Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If
any man love the world the love of the Father is not in him.—I.
John, ii:15.
There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace
from the human heart its love of the world—either by a demonstration
of the world’s vanity, so that the heart will be prevailed upon simply
to withdraw its regards from an object that is not worthy of it, or by
setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment,
so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old
affection, which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange
an old affection for a new one. My purpose is to show that from the
constitution of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent
and ineffectual, and that the latter method will alone suffice for the
rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection that sometimes
domineers over it. After having accomplished this purpose, I shall
attempt a few practical observations.
Love may be regarded in two different conditions. The first is when the
object is at a distance, and then it becomes love in a state of desire.
The second is when its object is in possession, and then it becomes love
in a state of indulgence. Under the impulse of desire, man feels himself
urged onward in some path or pursuit of activity for its gratification.
The faculties of his mind are put into busy exercise. In the steady
direction of one great and engrossing interest, his attention is recalled
from the many reveries into which it might otherwise have wandered; and
the powers of his body are forced away from an indolence in which it else
might have languished; and that time is crowded with occupation, which
but for some object of keen and devoted ambition, might have driveled
along in successive hours of weariness and distaste, and though hope does
not enliven, and success does not always crown this career of exertion,
yet in the midst of this very variety, and with the alternations of
occasional disappointment, is the machinery of the whole man kept in a
sort of congenial play, and upholden in that tone and temper which are
most agreeable to it. Insomuch, that if through the extirpation of that
desire which forms the originating principle of all this movement, the
machinery were to stop, and to receive no impulse from another desire
substituted in its place, the man would be left with all his propensities
to action in a state of most painful and unnatural abandonment.
A sensitive person suffers, and is in violence, if, after having
thoroughly rested from his fatigue, or been relieved from his pain, he
continues in possession of powers without any excitement to these powers;
if he possess a capacity of desire without having an object of desire;
or if he have a spare energy upon his person, without a counterpart,
and without a stimulus to call it into operation. The misery of such
a condition is often realized by him who is retired from business, or
who is retired from law, or who is even retired from the occupations
of the chase and of the gaming table. Such is the demand of our nature
for an object in pursuit, that no accumulation of previous success can
extinguish it, and thus it is that the most prosperous merchant, and
the most victorious general, and the most fortunate gamester, when the
labor of their respective vocations has come to a close, are often
found to languish in the midst of all their acquisitions, as if out of
their kindred and rejoicing element. It is quite in vain with such a
constitutional appetite for employment in man, to attempt cutting away
from him the spring or the principle of one employment, without providing
him with another. The whole heart and habit will rise in resistance
against such an undertaking. The else unoccupied female, who spends the
hours of every evening at some play of hazard, knows as well as you, that
the pecuniary gain, or the honorable triumph of a successful contest, are
altogether paltry. It is not such a demonstration of vanity as this that
will force her away from her dear and delightful occupation. The habit
can not so be displaced as to leave nothing but a negative and cheerless
vacancy behind it—though it may be so supplanted as to be followed up by
another habit of employment to which the power of some new affection has
constrained her. It is willingly suspended, for example, on any single
evening, should the time that was wont to be allotted to gaming require
to be spent on the preparation of an approaching assembly.
The ascendant power of a second affection will do what no exposition,
however forcible, of the folly and worthlessness of the first, ever
could effectuate. And it is the same in the great world. You never will
be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits, by a naked demonstration
of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of stopping one of these
pursuits in any way else, but by stimulating to another. In attempting
to bring a worldly man, intent and busied with the prosecution of his
objects, to a dead stand, you have not merely to encounter the charm
which he annexes to these objects, but you have to encounter the pleasure
which he feels in the very prosecution of them. It is not enough, then,
that you dissipate the charm by your moral, and eloquent, and affecting
exposure of its illusiveness. You must address to the eye of his mind
another object, with a charm powerful enough to dispossess the first of
its influence, and to engage him in some other prosecution as full of
interest, and hope, and congenial activity, as the former. It is this
which stamps an impotency on all moral and pathetic declamation of the
insignificance of the world. A man will no more consent to the misery of
being without an object, because that object is a trifle, or of being
without a pursuit, because that pursuit terminates in some frivolous
or fugitive acquirement, than he will voluntarily submit himself to
the torture because that torture is to be of short duration. If to be
without desire and without exertion altogether, is a state of violence
and discomfort, then the present desire, with its correspondent train of
exertion, is not to be got rid of simply by destroying it. It must be
by substituting another desire, or another line of habit or exertion in
its place, and the most effectual way of withdrawing the mind from one
object, is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy,
but by presenting to its regards another object still more alluring.
