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THE

GENERAL BAPTIST MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1868.

NO FUEL, NO FIRE.

BY THE REV. S. COX.

"Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out."—Prov. xxvi. 20.

PROVERBS are the oracles of common sense. They express in a homely yet authoritative form the results of popular thought and experience, They are very commonly the work of some poet who, seizing the popular thought, has expressed it in a simile so happy that it at once stamps itself on the public memory and becomes a "standing form" of speech. Such a poet I take King Solomon to have been. We are told that he spake three thousand proverbs:" which does not mean, I apprehend, that he invented so many wise and beautiful sayings, that he brought them out of his private stores of thought; but that having the insight of a poet into the general Hebrew heart, knowing to a nicety its various currents of thought and feeling, he cut appropriate channels for them; that he drew from the public stores the garnered results of fong manifold experience, and expressed them once for all in the fittest and most striking words. Or, to change the figure, he found the golden ore of wisdom hidden in the VOL. LXX.-NEW SERIES, No. 13.

mines of Hebrew tradition, smelted it, purged it from its soils, put his image and superscription upon it, and made it current coin.

One of these coins, a coin of no little value if only we can get change for it, lies before us: "Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out." This is one of the hoarded results of Jewish thought expressed in Solomon's perfect words. And if, as Tholuck affirms, "A proverb is valuable in proportion as it is on all sides rich in applications," this Hebrew proverb has a very high value; it must be well worth our while to put it into our mental sc ).

Observe the exact force of te

proverb, and its primary applicatio. "Where no wood is, there the fi goeth out," i.e., you need not put it out, need not rake its embers apart, or throw cold water over it; only cease to feed it, and out the fire goes. This is the simile, the natural fact that Solomon employs to convey the moral which he has taken in hand to express. And what is that moral? There can be no doubt that

it is a caution to scandal-mongers and tale-bearers, to that very large class of persons who obey the royal law of charity only in the sense, that they look upon their neighbours' things rather than their own. "Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out; so," adds the wise King, "where there is no whisperer, the strife ceaseth." For "as wood is to fire," so is a carping suspicious spirit "to kindle strife." Taken in its original sense, the Proverb suggests some such picture as this:-There lies an expiring fire of scandal which has done no great harm as yet, its embers slowly smouldering away. But, lo! here come all the gossips of the neighbourhood, each with his or her fagot of half-rotten sticks his or her little contribution of winks, nods, guesses, hearsays, daresays, suspicions, half lies, half truths, which they fling on the lessening pile. Forthwith the smouldering embers kindle into a flame, which goes smoking and stinking up to heaven, offending all innocent nostrils, scathing and blackening the green undergrowths, burning up the very seeds of after good. And that, my brethren, is a picture which each of us will do well to hang up in "the study of his imagination," looking at it, and taking its rebuke, so often as we are tempted to repeat a scandal, or to put the worst interpretation on actions which have, or may have, many better meanings. Let us keep our tongues from evil, our lips from speaking guile, and many a fire of scandal, kindled by malicious tongues, will, for want of wood, go out. No fuel, no fire!

This I suppose to be the original application of our Proverb. But it is capable of many other applications of equal or superior moment, some of which are more germane to my present purpose.

It holds good, for instance, of man's physical life. For here, in a literal and obvious sense, is a

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fire, a fire which must be fed, a fire which may be extinguished simply by neglecting it. Food is the fuel of the physical fire, the wood with which, if it is to be kept burning, it must be fed. To kill a man, you need not thrust him through with a dart, nor hang him from a beam, nor inject poison into his veins. Cease to feed him, and he will die. To starve him is just as effectually to murder him as though you knocked him on the head or shot him through the heart for "where no wood is, there the fire goeth out ;" and to let it out is quite as bad as to put it out, if at least it be your business to keep it in.

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Again the Proverb holds good of our mental life. The mind requires food and exercise no less than the body. It lives only as it assimilates the facts of social and commercial life, or the truths of speculative thought, or the discoveries of science. Unless it be fairly occupied in handling the practical facts of domestic or business economy, or in acquainting itself with the meaning and uses of the objects around it, or in arranging and applying its stores of acquired knowledge, it soon loses elasticity and vigour. The man who does not learn and think and reflect, sinks to the level of an animal,superior animal perhaps, as for instance a beaver or an ant; like the beaver, he may be a cunning builder, or like the ant, he may provide meat in the summer and gather food in the harvest; but, like them, he acts from instinct rather than reason: the distinctive mental life of man has departed from him. For want of wood the fire has gone out. If an inquest of angels were held on his dead intellect, their verdict would probably be, "Clemmed to death: died for want of food."

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Nor, once more, is it otherwise with man's spiritual life. Of that it is true that "where no wood is, there the fire goeth out." Cease to

feed it, and there is no need that the Great Adversary should spread his snares or strike his blows; no need that the man should stray into fatal heresies, or fall into open and notorious sins. He dies from simple lack of food. For want of fuel, the flames, which once burned hotly enough, sink into dull glowing embers, the embers grow cold and black; till, at length, the last spark of genuine vital heat departs, and only the bare ashes are left to tell of the fire which once carried warmth and pleasure through all the courts of the soul.

