks on account of all your labour and sorrow, and count it all joy when ye fall into divers tribulations.

It is true, my friends, we are a hard working and a somewhat sad race of men, we English.  The life of the working man is labour and sorrow, and so is the life of the scholar, and so is the life of even many a rich man.  All things are full of labour in England.  Man cannot utter it, the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing; we are the wisest of all nations; and yet as Solomon says, behold in much wisdom is much grief; and in increasing knowledge, we still increase sorrow.

Truly, I may say of us Englishmen, as Paul said of the Christians of his time, that if Christ be not raised from the dead, and if in this life only we have hope in Him, we are of all nations one of the most unhappy.  When we look at all the hundreds of thousands pent up in our great cities among filth and smoke, toiling in factories, in workshops, in dark mines under ground—when we think of the soldier on the march under the sultry sun of India, the sailor on the stormy sea—when we think of this our bleak inclement climate, our five months of winter every year;—no man’s food and clothing to be gained but by bitter toil, either of himself or of others—and then when we compare our lot with that of the dwellers in hot countries, in India and in Africa, and the islands of the South Seas, where men live with no care, no labour—where clothes and fire are never needed—where every tree bears delicious food, and man lives in perpetual summer, in careless health and beauty, among continual mirth and ease, like the birds which know no care—then it seems at moments as if God had been unfair in giving so much more to the savage than He has to us, of the blessings of this earthly life; and we are led to long that our lot was cast in those fruitful and delicious climates of the South, in a continual paradise of mirth and plenty, and beauty and sunshine.

But no, my friends, we are more blest than the careless Indian who never knows what labour is; his life is but the life of the butterfly, which flutters from flower to flower and sports in the sunshine, and sucks sweets for a brief hour, and then perishes without hope.  His life is a dream, he sees no heaven before him, he knows no glorious God, with the sight of whom he is to be blest for ever.  His body may be in perpetual ease, and health, and beauty for a few short years, but what care has he for his undying spirit, that is blind and dead within him?

But to bring a man’s soul to life, to train and educate a man’s soul that it may go on from strength to strength, and glory to glory till it appears in the presence of God—that wants a stern and a severe training of sorrow and labour, of which the poor, pampered, luxurious savage knows nothing.  This is why Christ brought our forefathers into this bleak, cold, northern land, and forced them to gain their bread by the sweat of their brows, and the sorrows of their hearts, and to keep their land by many wars.

Now this is the reason of our carefulness, of our many troubles, that God is educating and training us English; that He will not have us be savages, but Christian citizens; He will have us not merely happy, but blessed through all eternity.  He will not have us to be like the poor Indians, slaves to our flesh and our appetites—slaves to the pleasant things around us; but He will have us fill the earth and subdue it; He will have England the light of the nations—and Englishmen preach freedom, and wisdom, and prudence, and the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the nations of the earth.  Therefore Christ afflicts us because He loves us, because whom He loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.  Because He has ordained England to preach the Cross, therefore He will have England bear the cross.

It has often struck me, my friends, as a beautiful and a deep sign, a blessed ordinance of the great and wise God, that the flag of England, and especially the flag of our navy—the flag which is loved and reverenced through all the world, as the bringer of free communion between nation and nation, the bringer of order and equal justice and holy freedom, and the divine majesty of law, and the light of the blessed gospel wherever it goes; that this flag, I say, should be the red-cross flag, the flag of the Cross of Christ—a double sign—a sign to all men that we are a Christian nation, a gospel people; and a sign, too, to ourselves, that we are meant to bear Christ’s cross—to bear the afflictions which He lays upon us—to be made perfect through sufferings, to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts, that we may be brave and self-denying; going forth in Christ’s strength, remembering that it is He who gives us power to get wealth; that we ought to fight His battles, that we ought to spread His name at home and abroad; and rejoice in every sorrow, which teaches us more and more the blessed meaning of His saving name, and the share which we have in it.

