state the
call to us is to pray; in our hard state there is equal need for both.
And even in our best moods, when we are not hard, nor careless, nor
over-busy, when we are at once sober and earnest and gentle, then not
least does Christ call upon us to watch and to pray, that we may retain
that than which else no gleam of April sunshine was ever more fleeting;
that we may perfect that which else is of the earth, earthly, and when
we lie down in the dust will wither and come to dust also.

Jesus Christ brought life and immortality, it is said, to light through
the gospel. He brought life and immortality to light:--is this indeed
true as far as we are concerned? What do we think would be the
difference in this point between many of us--who will dare say how
many?--and a school, I will not say of Jewish, but even of Greek or
Roman or Egyptian boys, eighteen hundred, or twenty-four hundred, or
three or four thousand years ago? Compare us at our worship with them,
and then, I grant, the difference would appear enormous. We have no
images, making the glory of the incorruptible God like to corruptible
man; we have no vain stream of incense; no shedding of the blood of
bulls and calves in sacrifice: the hymns which are sung here are not
vain repetitions or impious fables, which gave no word of answer to
those questions which it most concerns mankind to know. Here, indeed,
Jesus Christ is truly set forth, crucified among us; here life and
immortality are brought to light. But follow us out of this place,--to
our respective pursuits and amusements, to our social meetings, or our
times of solitary thought,--and wherein do we seem to see life and
immortality more brightly revealed than to those heathen schools of old?
Do we enjoy any worldly good less keenly, or less shrink from any
worldly evil? Death, which to the heathen view was the end of all
things, is to us (so our language goes) the gate of life. Do we think of
it with more hope and less fear than the heathen did? Christ has risen,
and has reconciled us to God. Is God more to us?--God now revealed to us
as our reconciled Father--do we oftener think of him, do we love him
better, than he was thought of and loved in those heathen schools, which
had Homer's poetry for their only gospel? We talk of light, of
revelation, of the knowledge of God, while verily and really we are
walking, not in light, but in darkness: not in knowledge of God, but in
blindness and hardness of heart