These remarks apply not merely to love considered in the state of desire
for an object not yet attained. They apply also to love considered
in its state of indulgence, or placid gratification, with an object
already in possession. It is seldom that any of our tastes are made
to disappear by a process of natural extinction. At least, it is very
seldom that this is done by the instrumentality of reasoning. It may be
done by excessive pampering, but it is almost never done by the mere
force of mental determination. But what can not be thus destroyed may
be dispossessed, and one taste may be made to give way to another, and
to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind. It is
thus that the boy ceases, at length, to be the slave of his appetite,
but it is because a manlier taste has now brought it into subordination,
and that the youth ceases to idolize pleasure, but it is because the
idol of wealth has become the stronger, and gotten the ascendency—and
that even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart of
many a thriving citizen, but it is because drawn into the whirl of city
politics, another affection has been wrought into his moral system, and
he is now lorded over by the love of power. There is not one of these
transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire
for one particular object may be conquered; but as to its desire for
having some one object, or other, this is unconquerable. Its adhesion
to that on which it has fastened the preference of its regards, can not
willingly be overcome by the rending away of a single separation. It can
be done only by the application of something else, to which it may feel
the adhesion of a still stronger and more powerful preference. Such is
the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have something
to lay hold of—and which, if wrested away, without the substitution
of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy
as painful to the mind as hunger is to the natural system. It may be
dispossessed of one object or of any, but it can not be desolated of all.
Let there be a breathing and a sensitive heart, but without a liking and
without affinity to any of the things that are around it, and in a state
of cheerless abandonment, it would be alive to nothing but the burden
of its own consciousness, and feel it to be intolerable. It would make
no difference to its owner, whether he dwelt in the midst of a gay and
goodly world, or placed afar beyond the outskirts of creation, he dwelt
a solitary unit in dark and unpeopled nothingness. The heart must have
something to cling to—and never, by its own voluntary consent, will it
so denude itself of all its attachments that there shall not be one
remaining object that can draw or solicit it.
[_April 13._]
The misery of a heart thus bereft of all relish for that which is wont
to minister to its enjoyment, is strikingly exemplified in those who,
satiated with indulgence, have been so belabored, as it were, with
the variety and the poignancy of the pleasurable sensations that they
have experienced, that they are at length fatigued out of all capacity
for sensation whatever. The disease of ennui is more frequent in the
French metropolis, where amusement is more exclusively the occupation
of higher classes, than it is in the British metropolis, where the
longings of the heart are more diversified by the resources of business
and politics. There are the votaries of fashion, who, in this way, have
at length become the victims of fashionable excess, in whom the very
multitude of their enjoyments has at last extinguished their power of
enjoyment—who, plied with the delights of sense and of splendor even to
weariness, and incapable of higher delights, have come to the end of all
their perfection, and, like Solomon of old, found it to be vanity and
vexation. The man whose heart has thus been turned into a desert can
vouch for the insupportable languor which must ensue, when one affection
is thus plucked away from the bosom, without another to replace it.
