suggests exertion ere the night comes when no man can work. O that some might be moved from this day to adopt as their motto what the Saviour revealed as His own principle, "I must work the works of Him that sent Me." Realise that you have a mission, that it is a mission to work. If a man will not work, neither let him eat; he will not eat, in the sense of enjoying healthy life, deriving nutriment and exhibiting growth; he will be less able to do work, he will dwarf himself, he will dwindle; he will be rejected as a wicked and slothful servant in the great day of account, when the Lord, having returned, having received the kingdom, shall command His servants to be called unto Him and shall reckon with them. ODL SERMON V. Personal Responsibility of Man, as the ISAIAH vi. 5. "Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." O-NIGHT I am to ask you to consider the great TO-N gift of speech, and the responsibility it brings with it. Like the coins which we daily pass through our hands without reading the superscription or testing the metal, we use language for our momentary needs without thinking whence it came to us, nor what is its worth. Words! What are they after all? We use them without thought, we twist them into jests, we combine them into the speech or the poem. They are the handy interpreters of every day's wants; when we have no wants, they are the convenient toys that amuse us with our friends. Who can find any solemn side to such a subject? Who, that does not exaggerate for an effect, can attach much importance to the use of speech? But words are a great gift of God to man. Preserved in the strata of the language we speak are all the monuments of our history, and you could tell whence our people came and what they believed, what virtues they ranked high, what vices they glossed over. The names we use are often the sole monuments left to us of some forgotten theory of morals, or physics, or medicine. And this reminds us that our language is our inheritance from the ages that are gone; it grows richer as generations pass from the accumulations of their thought. Descending to us, it educates us; for the ideas which animated our fathers in their struggles, in their aspirations, pass into watchwords which recall and excite the same ideas in them that use them. And the sound of such words, before they are quite understood, stimulates us to apprehend the fulness of their meaning. Such words as faith, and truth, and freedom, contain almost a moral system. To know them fully, we must ourselves have learnt to trust in God, and to yearn for truth, and to value the protection of equal laws; to know them fully, we must know something at least of the history of those whose blood, poured out for the sake of the faith that they professed, became the seed of the Church that bore a hundred fold, of those who step by step wrested from various forms of tyranny the rights which have made our persons safe, our property secure, and our nation the envy of those who have not advanced so far in the same conflict. But if language does so much to fashion us, it is an instrument for us of wonderful power in moulding other minds. I do not mean now that the great masters of speech can sway the passions of mankind, or soften their affections, or convince them by force of reason. This is obvious, but it concerns us less. I mean that all speech, the common currency of a place like this, is an instrument of power, whether we have measured its power or not. Most of us have not thought of estimating the power of a thing so common and so familiar. But the mightiest forces that actuate the world are those which are unobserved, because they are so constant. The thunder makes us tremble with awe, though the storm after all only smites a chimney or a tree. The earthquake is a whole world's wonder, though perhaps it only swept away a few cottages. But the gentle breath of the air, which no one notes, is the life of man and beast; taint it, and the whole earth will reek with pestilence; withdraw it, and every living thing will die and vanish into dust. And the sun, which rises daily to run its endless course, gives life and growth to plant and animal; and the slow current which sweeps over the Atlantic unnoticed, bearing with it the genial warmth of another climate, tempers the air for us, and disperses the chilling fog, and makes our isle endurable. It is so with the power of speech. It is common as the air we breathe, as the sunshine which we welcome, as the water that washes our shores; but it is mighty in operation, The hum of many it is universal. It never sleeps. voices rises from the earth continually, and rises not in vain. God's work, or else Satan's work, it is for ever doing. There is no hyperbole in those words of St. James which perhaps we have been accustomed to construe as if there were: "The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature." Let us for a few minutes consider the great power and responsibility of the gift of speech. Amongst our companions words are cheap enough, and we think only of saying what may please their taste; before our God, who means us to be, in our way, prophets and preachers of His truth by all we say and do, our speech is an awful gift. We need God's presence to shew us how awful: "Woe is me, for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." Oh Lord of Hosts, be with us to-night, that these words of the prophet may sink deep into our hearts for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. Let us then consider this matter not as an abstract question, but in the way that becomes us, in connection with our own shortcomings. We speak that which we ought not; we fail to speak when we ought to speak. If we were to decide what was the commonest fault of the tongue amongst ourselves, we should almost all answer that it was the making light of sin. We can allude to any sinful act in three ways: we can speak of it as the Bible speaks, as a sin against the pure and holy God; or as prudent men of the world speak, as a mistake, and a blunder, and a want of self-command and dignity; or as the thoughtless speak, as something to be laughed at and forgotten, a natural and admissible thing. Our language is copious enough for any of these. Let me take one set of cases in which it makes the greatest difference which of the three tones we adopt. In such a society as this place contains, one of the greatest dangers to souls is impurity. The temptation is strong at a time of life when the passions are turbulent and feverish, and the ruin, when it does come, is complete. For so it is, that that sin which is palliated sometimes as being manly, does involve in a great ruin all the noblest parts of manhood in us. Those that worship this idol are fit for nothing else. The delusion is so engrossing that it leaves room for no other feeling. It makes the heart hard beyond all other sins. The steady light of family affection which burns in the breast of many a young man, cannot subsist amid the fierce glare and stifling fumes of passion let loose; it flickers and disappears. Serious studies become impossible; pure wholesome nourishment is savourless to |