moved ate of the fruit, and gave to her husband, and he did eat also. The hope was realised; the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew good and evil; but oh, it was a fatal knowledge! There is not a woe in the long, dark catalogue of mortal afflictions, there has not been the tear shed, nor the sigh heaved, nor the shroud woven, nor the grave dug, which must not be referred to the acquisition of knowledge as its producing cause. There was the increase of knowledge, but with it, and consequent on it, there was the birth of sorrow-a giant so soon as it saw the light. And although it were wrong to argue that the increase of knowledge is now the increase of sorrow, on the same accounts that it was in the case of Adam and Eve, yet we cannot but think that God fastened for ever the same penalty on knowledge, in order that there might be a memento of human apostacy. It was sin in our first parents to seek the increase of knowledge, and the sorrow came as the punishment of sin. Of course we do not say that it is sin in us to seek knowledge; neither therefore do we say that the sorrow is the punishment for the sin. But it is certain that the appointment under which we are placed is nothing but the original appointment continued; and that from the first creation man has been subjected to the law, that to increase knowledge should be also to increase sorrow. And thus hath God ordained that men should, as it were, carry about in themselves the memorial of the first act of rebellion, and that there should be written in their daily and continued experience a kind of history of the fall of their race. We suppose it to be simply because we are fallen beings that knowledge and sorrow must grow together. Once delivered from the trammels of corruption, standing as the sons and daughters of the resurrection, we know that the penalty shall be for ever removed; and that as one field after another of glorious intelligence is given to our search, and we expatiate over mighty tracts of cleared up mystery and developed purposes; each accession to our wisdom will be an accession to our happiness. As we join the assembly of the just made perfect, and catch the flashings of Deity which circulate through the rejoicing group, we shall find and feel that though the knowledge of God and of Christ is literally inexhaustible, the rapture as well as the business of eternity shall lie in the searching deeper and the soaring higher. But until our every faculty shall be finally regenerated, until in all its length and breadth the curse is taken off every man; if we have the knowledge we must have with it the original penalty. Adam, it may be said, won for us the knowledge of good and evil, but then he won it by disobedience, and therefore he annexed to it sorrow. And now, in ascertaining that in much wisdom is much grief, I am only ascertaining that I am myself a child of the apostate. I look upon the thorn and the thistle which the earth brings forth; I see the fixedness of the institution that in the sweat of his face man shall eat bread; I hear the wail of the orphan and the cry of the oppressed; I behold disease and death holding lordship over man; and when all these signs of a stricken and burdened creation have forced on me the remembrance that I belong to a tribe which has thrown off allegiance, I no longer marvel that if I would have wisdom, I must also have grief.

What then, is there no exception? None we believe. It holds good of religious knowledge as well as of worldly knowledge, that to increase it is to increase sorrow. Religious knowledge may be resolved into knowledge of one's self and knowledge of God in Christ. No man knows anything of himself, but the man who is enabled to examine himself by the light of the Holy Scripture, and as self-knowledge increases must not sorrow also increase? What is this knowledge but the knowledge of our own corruption, the knowledge of the deceitfulness of the heart, the knowledge of one's own depravity. He who is increasing knowledge in himself, is he not possessed of a growing sense of his own weakness, his own depravity; his own obduracy, his own ingratitude? He will not seem to himself to be growing better. The proof that he grows better, is that he seems to himself to grow worse; and day by day the Holy Spirit will show him some new and foul chamber of imagery in the heart; day by day this Celestial Agent will unveil some fresh deformity and lay bare some cherished and unsuspected evil. And though it be most wholesome and most

necessary that we be thus taught ourselves, can it be denied that there is something painful and grievous in the lessons which are furnished? Oh! if up to his dying day a Christian must be increasing in knowledge of himself, and if this increasing knowledge be an increasing sense, that in spite of all which has been done for him, he is a rebellious, sin-loving, ungrateful creature; will it not come to pass that the more he knows of himself the more will he lament over himself? And, will it not therefore be emphatically true, that "in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow?"

