pain it inflicts, may easily point out to us in what direction the sin and the danger lie. Does it cause you irritation when your enthusiastic appreciation of genius is disturbed or interrupted by the ordinary cares and duties of life being intruded on your notice, or when your bright visions of intellectual excellence are contrasted with the common-place characters among whom your lot may be cast? You are then ceasing to be "sober"-minded, and you have more than usual need to be "vigilant."

Either

avoid the danger, or exercise stricter self-control. Give heed to the warning administered by the growing burden of the daily cross; or the weight of it, by continued intellectual self-indulgence, may become heavier than you can well bear. The punishment of sin is always involved in its inevitable consequences. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall

118

SEVENTH DAY..

WORLDLINESS.

"Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.' - COL. iii. 2.

THE Word of God continually forces upon us the inquiry: "What manner. of spirit are we of?"* It does not enjoin us to use self-examination as to whether we go here or there, to this or to that place of resort: but it does enjoin upon us the necessity of ascertaining the relative state of the heart and of the mind under varying circumstances and in varying situations. For this is the real, the important test: if the "affection be set on things above," the outward conduct will not be conformed to this world." + It has been justly said, that one of the † Romans, xii. 2.

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*Luke, ix. 55.

reasons why the Bible never denounces by name any external form of worldliness, is, that while such external forms alter in every different age and country, its precepts were intended to be universal, to extend to all. The Bible, however, was not only intended to be universal to every age and country, but to every heart also; and this is another reason why no occupation or employment is denounced as worldly; for the term worldliness has various significations for each individual character, and that which is to one a means of "growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," may to another be a means of awakening into vitality the hidden worldliness of the deceitful heart.

Vain, then, is the expectation that we exclude the world when its professed votaries are rejected from our companionship, and their pursuits and amusements

entirely relinquished. There is no more dangerous self-deceit than the undefined confidence that the temptations of the world are excluded when its favourite places of resort are abandoned. Too many members of what is called "the religious world," forget that such strictness of practice is only a means to an end; nay, through the deceitfulness of the human heart it may only expose them to the very same temptations in a more subtle form. Nor is it even by a direct struggle against worldly hopes, worldly fears, and worldly pride, that the spirit of worldliness can be effectually overcome. Such emotions ought, indeed, to be carefully detected, and penitentially mourned over; but vain will be all efforts to exclude them from the heart except by substituting other nobler, higher, more satisfying objects in their room. When our "affections are set on things above," then, and then only, will they be effectually with

drawn from "things on the earth.”*

It

is the same in love to an earthly friend as to a heavenly Master. Love not only makes the fulfilment of duty a delight, it further points out what duty is. The Latin father said truly, "Love God, and then do what you will." It is, however, in this right placing of the affections that the difficulty consists. It is undoubtedly more difficult "to love God whom we have not seen,"† than to love the earthly objects whom we have seen." It requires a constant exercise of very vivid faith, and is an emotion directly opposed to those remains of carnal nature that linger even in the regenerate. Still, however, as the love of God is the test of happiness, of safety, of meetness for our heavenly inheritance, it must be a feeling, the attainment of which is within every Christian's reach. We should all anxiously examine ourselves whether it yet † 1 John, iv. 2.

* Col. iii. 2.

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