SERMON I

DELIVERED AT THE CATHEDRAL, QUEBEC, SEPT. 14, 1885.

Christ's Lesson from the Lilies and the Sparrows.

"Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment ?"-MATT. vi. 25.

I HAVE chosen these words for my text, only because they form part of the Gospel for the day.

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1. You all know, I trust, almost by heart, that lovely and rhythmic passage of the Sermon on the Mount. You are also doubtless aware that the words, "take no thought," did not, when the Bible was translated, mean as they now mean-" be wholly indifferent to," never cast a thought upon "—but that they meant, as in our admirable Revised Version, "be not anxious," "be not over-careful about." To take no thought for the morrow would, in the present sense of the phrase, be at once impracticable and immoral; it would be as much against the precepts of the Old as of the New Testament; it would be contrary to the clear practice both of

our Lord and His Apostles. The passage in past ages was often abused into an excuse for worthless idleness, for slothful self-indulgence, for pernicious mendicancy. The perversion was inexcusable. No man has any right to live on the toil of his neighbors; no man has a right to be a useless burden on others; no man, unless he be utterly base, will sit down at the feast of life, and meanly rise up and go away, without paying the reckoning. I need hardly pause to correct this abuse. I trust that all of us, of every rank, of every age, have learnt the dignity of work, the innocence of work, the holiness of work, the happiness of work. I trust that the very poorest person here present has a healthy scorn for the unworthy indolence of the drunkard, the idler, and the tramp. I trust that the most ignorant has risen above. the wilful error of those who choose to think that these words abrogated the primary law of Eden, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat;" or nullified the richest promise of futurity, "Now that thy work is over, enter into thy rest." The idler and the sluggard have no right either to heaven or to earth.

2. But while we thus guard this passage from a wrong meaning, let us be very careful that we do not rob it of all meaning. There is perhaps no part of Scripture which we are more tempted to praise, while we scarcely even attempt to practise, than the Sermon on the Mount. It is so transcendent; so ideally noble ; it is so unspeakably superior to the prudential egotisms of worldly wisdom. It comes to us so completely as a melody out of a better and purer world, that we are too apt to admire and to forget it; to glorify it as a picture instead of using it as a chart. After dwelling on

its music and its poetry, we carefully proceed to explain it all away. "Take no thought," "Be not anxious:" strange exhortation! How many nominal Christians even pretend to follow it! Go forth into the roaring, surging streets of any of our great cities, and how many are there of these careworn myriads, except here and there some happy boy or girl, who are not full of a restless and devouring anxiety about the concerns of this life of this brief day, which, in an hour or two, shall plunge into irrevocable night? They know that, at the best, they have but a few years to live, and those full of sorrow; yet they are madly absorbed in the desire to gain things which, even for this brief space, cannot satisfy. They are all madly absorbed in chasing bubbles, in weaving spiders' webs, hewing broken cisterns, giving their labors to the caterpillar-bewildered by the very intensity of their desire to win that which does not and cannot profit, even for the brief span and ever-deepening twilight of these our saddened days. Yes, and they will maintain it to you, that so it ought to be; that in this to them-unintelligible world, they could not possibly get on without dubious dealing; that (as they phrase it) "business is business;" that the Sermon on the Mount is too romantic, too angelical, for the warehouse and the street; and that the heaven, which is so near to us, since we all may enter it, is impossibly far away, because so very few of us do. And thus the voice -the human voice-the still small voice of Jesus on the hill becomes to us but like the half-remembered echo of music out of some heavenly dream. We visit the scenes of the Saviour's earthly life. We stand, as I have stood, on the very spot where the words were uttered.

The fowls of the air still fly around us, as when He was there; the roller-bird still flashes, like a living sapphire, through the flowering oleanders; the kingfisher still keenly watches the water from the plumed reeds beside the stream; the white wings of the pelicans still ripple the azure crystal of the lake; the eagle still soars overhead in the transparent air; and underfoot the flowers, still in their vernal bloom, surpass Solomon in all his glory; the pastures are still brilliant with the golden amaryllis ; the scarlet anemones still glow like flame amid the springing corn; the lilies still breathe forth their delicate incense; the anthers of the crocus still bloom with vegetable gold. Ah, yes! the fair world is unaltered; the sky is there, the hill is there, the lake is there, the flowers are there, the birds are there, and Hermon still upheaves his shining shoulder into the blue air, and the farther snows of Lebanon are still crimson with the setting sun;-but where is He? To many of you, my brethren, if you will confess the truth, has not that awful, that gracious figure of the Son of man, seated upon the mountain slope, faded away into a sea of darkness? Does not His voice sound to you like the dim-remembered story out of half-legendary days?

3. Alas! my friends, and why is this? Why has Christ seemed to vanish so far away? Why to so many is He a dead Christ, not a living Christ? Is it not chiefly because the world is ever with us? because it has got thoroughly into our hearts? because "getting and spending we lay waste our powers?" Are we not ever, and almost exclusively, thinking of this world? are we not mastered by the scrambling selfishness, and eager greed of our mere animal and earthly instincts? How many of us rise,