V. Temperance: Eating, Drinking, Sleeping. God's claim over the body-True and false spirituality— The carnal nature-Bodily pleasures not necessarily sinful— All God's creatures good - Extent of temperance - Saying grace-Christian moderation. F Scriptural Illustrations. PRINCIPLES OF CONDUCT. God to be served with the body. Rom. vi. 13, 19; viii. 13; xvi. 18; 1 Cor. vi. 13, 19, 20; Eph. v. 23; Phil. iii. 19; 1 Thess. v. 23. Food and sleep are God's gift. Ruth i. 6; Ps. civ. 14, 27 · cxxvii. 2; cxxxvi. 25; cxlv. 15; Prov. iii. 24; Jer. xxxi. 12; Acts xiv. 17. Thanks to be given for them. Exod. xxiii. 25; Prov. xiii. 25; Matt. vi. 11; Rom. xiv. 6; 1 Cor. x. 30, 31; 1 Tim. iv. 4, 5. INSTANCES. Noah overcome with wine. Gen. ix. 21.-Lot's sin. Gen. xix. 30. Joseph's brethren enjoying his hospitality in Egypt. Gen. xliii. 34. Nabal in his cups. 1 Sam. xxv. 36. The Amalekite spoilers overtaken. 1 Sam. xxx. 16. Elah slain in his drunkenness. 1 Kings xvi. 9. Ahasuerus merry with wine. Esth. i. 10. Belshazzar's drunken feast. Dan. v. Our Lord at Cana. John ii. 1.-Our Lord eating and drinking. Matt. xi. 19.-Blessing food. John vi. 11. If thou well observe The rule of not too much, by temperance taught, In what thou eat'st and drink'st, seeking from thence Till many years over thy head return, So may'st thou live, till, like ripe fruit, thou drop Gathered, not harshly plucked, in death mature. MILTON. Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all the virtues.-BISHOP HALL. Ir would be easy to lay down a few general rules on the subject of temperance. But such maxims would deal with the connexion of temperance with morality, rather than of temperance with religion. The last is however our subject-to point out the links whereby the grand principles of our religious faith should guide us even in our bodily acts and habits. The special questions of eating, drinking, and sleeping, will be illustrations, but illustrations only; for the principle itself must extend far more widely, into details almost coextensive with our life. Many texts of Scripture affirm this common truth. The words of Solomon for instance, in Prov. xxiii. 21, couple the three sins of the drunkard, the glutton, and the sluggard together, and consequently imply that some common error is the nursing mother of them all. The language of the New Testament is, as might be expected, more specific. Nothing can be more erroneous than the notion some persons entertain that the New Testament relaxes the moral obligations of the Old. In the very fact of asserting principles rather than dwelling upon the mere details, it draws the bond very much tighter. Thus the language of St. Paul to the Corinthians asserts that "whatever we do," even though it should only be the natural act of eating and drinking, should be done with a special purpose, and under the sense of a special responsibility, "do all to the glory of God." Such a rule evidently includes the whole governance of the body, and the relation of the fleshy tabernacle towards the new life of the soul in Christ. The ultimate principle broadly laid down is that we are not our own-we, that is every part of us. This comes into collision with men's common language and modes of thinking. "May I not do what I like with myself?" is their plea; "is not even my body my own?" and they urge this, as if to deny it were to deprive them of some inalienable right, inseparable from our common human nature. There is a manifest confusion in such a plea, between a man's rights in relation to his fellow-men and his rights in relation to God. The first exist, but not the second. There are in us certain rights which belong to all, men and women -reasonable and immortal men and women which other men have no more right to take from us, than they have a right to take from us our lives. Our freedom of thought and of worship,, our rights as parents and children, husbands and wives, our claim not to be worked out of life, nor to be deprived of our Sunday rest, nor to be debarred froin all opportunities of intercourse with God, are things of which the loss would be a state of slavery. But these rights exist because we all are men equally deriving life and being from à common Creator, and not from each other. What man does not give, man has no right to take away. But between us and God all this is different. Our very bodies and souls and lives are God's; not only God's in the first gift, but God's in the daily maintenance of them-God's, with God's stamp and claim accompanying them in the silent witness of our consciences. A great lesson is learned when we heartily recognise God's right over our time, our talents, our property, our influence. But it is a greater and more solemn thing still to recognise his right over ourselves, the reasonable spirit, the warning conscience, the craving affections, and even the very flesh in which the soul tabernacles, and through which it works, acts, and even thinks, as through an instrument-the flesh which is united to the soul, and makes up, by the union, our identical and indivisible selves. The ground on which this claim is affirmed and pressed upon the conscience is very worthy of attention. We rest it naturally upon creation, and the right possessed by an artificer over the work of his own hands. This plea is not absent from |