It is not necessary that a man receive pain from anything in order to
become miserable. It is barely enough that he looks with distaste at
everything—and in that asylum which is the repository of minds out of
joint, and where the organ of feeling as well as the organ of intellect,
has been impaired, it is not in the cell of loud and frantic outcries
where you will meet with the acme of mental suffering. But that is the
individual who outpeers in wretchedness all his fellows, who throughout
the whole expanse of nature and society, meets not an object that has at
all the power to detain or interest him; who neither in earth beneath,
nor in heaven above, knows of a single charm to which his heart can
send forth one desirous or responding movement; to whom the world, in
his eye a vast and empty desolation, has left him nothing but his own
consciousness to feed upon—dead to all that is without him, and alive to
nothing but to the load of his own torpid and useless existence.
* * * * *
We hope that by this time you understand the impotency of a mere
demonstration of this world’s insignificance. Its sole practical effect,
if it had any, would be to leave the heart in a state which to every
heart is insupportable, and that is a mere state of nakedness and
negation. You may remember the fond and unbroken tenacity with which
your heart has often recurred to pursuits, over the utter frivolity
of which it sighed and wept but yesterday. The arithmetic of your
short-lived days, may on Sabbath make the clearest impression upon
your understanding, and from his fancied bed of death may the preacher
cause a voice to descend in rebuke and mockery on all the pursuits of
earthliness, and as he pictures before you the fleeting generations of
men, with the absorbing grave, whither all the joys and interests of
the world hasten to their sure and speedy oblivion, may you, touched
and solemnized by his argument, feel for a moment as if on the eve of a
practical and permanent emancipation from a scene of so much vanity.
But the morrow comes, and the business of the world, and the objects of
the world, and the moving forces of the world, come along with it, and
the machinery of the heart, in virtue of which it must have something
to grasp, or something to adhere to, brings it under a kind of moral
necessity to be actuated just as before, and in utter repulsion toward
a state so unkindly as that of being frozen out both of delight and
of desire, does it feel all the warmth and the urgency of its wonted
solicitations, nor in the habit and history of the whole man can we
detect so much as one symptom of the new creature, so that the church,
instead of being to him a school of obedience, has been a mere sauntering
place for the luxury of a passing and theatrical emotion; and the
preaching which is mighty to compel the attendance of multitudes, and
which is mighty to still and to solemnize the hearers into a kind of
tragic sensibility, and which is mighty in the play of variety and vigor
that it can keep up around the imagination, is not mighty to the pulling
down of strongholds.
The love of the world can not be expunged by a mere demonstration of the
world’s worthlessness. But may it not be supplanted by the love of that
which is more worthy than itself? The heart can not be prevailed upon
to part with the world by a single act of resignation. But may not the
heart be prevailed upon to admit into its preference another, who shall
subordinate the world, and bring it down from its wonted ascendancy? If
the throne which is placed there must have an occupier, and the tyrant
that now reigns has occupied it wrongfully, he may not leave a bosom
which would rather detain him than be left in desolation. But may he not
give way to the lawful sovereign, appearing with every charm that can
secure his willing admittance, and taking unto himself his great power
to subdue the moral nature of man, and to reign over it? In a word, if
the way to disengage the heart from the positive love of one great and
ascendant object, is to fasten it in positive love to another, then it is
not by exposing the worthlessness of the former, but by addressing to the
mental eye the worth and excellence of the latter, that all things are to
be done away, and all things are become new.
To obliterate all our present affections by simply expunging them,
so as to leave the seat of them unoccupied, would be to destroy the
old character, and to substitute no new character in its place. But
when they take their departure upon the ingress of others, when they
resign their sway to the power and the predominance of new affections,
when, abandoning the heart to solitude, they merely give place to a
successor who turns it into as busy a residence of desire, and interest,
and expectation as before—there is nothing in all this to thwart or
to overthrow any of the laws of our sentient nature—and we see how,
in fullest accordance with the mechanism of the heart, a great moral
revolution may be made to take place upon it.
