s need of him yet."
So wrote Thomas Carlyle of the preacher. "Could we but find the point
again--take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover,
almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, the soul-devouring,
world-devouring devils are." I have tried, however imperfectly, yet
faithfully, to talk to you about three of these "soul-devouring,
world-devouring devils." Give them no inch of foothold in your life,
and do a brother's part for others who, perhaps weaker than you, are
waging the same conflict in the interest of the things that are sacred,
and kingly, and divine. And when your brief mortal life is over you
shall have the noble satisfaction of knowing that you have done
something to make sure and real the power of that new day when our
"sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth, and our daughters
shall be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace."

TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY

"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot
be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempteth no man; but each man is
tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed."--St.
James i. 13, 14.

V

TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY

St. James has been called the Saxon of the goodly company of the
Apostles. It is in many ways a happy description. We associate the
term with thought, rugged, perspicuous, easily grasped, and expressed
in the shortest and most readily understood words. St. Peter, in a
reference to the letters of his "beloved brother Paul," warns the
reader of these letters that there are things in them hard to be
understood, which the ignorant handle only to their own confusion. If
the former part of this warning were written about the Epistle General
of St. James it would be dismissed at once, as having neither point nor
application.

St. James does not think deeply, but he thinks clearly. He knows what
he wants to say, and he says it in language that he who runs may not
only read but understand. He touches most of the great themes that
engage the commanding mind of St. Paul, and settles them--for no other
word so well describes the process--in his own characteristic fashion.
In the passage before us he attacks the most difficult subject which
the mind of man can approach, and disposes of it to his own
satisfaction in some forty-two of the shortest and most decisive words
to be found in any speech or language.

It is well to c