sleep of death. It is one of the devil’s great devices for destroying souls, to satisfy men — to give them the drug of indifference, the laudanum of procrastination, and so to stultify and stupefy them, that they go on from day to day, careless and reckless, until in hell they lift up their eyes. Why, if you are concerned about your souls there is hope for you; the way to peace lies through distress. You must first be agitated before you can be pacified. But, if you now say, “peace, peace,” I tell you there is no peace; and if you now say, “be quiet, be still, hush!” I warn you, that all the quiet of which you boast is the hush before the hurricane, when the world seems as if it stood still in terror, when the birds droop their wings upon the trees, and cease their songs, when the very lion hides himself in the thicket, and when he roars no more, but is still, waiting for the rushing wings of tempest. Here is a picture of your vaunted peace! Your calm is only a prelude of an eternal storm. The sunshine of today is only the index of the awful shower of tomorrow, a shower of red rain of vengeance, and of hail mingled with fire. Oh, the peace the world gives is delusive. Those who rest there, rest upon a bed of death; but the peace which Christ gives is no delusion. When the Christian can sit down and say “I have nothing to fear; I have nothing to trouble me — nothing to tremble about, neither for this world, nor for the next,” he is not saying one word more than he has good ground for saying; no he is not going so far as he might go. He may say
Now let earth’s old pillars shake,
And all the wheels of nature break,
My steadfast soul shall fear no more,
Than solid rocks when billows roar.
That peace has no pretence in it. It is not bombast; it is a reality, Profound though it is, it is not one whit more profound than it is warranted to be. The believer rests upon a solid rock, and all the waves of trouble can never make that rock give way, or shake the foundation of his peace. “Not as the world gives do I give to you.”
7. II. Now having touched upon the first point, I come to the second IN THE MATTER OF GIVING. Take a broad view of it. In whatever the world gives, Christ does not give after the same fashion.
8. In the first place, the world gives scantily. Even the world’s best friends have had cause to complain of its shabby treatment. In reading the biographies of mighty men whom the world honours, you will soon be convicted that the world is a most ungrateful friend. If you should devote your whole life to serve the world, and make it happy, do not think the world would ever return you so much as a farthing. Robert Burns is an instance of the world’s fine gratitude. There was the world’s poet; he sung the roaring tankards foaming; he sang the loves of women and the joys of lust; the world admires him, but what did the world do for him? He might spend his whole life in almost poverty. When the time comes for Robert Burns to be honoured, (which was all too late for a buried man,) how did they honour him? He had poor relatives; look to the subscription list, and see how magnificent the donations they received! They honoured him with libations of whisky which they drank themselves; that was all they would give him. The devotion of the Scotch drunkards to their poet is a devotion to their drunkenness, not to him. Doubtless there are many true hearted men who bewail the sinner as much as they admire the genius, but the mass like him no worse for his faults. However, if it had been ordained and decreed that every drunkard who honoured Burns should go without his whisky for a week, not a dozen of them would have done it — not even half a dozen. Their honour to him was an honour to themselves; it was an opportunity for drunkenness, at least in thousands of instances. As I stood by his monument some little time ago, I saw around it a most dismal, dingy set of withered flowers and I thought “Ah, this is his honour! Oh, Burns! how have you spent your life to have a withered wreath for the world’s payment of a life of mighty genius, and a flood of marvellous song!” Yes, when the world pays best she pays nothing, and when she pays least, she pays her flatterers with scorn; she rewards their services with neglect and poverty. Many a statesman might I quote who has spent his life in the world’s service, and at first the world said “Go on, go on,” and he was praised everywhere; he was doing something to serve his time; but he made a little mistake, a mistake perhaps, which will prove not to have been a mistake at all, when the books of history shall be read with a clearer eye. “Down with him,” says the world, “we will have nothing more to do with him.” All he may have done before went for nothing; one mistake, one flaw in his political career — “Down with him, cast him to the dogs, we will have nothing to do with him again.” Ah, the world pays scantily indeed! What will it do for those it loves the best? When it has done all it can, the last resource of the world is to give a man a title (and what is that)? And then to give him a tall pillar and set him up there to bear all kinds of weather, to be pitilessly exposed to every storm; and there he stands for fools to gaze at, one of the world’s great ones paid in stone; it is true the world has paid that out of its own heart, for that is what the world’s heart is made of. The world pays scantily; but did you ever hear a Christian who complained thus of his Master? “No,” he will say “when I serve Christ, I feel that my work is my wages; that labour for Christ is its own reward. He gives me joy on earth, with a fulness of bliss hereafter.” Oh! Christ is a good paymaster. “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” He who serves Christ may get very little gold and silver such as this world calls precious, but he gets a gold and a silver that shall never be melted in the last refining fire, that shall glitter among the precious things of immortality throughout eternity. The world pays niggardly and scantily, but not so Christ.
9. Again if you will serve the world, and you wish to have gifts from it, the world will pay you half-heartedly. Now by the world, I mean the religious world quite as much as any other part of it; I mean the whole world, religious, political, good, bad, and indifferent — the whole lot of them. If you serve the world it will pay you half-heartedly. Let a man spend himself for his fellow creatures’ interests, what will he get for it? Some will praise him, some will abuse him. The men who escape without abuse in this world, are the men who do nothing at all. He who is most valiant and useful, must expect to be most reprobated and abhorred. Those men who are borne upon the waves of popular applause are not the men whose worth is true; real philanthropists must swim against the stream. The whole list of the world’s benefactors is an army of martyrs. All along, the path of the good is marked with blood and fire. The world does not pay the men who really serve it, except with ingratitude. I say, to come back, even when the world does pay, it pays half-heartedly. Did you ever know a man yet, concerning whom the world was all of one mind? I never heard of any. “Oh,” one says, “So-and-So is one of the best men of his times.” Go down the next street, and you will hear it said, “He is the biggest vagabond living.” Go to one, and you will hear him say, “I never heard a man of such genius as he is.” “Oh,” says another, “mere twaddle.” “There is such a newspaper,” one says, “how ably it defends the rights of the people.” “Oh,” says another, “mere democracy; seeking to pull down everything that is constitutional and proper.” The world never made up its mind about any man yet. There is not a soul living concerning whom the world is unanimous. But when Christ gives anything, he always gives with all his heart. He does not say to his people, “There, I give you this, but still I have half-a-mind to keep it back.” No, Christ gives his heart to all his people. There is no double mindedness in Jesus. If we are enabled by free grace to serve him and to love him, we may rest quite sure that in the rich reward which his grace shall give us, his whole heart shall go with every blessing. When Christ blesses the poor needy soul, he does not give with one hand, and strike with the other; but he gives him mercies with both his hands — both full; and he asks the sinner simply to receive all that he is willing to give.
10. Then again, whenever the world gives anything, it gives mostly to those who do not need it. I remember once, when a lad, having a dog, which I very much prized, and some man in the street asked me to give him the dog; I thought it was pretty impudent, and I said as much. A gentlemen, however, to whom I told it, said, “Now suppose the Duke of So-and-So,” — who was a great man in the neighbourhood — “asked you for the dog, would you give
