the glory of his Christian vocation—sharing the conflict, the toil, the sorrow, the joy, and the triumph of hisever God. Then lay aside “every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset you.” That sin is poverty of faith—a poor-spirited estimate of life, its experiences and its issues; a love for the serfdom of Egypt rather than the freedom of the wilderness, the fleshpots of Goshen rather than the bread of Canaan, the pleasure of the moment rather than the joy which springs from fountains that outlast eternity. The sin which doth so easily beset us. Want of faith. I. In ourselves. II. In God. III. In the future. I. Want of faith in ourselves—poor, base views of our nature, power, and destiny. The essential dignity of man’s nature, as God constituted it, and the utter debasement it has suffered through sin, are facts which in nowise clash or contradict each other. In truth, no man who has not faith enough to comprehend what “_power to become the sons of God_” may mean, as spoken of man, can enter into the depth of anguish and shame wrung out in the confession, “_I was as a beast before thee._” “_I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes._” At the root of the humiliation, the debasement, lies this want of faith in our higher being and destiny. We prefer the slave’s portion, with the slave’s security, to the cares and burdens of freedom, with its hopes and joys. The main difficulty in the emancipation of serfs arises always from themselves. They do not care, nay they fear, to be free. The responsibility of self-government and self-control is a burden from which they shrink;—let us creep safely on the lower levels, rather than strain perilously up the mountain paths, with the free air around us, the bright heaven above us, the mists, the clouds, the storms, seething and flashing beneath our feet. This is the cry of our souls—yours and mine. God is ever stirring us to take the higher view of our nature and destiny; we are ever burying ourselves in the lower:—“‘_Let us alone, Jesus, thou Son of God._’ Thy words are perilous; they search and judge us; they trouble us in our politics, our pleasures, our trade. We are fairly content as it is; why should we weary ourselves by straining after the higher good, which seems thin, impalpable, and may easily elude our hand? Let us alone; depart out of our coasts.” This was the mood of these Hebrew Christians; it is ours. And nothing does the devil’s work more surely within us than this feeling that on the whole we were made for poor work, poor interests, and poor joys. Paul seeks to stir us to a nobler mood, to fire something within us which will burn with a heavenly lustre and seek to mingle itself with the brightness of its native skies. Man is made to deal with the substance of things, the eternal substance; you are content to converse with their fleeting shadows.