HOW gently, yet how earnestly, does he call upon us to "watch and pray, lest we enter into temptation." To watch and to pray: for of all those around him some were sleeping, and none were praying; so that they who watched were not watching with him, but against him. In our careless state of mind the call to us is to watch; in our over-busy state the call to us is to pray; in our hard state there is equal need for both. And even in our best moods, when we are not hard, nor careless, nor over-busy, when we are at once sober and earnest and gentle, then not least does Christ call upon us to watch and to pray, that we may retain that than which else no gleam of April sunshine was ever more fleeting; that we may perfect that which else is of the earth, earthly, and when we lie down in the dust will wither and come to dust also. Jesus Christ brought life and immortality, it is said, to light through the gospel. He brought life and immortality to light:--is this indeed true as far as we are concerned? What do we think would be the difference in this point between many of us--who will dare say how many?--and a school, I will not say of Jewish, but even of Greek or Roman or Egyptian boys, eighteen hundred, or twenty-four hundred, or three or four thousand years ago? Compare us at our worship with them, and then, I grant, the difference would appear enormous. We have no images, making the glory of the incorruptible God like to corruptible man; we have no vain stream of incense; no shedding of the blood of bulls and calves in sacrifice: the hymns which are sung here are not vain repetitions or impious fables, which gave no word of answer to those questions which it most concerns mankind to know. Here, indeed, Jesus Christ is truly set forth, crucified among us; here life and immortality are brought to light. But follow us out of this place,--to our respective pursuits and amusements, to our social meetings, or our times of solitary thought,--and wherein do we seem to see life and immortality more brightly revealed than to those heathen schools of old? Do we enjoy any worldly good less keenly, or less shrink from any worldly evil? Death, which to the heathen view was the end of all things, is to us (so our language goes) the gate of life. Do we think of it with more hope and less fear than the heathen did? Christ has risen, and has reconciled us to God. Is God more to us?--God now revealed to us as our reconciled Father--do we oftener think of him, do we love him better, than he was thought of and loved in those heathen schools, which had Homer's poetry for their only gospel? We talk of light, of revelation, of the knowledge of God, while verily and really we are walking, not in light, but in darkness: not in knowledge of God, but in blindness and hardness of heart.