Page:A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey (Lichfield).djvu/8

4 zealous of good works." It was to the spreading abroad of this knowledge that the teaching of our Lord, and of His apostles, otherwise "unlearned and ignorant men" (as, with but one exception, they were), was ever directed. It was this that became the light and the ornament of their first followers. And it is this knowledge, brethren, which still sets the humblest possessor of it among us far above the most accomplished proficient in other knowledge, if his proficiency be without "understanding in the way of godliness," and unsanctified by "the wisdom that is from above." In a word, they who have this knowledge are uninstructed in nothing which it absolutely and indispensably concerns them to know; they who have it not are in a state of the most pitiable and perilous ignorance, whatever may be their other attainments, because their ignorance involves in it disobedience to the laws of an almighty and all-judging God.

As, then, brethren, it must needs be the soundest wisdom to secure this knowledge for ourselves, lest we be among those whom an apostle describes as "professing that they know God, but in works denying Him;" so must it be the truest charity to communicate it to others. And it is this last-named duty, of which the occasion of my being here to-day leads me earnestly to put you in remembrance.

That there are many, very many, around us, almost at our doors, who "go into captivity" and "are destroyed," because they have no such knowledge as that of which I have been speaking, is one of those sad truths to which we can none of us be strangers.

The two prophets indeed whose declarations, so exactly parallel to each other, I have brought before you, uttered them in relation to a temporal captivity, and a carnal destruction: but they may well be applied by us to that "everlasting destruction," which is the end of a spiritual captivity; the captivity which enslaves the soul, and the body with it, to the lusts and passions of a corrupt and unrenewed nature; the captivity which St. Paul described to the Romans as the effect of the law of sin warring in the members, and of which our Lord took solemn notice, when He said to the Jews, vainly boasting of their freedom from bondage (a boast which was untrue, both in a temporal and a spiritual sense), "Whosoever committeth sin"—lives in the habit of committing it—"is the servant (according to the original, the slave) of sin." But He at the same time pointed out the way of deliverance from that wretched servitude by declaring that they who would become His "disciples indeed,