LECT. XI. Human nature paradoxi cal. The Christian peace. were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were nourished in war and wasted by peace, taught by war and deceived by peace, trained by war and betrayed by peace ;-in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace." It sounds paradoxical, and even awful, but human nature is sometimes awfully paradoxical. Therefore it is that "God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." The conclusion must be paradoxical too for the praying for same reason. We ought to pray for peace, to pray for it as Christians; to work for it, and to sacrifice for it. "Thy kingdom come." But therefore also we ought never to pray for peace except as Christian, that is, for a peace of which right is the foundation, and in which truth is not sacrificed to love of ease or gold. gold. The peace which is without honour, which is only ignoble selfishness, is the peace Ruskin speaks of which which corrupts and is death. Better war a thousand times; better troubles and trials-nature's war with us—1 -than the peace which saps and mines manhood's truth and virtue. Until men are noble, and pure, and good, they are not fit for peace. XII. THE SEVENTH WORD. HOLY CHASTITY. Thou shalt not commit adultery.—Exod. xx. 14. TREAT this commandment how a preacher will LECT. XII. there is danger for some, not in the subject Danger. but in themselves. That danger only the help of the Spirit of Holiness can obviate. I commend you to seek His protection. Taylor's When Bishop Jeremy Taylor, in his Holy Jeremy Living and Dying,' comes to treat on chastity he caution. bids the reader who is prurient read no more, "lest he turn the grace of God into wantonness ; but," he continues, "if any man will snatch the pure taper from my hand and hold it to the devil he will only burn his own fingers, but shall not rob me of the reward of my care and good intention." I speak to-night only to hold out the taper of God before the conscience. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." Alas! for the terrible need of it, and for the The need The his LECT. XII. terrible reality of the subject! Every age has needed this commandment, every age will continue to need it, until man live in his higher self, and is swayed by passion no more. The survey of the past is indeed an awful task. When the historian comes to deal with the moral condition of ancient times, he does it, so to speak, with downcast eyes and averted face. He dare not touch on the immoralities of Greece and Rome; he only ventures on dark hints which veil monstrous, unspeakable infamies. torian of ancient times. The homes of Pompeii. God forbid that we should even try to imagine these hidden works of darkness. Only one suggestive illustration will I set before you. So lost to the sense of virtue were those ancients that the very walls of private dwellings were covered with unchaste pictures. Children, our type of innocence, grew up amid familiar images of vice. After speaking of the obscene paintings discovered in the excavations of Pompeii, an unprejudiced German writer says: "One might almost venture in the midst of such horrors to admit that it was high time these were covered by the terrible agency of the volcano, by the pure mantle of Christianity. For if such was the state of Rome and things in a Roman country town, what must it have been in Rome itself, or in those schools of dissoluteness, Corinth and Alexandria? We Corinth. little think of the beneficence of the fire and LECT. xii. brimstone which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah. But fire and brimstone, God would tell us in their burning, are better than the foul and deadly leprosy of immorality which destroys nations wherever its subtle infection gets the upper hand. Christian as bad? Some may say, "It is as bad in Christian Eng- Is land to-day." The answer is direct and twofold. England First, certainly not in Christian England. Christianity allows of neither adulterer nor fornicator. Such there may be in her visible communion, but they are not of her inner life, not even if they be magistrates on the bench of justice, or officials at places of worship; no, not even if they minister in her pulpits and are styled reverend. It is too stale a device to parade the sins of professors as the blame of Christianity. It is blasphemous and unjust. We meet it with the declaration. of the inspired word, "No whoremonger or adulterer shall enter into the kingdom of heaven." tian not so bad. Secondly, the charge is not true of even un- UnchrisChristian England. Cast into the scale all the England foul lives of the Divorce Court, and all the darkest things of her immoral world, and it is not true. No, thank God, the Christian world can never be again what it was before the days of Christ. It is too dark still, but not so dark as then. Then The conthe whole fountain-head of social life was corrupt, S trast of then and now. LECT. XII. the very atmosphere of home, and street, and temple was tainted with impurity. It was not as with us vice in the dark, but vice in the light of noonday; not skulking and ashamed, but stalking abroad with unabashed face, and uncondemned by any public opinion. It was vice, I say, befouling the pages of the philosopher, the walls of home, and the very courts of the temples. Women spurning the conjugal tie, ranging from husband to husband; men with absolute power of divorce at will; the highest names in literature advocating the brothel; courtesans wielding vast social and political influence; the temple vestals given up to common prostitution; public worship often only an excuse and occasion for foul orgies; the very gods, creations of debased imaginations, deities of lust and infamy. Open immoralities. My purpose in these glimpses. Why do I show you these glimpses of the lurid darkness? I want you to understand something of the world's indebtedness to Israel's moral law. Christianity has no need to shrink from the study of history. History indeed proclaims her the saviour of society, its redeemer from otherwise irredeemable deadly corruptions. Histianity the saviour of tory clearly proclaims that the worship of the society. beautiful under conditions more favourable than can ever recur again ended in degradation. History makes it plain that the wisest have no scheme Chris |