THE CHURCH AND HER ADVERSARY. 1 PETER V. 8, 9. "BE SOBER, BE VIGILANT ; BECAUSE YOUR ADVERSARY THE DEVIL, AS A ROARING LION, WALKETH ABOUT, SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR: WHOM RESIST, STEDFAST IN THE FAITH." IF, my Christian brethren, I had it in commission to exhort you to come forward, with a ready mind and a liberal hand, for the support of an efficient system of watching and lighting in this neighbourhood, there is nothing, I conceive, that would so soon dispose you to lend a favourable ear to my arguments and persuasions, as if I had it in my power to state to you, as a matter of fact, that a wellorganized, clever, and powerful band of robbers had taken up their quarters in this part of the country, and singled out the district in which you dwell, as the particular object of their keenest and most formidable schemes. If, under such circumstances, I were to call upon you, for the protection of your property, and of your own and your children's lives, to sacrifice a portion of your substance, or even to put yourselves to considerable personal inconvenience, so far from charging me with making any unreasonable demands upon you, on the contrary, you would feel beholden to me for the care and anxiety evinced by me in averting from you and yours such imminent danger; and most cheerfully, no doubt, would you all come forward to unite in any measure of precaution which I might be enabled to recommend for your adoption and support. Now the fact is, my Christian brethren, that I have to discharge among you, this day, an errand of the precise nature I have described. I have to exhort you to come forward readily and liberally in support of measures which are indeed already in progress among you, but which, not only for that extension which in the nature of things they will always require in order to keep pace with the wants of a growing population, but for their very continuance from year to year, are, if not wholly, at least chiefly, dependant upon your contributions on such occasions as the present; measures which have for their object to carry out a system of careful vigilance over your best interests, and by the diffusion of light to dispel the dangers that arise from the darkness with which you are surrounded. It is true that those measures have not reference to the streets and houses in which you dwell, but they have reference to a habitation of your own nevertheless, a habitation which not only I trust that none of you will disown, as if its concerns were not your concerns, but one which I fervently pray that you may all in due time joyfully inhabit, even that “continuing city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God," which shall abide for ever, when this world with all its habitations of love and of cruelty, of wealth and of misery, of virtue and of vice, shall have wholly passed away, when "all things" shall have been "made new." It is again true that the measures which I advocate with you this day, are not intended (though in the result they no doubt will have that effect also) to protect your earthly substance, your perishable possessions; yet, nevertheless, it is your own substance, a possession of your own, which is to be secured by them against surrounding dangers, a substance which I hope you hold, which I pity you most deeply if you do not hold, infinitely more precious than any amount of this world's treasure which you may, or, if you had your heart's utmost desires, might, be possessed of; ❝ a better and an enduring substance, an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in Heaven for you." Again, it is true, that it is not your and your children's lives of precarious tenure here upon earth, that the measures in which you are called upon to concur and to aid, are to guard and to preserve from the assaults of the destroyer; but, if not your own, at least your children's, and if not your own children's, yet the lives of children whom in. Christ you are bound to hold equally precious even with your own, whom Christ has expressly warned you not to despise, as you might be in danger of doing under the influence of selfish and exclusive affections; and their lives not for the short span of time allotted to man in this transitory state, but for time without end, in that state of immortality which, whether it be one of bliss or of woe, admits of no change or termination. ...Far be it from me to suppose that you will feel less interest in the subject I have to bring before you, because the question is not of an earthly habitation, but of "the city of the living God," not of earthly wealth, but of heavenly treasure, not of mortal existence, but of life eternal; I take it for granted that to such interests as these your hearts are fully alive; that all I have to do is, to make you aware of the full extent of the dangers to which these interests are exposed, and to show you the manner in which they are, by God's blessing, and with your help and support, to be protected. And to do this I know not that I could make to you any more forcible appeal than that which is involved in the considerations so obviously -suggested by the words of our text:-" Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist, stedfast in the faith." In these words we have plainly set before us-first, the danger which menaces our best interests, the interests of Christ's holy church; "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour;" secondly, the attitude of precaution and watchfulness to be assumed by us under such impending peril" Be sober, be vigilant ;" thirdly, the spirit of boldness and confidence in which we are to make head against the fierce malignity of our enemy: "whom resist, stedfast in the faith." First then, as regards the danger to which the interests of Christ's holy Church are exposed: no language can describe it more plainly than these words-" your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." This intimation of solemn warning cannot be new to any of you; and those amongst you who have bestowed attentive care upon the concerns of their souls, are no doubt painfully convinced, by the experience of their own hearts, of its awful truth; not unknown to them are the fierce assaults, the treacherous lures, the insidious temptations, on the one hand, with which the arch-enemy of God and man has formerly beset, and still is besetting, their heavenward track,-not unknown, on the other hand, the mighty wrestlings of faith, the unflinching resolve of self-denying obedience, the bold and open resistance of the firm and stable, or else the timely flight and hair-breadth escape of the weak and wavering mind. We each of us know, my brethren, the plague of our own hearts; and we must be sadly ignorant of our own spiritual course, and of the incidents by which it is marked, if we do not know that Satan too knows the plague of our hearts; that to the very point on which we are weakest and most easily assailable, his most frequent and most powerful assaults are directed; that in the very haunts into which our wandering souls are most prone to stray, we are most sure to encounter him, "the roaring lion," ever ready to spring upon us, and to make us his easy prey, if he could but find us unguarded and unprotected by that Royal Shepherd, from the fiery glance of whose all-seeing and all-penetrating eye, even the prince of devils is forced to skulk back into the deepest gloom of his native darkness. Who is there |