neglect
those interests which will endure when itself has passed away. In
truth, it promises more than it can fulfil. The goods of life and the
applause of men have their excellence, and, as far as they so, are
really good; but they are short-lived. And hence it is that many
pursuits in themselves honest and right, are nevertheless to be engaged
in with caution, lest they seduce us; and those perhaps with especial
caution, which tend to the well-being of men in this life. The
sciences, for instance, of good government, of acquiring wealth, of
preventing and relieving want, and the like, are for this reason
especially dangerous; for fixing, as they do, our exertions on this
world as an end, they go far to persuade us that they have no other
end; they accustom us to think too much of success in life and temporal
prosperity; nay, they may even teach us to be jealous of religion and
its institutions, as if these stood in our way, preventing us from
doing so much for the worldly interests of mankind as we might wish.

In this sense it is that St. Paul contrasts sight and faith. We see
this world; we only believe that there is a world of spirits, we do not
see it: and inasmuch as sight has more power over us than belief, and
the present than the future, so are the occupations and pleasures of
this life injurious to our faith. Yet not, I say, in themselves
sinful; as the Jewish system was a temporal system, yet divine, so is
the system of nature--this world--divine, though temporal. And as the
Jews became carnal-minded even by the influence of their
divinely-appointed system, and thereby rejected the Saviour of their
souls; in like manner, men of the world are hardened by God's own good
world, into a rejection of Christ. In neither case through the fault
of the things which are seen, whether miraculous or providential, but
accidentally, through the fault of the human heart.

2. But now, secondly, let us proceed to consider the world, not only as
dangerous, but as positively sinful, according to the text--"the whole
world lieth in wickedness." It was created well in all respects, but
even before it as yet had fully grown out into its parts, while as yet
the elements of human society did but lie hid in the nature and
condition of the first man, Adam fell; and thus the world, with all its
social ranks, and aims, and pursuits, and pleasures, and prizes, has
ever from its birth been sinful. The infection of sin spread t