And if you ask me how to try the spirits, how to know whether your own thoughts, whether the sermons which you hear, the books which you read, are speaking to you God’s truth, or some lying spirit’s falsehood, I can only answer you, “To the law and to the testimony”—to the Bible; if they speak not according to that word, there is no truth in them. But how to understand the Bible? for the fleshly man understands not the things of God. The fleshly man, he who cares only about pleasing himself, he who goes to the Bible full of self-conceit and selfishness, wanting the Bible to tell him only just what he likes to hear, will only find it a sealed book to him, and will very likely wrest the Scriptures to his own destruction. Take up your Bible humbly, praying to God to shew you its meaning, whether it be pleasant to you or not, and then you will find that God will shew you a blessed meaning in it; He will open your eyes, that you may understand the wondrous things of His law; He will shew you how to try the spirit of all you are taught, and to find out whether it comes from God. SERMON IX. HELL ON EARTH. MATTHEW, viii. 29. “And behold the evil spirits cried out, saying, What have we to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of God? Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time?” THIS account of the man possessed with devils, and of his language to our Lord, of our Lord’s casting the devils out of the poor sufferer, and His allowing them to enter into a herd of swine, is one that is well worth serious thought; and I think a few words on it will follow fitly after my last Sunday’s sermon on Ahab and his temptations by evil spirits. In that sermon I shewed you what temper of mind it was which laid a man open to the cunning of evil spirits; I wish now to shew you something of what those evil spirits are. It is very little that we can know about them. We were intended to know very little, just as much as would enable us to guard against them, and no more. The accounts of them in the Scriptures are for our use, not to satisfy our curiosity. But we may find out a great deal about them from this very chapter, from this very story, which is repeated almost word for word in three different Gospels, as if to make us more certain of so curious and important a matter, by having three distinct and independent writers to witness for its truth. I advise all those who have Bibles to look for this story in the 8th chapter of St. Matthew, and follow me as I explain it. {92}