using, but to everlasting things that God has reserved in his kingdom for those who love him. So no impossibility is presented to men when they are called to repentance and to righteousness. To say that men cannot repent, to say that they cannot return to righteousness, to say that they cannot become meek and gentle and long-suffering, clothed with hope and filled with love, is to say that men are unsusceptible to education. Education will not come of itself; it will never come unless you seek it; it will not come unless you take the first steps which lead to it; but, taking these steps, every man can acquire it. It is exactly to this point that I bring my discourse tonight. I address it to those here who are consciously living in courses that are wrong; and my message to them is, Repent! The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Divine Spirit, that evokes desires and aspirations, and addresses the conscience and the reason, inspires me to speak this message to you. Turn back from evil. That you can do, if you will to do it. If the evil be multiplied, if it be spread through various relations, then the will must be repetitious, and meet the thing to be done, step by step, and continuously; and I call to every one of you, whatever may be the wrong,whether it be wrong flowing from pride, or wrong flowing from ambition, or wrong flowing from vanity, or wrong flowing from the appetites and passions; whatever be the nature of the wrong, whether you are joined with others or whether you are solitary, whether you be long practiced or new in evil, whether it be secret or overt,-I call upon every man that believes himself to be an heir of immortality, to abandon the wrong. Bring your mind to the consideration of it now. Why should you go on in wrong longer? Why should you continue to educate yourself in that which you yourself disallow with your best nature, and which you, in your clearest hours and sunniest moods, believe to be unworthy of you? Why should you continue it? Since the power resides in you to change it, why should you not bring that power to bear upon it at once, and say, "By the help of God, I will forsake every known evil." In one bosom such a purpose as that will lift up one specter; and in another, another. Many of you will, perhaps, be appalled when you consider how wide has been the waste, how great has been the desolation in your souls, how they lie like Tadmor and Palmyra in the wilderness; and how to repair this waste seems almost beyond your competence. Nevertheless, it can be repaired. No man lives. who cannot repent and reform. There is no evil that you cannot resist and conquer by the help that God will give to every right-minded, right-willing man. I call you to take one step beyond this. The forsaking of evil is not enough. No man can easily forsake evil except by taking hold on good. Industry is the cure of idleness. "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good," says the apostle. Work is a cure for dishonesty, if a man works at right things hard enough and long enough. The way to attack any evil is to put into the place of it its opposite. Let the liar speak the truth. It may be awkward at first, he may have to try it a good many times before it fits his tongue; but there is the law, and the practice is to be begun and continued until the tongue naturally speaks the truth. In all the relations which you sustain to one another there are many things that are wrong, and many duties that you will recognize without my mentioning them. Now do the best things, as the way to abandon evil, and as the method by which to overcome those habits that are so perilous to your manhood here and hereafter. Search out the positive virtue that stands over against every known evil; will that and follow after that. More than this, why should a man who can do a thing easily do it by the hardest? There are two ways in which a clock may be made to keep time. One is to go to the hand and pull it round five minutes, and then in five minutes go and pull it round again, and keep moving the hand round on the dial five minutes at a time until the twelve hours are passed-by which time you will be tired of the operation. The other way is to wind the clock up. There is an active force inside of it; and if you wind it up and start it, it will go of itself, and keep going. What What It is wrong. Now, can a man be helped in any such way as that? Must a man, all day long, say to himself, "May I say that? No, I must not say that, because it is wrong. I am going to try to do right, and that would not be right. am I thinking? I must not think this. did I feel then? I must not feel so. I am afraid it was not right." The dealing of a man in that way with himself would be like the turning of the pointer of a clock by hand instead of winding it up. A man who should act in that way would make a fool of himself in a year. He would break up all continuity of thought and action, and destroy himself. It is bad for a man to be thinking about his digestion. Any man can make himself sick by watching his stomach all the time. A man can impair the integrity and efficiency of his mental faculties by continually watching their action. And is there any way in which this can be avoided? Certainly there is. There is such a thing as a supreme affection, which takes charge of the mind and drives out every other affection. I carry in my mind a great many dramas, a great many