Some of you are old men, your heads white with manifold experience, and life is writ in storied hieroglyphics on cheek and brow. Venerable faces! I hope I learn from you. I hardly dare essay to teach men before whom time has unrolled his lengthened scroll, men far before me in the experience of life. But let me ask you, if, while you have been doing your work,—have been gathering riches, and tasting the joys of time, — been son, husband, father, friend,—you have also greatened, deepened, heightened your manly character, and gained the greatest riches, the wealth of a religious soul, incorruptible and undefiled, the joys that cannot fade away? - For old or young, there is no real and lasting human blessedness without this. It is the sole sufficient and assured defence against the sorrows of the world, the disappointments and the griefs of life, the pains of unrequited righteousness and hopes that went astray. It is a never-failing fountain of delight. "There are briers besetting every path, That call for patient care; There is a cross in every lot, And an earnest need for prayer; But the lowly heart that trusts in Thee Is happy everywhere." THE L THERE no more mer to mental more merit to be bo ious strength t But it is a grea large estate of vantage to posse power,-eminenc the affections, of th VII. OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF STRENGTH. THE LORD IS THE STRENGTH OF MY LIFE. Ps. xxvii. 1. THERE are original differences of spiritual strength. I mean of intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious power; these depend on what may be called the natural spiritual constitution of the individual. One man is born with a strong spiritual constitution, another with a weak one! So one will be great, and the other little. It is no shame in this case, no merit in that. Surely it is no more merit to be born to genius than to gold, to mental more than to material strength; no more merit to be born to moral, affectional, and religious strength than to mere intellectual genius. But it is a great convenience to be born to this large estate of spiritual wealth, a very great advantage to possess the highest form of human power, eminence of intellect, of conscience, of the affections, of the soul. There is a primitive intellectual difference amongst men which is ineffaceable from the man's mortal being, as the primary qualities are ineffaceable from the atoms of matter. It will appear in all the life of the man. Even great wickedness will not wholly destroy this primeval loftiness of mind. Few men were ever better born in respect to intellect than Francis Bacon and Thomas Wentworth," the great Lord Verulam" and "the great Earl of Strafford": few men ever gave larger proof of superior intellect, even in its highest forms of development, of general force and manly vigor of mind; few ever used great natural ability, great personal attainments, and great political place, for purposes so selfish, mean, and base. Few ever fell more completely. Yet, spite of that misdirection and abuse, the marks of greatness and strength appear in them both to the very last. Bacon was still "the wisest, brightest," if also "the meanest of mankind." I know a great man may ruin himself; stumbling is as easy for a mammoth as a mouse, and much more conspicuous; but even in his fall his greatness will be visible. The ruin of a colossus is gigantic, — its fragments are on a grand scale. You read the size of the ship in the timbers of the wreck, fastened with mighty bolts. The Tuscan bard is true to nature as to poetry in painting his odious potentates magnificently mighty even in hell. Satan fallen seems still "not less than archangel ruined"! I do not deny this natural and ineffaceable difference between men in reference to their strength of character, their quantity of being. I am not going to say that conscious piety will make a great man out of a little one; that it would give to George the Third the strength of Charlemagne or Napoleon. No training will make the shrub-oak a tree-oak; no agriculture swell a cape to a continent. But I do mean to say, that religion, conscious piety, will increase the actual strength of the great and of the little; that through want of religious culture the possibility of strength is diminished in both the little and the great. Not only does religion greaten the quantity of power, it betters its quality at the same time. So it both enlarges a man's general power for himself or his brother, and enhances the mode of that power, thus giving him a greater power of usefulness and a greater power of welfare, more force to delight, more force to enjoy. This is true of religion taken in its wide sense, a life in harmony with myself, in concord with my brother, in unity with my God; true of religion in its highest form, the conscious worship of the Infinite God with the normal use of every faculty of the spirit, every limb of the body, and every portion of material or social power. Without this conscious religious development, it seems to me that no strength or greatness is admirably human; and with it, no smallness of opportunity, no littleness of gift, is contemptible or low. I reverence great powers, given or got; but I reverence much more the faithful use of powers either large or little. Strength of character appears in two general modes of power, accordingly as it is tried by one or other of two tests. It is power to do, or power to bear. One is active, and the other passive, but both are only diverse modes of the same thing. The hard anvil can bear the blows of the hard hammer which smites it, because there is the same solidity in the nether anvil which bears up, as in the upper hammer which bears down. It takes as much solidity to bear the blow as to give it; only one is solidity active, the other merely passive. Religion increases the general strength and volume of character. The reason is plain: Religion is keeping the natural law of human nature in its threefold mode of action,—in relation to myself, to my brother, and to my God; the coördination of my will with the will of God, with the ideal of my nature. So it is action according to my na |