I have said that we are a melancholy people.  Foreigners all say of us, that we are the saddest of all people; that when they come to England, they are struck with our silence, and gloominess, and careworn faces, and our want of merriment and cheerfulness.  And yet, with all this, we are the greatest of nations at this day—the strongest and the most industrious and the wisest.  The gospel of Jesus Christ is preached oftener, and more simply, and more fully here in England than in any nation, and I dare to say it, that in spite of all our sins, there are as many or more of God’s true saints, more holy men and women among English people at this moment, than among any people of the earth.  And why? because there are so many among us who have hope in Christ beyond this life, who look for everlasting salvation through all eternity to His name.  If in this life only we have hope in Christ, truly of all people we should be most miserable; but Christ is risen from the dead, and He has ascended up on high, and led captivity captive, and received gifts for men.  He sits even now at God’s right hand praying for us.  To Him all power is given in heaven and earth, and He is our covenant God and Saviour, He is our King.  He is ours; and He will have us put on His likeness, and with Him be made perfect through sufferings—through sufferings, for sorrow is the gate of life.  Through much tribulation we enter into the kingdom of God; without weary pain none of us is born into the world; without weary labour not a harvest in England is grown and reaped; without weary thought, and teaching, and correction, not a child among us is educated to be a man; without weary thought and weary labour, not one of us can do his duty in that station of life to which Christ has called him.  Not without weary struggles and arguings and contentions, by martyrdoms, by desperate wars, our forefathers won for us our religion, our freedom and our laws, which make England the wonder of the world.  This is the great law of our life—to be made perfect through sufferings, as our Lord and Master was before us.  He has dealt with us, as my text tells you He dealt with the Jews, His chosen people of old, as He deals with every soul of man on whom He sets His love.  “All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers.  And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments, or no.  And He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live . . . Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee.”

For, believe me, my friends, whatever nation or whatever man Christ chooses to be His own, and to be holy and noble and glorious with Him, He makes them perfect through suffering.  First, He stirs up in them strange longings after what is great and good.  He makes them hunger and thirst after righteousness, and then He lets them see how nothing on this earth, nothing beautiful or nothing pleasant which they can get or invent for themselves will satisfy; and so He teaches them to look to Him, to look for peace and salvation from heaven and not from earth.  Then He leads them, as He led the Jews of old, through the wilderness and through the sea, through strange afflictions, through poverty, and war, and labour, that they may learn to know that He is leading them and not themselves; that they may learn to trust not in themselves, but in Him; not in their own strength: but in the bread which cometh down from heaven; not in their own courage, but in Him; and just when all seems most hopeless, He makes one of them chase a thousand, and by strange and unexpected providences, and the courage which a just cause inspires, brings His people triumphant through temptation and danger, and puts to flight the armies of the heathen, and the inventions of the evil fiend, and glorifies His name in His chosen people.

So He calls out in the heart of men and of the heart of nations, the two great twin virtues, which always go hand in hand—Faith in God, and Faith in themselves.  He lets them feel themselves foolish that they may learn how to be wise in His wisdom.  He lets them find themselves weak that they may learn how to be strong in His strength.  Then sometimes He lets them follow their own devices and be filled with the fruits of their own inventions.  He lets their sinful hearts have free course down into the depths of idolatry and covetousness, and filthy pleasure and mad self-conceit, that they may learn to know the bitter fruit that springs from the accursed root of sin, and come back to Him in shame and repentance, entreating Him to inform their thoughts, and guide their wills, and gather them to Him as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing, that they may never more wander from Him, their life, their light, and their Saviour.  Then, sometimes, if His children forsake His laws and break His covenant, He visits their offences with the rod, and their sin with the stripes of the children of men.  That is, He punishes them as He punishes the heathen, if they sin as the heathen sin.  He lets loose upon them His wrath, war, disease, or scarcity, that He may drive them back to Him.

And all the while He will have them labour.  He will make them try their strength, and use their strength, and improve their strength of soul and body.  By making them labour, Christ teaches His people industry, order, self-command, self-denial, patience, courage, endurance, foresight, thoughtfulness, earnestness.  All these blessed virtues come out of holy labour; by working in welldoing we learn lessons which the savage among his delicious fruits and flowers, in his life of golden ease, and luxurious laziness, can never learn.

And all this Christ teaches us because He loves us, because He would have us perfect.  His love is unchangeable.  As He swore by Himself that He would never fail David, so He has sworn that He will never fail any one of His Churches, or any one of us.  Lo, said He, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.  Nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ; neither battle nor famine, nor anything else in heaven or earth.  All He wants is to educate us, because He loves us.  He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.  And because He is a God of love, He proves His love to us every now and then by blessing us, as well as by correcting us; else our spirits would fail before Him, and the souls which He has made.  When He sees our adversity, He hears our complaint, He thinks upon His covenant and pities us, according to the multitude of His mercies.  “A fruitful land maketh He barren for the wickedness of them that dwell therein, yet when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, He delivereth them out of their distress.  He maketh the wilderness standing water, and water springs of dry ground, and there He setteth the hungry that they may build them a city, that they may sow their lands and plant vineyards, to yield them fruits of increase.  He blesseth them, so that they multiply exceedingly, and suffereth not their cattle to decrease; and again, when they are diminished or brought low through affliction, through any plague or trouble, though He suffer them to be evil entreated by tyrants, and let them wander out of the way in the wilderness; yet helpeth He the poor out of misery, and maketh them households like a flock of sheep.” (Ps. cvii.)

