false pretences. Recruiting-sergeants tell country bumpkins or city
louts wonderful stories of what they will get if they take the
shilling and put on the king's uniform; but Jesus Christ does not
recruit His soldiers in that fashion. If a man does not open his eyes
to a clear vision of the consequences of his actions, his life will go
to water in all directions. And there is no region in which such clear
insight into what is going to follow upon my determinations and the
part that I take is more necessary than in the Christian life. It is
just because in certain types of character, 'the word is received with
joy,' and springs up immediately, that when 'the sun is risen with a
burning heat'--that is, as Christ explains, when the pinch of
difficulty comes--'immediately they fall away,' and all their grand
resolutions go to nothing. 'Lightly come, lightly go.' Let us face the
facts of what is involved, in the way of sacrifice, surrender, loss,
if we determine to be on Christ's side; and then, when the anticipated
difficulties come, we shall neither be perplexed nor swept away, but
be able quietly to say, 'I discounted it all beforehand; I knew it was
coming.' The storm catches the ship that is carrying full sail and
expecting nothing but light and favourable breezes; while the captain
that looked into the weather quarter and saw the black cloud beginning
to rise above the horizon, and took in his sails and made his vessel
snug and tight, rides out the gale. It is wisdom that becomes a man,
to ask this question, if first of all he has asked, 'What ought I to
do?'

But we have here an instance of a right thing in a wrong place. It was
right to ask the question, but wrong to ask it at that point. Amaziah
thought nothing about duty. There sprang up in his mind at once the
cowardly and ignoble thought: 'I cannot afford to do what is right,
because it will cost me a hundred talents,' and that was his sin.