Page:Sermons preached in the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas', Philadelphia.djvu/194

190 otherwise, you will be carried down the stream of this world's delights, and be finally lost in the gulf of endless woe. 2. By evil days the apostle had reference to the days of persecution. When he wrote the epistle in which the text is found, he was imprisoned at Home, then the seat of learning, and the metropolis of the world, for the testimony he bore to the despised doctrines of the cross. In this view his argument may run thus:—the days are evil.—You are daily liable to be dragged to a loathsome prison, thence to the place of execution, therefore, I exhort you, to "walk circumspectly" correctly, "not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time." We may not consider our lives to be in danger from the spirit of persecution. We are permitted to sit under our own vine and fig-tree, none daring to molest us. But are we secure against the attack of some of the multiplied diseases and