O my friends, have not these words ever been wonderfully fulfilled to some of you!  Then see how true it is that God will not always be chiding, neither keepeth He His anger for ever; but He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are but dust, and like as a father pitieth his children, so does He pity those who fear Him; and oftentimes, too, in His great condescension, those who fear Him not.

My friends, I have been trying in this sermon to make you feel that you are under God’s guidance, that His providence is trying to train and educate you.  I have told you that there is a blessed use and meaning in your very sorrows, and in this life of continual toil which God has appointed for you; I have told you that you ought to thank God for those sorrows: how much more then ought you to thank Him for your joys.  If you should thank Him for want, surely you should thank Him for plenty.  O thank Him earnestly—not only with your lips, but in your lives.  If you believe that He has redeemed you with His precious blood, show your thankfulness by living as redeemed men, holy to God—who are not your own, but bought with a price; therefore show forth God’s glory, the power of His grace in your bodies and your spirits which are His.  If you feel that it is a noble thing to be an Englishman—especially an English soldier or an English sailor—a noble and honourable privilege to be allowed to do your duty in the noblest nation and the noblest church which the world ever saw—then live as Englishmen in covenant with God; faithful to Him who has redeemed you and washed you from your sins in His own blood.  Do you be faithful and obedient to Christ’s Spirit, and He will be faithful to those promises of His.  Though a thousand fall at thy right hand, yet the evil shall not come nigh thee.  Blessed are all they that fear the Lord and walk in His ways.  For thou shalt eat the labours of thine hand.  O well art thou and happy shalt thou be.  The Lord out of heaven shall so bless thee, that thou shalt see England in prosperity all thy life long.  Yea, thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon thy native land.

Oh, remember how God fulfilled that promise to England seventy years ago, when the French swept in fire and slaughter, and horrors worse than either, over almost every nation in Europe, while England remained safe in peace and plenty, and an enemy never set foot on God’s chosen English soil.  Remember the French war, and our salvation in it, and then believe and take comfort.  Trust in the Lord and be doing good; dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.

VII. HIGHER OR LOWER: WHICH SHALL WIN?

“Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.  For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.  For as many as are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God.  For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”

    —Romans viii. 12-15.

Let us try to understand these words.  They are of quite infinite importance to us all.

We shall all agree, all of us at least who have thought at all about right and wrong, and tried to do right and avoid wrong—that there goes on in us, at times, a strange struggle.  We wish to do a right thing, and at the very same time long to do a wrong one.  We are pulled, as it were, two different ways by two different feelings, feel as if we were two men at once, a better man and a worse man struggling for the mastery.  One may conquer, or the other.  We may be like the confirmed drunkard who cannot help draining off his liquor, though he knows that it is going to kill him; or we may be like the man who conquers his love for drink, and puts the liquor away, because he knows that he ought not to take it.

We know too well, many of us, how painful this inward struggle is, between our better selves, and our worse selves.  How discontented with ourselves it makes us, how ashamed of ourselves, how angry with ourselves.  We all understand too well—or ought to understand, St. Paul’s words: How often the good which he wished to do, he did not do, but the evil which he did not wish to do, he did.  How he delighted in the law of God in his inward man; but he found another law in him, in his body, warring against the law of his mind—that is his conscience and reason, and making a slave of him till he was ready at times to cry, “Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

We can understand too, surely the famous parable of Plato, the greatest of heathen philosophers, who says, that the soul of man is like a chariot, guided by a man’s will, but drawn by two horses.  The one horse he says is white, beautiful and noble, well-broken and winged, too, always trying to rise and fly upward with the chariot toward heaven.  But the other horse is black, evil, and unmanageable, always trying to rush downward, and drag the chariot and the driver into hell.

Ah my friends, that is but too true a picture of most of us, and God grant that in our souls the better horse may win, that our nobler and purer desires may lift us up, and leave behind those lower and fouler desires which try to drag us down.  But to drag us down whither?  To hell at last, says Plato the heathen.  To destruction and death in the meanwhile, says St. Paul.

Now in the text St. Paul explains this struggle—this continual war which goes on within us.  He says that there are two parts in us—the flesh and the spirit—and that the flesh lusts, that is, longs and struggles to have its own way against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.  First, there is a flesh in us—that is, a carnal animal nature.  Of that there can be no doubt: we are animals, we come into the world as animals do—eat, drink, sleep as they do—have the same passions as they have—and our carnal mortal bodies die at last, exactly as the animals die.

But are we nothing more?  God forbid.  St. Paul tells us that we are something more—and our own conscience and reason tell us that we are something more.  We know that to be a man, we must be something more than an animal—a mere brute—for when we call any one a brute, what do we mean?  That he has lost his humanity, his sense of justice, mercy, and decency, and given himself up to his flesh—his animal nature, till the man in him is dead, and only the brute remains.  Mind, I do not say that we are right in calling any human being a brute, for no one, I believe, is sunk so low, but there is some spark of humanity, some spark of what St. Paul calls “the spirit,” left in him, which may be fanned into a flame and conquer, and raise and save the man at last—unless he be a mere idiot—or that most unhappy and brutal of all beings, a confirmed drunkard.

