amongst the sons of earth if God is to be your inheritance. Or, to put
it into plain words, there must be a giving up of the material and the
created if there is to be a possession of the divine and the heavenly.
There cannot be _two_ supreme, any more than there can be two
pole-stars, one in the north and the other in the south, to both of
which a man can be steering. You cannot stand with

'One foot on land, and one on sea,
To one thing constant never.'

If you are to have God as your supreme good, you must empty your heart
of earth and worldly things, or your possession of Him will be all
words, and imagination, and hypocrisy. Brethren! I wish to bring that
message to your consciences to-day.

And what is this renunciation? There must be, first of all, a fixed,
deliberate, intelligent conviction lying at the foundation of my life
that God is best, and that He and He only is my true delight and desire.
Then there must be built upon that intelligent conviction that God is
best, the deliberate turning away of the heart from these material
treasures. Then there must be the willingness to abandon the outward
possession of them, if they come in between us and Him. Just as
travellers in old days, that went out looking for treasures in the
western hemisphere, were glad to empty their ships of their less
precious cargo in order to load them with gold, you must get rid of the
trifles, and fling these away if ever they so take up your heart that
God has no room there. Or rather, perhaps, if the love of God in any
real measure, howsoever imperfectly, once gets into a man's soul, it
will work there to expel and edge out the love and regard for earthly
things. Just as when the chemist collects oxygen in a vessel filled with