simple, temperate life, wandering to and fro with their tents and
cattle, instead of dwelling in great cities, and making money, and
becoming what is now-a-days called civilized, in luxury and
covetousness. Surely according to the wisdom of this world, the
Rechabites were foolish enough. But it is the wisdom of this world
itself--not simplicity and loyalty like theirs--which is foolishness
with God.

My friends, let us all take warning, each man for himself. When a
nation corrupts itself--as we seem inclined to do now, by luxury and
covetousness, selfishness and self-will, forgetting more and more
loyalty and order, honesty and high principle--then some wholesome,
but severe judgment of God, is sure to come upon that nation: a day
in which all faces shall gather blackness: a day of gloominess and
thick darkness, like the morning spread upon the mountains.

For the eternal laws of God's providence are still at work, though we
choose to forget them; and the Judge who administers them is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, even Jesus Christ the Lord, the
everlasting Rock, on which all morality and all society is founded.
Whosoever shall fall on that Rock in repentance and humility,
confessing, bewailing, and forsaking his worldliness and sinfulness,
he shall indeed be broken: but of him it is written, 'The sacrifices
of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise.' And he shall find that Rock, even Christ, a
safe standing-ground amid the slippery mire of this world's
temptations, and the storms and floods of trouble which are coming--
it may be in our children's days--it may be in our own.

But he who hardens his heart: he who says proudly, 'We are they that