n. The temptation comes through our misuse of the circumstances
which God offers us as our opportunity. We turn these circumstances
into temptations.

Every condition of life has these two aspects. It is on the one hand
an opportunity, and it is on the other hand a temptation. God gives it
as an opportunity and we misuse the opportunity and it becomes our
temptation. The rich have their special and great opportunity of
generous service for the common good, and yet through that very
opportunity comes their special temptation. The poor are saved by
their lot from many temptations of self-centred and frivolous luxury,
but are much tempted {218} by their poverty itself. The healthy have a
great gift of God, but they are tempted by that very gift to
recklessness, inconsiderateness and self-injury. The sick receive
peculiar blessings of patience and resignation, but are much tempted to
selfishness and discontent. The business man is tempted by his very
knowledge of the world to the hardness of materialism; the minister is
tempted by his very indifference to the world to unsophisticated
imprudence. Wherever on earth a man may be he must scrutinize his
future, and calculate his powers, and face his problems, and pray: "My
God, prevent my vocation from becoming my temptation. Let me not put
myself where I shall be tried over much. Save me from the peculiar
temptation of my special lot. Deliver me from its evils and lead me
not round its temptations, but through them into its opportunity and
joy."

{219}

LXXXIX

SIMPLICITY TOWARD CHRIST

2 _Corinthians_ xi. 3.

In listening, as we have done, from day to day to Bishop Vincent, there
has repeatedly come to my mind this phrase: The simplicity that is in
Christ; or, as the Revised Version more accurately translates it, the
simplicity that is toward Christ,--the power which is often so much
greater than eloquence, of an obviously genuine, sincere, simple
Christian life.

But when one inquires into the nature of this Christian simplicity,
which is one of the fairest blooms of character, it turns out to be, so
to speak, not so simple a trait as it at first appeared. Of course,
there is a kind of simplicity which is a survival of childhood, a
guileless, childish ignorance; but when a man is simple in a childish
way, he is only what we call a simpleton. Christian simplicity is not
a survival but an achievement, wrought out of the struggles and
problems of