1 no vision; and for those who listen not, no voice. Do you ask how you shall hear His voice? My brethren, you have heard it often, you do hear it daily, you have heard it from your earliest years. When I was a little boy of four years old," says one who afterwards grew up to be a good and eminent and courageous man,1 one fine day in spring my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone, On the way I had to pass a little pond, then spreading its waters wide; a rhodora in full bloom, a rare flower, which grew only in that locality, attracted my attention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the flaming shrub; I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile, for though I had never killed any creature yet, I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds and squirrels and the like, and I felt a desire to follow their wicked example. But all at once. something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said loud and clear, 'It is wrong!' I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion, the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what it was that told me 'It was wrong.' She wiped a tear from her eye, and taking me in her arms said, 'Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear, or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you in the dark without a friend. Your life depends on heeding that little voice.' She went her 1 Theodore Parker. way," he adds, " careful and troubled about many things, and doubtless pondered them in her motherly heart, while I went off to ponder and think of it in my poor childish way. But I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impresion on me.” Wise mother! happy son! Your life, too, depends on heeding that little voice, for that little voice is the still, small voice of God. If you will heed, if you will obey it, you may never hear it but in whispers of tenderness and warning love; but if you disobey it, oh, with what tones of scorn and menace can it speak, what thunder-crashes of wrath and fear can it roll over the troubled sea of the evil soul. Have none of you ever been guilty of mean actions, which you knew to be mean, spoken wicked words knowing them to be wicked, done that which you would fain hide from every eye? Ah! have you never heard it then? Yes, that voice is the voice of God. You may hush it, stifle it, defy it, drown it deep under rivers of iniquity, but all that is good and dear, all that is true and holy, all in your life which can raise man above beasts that perish, depends upon heeding that little voice. III. But thirdly, and lastly, in very few words, what will it bid you do? Think of yourself? care only for your own soul? No; but think of God, think how you may make your little life a help and blessing to your fellow men. There has been but one perfect life that has ever been lived on earth, and that was the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And what is the briefest epitome of the working of that life? Is it not that He went about doing good "? prevailing principle of that life? be about my Father's business" ? meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish And what was the Was it not "I must Was it not "My His work"? Yes; depend upon it that the path to a righteous and eternal life lies far more in thinking of God as the living source of all our duties, and of the world as the sphere in which those duties are to be performed, than in thinking only, or even mainly, of our own souls. But observe that we cannot serve man without loving God; our duty to the one must flow from, must be aided by, must be mingled with our duty to the other. When a good and wise modern philosopher summed up the law and duty of life in Altruism-Vive pour autrui—“ Live for others "—he was guided by the same conception as that of the sweet and noble Hillel, the great president of the Jewish sanhedrin. Hillel and Shammai were the two most eminent of the Jewish rabbis in the days immediately preceding the days of Christ, and there is a celebrated story that a Pagan went to Shammai and asked him to tell him the whole law in one sentence and in one minute. Shammai angrily drove the man from his presence, and he then went to Hillel with the same demand. Hillel, with calm and unruffled temper, replied: "What thou wouldest that another should do to thee, that do thou to him; this is the whole law: the rest is but commentary." Yet both these great teachers-the ancient and the modern-said but half the truth. It is quite true that "The high desire that others may be blest but I do not believe that that high desire can either be originated, or purified, or wisely acted on, apart from God and without the aid of God's Holy Spirit, freely given to them who seek Him. To know the whole truth we must go back to the immortal wisdom of the Decalogue, of which the first table comprises the duty to God, as well as the second the duty to man, and we must go to sit at the feet of our Saviour and hear Him explain it, when He says, "Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself; on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." In that rule all is included. God is there, humanity is there; and to love God and to love man is the completeness of life and the salvation of the soul. He to whom God is the living law, he who has no dearer hope than to suffer all and sacrifice all, if thereby he may benefit others, he to whom life is communion, he to whom heaven means principle, oh! there is no fear but his soul will be bound up in the bundle of life, no fear that God will not cherish it in that day when He maketh up His jewels. Go from this chapel with the humble, hearty prayer to God that you may love Him more, and keep Him more in all your thoughts, and that by doing this your lives, more than ever hitherto, may be unselfish lives, and lives devoted to making all about you better and happier; and by doing this you will be looking into the perfect law of liberty, and, not being a forgetful hearer but a doer of the word, shall be blessed in your deed. May 18, 1873. SERMON XVII. THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PRAYER. 1 KINGS iii. 5. "Ask what I shall give thee." SOME of you will recognise that these words belong to the story of King Solomon. He had recently succeeded to his father's kingdom, and with royal swiftness and dauntless promptitude had crushed and swept away the guilt and opposition of dangerous schemers. Then, the moment that his throne was established, he went with Oriental pomp to the high palace of Gibeon, and after many a prayer and many a hecatomb for the future of that realm, whose fairest fields and cities he saw from that sacred hill, he retired to rest. And in the night he dreamed a dream, and knew that this dream was a reality. The God whom he had been worshipping came before him and said, "Ask what I shall give thee;" and Solomon, reflecting the yearnings of the day in the visions of the night, asked God to give him a wise and understanding heart. He was but a boy— according to the Jewish historian he was but fifteen years old—and yet he was king over a great nation. He prayed for God's grace that he might govern them aright. And God, approving the petition, gave more besides. Solomon had asked for wisdom, and God gave |