This, we trust, will explain the operation of that charm which
accompanies the effectual preaching of the gospel. The love of God, and
the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of
rivalship, but in a state of enmity—and that so irreconcilable that they
can not dwell together in the same bosom. We have already affirmed how
impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to
cast the world away from it, and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The
heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old
affection is by the expulsive power of a new one. Nothing can exceed the
magnitude of the required change in a man’s character, when bidden, as he
is in the New Testament, not to love the world; no, nor any of the things
that are in the world, for this so comprehends all that is dear to him in
existence as to be equivalent to a command of self-annihilation. But the
same revelation which dictates so mighty an obedience, places within our
reach as mighty an instrument of obedience.
It brings for admittance, to the very door of our heart, an affection
which, once seated upon its throne, will either subordinate every
previous inmate, or bid it away. Beside the world, it places before the
eye of the mind Him who made the world, and with this peculiarity, which
is all its own—that in the gospel do we so behold God, as that we may
love God. It is there, and there only, where God stands revealed as an
object of confidence to sinners—and where our desire after Him is not
chilled into apathy by that barrier of human guilt which intercepts every
approach that is not made to Him through the appointed Mediator. It is
the bringing in of this better hope whereby we draw nigh unto God—and to
live without hope is to live without God, and if the heart be without
God, the world will then have the ascendancy. It is God apprehended
by the believer as God in Christ, who alone can disport it from this
ascendancy. It is when He stands dismantled of the terrors which belong
to Him as an offended lawgiver, and when we are enabled by faith, which
is his own gift, to see His glory in the face of Jesus Christ, and to
hear His beseeching voice, as it protests good will to men, and entreats
the return of all who will, to a full pardon and a gracious acceptance—it
is then that a love paramount to the love of the world, and at length
expulsive of it, first arises in the regenerating bosom. It is when
released from the spirit of bondage, with which love can not dwell, and
when to the number of God’s children, through the faith that is in Christ
Jesus, the spirit of adoption is found upon us; it is then that the
heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection,
is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, and in the only way
in which deliverance is possible. And that faith which is revealed to us
from heaven, as indispensable to a sinner’s justification in the sight of
God, is also the instrument of the greatest of all moral and spiritual
achievements on a nature dead to the influence, and beyond the reach of
every other application.
[_April 20._]
Thus may we come to perceive what it is that makes the most effective
kind of preaching. It is not enough to hold out to the world’s eye the
mirror of its own imperfections. It is not enough to come forth with a
demonstration, however pathetic, of the evanescent character of all
its enjoyments. It is not enough to travel the walk of experience along
with you, and speak to your own conscience and your own recollection of
the deceitfulness of the heart, and the deceitfulness of all that the
heart is set upon. There is many a bearer of the gospel message who has
not shrewdness of natural discernment enough, and who has not power of
characteristic description enough, and who has not the talent of moral
delineation enough, to present you with a vivid and faithful sketch
of the existing follies of society. But that very corruption which he
has not the faculty of representing in its visible details, he may
practically be the instrument of eradicating in its principle. Let him be
but a faithful expounder of the gospel testimony; unable as he may be to
apply a descriptive hand to the character of the present world, let him
but report with accuracy the matter which revelation has brought to him
from a distant world, unskilled as he is in the work of so anatomizing
the heart, as with the power of a novelist to create a graphical or
impressive exhibition of the worthlessness of its many affections—let
him only deal in those mysteries of peculiar doctrine, on which the best
of novelists have thrown the wantonness of their derision. He may not be
able, with the eye of shrewd and satirical observation, to expose to the
ready recognition of his hearers the desires of worldliness—but with the
tidings of the gospel in commission, he may wield the only engine that
can extirpate them. He can not do what some might have done, when, as if
by the hand of a magician they have brought out to view, from the hidden
recesses of our nature, the foibles and lurking appetites which belong to
it. But he has a truth in the possession, which, into whatever heart it
enters, will, like the rod of Aaron, swallow up them all—and unqualified
as he may be, to describe the old man in all the nicer shading of
his natural and constitutional varieties, with him is deposited that
ascendant influence under which the leading tastes and tendencies of the
old man are destroyed, and he becomes a new creature in Jesus Christ our
Lord.
