speak now of them. I speak to you, my brothers, who are trying to live
a godly and a Christian life, the life of duty. And I tell you that
you will often find this life a prison-house, where you must give up
your own will, deny yourselves, learn to endure hardness, and to bear
the chain which suffering, or neglect, or ignorance put upon you. If
you are indeed the prisoners of the _Lord_, the iron of your chain will
make you brave to suffer and be strong. The same hope which sustained
Paul the aged long ago will sustain you now; the glorious certainty
that after a while the Lord looseth men out of prison, and receives
them into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

SERMON LIII.

FIRM TO THE END.

(Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity.)

1 COR. i. 8.

"Who also shall confirm you unto the end."

Steadfastness is one of the most important characteristics of a
Christian. Perhaps you will tell me that love, and self-denial, and
patience, and faith are the chief marks of Christ's followers. And I
answer that these things are useless without steadfastness. It will
not avail us to be very loving, and self-sacrificing, and patient, and
trustful for a little while, and then to fall away, and be selfish, and
impatient, and faithless. It is not the best regiment of soldiers
which makes the most headlong charge, but which can _stand firm_
against the enemy. The Spartans of old were forbidden by their laws
ever to flee from a foe. In the Pass of Thermopylae stands a monument
to Leonidas and his followers, bearing this inscription--"Go, stranger,
and tell at Lacedaemon that we died here in obedience to our laws." My
brethren, what we want, as soldiers of Jesus Christ, is not so much
zeal, or enthusiasm, or outward profession, as _firmness_ to the end,
steadfastness to die, if need be, for the laws of our God.

We find plenty of people ready to make professions, to be very zealous
in the service of God, but after a time the fire of their zeal dies out
into dead ashes; they have no _staying power_; like the seed on the
rocky ground they wither away, because they have no root. Such
unstable religion as this is useless. We must be firmly _rooted_ and
_established_ in the faith. We must endure to the end, if we would be
saved. We must, for our part, hold fast to the truth as it is in
Christ Jesus, and He, for His part, will confirm or strengthen us unto
the end. Every period of the Church's history has had i