It behoves us, therefore, to ask ourselves, Does Christ stand first in our affections? Are we enthusiastically endeavouring to live the Christian life? Are we, for example, more anxious about the Christ-likeness of our character than we are about our dividends or about our personal appearance ? You remember some lines of Coplas de Manrique's, which have been translated by Longfellow :

"Could we new charms to age impart,
And fashion with a cunning art

22

Defects of Modern Christianity.

III.

MISDIRECTED ENTHUSIASM.

"The Samaritans did not receive Him, because His face was as though He would go to Jerusalem. And when His disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt Thou that we command tire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But He turned and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of."-LUKE ix. 53-55.

IN

N the last sermon, I drew your attention to the want of enthusiasm which is too often apparent in modern Christianity. Now let me ask you to consider the misdirected enthusiasm which frequently characterises it. The next worst thing to being destitute of enthusiasm altogether, is to expend it on the wrong objects. As the poet says:

"What is enthusiasm? What can it be

But thought enkindled to a high degree,

That may, whatever be its ruling turn,
Right or not right, with equal ardour burn?
That which concerns us, therefore, is to see
What species of enthusiasts we be."

The words I have read as a text afford a very suggestive example of my subject. "Shall we

command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?" Here was enthusiasm, and enthusiasm for Christ; but it was expending itself in unchristian, and even anti-Christian, channels. "He turned and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." Ye think that ye are Christians, but as yet ye are not. Ye do not even know why I am come into the world. "The Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them."

We are constantly meeting, in our everyday experience, with instances of misdirected enthusiasm. For example, there are persons who will shed floods of tears over imaginary griefs depicted in a novel or on the stage, who are hardness itself to the real sufferings around them in actual life. There are persons, again, who feel the greatest interest in morality,—but unfortunately it is in the morality of other people. They never tire of pointing out the defects in their

neighbours' characters, but they take no pains to discover any in their own. The expenditure of enthusiasm in the wrong direction, necessarily involves its absence in the right. If it is wasted upon trifles, there will be none left to bestow upon matters of real importance. Like all the other forces with which our nature has been endowed, our power of enthusiasm is a strictly limited quantity. It may be diminished by carelessness; it may be increased by care; but it is at the best incapable of anything approaching to indefinite expansion. How important, then, that it be always wisely and justly bestowed! The very meaning of the word suggests that enthusiasm should not be given to anything and everything, but that it demands a worthy object. It signifies, etymologically, to be full of the Deity— to be, as we say, inspired. The term "enthusiasm" has been used, I know, by Locke, Isaac Taylor and others, in a bad sense-for the working of a diseased imagination, or for the stupidity of an unreasoning prejudice. But in modern English and in common speech, we signify by enthusiasm the taking a deep and ardent interest in any object or pursuit. And truly there is no power possessed by man so deserving of being called divine, as the power of becoming, in this sense,

enthusiastic. Without it, as I pointed out in the last sermon, no life can be successful.

ure.

With it, if duly applied, no life can be altogether a failBut alas for the man who wastes upon trifles that inspiration which he needs to bring him triumphantly through the great struggles and conflicts of his career!

There are three cases, it seems to me, in which the enthusiasm of Christians,-many of them good and earnest Christians,—has been misdirected; I refer to what may be called the Puritanical, the Theological, and the Ritualistic enthusiasms.

By the Puritanical enthusiasm, I mean the giving up and anathematising certain practices and amusements, not on the ground that they are wrong, but on the ground that they are "worldly." This is the result of a mistake regarding a passage in St John's Epistle. "If any man love the world,” he says, "the love of the Father is not in him." Now it is often forgotten that in the very same Epistle, "the world" is defined as "that which lieth in wickedness." Nothing, then, can be legitimately called worldly, in the bad sense of the term, merely because it is fashionable or common. The Bible has nothing to say against the world except in so far as it is wicked. "I pray not," said our Lord, "that Thou shouldest take them out