are some well capable of enjoying them, there are some who can share with us in the pleasures of extended knowledge, in the delights of an active exercise of the understanding. You too, and we, are liable to feel the excitement of praise and distinction; academical honours, and a high reputation, are objects sufficiently tempting to all of us. God grant that they may not be a snare to us,—that we may not make an idol of talent or knowledge,—that we may not desire to be clever, learned, and distinguished, rather than wise and good. I am sure that this is a danger against which we should pray earnestly, and watch carefully, -lest the fruit which we are rearing, like the fabled apples of Sodom, turn in our touch to rottenness. May God grant that we may feel all this, and, whatever progress we may make, that we may consider it as worse than useless if it beguiles us from our Christian watchfulness, our dread of sin, and counting all things but loss in comparison of the excellency of the knowledge of Christ.

SERMON XV.

MATT. X. 36.

A man's foes shall be they of his own household.

In my last sermon I spoke of two of those excuses which you sometimes make to your own consciences, for not obeying the particular call which God here addresses to you. And I then said, that there yet remained another excuse, more common than the rest, and far more mischievous, which I proposed to consider on another occasion. It is, indeed, an excuse which is one of the strongest supports of the cause of Satan, an excuse which will never be laid aside till sin and death are put down for ever: and, indeed, if it did cease to influence men's minds, earth would be at once changed into something almost heavenly; the greatest part of the wickedness which infests it would be done away with altogether. I mean that excuse by which we either plead the example and authority of our neighbours for our doing evil, or, for fear of their laughing at us and persecuting us, leave off to do good, and become even ashamed of appearing to care for it. In this state it may well be said, that “a

man's foes will be they of his own household;" that nothing is so dangerous to his salvation as the principles and practice of other men with whom he is living in daily intercourse, nothing so much to be feared, as that he should make their opinions his standard, instead of the declared will of God.

This is a subject on which I have spoken often before, and on which I may speak often again. I know not, indeed, to what congregation a Christian minister could make frequent addresses, without finding it expedient to dwell upon this most besetting danger: I am sure that here it might be made the daily subject of our warnings to you, and yet not be mentioned too frequently. It is not too much to say, that scarcely a single day ever passes without my seeing some instance of its fatal power: every day I observe some wickedness, or low principle or other, for which the ever-ready excuse would be, that every one else says or does the same. In proportion, therefore, to the strength and commonness of this feeling, must be the frequency and earnestness of my attacks upon it: as you are, too many of you, the veriest slaves of each other's opinions, the veriest imitators of each other's conduct, so I must try to rouse you to something of a more independent feeling, and to break through that bondage which may most properly be called the bondage of sin and death.

Nothing, I suppose, shows the weakness of human nature more than this perpetual craving after some guide and support out of itself,—this living upon the judgment of others rather than on our own. And it is not to be disputed but that we do need a guide and

support out of ourselves, if we would but choose the right one. All the idolatry in the world grew out of a just sense of human weakness: men looked at themselves and at the world around them; they felt how little they were, and by how much greatness they were surrounded; they saw how their bodies and their minds, their friends and their property, all the several elements of their happiness, were subjected to the control of causes wholly above their power to resist; and they turned, in their blindness, to worship every thing from whose influence upon their condition, whether for good or for evil, they had any thing to hope or to fear. This is the early form of idolatry, from the worship of the most glorious of God's creatures--the sun, and the moon, and the stars-to that of the vilest objects which have ever received the homage of a degraded superstition. But, in time, the progress of knowledge destroys this kind of idolatry, by explaining the causes of the most wonderful operations of nature, which men had hitherto regarded with ignorant fear or wonder. Images of brass, and wood, and stone,—the sun, and all the host of heaven,—are adored no longer: but the sense of human weakness still presses upon us, and averse as we are to turning to our true Guide and Guardian, we only change the nature of our idolatry, and become idolaters of our fellow-men. Before their influence we bow down as blindly as our fathers did before their images of stone. But it is an influence far more mischievous, because it is a real one: men can express opinions, and enforce them; can encourage the pursuit of some objects, and chill all fondness for others; they can largely affect the happiness of

our lives. Of this idol of civilized life its worshippers are apt to say, "Lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh: thou canst not say that he is no living God; therefore worship him." They would persuade us, indeed, that there is no power in the universe so real; none which may so justly deserve our hopes and our fears. And we may think so, perhaps truly, if we once forget the Lord our God; for the mass of mankind cannot enter into the high feeling of the old philosophers; and if the divinity of our own minds were one that we might safely in any case worship, yet in too many instances the mind is so feeble, so little possessed of any attribute of divinity, that it were worse than madness to lean on a staff so rotten.

I hold it, therefore, to be certain, that in our days, and for the bulk of mankind, there is a choice of only two things: they must worship God, or one another; they must seek the praise and favour of God above all things, or the praise and favour of man. Being too weak to stand alone, they must lean upon the Rock of Ages, or upon the perishing and treacherous pillar of human opinion. This is the case with men, and this, in an equal, or even in a greater degree, is the case with you.

But the evil here is particularly great, because the standard of excellence here approved of is so exceedingly false and low. It would be curious to gather and to record the several points in a character which boys respect and admire, in order to show what a crooked rule they walk by. In the true scale of excellence, moral perfection is most highly valued, then comes excellence of understanding, and, last of all,