Christian Manhood.
I. Consider our love of the pleasures of life. I am willing to allow that there is an innocent love of the world, innocent in itself. God made the world, and has sanctioned the general form of human society, and has given us abundant pleasures in it. I do not say lasting pleasures, but still, while they are present, really pleasures. It is natural that the young should look with hope to the prospect before them. They fancy themselves rising in the world, distinguished, courted, admired, securing influence over others, and rewarded with high station. James and John had such a dream when they besought Christ that they might sit at His side in the most honourable places in His kingdom. Now, such dreams can hardly be called sinful in themselves and without reference to the particular case; for the gifts of wealth, power, and influence, and much more of domestic comfort come from God, and may be religiously improved. But, though not directly censurable, they are childish childish in a Christian who has infinitely higher views to engross his mind, and as being childish excusable only in the young.
II. But there are other childish views and habits besides which must be put off while we take on ourselves the full profession of a Christian, and these, not so free from guilt as those which have been already noticed; such as the love of display, greediness of the world's praise, and the love of the comforts and luxuries of life. Let us take it for granted, as a truth which cannot be gainsaid, that to break with the world and make religion our first concern, is only to cease to be children; and again, that, in consequence, those Christians who have come to mature years, and yet do not even so much as this, are in the presence of the angels of God an odious and unnatural spectacle and mockery of Christianity. God knows no variableness, neither shadow of turning; and when we outgrow our childhood, we but approach, however feebly, to His likeness, who has no youth nor age, who has no passions, no hopes, nor fears, but who loves truth, purity, and mercy, and who is supremely blessed, because He is supremely holy.
J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,vol. i., p. 336.
Present and Future Knowledge.
I. Our present love is exactly the same with our future love; it differs only in degree. But our knowledge here is altogether of a different nature to that which we are to have by-and-by. For now we know nothing. We know things only by their reflection; there is no direct acquaintance with anything; we are not capable of it yet. It is like seeing the object in a mirror. And remember the ancients, having no glass, had only metal, and therefore indistinct mirrors. We see reflections, not realities, and those reflections through the medium in which we look at them, confused, or, as it is in the original, riddled.
II. What are the practical duties which are to grow out of the fact of the decided insufficiency of human knowledge? (1) First let us learn that our province is more with love than with knowledge. Our knowledge is essentially and intentionally limited. It is given to us under a prescribed restriction. But love has no limitation. (2) Seeing that our knowledge is intended to be very small, let us take care that we hold it modestly. For it is not the oneness of knowledge, but the integrity of charity, which is to hold together the Church. Shall we fight over the mirror, when we ought each to be helping the other to be looking into it more closely, and trace the fine lines of truth which God exhibits to eyes that watch? (3) And never let us forget that this imperfection which abases all science, both human and Divine, is part of God's great plan in reference to another world. There every man will know, what the Christian has begun to see a little already, that this world is all a shadow, that what we do not see is the substance, and that all we look upon is a mere shadow of the invisible substances. Begin, as soon as you can, to deal with that world as the substance and with this world as the shadow.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 168.
References: 1 Corinthians 13:11. J. Burton, Christian Life and Truth,p. 94; Church of England Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 158; Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 250; T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 31; Ibid.,vol. iv., pp. 8, 16.