Page:Sermons preached in the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas', Philadelphia.djvu/36

32 is always followed, more or less, with painful reflections. It is a false pleasure. It is not a pleasure that results from the whole machinery of man, moving on in harmonious order, but a pleasure consequent upon doing violence to the highest faculty of our moral nature. There can be no pleasure in sin, unless steps are taken to hush the clamoring voice of conscience, and thus degrade the immortal spirit by bringing it into subjection to the animal nature. When men succeed in this, then, they have a pleasure similar to what is enjoyed in a delightful dream, when the imagination chiefly is at work—a pleasure, equally as false, and which they find to be so, when they are awakened by the rebukes of the Spirit, or the fatal blow of death, who forces them to acknowledge, that alas! it was but a dream. "We proceed now to inquire:—

1. Whether or not true peace is to be found in the acquisition of wealth. One