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the Gospel to you, I were not myself to be a SERMON partaker of it. In short, we all, you and I alike, are engaged in a life-long contest, which has a very precise aim, and which demands a very severe and continued exertion.

Know ye not that they who run in a course all Verse 24. run, but one receiveth the prize? Ye inhabitants

of Corinth, who have so often flocked together from your city to your far-famed Stadium, to witness, in company with all Greece, your own Isthmian games; have you never noticed, have you never read the meaning of, that intense, that concentrated energy, with which the runners in the foot-race strain every nerve to be the first to reach the goal? All run, though but one can attain. Each runs in the hope of being that one. The slightest relaxation of the tension of one muscle, a momentary failure of the very utmost speed, would be fatal to the chance of one of those eager runners. So, even so, even with that intense eagerness, even with that vigorous determination, even so run ye, in order that ye may obtain. Such be your zeal, such your earnestness, such your sustained constancy, in order that you may obtain that prize which is the object of the Christian runner.

But remember one other thing. Every one who Verse 25. contends for a prize-not the runner only, but every one who takes part in any of these athletic contests

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SERMON which are the pride of Greece, which form so large a part in the education of every citizen-controls himself, practises self-restraint, in all things; has to submit, for many months beforehand, to a system of the most rigid training: every habit of life, every function of the body, is subjected to rule and discipline of a severe and irksome strictness, to give him the slightest chance of success in the competition to which he is looking forward: remember this, ye Christian combatants, and remember also the disparity, as well as the resemblance, between you and them: they then submit to their discipline that they may receive a corruptible crown, a perishable garland, like that which was the prize in the games of Greece, of a few leaves of bay or olive, of pine or parsley; but we an incorruptible, an imperishable, a heavenly prize.

Verse 26.

I therefore for in this I am one of you; I have no exemption from the personal anxieties, as well as the personal responsibilities, of the Christian conflict; rather would I be your example in bearing and in facing all; I therefore so run, as not uncertainly; not vaguely, is the exact sense: so fight I

-but the figure thus expressed is derived, in the original, from one particular department of the Grecian games, the encounter of the pugilistsso fight I, as not beating air; as one who does not

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allow his blows to fall short of his antagonist, but who SERMON takes care that each one shall tell, and tell heavily: but I buffet my body-the metaphor is still from Verse 27. the same subject: the word is properly, I cover my body with bruises: my own body, with its appetites, desires, and slothfulnesses, is my chief antagonist in this daily contest: through it, if not from it, come all the perils and all the conflicts of this mortal life its infirmities make us sluggish, its lusts tempt, its wants enchain us to earth, its vanities puff us up, its selfishnesses make us quarrelsome: it is, as elsewhere expressed, the flesh Gal. v. 24. with its affections and lusts which they that are Christ's have to crucify: I buffet therefore my body, and bring it into servitude; I make it my slave, instead of being, as it expects and claims to be, my master; lest by any means, after making proclamation to others, after playing the herald to others a figure still from the games, where it was the office of the herald both to give out the rules. of the contest, and to announce their commencement, and to proclaim their result-lest, then, after heralding for others after making to them the proclamation of Christ's Gospel, with its promises and its hopes, its terms and its duties-I myself should prove rejected, should find myself refused and outcast in the day of the manifestation of the sons of God, as one who had himself run negligently,

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SERMON or unfairly, or presumptuously, and who therefore must expect only shame and discomfiture when he would come forward to take his crown.

My brethren, if I were addressing an assembly of Christian ministers, these last words would furnish the most suitable as well as the most striking subject. And I hope that no clergyman ever reads them in the congregation without serious and even anxious self-application. It is possible, or St. Paul, under the inspiration of God, would not thus have expressed himself, for a minister of the Gospel to be even diligent and respected and successful, and yet, all the time, unsound at heart, and yet therefore, in the end, rejected and cast away. It is possible too, or St. Paul, under the inspiration of God, would not thus have expressed himself, for a Christian minister or a Christian man to fall away from grace once given; possible, as Heb. vi. 4. it is written in another place, for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, to fall away, and that beyond repentance. Let us lay these things to heart, for our quickening, and for our humbling, and for our sobering; for the extirpation of all self-confidence, and for the awakening in us of a godly fear.

But it is in the verse read as the text of my sermon that I desire to seek a few words of advice and of admonition, as the special lesson of this morning.

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I therefore so run, as not uncertainly: so fight I, SERMON as not beating the air. We have here two topics: first, the danger of running vaguely; and secondly, the danger of fighting ineffectively.

1. I so run, St. Paul says, as not vaguely. There is a danger, then, of doing that; of running vaguely. And I will mention two modes of this error.

i. We may fail to keep the goal in view.

My brethren, the Christian life is a precarious thing, humanly speaking-and, indeed, more than humanly speaking-in each one of us. Precarious

on many accounts: but on no account more precarious, than because we are so apt to lose sight of our goal; and, if we do this, we must run at hazard, or go wrong.

I greatly fear that many of us have no definite goal at all. Every one, when asked, hopes to reach heaven. But what is heaven? and what is reaching it? I am sure we many of us have no real, certainly no adequate, notion of heaven. A safe place; a place of rest after earth; a place of meeting lost friends; a place of calm and tranquillity; a place where our sins will give us no trouble; place where sorrow, and crying, and pain, and change, will be no more. These are our more thoughtful ideas of heaven. I hope and believe that they are all true. But I am quite sure they are not the

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