Let us not cease, then, to ply the only instrument of powerful and
positive operation, to do away from you the love of the world. Let us try
every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of
Him who is greater than the world. For this purpose, if possible, clear
away that shroud of unbelief which so hides and darkens the face of the
Deity. Let us insist on His claims to your affection, and whether in
the shape of gratitude or in the shape of esteem, let us never cease to
affirm that in the whole of that wondrous economy, the purpose of which
is to reclaim a sinful world unto Himself, He, the God of love, so sets
Himself forth in characters of endearment, that naught but faith, and
naught but understanding are wanting, on your part, to call forth the
love of your hearts back again.
And here let me advert to the incredulity of a worldly man; when he
brings his own sound and secular experience to bear upon the high
doctrines of Christianity, when he looks upon regeneration as a thing
impossible, when feeling as he does the obstinacies of his own heart,
on the side of things present, and casting an intelligent eye, much
exercised, perhaps, in the observations of human life, on the equal
obstinacies of all who are around him, he pronounces this whole matter
about the crucifixion of the old man, and the resurrection of a new man
in his place, to be in downright opposition to all that is known and
witnessed of the real nature of humanity. We think that we have seen such
men, who, firmly trenched in their own vigorous and homebred sagacity,
and shrewdly regardful of all that passes before them through the week,
and upon the scenes of ordinary business, look on that transition of
the heart by which it gradually dies unto time, and awakens in all the
life of a new felt and ever growing desire toward God, as a mere Sabbath
speculation; and who thus, with all their attention engrossed upon the
concerns of earthliness, continue unmoved to the end of their days,
amongst the feelings and the appetites, and the pursuits of earthliness.
If the thought of death, and another state of being after it, comes
across them at all, it is not with a change so radical as that of
being born again, that they ever connect the idea of preparation.
They have some vague conception of its being quite enough that they
acquit themselves in some decent and tolerable way of their relative
obligations; and that upon the strength of some such social and domestic
moralities as are often realized by him in whose heart the love of God
has never entered, they will be transplanted in safety from this world,
where God is the Being with whom it may almost be said that they have
had nothing to do, to that world where God is the Being with whom they
will have mainly and immediately to do throughout all eternity. They
admit all that is said of the utter vanity of time, when taken up with
as a resting place. But they resist every application made upon the
heart of man, with the view of so shifting its tendencies that it shall
not henceforth find in the interests of time, all its rest and all its
refreshment. They in fact regard such an attempt as an enterprise that
is altogether aerial, and with a tone of secular wisdom caught from the
familiarities of every-day experience, do they see a visionary character
in all that is said of setting our affections on the things that are
above, and of walking by faith, and of keeping our hearts in such a love
of God as shall shut out from them the love of the world, and of having
no confidence in the flesh, and of so renouncing earthly things as to
have our conversation in heaven.
Now, it is altogether worthy of being remarked of those men who thus
disrelish spiritual Christianity, and, in fact, deem it an impracticable
acquirement, how much of a piece their incredulities about the doctrines
of Christianity are with each other. No wonder that they feel the work
of the New Testament to be beyond their strength, so long as they hold
the words of the New Testament to be beneath their attention. Neither
they nor any one else can dispossess the heart of an old affection, but
by the impulsive power of a new one, and, if that new affection be the
love of God, neither they nor any one else can be made to entertain it,
but on such a representation of the Deity as shall draw the heart of the
sinner toward Him. Now, it is just their unbelief which screens from the
discernment of their minds this representation. They do not see the love
of God in sending His Son into the world. They do not see the expression
of his tenderness to men, in sparing him not, but giving him up unto
the death for us all. They do not see the sufficiency of the atonement,
or of the sufferings that were endured by him who bore the burden that
sinners should have borne. They do not see the blended holiness and
compassion of the Godhead, in that He passed by the transgressions of
His creatures, yet could not pass them by without an expiation. It is
a mystery to them how a man should pass to a state of godliness from a
state of nature—but had they only a believing view of God manifest in the
flesh, this would resolve for them the whole mystery of godliness. As it
is, they can not get quit of their old affections, because they are out
of sight from all those truths which have influence to raise a new one.
