SERMON VI.

Personal Responsibility of Man, as to
his Use of Time.

ST. JOHN ix. 4.

"I must work the works of Him Who sent Me, while it is day. The night cometh, when no man can work."

HOSE world are we living in, our own or God's?

WH

Who is master of our being, ourselves or God? To whom are we to give account of our being, to ourselves or to God? Questions, all very simple to the understanding, but which we answer practically, in exactly the opposite way to that which we in theory and in words acknowledge. We confess, daily, most of us, to Jesus, "We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge." We follow that confession by the imploring cry, "We therefore pray Thee, help Thy servants, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy Precious Blood?" We sum up our prayers for pardon for sins, for mercy, by all He has done, merited, suffered for us, with "In the Day of Judgment, Good Lord, deliver us." We cannot say a Creed without confessing our belief, that He, now our Redeemer, shall hereafter be our Judge. The belief remains on our lips; we hold it in our understanding; does it enter into the texture of our everyday life? Supposing that, by God's grace, we have been kept to-day from anything, very notably wrong, does it occur to us that "to-day" will have anything to do

with our eternity? Well, it may be startling, that this one day (if there have been nothing in it markedly against the will and grace of God) should have to do with our eternal doom. Look back, then, to yesterday, or to many yesterdays, or to weeks past, always supposing that there have been no marked deadly sin in any of them, nothing which should, unrepented of, separate you from God, and destroy your spiritual life; nothing, in which you shall have taken a marked part against God's law, and have chosen the wages of the Evil one, present pleasure and eternal death. Granted your time of life, the buoyancy natural to it, the recreations, amusements, merriments, lightheartedness, which, in measure, no one would, at your age, wish to interfere with, so they be innocent, is there still nothing, which should, you think, influence your eternal being? But does it then come to this, that, but for those marked sins, of which God says that "they who do those things shall not inherit the kingdom of God," we need have no care, no anxiety, no thought about eternity?

To take the seeming ways of the mass of mankind, one could have no doubt that they think so. Here and there, one seems to be aware that lesser acts lead to greater of the same kind; that repeated acts form habits; that custom gains an iron power over the will, until a man, by misuse of his free-will, almost destroys the freedom of his will, to be recovered only by some strong effort or some mightier accepted grace of God. But, for the most part, if one were to ask any one, why he did any given thing, except just the actual necessary duties of his state of life, without which a person could not live or attain the temporal end which he wished for, the honest answer would, I fear, be, “because I like it." In other words, a man's own will is, with certain

great exceptions, the rule and measure of his acts; and, to judge from men's ways of speaking, Almighty God and he have each very good reason to be satisfied with the distribution. Almighty God gets His fair share; perhaps, more than He used to do, or more, may be he thinks, than others give Him. Almighty God has his prayers, morning and evening; some prayers (I fear for the most part not very many) in the Chapel-service; then on the Sunday, God has anyhow twice in the day his bodily presence (wherever or however occupied his mind may be, for, I fear, a notable part of the time), a poor man has a shilling every now and then ; and then, in the day, he gives a certain number of hours (very few, I fear, unless ambition has its share in the arrangement) to the cultivation of his mind. For the rest, who disputes his right to it? It seems as if the impious flattery of the Roman poet, when the weather cleared in the morning for the Imperial spectacle,

"With Jove divided empire Cæsar sways,"

were the religion of Christians, and that over ourselves at least we hold a partnership of jurisdiction with Almighty God. Of course, to make this not Atheistic, it must be put in the form, that Almighty God has waived His absolute right over us, that He has substituted for this His unlimited dominion over us, a sort of feudal sovereignty, in which, we holding this His earth, or our portion of it, and our time in it, as a sort of feof from Him, are bound to render Him certain limited services, to withhold ourselves from doing Him certain very limited despites, and that, these being either discharged or deferred (well is it, if the payment of God's dues is not deferred to some unknown period beyond our power, at the supposed end of life), then over all

the rest we are to be seized as lords, and it is resented as a very unreasonable and unjustified, and almost monstrous, demand, if any one put in any claim, on the part of God, as to any portion of this wide heritage which we hold of Him.

Of course, we have no intention to be Atheists. We speak respectfully of God, as far as we know of Him. He is the Great First Cause of all things, Who made our first father, Adam, some 6,000 years ago. He made this earth which we inhabit, whether with any distinct thought of us, geologists leave as a question in abeyance. He upholds us all somehow in being; whether by unvarying laws which He made at some time heretofore, people do not define to themselves. He is very great, and when people are in trouble, they betake themselves to Him. People can with difficulty, or cannot altogether, escape the idea of judgment. But then by whose rule? Tacitly or avowedly, men mean their own. From the “I am no worse than my neighbours,” by which the poor man satisfies his conscience amid the thought of death and judgment, to the "God cannot punish what belongs to the nature which He made” of the self-justifying dissoluteness of the rich; they mean, in fact, “we will not," (or to speak respectfully,) "we shall not, we will not have it, that we shall be judged, otherwise than we will."

"Responsibility!" the word is almost clean gone out of our common language, except that we speak of the "responsible minister of the Crown," in the sense that the Sovereign has to give no account of her acts to man; and a "responsible" person or firm, is one which can discharge his or its monied obligations; and we can understand that that responsibility must be complete to the very last farthing. How is it, that we can

so discern our relations to this world, and, in the midst of the light of the Gospel, not discern our relations to Almighty God?

And yet this would-be quasi-independence of God, if it were true, what a miserable lowering of our whole being it would be! For what would it amount to? Simply to this, That as to a large range of our being, we were beneath the notice or care or thought of Almighty God; that what we did or did not do was too insignificant for Him to heed; that He left us to battle (for battle we must, if not with sin, with misery in this stormy world), and set no more store by us, than we do on the uptorn weed, cast on our shores by an angry sea, unless indeed men make use of its decay and corruption to manure their fields. Wonderful dignity of man's would-be independence, to attain, in his own idea, to this, that he is held of too little account by God's infinite Wisdom to be regarded by Him; too mean, for Infinite Love to love him; too puny, for God's Infinite Majesty to stoop to elevate him; too limited, for Divine Intellect to communicate Itself to him, to enlarge him; too worthless, for Divine Greatness to heed whether It have or have not his service or his love. Miserable as it is false, and proving itself false by the misery to which it would abandon us!

The true dignity of our nature lies in that relation to Almighty God, which involves the minutest responsibility. We, all of us, think or have thought something more highly of ourselves,—it has added (whatever our standard was) dignity to our estimate of ourselves, to find ourselves an object of interest to one who was our superior in whatever our standard of eminence was,-pure intellect, or maturer knowledge, or ripened thought, or even this world's rank; and, if they bestowed individual