In like manner, with respect to a knowledge of Christ, there will be just that contemporaneous increase which we are setting ourselves to discover. I must know, experimentally know, that Jesus died for me, before I can know anything of the hatefulness of sin; and when a man is enabled to look by faith on the Lamb of God, bearing his sins in his own body on the tree, (and this it is to know God in Christ) then alone will he entertain a genuine and heartfelt sorrow for sin. And the more earnestly he gazes, the more he contemplates the dignity and innocence of the victim, the more he ponders the mystery, that the being who was one with the Father should have been given up to execration and sacrifice, the more disposed will he be to abhor and reproach himself, and the more will he bewail his own guiltiness, which demanded so awful an expiation. It is not the man who sits down to compute by an abstract calculation the evil of sin, who will ever attain to a knowledge of sin. A knowledge of sin is, and must be, a knowledge of Christ; the cross of the Redeemer being the only gauge, so to speak, by which iniquity can be sounded. If I would know the disruption between the Creator and the creature, I must estimate it by the machinery through which re-union was effected; and the man therefore who knows Christ, and who has closed with Christ as a Redeemer, he alone knows anything of the enormity and heinousness of sin. And as this man makes his pilgrimage to Gethsemane and Calvary, and stands by the cross, and marks the agonies of the Immaculate Surety in his last wrestlings with principalities and powers, oh! he will be increasing his knowledge of God's justice, of God's holiness; yea, of every Divine attribute centering itself and satisfying itself in the work of redemption. But as this knowledge increases, as the man learns more and more the vastness of the interference made on his behalf, the greater will be his sense of the overpowering love which prompted and effected his rescue; and the greater his sense of the love of the Redeemer, the more ardent in return will be his own love of the Redeemer. And oh! if as knowledge increases love increases, will he not loathe more intensely and bewail more bitterly the sinfulness which nailed the Lord of glory to the tree? Yea, and will it not continually happen, that as his soul is most elevated with the contemplations of Christ, and he has the fullest assurance of interest in the saving work of the atonement-will it not continually happen that at moments such as these, when knowledge is at the highest, contrition for sin will be most bitter and deep? And will there not thus be given a proof uttered in sighs and written in tears that even when knowledge is the knowledge of God in Christ, "in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow

Now, we may, perhaps, though it is rather travelling back in our subject, just illustrate our text by another kind of knowledge.

Just take the knowledge of history. We will suppose a man studying diligently every record of antiquity, thus possessing himself of the events and transactions of which this earth has been the scene. We are clear that he who increases his knowledge of history must have deadened himself to impressions, if he did not thereby increase sorrow. What is history but a record of crime and calamity, a melancholy summary of the woe and the wicked. ness with which our globe has been burdened? Here and there we have a bright light, some noble instance of the struggle and the triumph of virtue, but on the whole, feuds and wrongs, and rivalries, the oppression of the innocent, the struggles of ambition, the earth reeking with blood, polluted with guilt, and bathed with tears; these are ordinarily the features of the historic

picture. Who that calls himself a man can gaze on these and not be sorrowful? If it be true that to read history is to read the proofs of human apostacy, and the curse which it entailed-if it be true that the knowledge of what has befallen our race in successive ages is the knowledge of a long series of evidence of the total corruption and the consequent misery of man, then assuredly whatever the pleasure, and whatever the profit of storing the mind with the facts, the material of melancholy reflection will be forced on us by every page of the record; and we must either profess ourselves insensible to the sufferings with which guilt has endowed human nature, or we must assent to it as a truth that when history is concerned, to increase knowledge is to increase sorrow. And even if the increase of knowledge be a knowledge of the character and happiness of the excellent of the earth, it still brings with it the material of sorrow. Who can read the biography of saints without having two feelings excited in his mind: first, the feeling “how imperfect are the best!" and, secondly, "how much nearer have others gone to perfection than myself?" The first feeling must be attended by sorrow at the resistance which human nature will always oppose to God's grace; the second, at the superior strength of that resistance in myself. Thus, again, the knowledge brings the sorrow; in increasing the one we increase also the other. And therefore we affirm generally of knowledge, that you cannot acquire it without at the same time acquiring some fresh cause of regret and anxiety. If it be knowledge of nature, the further you advance, the more you are dissatisfied, the more hopeless appears pursuit. If it be the knowledge of character, you must think worse and worse of yourself and your fellow-men. If it be knowledge of literature, you have trouble in keeping as well as trouble in gaining. What is worth the being retained you will find slipping from your memory, and what ought to be dismissed will be fastened as with nails. If it be knowledge of the world, it consists too often in discovering hollowness where you had expected solidity, selfishness under the mask of generosity, daggers in smiles, and treachery in abundance. And even if it be a knowledge of God, still as we have shown you, the more we know, the more cause we have for self-abhorrence and bewailing. So still, what is it to increase knowledge, if not to increase sorrow? The text holds good of religious knowledge, as well as of worldly. In neither case do we argue that the knowledge is unattended by joy. The telescope and microscope ministered gladness to the philosopher, and they helped him to explore a thousand before hidden wonders, though all the while teaching him the dwarfishness of his highest possible attainments; they made him sorrowful by showing him that perfection would be always out of reach. And when the spiritual telescope is put into our hands, and we direct it to the home of the justified, and lovely things, and rich and sparkling cross the field of vision; or when we are equipped with the spiritual microscope, and can look into ourselves and see a world of iniquity in the tiniest motes that float in the mind's recesses, do we say that it is other than delightful to catch glimpses of the land of promise, or other than profitable to be helped to the scrutiny and anatomy of the heart? Each kind of knowledge is delightful, and each is profitable; at the same time each furnishes material for sorrow. It is delightful to hold the telescope and to see by the lenses of faith the domes and pinnacles of the heavenly city; and it is also profitable thus to occupy the vision of the saints' inheritance, for looking on the recompense we shall be animated to the toil. But who ever suryeyed the palaces of the faithful with

