s a hope disappointed. There is only one thing
more tragic than a life which has failed in its aims, and it is a life
which has perfectly succeeded in them, and has found that what promised
to be bread turns to ashes. The word of promise may be kept to the ear,
but is always broken to the hope. Many a millionaire loses the power to
enjoy his millions by the very process by which he gains them. The old
Jewish thinker was wise not only in taking as the summing up of all
worldly pursuits the sad sentence, 'All is vanity,' but in putting it
into the lips of a king who had won all he sought. The sorceress draws
us within her charmed circle by lying words and illusory charms, and
when she has so secured the captives, her mask is thrown off and her
native hideousness displayed.

II. The hard service which lying vanities require.

The phrase in our text is a quotation, slightly altered, from Psalm
xxxi. 6: 'I hate them that regard lying vanities; but I trust in the
Lord.' The alteration in the form of the verb as it occurs in Jonah
expresses the intensity of regard, and gives the picture of watching
with anxious solicitude, as the eyes of a servant turned to his master,
or those of a dog to its owner. The world is a very hard master, and
requires from its servants the concentration of thought, heart, and
effort. We need only recall the thousand sermons devoted to the
enforcement of 'the gospel of getting on,' which prosperous worldlings
are continually preaching. A chorus of voices on every side of us is
dinning into the ears of every young man and woman the necessity for
success in life's struggle of taking for a motto, 'This one thing I do.'
How many a man is there, who in the race after wealth or fame, has flung
away aspirations, visions of noble, truthful love to life, and a hundred
other precious things? Browning tells a hideous story of a mother
flinging, one after another, her infants to the wolves as she urged her
sledge over the snowy plain. No less hideous, and still more maiming,
are the surrenders that men make when once their hearts have been filled
with the foolish ambitions of worldly success. Let us fix it in our
minds, that nothing that time and sense can give is worth the price that
it exacts.

'It is only heaven that can be had for the asking;
It is only God that is given away.'

All sin is slavery. Its yoke presses painfully on the neck, and its
burden is heavy indeed, and the rest which it prom