as never been a time when
it has reached a more senseless, sinful, and destroying height than
in our day. The rapid growth of wealth, with no capacity of using it
nobly, which modern commerce has brought, has immensely influenced
all our churches for evil. It is so hard for us, aggregated in great
cities, to live our own lives, and the example of our class has such
immense power over us that it is very hard to pursue the path of
'plain living and high thinking' in communities, all classes of which
are more and more yielding to the temptation to ostentation,
so-called comfort, and extravagant expenditure; and that this is a
danger--we are tempted to say _the_ danger--to the purity, loftiness,
and vigour of religious life among us, he must be blind who cannot
see, and he must be strangely ignorant of his own life who cannot
feel that it is the danger for him. I believe that for one professing
Christian whose earnestness is lost by reason of intellectual doubts,
or by some grave sin, there are a hundred from whom it simply oozes
away unnoticed, like wind out of a bladder, so that what was once
round and full becomes limp and flaccid. If Demas begins with loving
the present world, it will not be long before he finds a reason for
departing from Paul.

We may take these two sisters, finally, as pointing for us the true
victory over this formidable enemy. They had turned resolutely away
from the heathen ideal enshrined in their names to a life of real
hard toil, as is distinctly implied by the word used by the Apostle.
What that toil consisted in we do not know, and need not inquire; but
the main point to be noted is that their 'labour' was 'in the Lord.'
That union with Christ makes labour for Him a necessity, and makes it
possible. 'The labour we delight in physics pain'; and if we are in
Him, we shall not only 'live in Him,' but all our work begun,
continued, and ended in Him, will in Him and by Him be accepted.
There is no victorious antagonist of worldly ease and self-indulgence
comparable to the living consciousness of union with Jesus and His
life in us. To dwell in the swamps at the bottom of the mountain is
to live in a region where effort is impossible and malaria weakens
vitality; to climb the heights brings bracing to the limbs and a
purer air into the expanding lungs, and makes work delightsome that
would have been labour down below. If we are 'in the Lord,' He is our
atmosphere, and we can draw from Him full dra