You are so deeply hurt that you have nigh lost your zeal for works of mercy, as well as of piety. You once pushed on through cold or rain, or whatever cross lay in your way, to see the poor, the sick, the distressed. You went about doing good, and found out those who were not able to find you. You cheerfully crept down into their cellars, and climbed up in their garrets,— "To supply all their wants, And spend and be spent in assisting his saints." You found out every scene of human misery, and assisted according to your power: "Each form of woe your generous pity moved; What hinders ? Do you now tread in the same steps? fear spoiling your silken coat? Or is there another lion in the way? Are you afraid of catching vermin? And are you not afraid lest the roaring lion should catch you? Are you not afraid of him that hath said: "Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto the least of these, ye have not done it unto me"? What will follow? "Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels!" THE ON DRESSING FOR DISPLAY (From a Sermon on I. Peter iii. 3, 4) HE question is: What harm does it do to adorn ourselves with gold, or pearls, or costly array, suppose you can afford it; that is, suppose it does not hurt or impoverish your family? The first harm it does is, it engenders pride, and where it is already, increases it. Whoever narrowly observes what passes in his own heart will easily discern this. Nothing is more natural than to think ourselves better because we are dressed in better clothes; and it is scarcely possible for a man to wear costly apparel without, in some measure, valuing himself upon it. One of the old heathens was so well apprised of this that when he had a spite to a poor man, and had a mind to turn his head, he made him a present of a suit of fine clothes. "Eutrabelus cuicunque nocere volebat, He could not then but imagine himself to be as much better as he was finer than his neighbor. And how many thousands, not only lords and gentlemen in England, but honest tradesmen, argue the same way? inferring the superior value of their persons from the value of their clothes! "But may not one man be as proud, though clad in sackcloth, as another is, though clad in cloth of gold?" As this argument meets us at every turn, and is supposed to be unanswerable, it will be worth while to answer at once for all, and to show the utter emptiness of it. "May not, then, one clad in sackcloth," you ask, "be as proud as he that is clad in cloth of gold?" I answer: Certainly he may: I suppose no one doubts of it. And what inference can you draw from this? Take a parallel case. One man that drinks a cup of wholesome wine may be as sick as another that drinks poison; but does this prove that the poison has no more tendency to hurt a man than the wine? Or does it excuse any man for taking what has a natural tendency to make him sick? Now, to apply: Experience shows that fine. clothes have a natural tendency to make a man sick of pride; plain clothes have not. Although it is true, you may be sick of pride in these also, yet they have no natural tendency either to cause or increase this sickness. Therefore, all that desire to be clothed with humility, abstain from that poison. The wearing gay or costly apparel naturally tends to breed and to increase vanity. By vanity I here mean the love and desire of being admired and praised. Every one of you that is fond of dress has a witness of this in your own bosom. Whether you will confess it before man or no, you are convinced of this before God. You know in your hearts, it is with a view to be admired that you thus adorn yourselves; and that you would not be at the pains were none to see you but God and his holy angels. Now the more you indulge this foolish desire, the more it grows upon you. You have vanity enough by nature; but by thus indulging it, you increase it a hundred fold. Oh, stop! Aim at pleasing God alone, and all these ornaments will drop off. Gay and costly apparel directly tends to create and inflame. lust. I was in doubt whether to name this brutal appetite; or, in order to spare delicate ears, to express it by some gentle circumlocution, like the dean, who, some years ago, told his audience at Whitehall: "If you do not repent, you will go to a place which I have too much manners to name before this good company." But I think it best to speak out; since the more the word shocks your ears, the more it may arm your heart. The fact is plain and undeniable; it has this effect both on the wearer and the beholder. To the former, our elegant poet Cowley addresses those fine lines: "Th' adorning thee with so much art Is but a barbarous skill; 'Tis like the poisoning of a dart, Too apt before to kill." That is,- to express the matter in plain terms, without any coloring,-"You poison the beholder with far more of this base appetite than otherwise he would feel." Did you not know this would be the natural consequence of your elegant adorning? To push the question home: Did you not desire, did you not design, it should? And yet, all the time, how did you — "Set to public view A specious face of innocence and virtue!" Meanwhile, you do not yourself escape the snare which you spread for others. The dart recoils, and you are infected with the same poison with which you infected them. You kindle a flame which at the same time consumes both yourself and your admirers. And it is well, if it does not plunge both you and them into the flames of hell! The wearing costly array is directly opposite to the being adorned with good works. Nothing can be more evident than this; for the more you lay out on your own apparel, the less you have left to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to lodge the strangers, to relieve those that are sick and in prison, and to lessen the numberless afflictions to which we are exposed in this vale of tears. And here is no room for the evasion used before: "I may be as humble in cloth of gold, as in sackcloth." If you could be as humble when you choose costly as when you choose plain apparel,-which I flatly deny,- yet you could not be as beneficent, as plenteous in good works. Every shilling which you save from your own apparel you may expend in clothing the naked and relieving the various necessities of the poor whom ye "have always with you." Therefore, every shilling which you needlessly spend on your apparel is, in effect, stolen from God and the poor. And how many precious opportunities of doing good have you defrauded yourself of! How often have you disabled yourself from doing good by purchasing what you did not want! For what end did you buy these ornaments? To please God? No; but to please your own fancy, or to gain the admiration and applause of those that were no wiser than yourself. How much good might you have done with that money! and what an irreparable loss have you sustained by not doing it, if it be true that the day is at hand when "every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor!" GEORGE WHITEFIELD (1714-1770) EORGE WHITEFIELD, one of the greatest extemporaneous orators of modern times, preached his first sermon at Gloucester in 1736, and his formidable appeals to their consciousness of 'wrongdoing are said to have "driven fifteen persons mad." In view of this assertion of what is generally accepted as a fact, the reader must judge the extent to which it is a misfortune that Whitefield's written sermons do not at all represent his power as an extemporaneous speaker. It is said by one of his critics that "his printed works convey a totally inadequate idea of his oratorical powers, and are all in fact below mediocrity." While The Kingdom of God," here used to represent him, does not deserve this sweeping condemnation, it is certainly not equal in force or style to the average sermons of his great associate, Wesley, whom as an extemporaneous speaker he certainly surpassed. Whitefield was born in Gloucester in 1714. He began life as potboy in an inn, kept by his parents in Gloucester, and it is said that in his youth he was addicted "to Sabbath-breaking, card-playing, and other vicious practices." At eighteen, however, he became more sober-minded, and entering Oxford as a servitor of Pembroke College, he came under the influence of the Wesleys. This decided his career and made him one of the founders of the Methodist Church. He was ordained as a minister of the Church of England and left it only when his great eloquence and astonishing power caused him to be condemned by the more lymphatic as an emotional enthusiast. It is said that he preached eighteen thousand times during the thirty-four years of his ministry, visiting almost every town in England, Scotland, and Wales, and crossing the Atlantic seven times back and forth between England and America. 30th, 1770. He died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, September |