what I have learned to utter with the lip, though it has never been fused in the crucible of my own heart?” Conscience is not very readily cheated. There are some men whose consciences are not a safe balance; they have by degrees become so hardened in sin that conscience refuses to work; but still I will hope that most of us may abide by the test of our own conscience, if we let it freely work. Dear friends, I wish that you would often retire to your rooms alone; shut the door and shut out all the world, and then sit and review your past life; scan carefully your present character and your present position; and do, I beseech you, try to get an honest answer from your own conscience. Bring up everything that you can think of that might lead you to doubt. You need be under no difficulty here; for are there not enough sins committed by us every day, to warrant our suspicions that we are not God’s children? Well, let all these black accusers for death, let them all have their say. Do not cloak your sins. Read your diary through, let all your iniquities come up before you; (this is the pith of confession) and then, ask conscience whether you can truly say, “I have repented of all these; God is my witness, I hate these things with a perfect hatred. God also bears me witness, that my trust is fixed alone in him who is the Saviour of sinners, for salvation and justification. If I am not awfully deceived, I am a partaker of divine grace, having been regenerated and begotten again to a lively hope.” Oh that conscience may help each of us to say, “I am not a mere painted image of life, but I trust I have ‘the life of Jesus revealed in my body.’ My profession is not the pompous pageantry with which dead souls are carried respectably to perdition; but it is the joy, the hope, the confidence of one who is being borne along in the chariot of mercy, to his Father’s home above.” Ah! how many people are really afraid to look their religion in the face! They know it to be so bad, they dare not examine it. They are like bankrupts that keep no books. They would be very glad for a fire to consume their books, if they ever kept any, for they know the balance is all on the wrong side. They are losing, breaking up, and they would not wish to keep an account of their losses or villainies. A man who is afraid to examine himself, may rest assured that his ship is rotten, and that it will not be long before it founders in the sea, to his eternal shipwreck. Call up conscience; put yourself in the scale, and God help you, that the verdict may not be against you — that it may not be said of you, “You are weighed in the balances and are found wanting.”
11. I would have every man also weigh himself in the scales of God’s Word — not merely in that part of it which we call legal, and which has respect to us in our fallen state; but let us weigh ourselves in the scale of the gospel. You will find it sometimes a holy exercise, to read some psalm of David, when his soul was most full of grace; and if you were to ask questions as you read each verse, saying to yourself, “Can I say this? Have I felt as David felt? Have my bones ever been broken with sin as his were when he penned his penitential psalms? Has my soul ever been full of true confidence, in the hour of difficulty, as his was when he sang of God’s mercies in the cave of Adullam, or the holds of Engedi? Can I take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord? Can I pay my vows now to the Lord, in the courts of his house, in the presence of all his people?” I am afraid that the book of Psalms itself would be enough to convince some of you that your religion is only superficial, that it is only a vain show, and not a vital reality. God help you often to weigh yourselves in that scale. Then read over the life of Christ, and as you read, ask yourselves whether you are conformed to him, such as he describes a true disciple. Endeavour to see whether you have any of the meekness, any of the humility, any of the lovely spirit which he constantly inculcated and displayed. Try yourselves by the sermon on the mount, you will find it a good scale in which to weigh your spirits. Take then the epistles, and see whether you can go with the apostle in what he said of his experience. Have you ever cried out like him: — “Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Have you ever felt like him, that “this is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners?” Have you ever known his self-abasement? Could you say that you seemed to yourself the chief of sinners, and always accounted yourself less than the least of all saints? And have you known anything of his devotion? Could you join with him and say, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain?” Oh, brethren! the best of us — if we put the Bible into the scales for the proof of our state, if we read God’s Word as a test of our spiritual condition — the very best of us has reason to tremble. Before Almighty God, on our bended knees, with our Bible before us, we have good reason to stop many a time and say, “Lord, I feel I have never yet been here, oh, bring me here! give me true penitence, such as this that I read of. Give me real faith; oh, let me not have a counterfeit religion! give me what is the current coin of the realm of heaven — your own sterling grace, which shall pass in the great day, when the gates of heaven shall be opened, and alas! the gates of hell wide open too.” Try yourselves by God’s Word, and I fear there are some who will have to rise from it, and say, “I am weighed in the balances and found wanting.”
12. Yet again, God has been pleased to set another means of trial before us. When God puts us into the scales I am about to mention, namely, the scales of providence it behoves us very carefully to watch ourselves and see whether or not, we are found wanting. Some men are tried in the scales of adversity. Some of you, my dear friends, may have come here very sorrowful. Your business fails, your earthly prospects are growing dark; it is midnight with you in this world; you have sickness in the house; the wife of your bosom languishes before your weeping eyes; your children perhaps, by their ingratitude, have wounded your spirits. But you are a professor of religion, you know what God is doing with you now; he is testing and trying you. He knows you, and he wishes to have you know that a summertime religion is not sufficient; he wishes to have you see whether your faith can stand the test of trial and trouble. Remember Job; what a scale was that in which he was placed! What weights of affliction were those cast in one after another, very mountains of severe trouble; and yet he could bear them all, and he came out of the scales proof against all the weight that even Satanic strength could hurl into the scale. And is it so with you? Can you now say — “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord?” Can you submit to his will without murmuring? Or if you cannot master such a phase of religion as this, are you able still to feel that you cannot complain against God? Do you still say, “Though he kills me, yet I will trust in him?” Oh, my friends, remember that if your religion will not stand the day of adversity, if it affords you no comfort in the time of storms, you would be better in that case without it than with it; for with it you are deceived, but without it you might discover your true condition, and seek the Lord as a penitent sinner. If you are now broken in pieces by a little adversity, what will become of you in the day when all the tempests of God shall be let loose on your soul? If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, what will you do in the swellings of Jordan? If you cannot endure the open grave, how can you endure the trump of the archangel, and the terrific thunders of the last great day? If your burning house is too much for you, what will you do in a burning world? If thunder and lightning alarm you, what will you do when the world is ablaze, and when all the thunders of God leave their hiding place, and rush pealing through the world? If mere trial distresses you and grieves you, oh, what will you do when all the hurricanes of divine vengeance shall sweep across the earth and shake its very pillars, until they reel and reel again? Yes, friends, I would have you, as often as you are tried and troubled, see how you bear it — whether your faith then stands and whether you could see God’s right hand, even when it is wrapped in clouds; whether you can discover the silver lining to the black clouds of tribulation. God help you to come out of the scales, for many are weighed in them and have been found wanting.
13. There is another set of scales, too, of an opposite colour. Those I have described are painted black; these are of golden hue. They are the scales of prosperity. Many a man has endured the chills of poverty who could not endure sunny weather. Some men’s religion is very much like the palace of the queen of Russia, which had been built out of solid slabs of ice. It could stand the frost; the roughest breeze could not destroy it; the sharp touch of winter could not devour it; they only strengthened and made it more lasting. But summer melted it all away, and, where once were the halls of revelry, nothing remained but the black rolling river. How many have been destroyed by prosperity? The fumes of popularity have turned the brains of many
