from his troubles.

Is the breed extinct, think you? Is there any one among us who, if he
cannot get what he wants by fair ways, will try to get it by foul? Do
none of you ever bow down to Satan for a slice of the kingdoms of this
world? Ahaz has still plenty of brothers and sisters in all our
churches and chapels.

This story illustrates for us what, alas! is only too true, both on
the broad scale, as to the generation in which we live, and on the
narrower field of our own individual lives. Look at the so-called
cultured classes of Europe to-day; turning away, as so many of them
are, from the Lord God of their fathers; what sort of gods are they
worshipping instead? Scraps from Buddhism, the Vedas, any sacred books
but the Bible; quackeries, and charlatanism, arid dreams, and
fragmentary philosophies all pieced together, to try and make up a
whole, instead of the old-fashioned whole that they have left behind
them. There are men and women in many congregations who, in modern
fashion, are doing precisely the thing that Ahaz did--having abandoned
Christianity, they are trying to make up for it by hastily stitching
together shreds and patches that they have found in other systems.
'The garment is narrower than that a man can wrap himself in it,' and
a creed patched together so will never make a seamless whole which can
be trusted not to rend.

But look, further, how the same thing is true as to the individual
lives of godless men.

Many of us are trying to make up for not having the One by seeking to
stay our hearts on the many. But no accumulation of insufficiencies