The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Sermons
To do any work in the best manner, you would make use of the fittest
tools for it. And we trust that what has been said may serve in
some degree for the practical guidance of those who would like to
reach the great moral achievement of our text, but feel that the
tendencies and desires of nature are too strong for them. We know
of no other way by which to keep the love of the world out of our
heart than to keep in our hearts the love of God--and no other way
by which to keep our hearts in the love of God, than by building
ourselves on our most holy faith. That denial of the world which
is not possible to him that dissents from the gospel testimony, is
possible, even as all things are possible, to him that believeth.
To try this without faith is to work without the right tool or
the right instrument. But faith worketh by love; and the way of
expelling from the heart the love that transgresseth the law is to
admit into its receptacles the love which fulfilleth the law.
Conceive a man to be standing on the margin of this green world, and
that, when he looked toward it, he saw abundance smiling upon every
field, and all the blessings which earth can afford scattered in
profusion throughout every family, and the light of the sun sweetly
resting upon all the pleasant habitations, and the joys of human
companionship brightening many a happy circle of society; conceive
this to be the general character of the scene upon one side of his
contemplation, and that on the other, beyond the verge of the goodly
planet on which he was situated, he could descry nothing but a dark
and fathomless unknown. Think you that he would bid a voluntary
adieu to all the brightness and all the beauty that were before
him upon earth, and commit himself to the frightful solitude away
from it? Would he leave its peopled dwelling places, and become a
solitary wanderer through the fields of nonentity? If space offered
him nothing but a wilderness, would he for it abandon the home-bred
scenes of life and cheerfulness that lay so near, and exerted such
a power of urgency to detain him? Would not he cling to the regions
of sense, and of life, and of society? Shrinking away from the
desolation that was beyond it, would not he be glad to keep his firm
footing on the territory of this world, and to take shelter under
the silver canopy that was stretched over it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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