we are sinners. Nevertheless, His example will warrant to us the lawfulness of mixing in the world as our duties and obligations require. What has been said ought to teach us these two things: first, to use great and discriminating care in choosing the friends and families with whom we mix, and the occasions and festivities in which we join. This principle of spiritual discernment, foresight, and caution, alone can keep us from serious entanglements, and, it may be, from grievous falls. I know of no lines of outward demarcation, nor any sufficient catalogue, distinguishing worldly from innocent amusements: our safeguard must be in ourselves. And the next thing we should learn is, when we can avoid even such intercourse as is lawful, to do so. "All things to me are lawful, but all things are not expedient. All things to me are lawful, but all things edify not." It is far better to bestow the time which we can rescue from the world in things that will deepen the work of God in our hearts, and perfect our repentance.

Or if we think well to go, let us go with a heart estranged from the fair and smooth things of this perishing world,-from its honours, powers, pleasures, and refinements. None ever graced a marriage-feast as He who knew not the very taste of earthly happiness. None was ever so meek, gen

1 1 Cor. vi. 12.

tle, and benign as He that was alive to God alone. So let us strive to mingle among men-to toil with them, sorrow with them, rejoice with them; to visit their homes, and partake of their hospitality, and not turn even from their days of festival-praying always in secret that we may be sheltered under His last intercession: "Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, as We are;" "they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world;” “I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”

1 St. John xvii. 11, 15, 16.

SERMON XV.

POVERTY A HOLY STATE.

2 COR. viii. 9.

"Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich."

ST. PAUL is here stirring up the Corinthians to give alms to the poor saints, by the voluntary poverty of our Lord. He tells them of the Macedonians, who, in the spirit of His example, made large offerings out of their "deep poverty;" and says that they "first gave their own selves to the Lord," and, with themselves, all that they had to His service. He then says, "Ye know the grace," the freeness and largeness of the charity of Christ, who, "though He was rich," in His eternal kingdom, in the bliss of His Father, "yet for your sakes He became poor;" stripped Himself of His heavenly state, laid aside His glory, "made Himself of no reputation;" was made man, hungered,

thirsted; was weary, wandered without a place where to lay His head; suffered all shame, hardship, pain, and death; that through this, His poverty of all things heavenly and earthly, ye, in the remission of sins, the cleansing of the soul, the grace of adoption, and the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven, "might be rich."

Some perhaps might have expected that, at the coming of the Son of God into the world, He would have assumed the power and disposal of all things by which the world is maintained and governed; that is to say, that He would have carried on openly, and by a visible disposal, the divine administration of worldly affairs, as He ever does in secret; that His providence would have been manifested in His person. Of course, no one would expect that He should have affected earthly state or greatness: the very thought can hardly be expressed without a sin. It seems almost like the suggestion of Satan when he shewed Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. And yet, we might have expected Him to be openly greater than all powers of the earth; to have made them acknowledge Him, and yield, as the winds and the waves did, to the power of His word. But, on the contrary, no man was ever lower in the world than He-more outcast, destitute, weak, and forsaken; none, perhaps, ever hungered oftener, or

thirsted more, or wandered so wearily; was so banished, not from kings' palaces, and princes' courts, and the houses of great men, and the company of the soft, high, rich, and noble, but from home and hearth, and from the shelter and charities of life. Surely as the world had never seen before an example of such perfect holiness, so it had never seen such perfect and willing poverty. In the Gospels we read of His passing whole nights on the mountain, and in the fourth watch upon the Once we read that He went "unto Bethany, and lodged there," in the house of a friend, the stranger's home. His life He began and ended as a wanderer, from the stable to the sepulchre. So true to the letter were His words, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head." Of His own He had little but His raiment; even His daily food, they that followed Him "ministered to Him of their substance."

sea.

Now this absolute destitution of all things needful for our bodily life was, without doubt, a designed feature in His humiliation. When He took upon Him our manhood, He took it with all its capacities of suffering; and He placed Himself, so to speak, in that position in the life of man where all the sorrows which came with sin into 2 St. Luke viii. 3.

1 St. Matt. xxi. 17.