cs
supplied to the increasing demand of our west-ends of flourishing Cities
of the Plain, ever consider what sort of sin it is for which God (unless
they lay it to heart) will "curse their blessings, and spread dung upon
their faces," or have understood, even in the dimmest manner, what part
_they_ had taken, and were taking, in "corrupting the covenant of the
Lord with Levi, and causing many to stumble at the Law"?

235. Perhaps the most subtle and unconscious way which the religious
teachers upon whom the ends of the world are come, have done this, is in
never telling their people the meaning of the clause in the Lord's
Prayer, which, of all others, their most earnest hearers have oftenest
on their lips: "Thy will be done." They allow their people to use it as
if their Father's will were always to kill their babies, or do
something unpleasant to them, instead of explaining to them that the
first and intensest article of their Father's will was their own
sanctification, and following comfort and wealth; and that the one only
path to national prosperity and to domestic peace was to understand what
the will of the Lord was, and to do all they could to get it done.
Whereas one would think, by the tone of the eagerest preachers nowadays,
that they held their blessed office to be that, not of showing men how
to do their Father's will on earth, but how to get to heaven without
doing any of it either here or there!

236. I say, especially, the most eager preachers; for nearly the whole
Missionary body (with the hottest Evangelistic sect of the English
Church) is at this moment composed of men who think the Gospel they are
to carry to mend the world with, forsooth, is that, "If any man sin, he
hath an Advocate with the Father;" while I have never yet, in my own
experience, met either with a Missionary or a Town Bishop who so much as
professed himself "to understand what the will of the Lord" was, far
less to teach anybody else to do it; and for fifty preachers, yes, and
fifty hundreds whom I have heard proclaiming the Mediator of the New
Testament, that "they which were called might receive the promise of
eternal inheritance," I have never yet heard so much as _one_ heartily
proclaiming against all those "deceivers with vain words" (Eph. v. 6),
that "no covetous person which is an idolater hath _any_ inheritance in
the kingdom of Christ, or of God;" and on myself personally and publicly
challenging the Bishops of England gene