with knowledge, and perfected in accomplishments. These are but the lower employments of life, or its intermittent pastimes. Its business is religion—the laying hold on salvation, and following the holy service to which we are bound, wherein we are apprentices and probationers for eternal glory, and whereby we are allowed and enabled to lay up treasure in heaven—the dedication of ourselves to CHRIST our Saviour, to live under His rule, and by His grace; to set forth His glory in all we do; to become qualified by unlearning and renouncing what is amiss, and acquiring new tastes, and inclinations, and powers, and fashioning ourselves after His glorious image for the state to which He will call us when this life is over. “If the LORD will I should live and do this or that.” How does such a suggestion break in upon and check the presuming worldliness of the called of GOD! “Here am I,” it makes him exclaim, “actually laying myself out for the engrossing and long-continued pursuit of worldly ends. Yet GOD may cut short my life in the midst of it, and if He does, without giving me time to resume my higher calling, to repair what is out of order, to fill up what is wanting, to make my peace with Him, to become fit for death—oh, to what in that case will my folly and my sin bring me! How shall I stand before Him at His awful Advent? What account shall I render of my neglected stewardship? What will justify my presumption in His delay? What excuse my want of the wedding garment? Surely He will deal with me as with one who knew his Master’s will, yet did it not; who refused the glory which he was created, and redeemed, and sanctified to render; who has preferred Mammon to GOD, earth to heaven; who has contracted the worldliness from which GOD shrinks, and despised the holiness which alone He will accept!” It is an awakening, a sobering, a solemn suggestion. It reveals to him the anomaly, the folly, the sin, the peril of his condition, whatever the kind of worldliness which engrosses him. He a servant of CHRIST, a votary of religion, a worker for eternity, an heir of glory, forgetting his calling, neglecting his best hopes and interests, perverting his time and powers, and opportunities from their highest and most necessary use, to gratify self with childish pleasures, to heap up gold, to make to himself a name among the pigmies of the earth; to become admired or stared at for his appearance or accomplishments; to excel in knowledge of languages, or sciences, or history, or for any other earthly end; when not only what he seeks must soon be yielded up (even if he succeeds in getting it), but also through the seeking he must neglect all that GOD requires of him, and forfeit all that GOD offers! Oh, how silly, how sinful, how awfully hazardous the course he is pursuing!