world are but splendid gewgaws, the stars of heaven glittering orbs of ice, and, what is yet far worse and colder, the trials of existence profitless and unadulterated miseries. How convincing, how appalling a proof then is it, of some dire disorder and depravation in mankind, that when obligation to God is the spring of all that is dearest, noblest in thought, and most exalted in experience, we are yet compelled to urge it on them by so many entreaties, and even to force it on their fears by God's threatened penalties. What does it mean, this strange, suicidal aversion to God's statutes; that which ought to be our song, endurable only as we are held to it by terrors and penalties of fire? Nay, worse, if possible, you shall even hear, not seldom, the men that say they love God's statutes, and who therefore ought to be singing on their way, complaining of their dearth and dryness, and the necessary vanity of their experience. Let these latter see that the vanity they complain of is the cheat of their own self-devotion, and the littleness of their own empty heart. Let them pray God to enlarge their heart, and then they will run the way of God's commandments with true lightness and freedom. All this moping ends when the fire of duty kindles. As to the other and larger class, who are living, confessedly, in no terms of obligation to God, let them see, first of all, what they gain by it; how the load of life's burden chafes them; how they are crushed, crippled, wearied, confounded, when they try to get their songs out of this world and the dust itself of their pilgrimage; then go to God, and set their life on the footing of religion, or duty to God, which if they do, it shall be all gladness and peace; for the rhythm of all God's works and worlds chimes with His eternal law of duty. Nothing is more certain or clear than that human souls are made for law, and so for the abode of God. Without law therefore, without God, they must even freeze and die. Hence, even Christ himself must needs establish and sanctify the law; for the deliverance and liberty He comes to bring are still to be sought only in obedience. Henceforth duty is the brother of liberty, and both rejoice in the common motherhood of law. And just here, my friends, is the secret of a great part of your misery and of the darkness that envelops your life. Without obligation you have no light, save what little may prick through your eyelids. Only he that keeps God's commandments walks in the light. The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things-that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only of protection to His realm. Such and no other is the glad ministry of religion. Say not, when we come to you tendering its gifts, as we do to-day, that you are not ready, that you are not sufficiently racked by remorse and guilty conviction, that you have spent, as yet, no sorrowing days or sleepless nights,—what can these do for you? God wants none of these; He only wants you to accept Him as your privilege. When He calls you to repentance and new obedience, this is what He means; that you quit your madness, cease to gore yourself by your sins, come to your right mind, and accept, as a privilege, His good, eternal law. Giving thus your life to duty, let it, from this time forth, suffuse alike your trials and enjoyments with its own pure gladness, and let the self-approving dignity and greatness of a right mind be gildedvisibly and consciously gilded-by the smile of God. And, as the good and great society of the blessed is to be settled in this glorious harmony of law, and the statutes of the Lord are to be the song of their consolidated joy and rest, sing them also here; and in all life's changes-in the dark days and the bright, in sorrow and patience and wrong, in successes and hopes and consummated labours-everywhere adhere to this, and have it as the strength of your days, that your obligations to God are the best and highest privilege He gives you XL HAPPINESS AND JOY. JOHN XV. 11-". "These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." CHRIST enters the world bringing joy: "Good tidings of great joy," cry the angels, "which shall be to all people." So now He leaves it, bestowing His gospel as a gift of joy: "These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." This testament of His joy He also renews in His parting prayer: 66 And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." "Man of sorrows" though we call Him, still He counts Himself the man of joy. Would that I could bring you into His meaning when He thus speaks, and assist you to realise the unspeakable import which it has to Him. It is an impression deeply rooted in the minds of men, that the Christian life is a life of constraint, hardship, loss, penance, and comparative suffering; Christ, you perceive, has no such conception of it, and no such conception is true. Contrary to this, I shall undertake to shew that it is a life of true joy, the profoundest and only real joy attainable,—not a merely future joy, to be received hereafter, as the reward of a painful and sad life here, but a present, living, and, completely full joy, unfolded in the soul of every man whose fidelity and constancy permit him to receive it. To clear this truth and shew it forth in the proper light of evidence, it is necessary, first of all, to exhibit a mistake which clouds the judgments, almost or quite universally, of those who are not in the secret of the Christian joy as revealed to a religious experience. It is the mistake of not distinguishing between happiness and joy, or of supposing them to be really one and the same thing. It is the mistake, indeed, not merely of their judgment, but of their practice; for they all go after L happiness without so much as a thought, more commonly of anything higher or better. Happiness they assume, and in their practice say, is the real joy of existence, beyond which and different from which there is, in kind, no other. Now there is even a distinction of kind between the two, a distinction beautifully represented in the words themselves. Thus happiness, according to the original use of the term, is that which happens, or comes to one by a hap; that is, by an outward befalling, or favourable condition. Some good is conceived, out of the soul, which comes to it as a happy visitation, stirring in the receiver a pleasant excitement. It is what money yields, or will buy-dress, equipage, fashion, luxuries of the table; or it is settlement in life-independence, love, applause, admiration, honour, glory, or the more conventional and public benefits of rank, political standing, victory, power. All these stir a delight in the soul, which is not of the soul, or its quality, but from without. Hence they are looked upon as happening to the soul, and, in that sense, create happiness. We have another word from the Latin, which very nearly corresponds with this from the Saxon-viz., fortune. For whatever befell the soul, or came to it bringing it pleasure, was considered to be its good chance, and was called fortunate. I suppose, indeed, that there is no language in the world that does not contain this idea, just because all mankind are after benefits that will stir pleasure in the soul, without regard to its quality -after happiness, after fortune. But joy differs from this, as being of the soul itself, originating in its quality. And this appears in the original form of the word, which, instead of suggesting a hap, literally denotes a leap or spring. Here again, also, the Latin had exult, which literally means a leaping forth. The radical idea, then, of joy is this that the soul is in such order and beautiful harmony, has such springs of life opened in its own blessed virtues, that it pours forth a sovereign joy from within. The motion is outward and not toward as we conceive it to be in happiness. It is not the bliss of condition, but of character. There is in this a well-spring of triumphant, sovereign good, and the soul is able thus to pour out rivers of joy into the deserts of outward experience. It has a light in its own luminous centre, where God is, that gilds the darkest nights of external adversity--a music charming all the stormy discords of outward injury and pain into beats of rhythm and melodies of peace. I ought, perhaps, to say that the original distinction between these two words, thus sharply defined, is not always regarded. I have traced the distinction only for the convenience of my present subject, and not because the words are always used, or must be, in this manner. In their secondary uses words are often applied more loosely; and so it has fallen out with these, which are used by the common class of writers indiscriminately one for the other. Still it will be seen that one of our English poets, Mr Coleridge, distinguished always for the exactness of his language, uses them both in immediate connexion, so as to preserve their exact distinction, without any apparent design to do so or consciousness of the fact. Addressing a noble Christian lady, he gives his conception of joy as an all-transforming, all-victorious power in virtuous souls in terms like these "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me Joy, virtuous lady! Joy that ne'er was given Save to the pure, and in their purest hour Life and life's effluence, cloud at once and shower; Joy, lady, is the spirit and the power That wedding nature gives to us in dower, A new earth and new heaven. We in ourselves rejoice!" Immediately after, without any thought of drawing the contrast, he speaks of his own folly with regret, because he was caught by the temptations of fortune and now endures the bitter penalty "Fancy made me dreams of happiness; For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, The picture he draws of himself is the picture, alas! of the general folly of mankind. Their "fancy makes them dreams of happiness," promising to bless them in what may be gathered "round" them in "fruits and foliage not their own;" that is, not of themselves, but external. All good, they fancy, is in |