But our giving way to the same selfish shameless passions, which we see in the lower animals, is letting the “brute” in us conquer, is giving way to the works of the flesh.  The shameless and profligate person gives way to the “brute” within him—the man who beats his wife—or ill-treats his children—or in any wise tyrannises over those who are weaker than himself, he too gives way to the “brute” within him.  He who grudges, envies, tries to aggrandise himself at his neighbour’s expense—he too gives way to the “brute” within him, and puts on the likeness of the dog which snatches and snarls over his bone.  He who spends his life in cunning plots and mean tricks, stealthy, crafty, silent, false, he gives way to the “brute” in him, just as much as the fox or ferret.  And those, let me say, who without giving way to those grosser vices, let their minds be swallowed up with vanity, love of admiration, always longing to be seen and looked at, and wondering what folks will say of them, they too give way to the flesh, and lower themselves to the likeness of animals.  As vain as a peacock, says the old proverb.  And shame it is to any human being so far to forget his true humanity, as to have that said of him.  And what shall we say of them who like the swine live only for eating and drinking, and enjoyment?  Or what of those who like the butterflies spend all their time in frivolous amusement, fluttering in the sunshine, silly and helpless, without a sense of duty or usefulness, without forethought for the coming frosts of winter, against which their gay feathers would be no protection?  Do not all these in some way or other give way to the animal within them, and live after the flesh?  And do they not, all of them, of the flesh, reap corruption, and fulfil St. Paul’s words, “If ye live after the flesh ye shall die?”

But some one will say—“Die?—of course we shall all die—good and bad alike.”  Is it so, my friends?  Then why does our Lord say, “He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die?”  And why does St. Paul say, “If ye through the spirit do mortify,” that is crush, and as it were kill, “the deeds of the body,” all those low animal passions and vices, “ye shall live.”

Let us look at the text again.  “If ye live after the flesh ye shall die.”  If you give way to those animal passions and vices—low and cruel—or even merely selfish and frivolous, you shall die; not merely your bodies—they will die in any case—the animals do—for animals they are, and as animals die they must.  But over and above that—you yourselves shall die—your character will die, your manhood or your womanhood will die, your immortal soul will die.  The likeness of God in you will die.  Oh, my friends, there is a second death to which that first death of the body is a mere trivial and harmless accident—the death of sin which kills the true man and true woman within you.  And that second death may begin in this life, and if it be not stopped and cured in time, may go on for ever.  The black horse of which I spoke just now, may get the mastery and drag us down, down, into bogs out of which we can never rise—over cliffs which we can never climb again—down lower and lower—more and more foolish, more and more reckless, more and more base, more and more wretched.  And then there will be no more use in saying, “The Lord have mercy on my soul,” for we shall have no soul left to have mercy on.

This is the dark side of the matter—a very dark one: but it has to be spoken of, because it is true; and what is more, it comes true only too often in this world.  God grant, my dear friends, that it may not come true of any of you.

But there is also a bright side to the matter—and on that I will speak now, in order that this sermon may end, as such gospel sermons surely should end, not with threats and fear, but with hope and comfort.

“If ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”  If you will be true to your better selves, if you will listen to, and obey the spirit of God, when He puts into your hearts good desires, and makes you long to be just and true, pure and sober, kind and useful.  If you will cast away and trample under foot animal passions, low vices, you shall live.  You shall live.  Your very soul and self shall live, and live for ever.  Your humanity, your human nature shall live.  All that is humane in you shall live.  All that is merciful and kind in you, all that is pure and graceful, all that is noble and generous, all that is useful.  All in you that is pleasant to yourselves shall live.  All in you that is pleasant to your neighbours.  All in you that is pleasant to God shall live.  In one word, all in you that is like Christ—all in you that is like God—all in you that is spirit and not flesh, shall live, and live for ever.  So it must be, for what says St. Paul?  “As many as are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”  Those who let the spirit of God lead them upward instead of letting their own animal nature drag them downward, they are the sons of God.  And how can a son of God perish?  How can that which is like God and like Christ perish?  How can he perish, who like Christ is full of the fruits of the spirit? of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance?  The world did not give them to him, and the world cannot take them from him.  They were not bestowed on him at his bodily birth—neither shall they be taken from him at his bodily death—for those blessed fruits of the spirit belong neither to the flesh nor to the world, but to Christ’s spirit, and to heaven—to that heaven in which they dwell before the throne of God—yea, rather in the mind of God Himself, the eternal forms of the truth, the beauty, the goodness—which were before all worlds—and shall be after all worlds have passed away.