Now this, my brethren, is a truth so generally admitted, and yet so generally neglected, that I have chosen my text mainly that I may say a few honest friendly words about it. You know as well as I do that, for all practical purposes, many religious persons believe that the fire of spiritual life, once kindled in them, will burn on, pretty nearly unfed, for ever. At all events they take very little pains to feed it; their shoulders do not ache with carrying fagots to the fire, nor do they put themselves to much expense for wood.

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But," it may be asked, "do not these persons read their Bibles, frequent places of worship, listen to sermons, engage in prayer?" O yes, brethren, they do all that-at least, in some sense they do it. They go to their place of worship; but how often they worship the Divine Spirit in spirit and truth is quite another question. They engage in prayer; but to engage in prayer is not always

to pray.

They listen to sermons, but they do not care to have any tax laid on their mental energies, and the shorter the sermon is the better it is.

Nor do they fail to read the Scriptures, if by that phrase you mean only taking in for a few moments the superficial sense of brief detached passages of Holy Writ,

and not a laborious endeavour to absorb the meaning and spirit of a discourse, or an epistle or a book. In short, they do not object to pick up a few slender sticks, and the lighter they are the better; but they will neither hew nor carry away any substantial log: and so their fire is, at the best, only just kept burning, and often altogether goes out.

But all this is very general, and if I would reach your consciences and my own, we must come to particulars. Do we, then, admit and seriously maintain that the spiritual life, that in us which is of God and abideth for ever, is the supreme life of man; and that we should take even more pains to supply it with its proper nutriment and exercise than we should take for any other form our life assumes? If we do, as I am very sure that at our best moments we all do, let me also ask:

Do we really and honestly take even as much pains about our spiritual life as we do about our physical or social life? It cannot be denied that worship, the common worship of the public sanctuary, is one, and the study of God's holy Word another great source of nourishment for this inward life of ours. Well, do we eagerly and wisely avail ourselves of them?

On what principle, for instance, do we select our Place of Worship? In what spirit do we join in its services? Do we attach ourselves to one congregation of faithful men rather than another simply, or mainly, with a view to our spiritual culture and progress? Do we make it our chief aim to be instructed in the truth, to become familiar with phases and applications of truth which as yet are strange to us, to find companions whose worship has in it the ring of a holy sincerity and charity? Assuredly this is not the

leading motive of all who attend our places of worship. There are some who, so far from going up to the house of God to be taught what as yet they know not, take offence at any new thought, new, I mean, to them, though in itself as old as the Gospel. These choose a place where they can hear in eternal repetition the few limited truths with which they are familiar set forth in equally familiar phrases. For them the pulpit should be like the church-bells, and only ring changes on a few well-known notes instead of ranging through the whole scale of truth. They try to keep their fire in, not with fresh wood cut from the great living forest of Truth, but with oftenburned ashes from the grate,-the scanty ashes of the few sticks which they take to be the only fuel. There are others who go where they have been used to go, to what they call "their own place," although they often lament that they learn very little, and get hardly any impulse to lead a higher or nobler life. Do these, then, give as much thought or take as much pains for their spiritual as they would for their commercial or physical life? What! would they go on eating a food they could not digest, or living in a house they found injurious to health, simply because they were used to it? Would they carry on dealings with a firm whose bills were protested, or continue a manufacture which found no market, simply because they had grown accustomed to the one or the other? Surely not. No words would be too strong to express their sense of the folly of letting mere use and wont thus injure either their fortune or their health. But when it is only their souls which are at stake, not their health or their purse, they let mere custom rule them, and often pride themselves on being so staunch to their cause! Rather than be at the pain of break

ing an old tie, rather than be at the trouble of forming a new habit, they are content to let the fire of spiritual life die down, if not die out!

There are some, again, who go to a place of worship because the "miserable sinners" who worship there are of wealthier or a more fashionable caste; because they hope to get into better society by going or to mend their business prospects; and there are others who stay away because they are not "noticed," i.e., made much of, or because they have a prejudice against some other attendant at the place, or because some minor arrangement of the service crosses their preference, or even because they don't like the singing. My dear brethren, I am not forgetting the warning to scandal-mongers with which I began. I am not bearing false witness against my neighbour; I am simply repeating what my neighbour himself has told me— what, I dare say, he has told you too. Quite a curious essay, indeed, might be written on the motives which lead people to go, and to leave off going, to their several places of worship; and the conclusion, one conclusion to which I fear the Essayist, if he were honest, would come, is that there is hardly any motive so selfish or mean or trivial but that some Christian persons suffer it to stand in the way of their spiritual good. For their health's sake, or their business' sake, they will put up with inconveniences, waive preferences, make sacrifices a thousandfold more irksome than they care to make where only the prosperity of their souls are in question. "After all it does not greatly matter whether

I go here or there" is the thought of their heart, a thought which it would be simply impossible for them. to entertain if the question were, "To which physician shall I go?" or "With which firm shall I deal?" In a word, they take infinitely more

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