out self-reproach, at the little influence which things eternal have upon him, when compared with things temporal, and without a painful consciousness, that though a king and an heir of glory, his deportment is often such as if slavery were his choice and corruption his element? Nothing so shows man his own coldness, his own backwardness, his own insensibility to the high destinies of the redeemed as a glimpse of heaven. He cannot behold the reserved joys without feeling that he deserves to lose them for the slight hold which after all, they have on his affections. The closer the view the stronger will be this feeling; so that whilst he is enraptured at the disclosures of the telescope, yea, and excited by them to exertion, he will be covered with shame at his own lukewarmness in the pursuit of what is infinitely desirable. And thus it will come to pass, that though there is joy, and though there is profit in increasing knowledge, he will increase also sorrow. And if, laying down the telescope, he take up the microscope, and subject his own heart to the magnifying power, then we need not tell you that it is profitable for him to be informed of the depth and extent of the corruption, and we need not tell you that it is delightful for him to be thus informed, seeing that the nature of the instruction proves God's Spirit to be the instructor, and any proof that we are taught of the Spirit is too precious to be bartered for the universe. But neither, at the same time, need we tell you that it is a saddening thing to be shown one's own vilenessvileness resisting all processes of sanctification; and thus, though with the moral microscope, as with the natural, joy and profit are gained from its showings, it remains true of both, that in increasing knowledge, they increase also

sorrow.

We do not strive to win you by false pretences; we own that in seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness you will increase sorrow, seeing that assuredly you will increase knowledge; but with this increase of sorrow there shall be that serenity of spirit, that counterpoise of joy, which will still make it true that "wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness." The difference between the Christian man and the man of the world is, that our text applies to the Christian only in this life, but it applies to the man of the world throughout eternity. Both shall increase in knowledge for ever and ever, but in increasing knowledge the redeemed shall increase joy, each new discovery sending a fresh wave of delight through the shining assembly; but to the lost, to increase knowledge shall be for ever and ever to increase sorrow. Knowledge shall increase, but knowledge shall be sorrow. They shall know more and more that they were their own destroyers, and this is sorrow. They shall know more and more that God is just in punishing them, and this is sorrowoh, may none of us know how gnawing! Seek that knowledge which leaves sorrow in the grave, not that which carries sorrow into eternity. Yes, though there will be a contemporaneous increase of knowledge and of sorrow, yet is it so certain that "they who sow in tears shall reap in joy;" and we beseech you to make it a prayer for yourselves, as it is ours for you, that you may grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

32

CHRIST STOPPING AT EMMAUS.

A Sermon

DELIVERED ON TUESDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 21, 1856,

BY THE REV. HENRY MELVILL, B.D.

(Chaplain in Ordinary to Her Majesty, and Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's,)

AT ST. MARGARET'S CHURCH, LOTHBURY.

"And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures ?"—Luke xxiv. 32.

MOST of you will remember at once the narrative which is connected with these words. Our blessed Lord and Saviour had on the third day risen from the dead, according to his oft repeated prophecy. He had already shown himself to certain of his followers, though so little were they in expectation of his resurrection that they could scarcely credit the evidence of their senses; and now, as the eventful day drew towards a close, and found many of the disciples bewildered, rather than convinced, it happened that two of them went towards a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about three score furlongs. As they walked they communed together and reasoned, their subject of discourse being, as appears from the sequel, the death of their Master and the strange rumour of his being yet alive. Whilst they are thus engaged in earnest conversation they are joined by another traveller, none other than the risen Redeemer himself; but their eyes were supernaturally holden, so that they had no suspicion who their companion was. Christ accosted them as one who had been observing the dejection of their deportment, as well as the earnestness of their discourse. "What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?" The answer of the disciples is one every way remarkable, as expressive of surprise that even a stranger in Jerusalem, as possibly he might be, could have any doubt as to the subject which was engrossing their thoughts. It is a striking testimony to the deep interest that was felt by all classes in the death of our Lord, that those who were discoursing concerning it on the high road took for granted that every one they met must know without asking what engaged their conversation. "Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?" On this our Lord, as though ignorant, demands, "What things?" designing to draw from them a statement of their feelings, on which he might ground an instructive discourse. His disciples then mentioned the crucifixion of Jesus and the disappearance of the body from the sepulchre, acknowledging at the same time what their hopes had been, and implying that they had been completely overthrown. "We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel." It was then that our Lord commenced what every Christian must have longed to possess-that sermon in which, "beginning at Moses and all