They are like the children of Israel in the land of Egypt, when required
to make bricks without straw—they can not love God, while they want
the only food which can aliment this affection in a sinner’s bosom—and
however great their errors may be, both in resisting the demands of the
gospel as impracticable, and in rejecting the doctrines of the gospel as
inadmissible, yet there is not a spiritual man (and it is the prerogative
of Him who is spiritual to judge all men) who will not perceive that
there is a consistency in these errors.
[_April 27._]
But if there be a consistency in the errors, in like manner is there
a consistency in the truths which are opposite to them. The man who
believes in the peculiar doctrines will readily bow to the peculiar
demands of Christianity. When he is told to love God supremely, this
may startle him to whom God has been revealed in grace, and in pardon,
and in all the freeness of an offered reconciliation. When told he
should shut out the world from the heart, this may be impossible with
him who has nothing to replace it—but not impossible with him who has
found in God a sure and a satisfying portion. When told to withdraw his
affections from the things that are beneath, this was laying an order of
self-extinction upon the man who knows not another quarter in the whole
sphere of his contemplation, to which he could transfer them—but it were
not grievous to him whose view has been opened up to the loveliness and
glory of the things that are above, and can there find, for every feeling
of his soul, a most ample and delighted occupation. When told to look
not at the things that are seen and temporal, this were blotting out the
light of all that is visible from the prospect of him in whose eye there
is a wall of partition between guilty nature and the joys of eternity—but
he who believes that Christ has broken down this wall, finds a gathering
radiance upon his soul, as he looks onward in faith to the things that
are unseen and eternal. Tell a man to be holy—and how can he compass such
a performance, when his alone fellowship with holiness is a fellowship of
despair? It is the atonement of the cross, reconciling the holiness of
the lawgiver with the safety of the offender, that hath opened the way
for a sanctifying influence into the sinner’s heart, and he can take a
kindred impression from the character of God now brought nigh, and now at
peace with him.
Separate the demand from the doctrine, and you have either a system of
righteousness that is impracticable, or a barren orthodoxy. Bring the
demand and the doctrine together, and the true disciple of Christ is able
to do the one through the other strengthening him. The motive is adequate
to the movement, and the bidden obedience of the gospel is not beyond
the measure of his strength, just because the doctrine of the gospel is
not beyond the measure of his acceptance. The shield of faith, and the
hope of salvation, and the Word of God, and the girdle of truth—these
are the armor that he has put on; and with these the battle is won, and
the eminence is reached, and the man stands on the vantage ground of
a new field and a new prospect. The effect is great, but the cause is
equal to it—and stupendous as this moral resurrection to the precepts of
Christianity undoubtedly is, there is an element of strength enough to
give it being and continuance in the principles of Christianity.
The object of the gospel is both to pacify the sinner’s conscience, and
to purify his heart; and it is of importance to observe that what mars
one of these objects, mars the other also. The best way of casting out
an impure affection is to admit a pure one; and by the love of what is
good, to expel the love of what is evil. Thus it is, that the freer the
gospel, the more sanctifying the gospel; and the more it is received as
a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to
godliness. This is one of the secrets of the Christian life, that the
more a man holds of God as a pensioner, the greater is the payment of
service that he renders back again. On the tenure of “Do this and live,”
a spirit of fearfulness is sure to enter; and the jealousies of a legal
bargain chase away all confidence from the intercourse between God and
man; and the creature striving to be square and even with his Creator,
is, in fact, pursuing all the while his own selfishness instead of God’s
glory, and with all the conformities which he labors to accomplish, the
soul of obedience is not there, the mind is not subject to the law of
God, nor indeed under such an economy ever can be. It is only when, as
in the gospel, acceptance is bestowed as a present, without money and
without price, that the security which man feels in God is placed beyond
the reach of disturbance, or that he can repose in him, as one friend
reposes in another, or that any liberal and generous understanding can
be established betwixt them—one party rejoicing over the other to do him
good—the other finding that the truest gladness of his heart lies in the
impulse of a gratitude, by which it is awakened to the charms of a new
moral existence. Salvation by grace—salvation on such a footing is not
more indispensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of
justice, than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and
the weight of ungodliness.
Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the gospel, and you
raise a topic of distrust between man and God. You take away from the
power of the gospel to melt and to conciliate. For this purpose, the
freer it is, the better it is. That very peculiarity which so many dread
as the germ of Antinomianism, is in fact the germ of a new spirit, and a
new inclination against it. Along with the light of a free gospel, does
there enter the love of the gospel, which in proportion as you impair
the freeness, you are sure to chase away. And never does the sinner find
within himself so mighty a moral transformation, as when under the belief
that he is saved by grace, he feels constrained thereby to offer his
heart a devoted thing, and to deny ungodliness.
To do any work in the best manner, you would make use of the fittest
tools for it. And we trust that what has been said may serve in some
degree for the practical guidance of those who would like to reach the
great moral achievement of our text—but feel that the tendencies and
desires of nature are too strong for them. We know of no other way by
which to keep the love of the world out of our heart, than to keep in
our heart the love of God—and no other way by which to keep our hearts
in the love of God, than building ourselves up on our most holy faith.
That denial of the world which is not possible to him that dissents from
the gospel testimony, is possible, even as all things are possible to him
that believeth. To try this without faith, is to work without the right
tool or the right instrument. But faith worketh by love; and the way of
expelling from the heart the love that transgresseth the law, is to admit
into its receptacles the love which fulfilleth the law.
Conceive a man to be standing on the margin of this green world; and
that, when he looked toward it, he saw abundance smiling upon every
field, and all the blessings which earth can afford scattered in
profusion throughout every family, and the light of the sun sweetly
resting upon all the pleasant habitations, and the joys of human
companionship brightening many a happy circle of society—conceive of
this as being the general character of the scene upon one side of his
contemplation; and that on the other, beyond the verge of the goodly
planet on which he was situated, he could descry nothing but a dark and
fathomless unknown. Think you that he would bid a voluntary adieu to all
the brightness and all the beauty that were before him on earth, and
commit himself to the frightful solitude away from it? Would he leave
its peopled dwelling places, and become a solitary wanderer through the
fields of nonentity? If space offered him nothing but a wilderness, would
he abandon the homebred scenes of life and of cheerfulness that lay so
near, and exerted such a power of urgency to detain him? Would not he
cling to the regions of sense, and of life, and of society?—and shrinking
away from the desolation that was beyond it, would not he be glad to keep
his firm footing on the territory of this world, and to take shelter
under the silver canopy that was stretched over it?
But if, during the time of his contemplation, some happy island of the
blest had floated by; and there had burst upon his senses the light
of its surpassing glories, and its sounds of sweeter melody; and he
clearly saw that there a purer beauty rested upon every field, and a more
heartfelt joy spread itself among all the families; and he could discern
there a peace, and a piety, and a benevolence, which put a moral gladness
into every bosom, and united the whole society in one rejoicing sympathy
with each other, and with the beneficent Father of them all. Could he
further see that pain and mortality were there unknown, and above all,
that signals of welcome were hung out, and an avenue of communication was
made for him, perceive you not, that what was before the wilderness,
would become the land of invitation; and that now the world would be
the wilderness? What unpeopled space could not do, can be done by space
teeming with beatific scenes and beatific society. And let the existing
tendencies of the heart be what they may to the scene that is near and
visible around us, still, if another stood revealed to the prospect of
man, either through the channel of faith, or through the channel of his
senses—then, without violence done to the constitution of his moral
nature, may he die unto the present world, and live to the lovelier world
that stands in the distance, away from it.