SERMON IX. THE DANGER OF MISTAKING KNOWLEDGE FOR ST. JAMES i. 22, 23, 24. "But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." ST. JAMES is here warning the great body of the Church against a very common and subtle temptation; that is, the substituting of Christian knowledge for Christian obedience. The Gospel had in it such an overwhelming power of speculative and moral truth as to subdue a mixed multitude of men to a sort of professed allegiance to the mysteries of God. It came into the world as a veiled light of transcendent brightness, revealing the mystery of the Godhead, and the condition of mankind; resolving the doubts of the wise, and unravelling the perplexities of the unlearned; it laid open the secrets of the unseen world, and put a continuous meaning into the great movements of the world we see; it made man to know and to feel that he is a fallen and sinful being, and that God, of His great love, has pledged to him the forgiveness of his sins. And thus, as it declared the character of God, and the standing of man before Him, and the mysteries of life and death, and hell and heaven, it silenced the disputations of contending schools, and won men to itself by the yearnings of their hearts, and the convictions of their understanding, and the judgments of conscience, and a miraculous consent of will; it held up each man to himself, as in a mirror of supernatural truth, revealing depths of evil which men knew not before; and thus there was gathered round the Gospel a mixed and numberless multitude of all kinds and character of life; from the holiest to the least purified, from the man who is sanctified beyond the measure of his knowledge, to the man whose knowledge was as full as his life was unholy. Now this is the sin and the danger against which St. James warns them; against the sin, that is, of having knowledge without obedience, and the danger of hearing without doing the word of God. He tells them that all such knowledge is in vain, nay worse than in vain. And this is what we will more fully consider. 1. In the first place, we must remember that this knowledge without obedience ends in nothing. It is, as St. James says, like a man who looks at his own face in a glass. For a time he has the clearest perception of his own countenance; every line and feature, even the lightest expression, is visible, and, by the mysteriously retentive power of the mind, he holds it for a while in what we call the mind's eye but when he has gone his way, the whole image fades, and the vividness of other objects overpowers it, so that he becomes habitually more familiar with the aspect of all other things than with his own natural face. Nothing can better express the shallowness and fleetingness of knowledge without obedience. For the time it is vivid and exact, but it passes off in nothing -no resolution recorded in the conscience, or, if recorded, none maintained; no change of life, nothing done, or left undone, for the sake of the truth which is shadowed upon the understanding. And this is the folly which our Lord rebukes in the parable of the man that built his house upon the sand. He was not comparing the solidity of doctrinal foundations; but exhibiting the folly and disappointment of knowledge without obedience. Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand and 66 the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the fall of it."l 2. But it must also be considered that knowing without obeying is worse than in vain. It inflicts a deep and lasting injury upon the powers of our spiritual nature. Even in the hardest of men, a knowledge of Christianity produces an effect upon the conscience and the heart. It excites in a man certain convictions and emotions, and these are mysterious gifts of God; they are the first movements of the moral powers that are within us, the first impulse to set us in motion towards God. It is by these inward strivings that knowledge brings a man to repentance and to eternal life. But they are only movements and impulses—means to a further end, and good in so far as they attain that end. In their own nature they are most transitory: they can be prolonged only by issuing in obedience, and thereby settling into principle; or, if they issue in nothing, by keeping up a perpetual succession of the same excitements. Now here is the peril of habitually listening to truths which we habitually disobey. Every time we hear them, they goad the conscience, and stir the heart; but every time with a lessened force, and, as it were, with a blunter edge; —not, indeed, that they can St. Matthew vii. 26, 27. lose aught of their own power and keenness, but because the often-excited mind grows languid and dull; its senses, often acted on, are deadened; the passive powers of the mind wear out, as the ear seems to lose all hearing of familiar sounds, or as a pampered palate is vitiated and its functions destroyed. So it is with men who from their baptism have been familiar with the mysteries of Christ. In childhood, boyhood, manhood, the same sounds of warning, and promise, and persuasion, the same hopes and fears, have fallen on a heedless ear, and a still more heedless heart: they have lost their power over the man; he has acquired a settled habit of hearing without doing. The whole force of habit that strange mockery of nature-has reinforced his original reluctance to obey; and long familiarity with truth makes it all the harder to recognise, as the faces of those we most intimately know are often less distinct in our memory than those we have seen but seldom, and therefore noted all the more exactly. 3. But there is a yet further danger still; for knowledge without obedience is an arch-deceiver of mankind. "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” — deceiving, that is, as if you were any the nearer heaven for a cold, barren consciousness that the Gospel is the word of God, or a clear intellectual perception of |