My brothers, if you would prosper you must have God with you in your business, guiding your plough, blessing your farm, ruling your trade. You must have God with you behind the counter of your shop, or your office, and if God is to be there you _must speak_ the truth. A Christian man must have nothing to do with an unjust balance, or a false weight. He must refuse to adulterate his wares, for these things are lies. The Chinese are in the habit of adulterating some of their tea for the market, but they are honest enough to call it in their language _lie tea_. I only wish our traders would do the same when they offer us false articles under the name of genuine wares. The time would fail me to tell one quarter of the ways in which God's law of truth is broken. I may not stay to speak of the false advertisement, of the highly-coloured description, of the quack medicine, which we are solemnly told will cure any kind of disease. I would only say, take the matter home to your own hearts. Whoever you are, make up your mind that as Christians you must speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And may the God of all truth give your strength. SERMON XLI. ALIVE UNTO GOD. (Sixth Sunday after Trinity.) ROMANS vi. 11. "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." Every baptised person belongs to God. He is His absolute property, marked with the sign of the great King. As the broad arrow is the mark that certain property belongs to the British Government, so the Cross of Holy Baptism is the sign and pledge that we are God's. Think of that, my brothers, you are not free to choose your own way, your own masters; you belong absolutely to Jesus Christ. He made you His property by taking your flesh, by suffering in it, by dying in it, by rising with it in triumph. In Baptism you are made partakers of all these benefits. You are baptised into the Death of Christ that your old sinful nature may die and be buried. You are baptised too in His Resurrection, that you may after Baptism begin a new and higher life, with Jesus as your Ruler and Guide. From this fact come two others; first that we are not free to sin, because if we do wrong, we sin not against ourselves, but against Jesus Christ, "whose we are, and whom we serve." I do not say that sin will not come in our way, will not tempt us. We must, in passing through the world, encounter foul smells, hideous sights, dirty roads. But we can turn away from the foul smell, we can shut our eyes to the bad sight, we can pick our way carefully over the dirty road. So if sin meets us, we must turn aside from it, we must stop our eyes and our ears to the evil sight, or sound, we must try to keep in a clean path. The strength which our Master, Jesus, gives us in the Sacraments will be sufficient for us. And the second fact is that, as baptised people, we are never alone, never forsaken.