tragedies. I know a great many sorrows, a great many sufferings, a great many histories. Sometimes it seems to me as though I walked in a motley, ghastly crowd, there are so many things that I know professionally about so many people; and sometimes they are pitiful and painful. I recall a case, many years ago, in which one had lived a life of pleasure and indulgence, to the verge of vice. At length there sprang up a goodly affection in her bosom ; and that which had been impossible before-the avoidance of temptation and of connivance with evil-became easy. No sooner had there come a worthy object of love, and no sooner had her soul begun to love, than love expelled her lower feelings, rectified her life, cleansed her heart and imagination, and reëstablished her in purity and integrity, to which she has adhered to this hour. I know the history of a person (strange as it may appear, that person has no more idea that I know it than that the Emperor of China knows it; it is my secret and hers), and it is a marvelous one in many respects. Not only is it marvelous, but it is illustrative. For here was a nature really great, with nobleness; but it was almost a wreck, and it was recovered, not by a minute inspection of motives, not by working out this, that, or the other individual thing, but by enduing herself with a great affection that had such power over her whole soul that it became sovereign, expelling all evil and cleansing the heart. So, then, when you desire to overcome easily-besetting sins, let it not be by a minute inspection of every act of your life, but by becoming so imbued with a right purpose that your whole conduct shall be shaped and directed by it. What you want is the indwelling of the Divine Spirit, the love of God shed abroad in your heart; and this should be the master passion of your being, and should control your imagination, your understanding, all your lower affections. Let this divinely-inspired love once take possession of you, and it will expel all temptation, and cleanse your soul, and lead you into all right ways. This is the promise given. This is the office-work of the Spirit of God. While men are pressing toward evil, they should be aroused by having the light of this truth thrown upon their course, to inspire them with a purpose of reformation, and turn them about; but that which they need more than all else is the Spirit of God by which they shall be transformed through the renewing of their hearts, and by which their affection shall be changed through the plenitude and efficiency of the divine power. Only let a soul be caught up into a knowledge of the beauty of God in Christ Jesus, and feel the heart of God, the blood of Christ, as it were, pulsing in him, and that affection, supreme, regnant, becomes the mainspring of conduct, and all the wheels move, the hands keep time, ten thousand evils are dissipated, and the life becomes symmetrical and harmonious. There is, then, at every step, within the reach of your understanding, within the reach of your will, the initial experience the beginning of just those courses the ends of which are salvation to the soul. I preach to you possibilities. I set before you your own dispositions and outward lives. Look at them. Do they need rectification? Do they need exaltation? Do they need cleansing? There is provision made for all these things. You are, it is said, dependent upon God. Blessed be God for that dependence! You are dependent on God as the scholar is dependent on his teacher. It is not an irksome dependence. It is a dependence for which the scholar is. grateful. You are dependent upon God as the sick man is upon his physician. It is not a repulsive dependence. You are dependent upon God as you are upon the lawyer who interposes in your behalf, and wields his knowledge of equity. It is not a disagreeable dependence. We are dependent upon God as we are upon the seasons. It is not a dependence that we would fain be relieved from. It is a glorious dependence. No sooner do we invoke God, and open ourselves to the influx of the Divine Spirit, than it brings light, and change of purpose, and finally victory and joy. So, then, though I cannot call you to follow Christ as the disciples followed him, who laid aside their nets and forsook their vocation, I can call you to a Christian life. I can hold up before you this higher conception of following Christ by the inward man. I can urge you to abandon whatever is evil, and follow whatever is good. I can call you to do these things, not by your own strength, which will fail you a thousand times in life, but by the strength of God. Not only does the love of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, make provision for the pardon of every man, but it delivers every man from his sins, if he puts his trust in God. I commend you to this faith of Christ; to this love of God; to the beginnings of a course of life through the strength and light and guidance and help of the Divine Spirit. Ye that are so powerful in your households; ye that know the ways of refinement and of knowledge; ye that can command the elements of nature, in winter and in summer; ye that can walk the sea or the land; ye that are the architects of your own fortunes; ye that know how to stand in your civic relations patriotically, and do the things which good cit.. izens ought to do,-why should you not make God your soyereign, and the eternal world your commonwealth? Why |