SERMON I.

THE GREAT SPOILER.

GENESIS iii. 15.

"I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed."

Also LUKE viii. 12.

"Those by the wayside are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved."

(Sexagesima Sunday.—Morning.)

We have had both these passages brought before us this morning, and I think there will be some advantage in considering them together. The second portion comes, you will remember, not out of the second Lesson, but out of the Gospel for this particular Sunday; and therefore, year after year, the ancient sentence upon the serpent, and our Lord's comment on some of Satan's doings, go together. It is one of our privileges as Churchmen to hear so much, week by week, out of the Old Testament and the New, and to find the later re

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velation sometimes expounding the earlier. It is well, therefore, for preachers and hearers to mark this connexion, and to make the lesson of the day fit in with the services of the day. We may be glad of any thing that awakens the attention, or helps the memory; for we are dull and forgetful hearers at the best. But it is important, moreover, that we should understand and feel what unity there is in the Book of God,-how every portion of it reflects one Mind,-how the first chapters and the last speak to us in the same strain, and all is alike worthy of their Divine Author, who employed many agents, scattered through many ages, to declare His whole counsel to mankind.

We need hardly say that Sexagesima Sunday brings tidings to us of a very solemn kind. A man had better close his ears, or betake himself elsewhere till he is in a graver mood, who can listen with indifference, though it be for the hundredth time, to the tale which we have heard to-day. The individual actors in the scene, the noble pair, placed at the head of God's new creation, thus suddenly degraded and cast down, might well challenge our pity. Even if we had no part in their sentence, to see them banished from their fair inheritance, with the sad remembrance evermore pursuing them, that they had recklessly thrown away their own happiness, and darkened their lives with guilt,-this to spectators only, or listeners, would seem a reverse sad enough for tears. But coupling their story with the Apostle's plain declaration on the subject,

that "by one man's disobedience sin entered into the world, and death by sin,"-remembering that all the woes which burden mankind, physical and moral, flow down from that bitter spring which was opened in Paradise, when they rebelled against the Holy One, another feeling comes in, and the narrative, read it when we may, has a thrilling interest about it which can never belong to any other record of human suffering.

And then, apart from the human part of the story, there is the deep mystery of permitted evil,— the strange suddenness of Satan's incursion into the scene of innocence, the strange power exerted by one fallen spirit over the fortunes of a countless race, the unexplained, but most certain fact, that in such a strange guise he began the work of seduction, and by such poor pretences, succeeded in it. What so solemn in the world's history? What triumph of wickedness so disastrous? What event within the range of our knowledge so suggestive of inquiries from which no thoughtful man can escape, and which yet no human intellect can answer?

All this, I think, most of us have felt this morning. But then there is a disposition in many persons, partly because the events described are so remote,-partly because the whole transaction is, and must be, a thing by itself,-to think of what was done in Eden as resembling nothing else that can ever befal mankind. The serpent is a loathsome thing to us, instead of charming with seductive sounds; and if Satan wanders abroad upon our

earth, we cannot detect his presence; and our tempters, so far as our consciousness is concerned, are our own inbred passions, or our own evil-minded brethren; and if an Apostle talks about "wrestling with principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places," we think he was talking in a figure, or describing something that belonged to a chief captain in Christ's army; and for reasons like these, men put by what was done in Eden as a separate chapter in the book of God's providence, and hardly realize the conflict with evil, and the Prince of evil, as a thing of their own day.

Mark, then, the second portion of our text. We know who the speaker is; it is the Lord Himself. We remember what the occasion was; He is expounding one of His own simple, far-reaching parables, as fresh to us, and as intelligible to our children, as to the grown men, or the little ones, who looked into His face, and heard His words. The scene here is not Eden, but the busy, working world, the appointed place of our labours and trials, -human life as it has been since the fall, and will be to the end of all things. What is within our sight and reach, Christ talks about as the Lord of all things, making common things a sort of alphabet in which He writes lessons for all men and all times, and makes them speak to our consciences with a power which no human wit or eloquence can reach. And many things which are beyond our sight He declares with the simple straightforwardness of one who knew all things, and revealed just what He

saw fit, from time to time, respecting things earthly, and things heavenly, and the dim regions of the dead, and the dark regions of the lost. "A sower went out to sow his seed;" so runs the parable;

'and, as he sowed some fell by the wayside, and it was trodden down; and the fowls of the air devoured it up." "The seed is the word of God;" so runs the interpretation; "those by the wayside are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved."

Now, if a man shall say that Christ was talking in a figure here, I shall not waste words in arguing with him. We are not agreed upon first principles. We have no common standing ground. If the Bible be not so written that plain men may understand it by taking plain words in their plain sense, I am all at sea, and have nothing but my own guesses to offer you, and have no appeal to your reason or conscience as to the truth of what I say. If any one familiar with the gospels, and knowing how simple and direct and reasonable was the style of our Saviour's teaching, supposes that, in a matter of this sort, he could use equivocal language, and say positively that a living agent is at work to hinder God's work and rob your souls, while the real fact is that you are left to yourselves, and that man was tempted in a figure when he fell, or that Satan has been shut up in his own pit of darkness ever since,-why, then, we can but wonder at that man's perverseness, and pray that he may not go