in with him to the marriage, and the door was shut." They who were ready went in with him; not they, who, when it was too late, were trying to become so. Believe me, in those late turnings to God, death is apt to come quicker than repentance: you would be called to meet Christ as your Judge, ere you could venture to think that you might love him as your Saviour: I say, "ere you might venture to think that you might love him as your Saviour," for we cannot love him as such, till we learn to hate our sins; and this is far too hard a task to be learnt by enfeebled faculties, which, in so many years of their vigour, had been only learning and practising to love them. But to you, to all of us, I trust, here assembled, the words are not spoken too late. We may now make Christ our friend; nay, he entreats and calls upon us to suffer him to be so. We may yet make our death a sleep, however sudden it may be, however deserted, however painful. We may yet so fall asleep in Christ, that we shall assuredly share in the promise which he made to Lazarus: he will come and awaken us out of sleep, that we may be where he is for ever.

SERMON XXVIII.

LUKE, xvi. 8.

The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

It is a remarkable story told by the poet Cowper of himself, than when he was a young man, and living in London, where his companions were not only persons of profligate life, but of low and ungodly principles, they always had a great advantage over him when arguing upon the truth of Christianity, by reproaching him with the badness of his own life. In fact, it appears that his life at that time was quite as bad as theirs; and they used to upbraid him for it, telling him, that it would be well for him if they were right and he wrong in their opinions respecting the truth of the Gospel; for if it were true, he certainly would be condemned upon his own showing.

1

We must not indeed call a man of evil life one of the children of light in the highest sense of the term; and yet in the sense in which our Lord uses

it in the text, it does apply to any one who believes in his inward mind, that his obedience is due to Christ, however little his outward conduct may agree with such a belief. They are children of light as far as God's mercy is concerned :-they have been chosen by him to receive the knowledge of his Son; they have been called, and their understandings at least have listened to the call. They are children of light then in God's gracious purposes,-called, enlightened, redeemed;-what more could have been done to the vineyard that has not been done in it? but their own will makes them in the end the children of darkness; they are foolish persons, who take their lamps, but take no oil with them: they are the vine of God's husbandry, planted, watered, fenced about from every enemy, and open to the full sunshine of his love; but when he looks that they should bring forth grapes, they bring forth wild grapes. These are the children of light of whom Christ speaks;-and well might he say, that the children of this world are in their generation far wiser.

This was what Cowper's unbelieving companions thought, when they taxed him with the folly and inconsistency of living like a Heathen, and yet professing to believe as a Christian. They, on the other hand, were consistent enough: they believed of nothing more than this world, and accordingly they lived for this world only. But as

far as this world was concerned, the happiness which they believed to be within their reach, they did their best to gain;-the misery which they supposed to threaten them, they did their best to avoid. These men, like the unjust steward in the parable, had at least the merit of acting wisely upon their own view of the matter; they made the mammon of unrighteousness, that is, the riches and enjoyments of this world, serve their turn for all that they believed them capable of yielding. And, therefore, Christ makes their conduct a reproof to Christians, who do not make the world yield to them that fruit, which, according to their professed belief, it might afford them. So much are we accustomed to admire consistency of character, an adherence to principles, an acting uniformly and steadily on one regular system of conduct, that these qualities in vulgar estimation even throw a lustre upon crime, and have caused some of the most wicked men that the world has ever seen to be accounted amongst the greatest.

But if their presence almost seems to render vice respectable, what shall we say of the character in which they are wanting? and much more when it is the very character which would set them off, no less than be set off by them—a character in which their influence would be nothing but unmixed good? If consistency with our principles be in some sort admired even when they are evil,-if

forethought cannot but exalt a human being, even when employing evil means to arrive at an evil end, how can we excuse inconsistency and blind thoughtlessness, when the principles which we swerve from are those of mere goodness;-when the end which our forethought might compass, and the means for attaining it, are alike pure and spotless? This is the lesson which the parable of the unjust steward was designed to teach us, that nothing is more unworthy, nothing more ruinous, than to be a Christian by halves;-to begin to build and not be able to finish. Salt is good, but the salt that has lost its savour is good neither for the land nor yet for the dunghill, but men cast it out and even so vile and worthless is that Christian in name only who does not live according to his own principles but in defiance of them, -who, with a journey to an eternal state opened before him, plays away his time on the road, and makes no provision for the end of his pilgrimage.

We may be still the children of light; but, if we so live, we are fast hastening to make ourselves the children of darkness: we are chosen by God to be the heirs of glory, but we ourselves choose rather to be the heirs of folly and destruction. And it is this conduct which, as I said before, the parable was designed to reprove. It reproves it by showing that the opposite to this careless folly, the habit of laying down a settled