experience, or of natural age, they
equally carry the lesson that no age and no stage is beyond the danger
of being drawn away by the world's love, or beyond the need of the
solemn dehortation therefrom.

My text is the second of the reasons which the Apostle gives for his
earnest charge. We all, therefore, need it, and we always need it;
though on the last Sunday of another year, it may be more than usually
appropriate to turn our thoughts in its direction. 'The world passeth
away, and the lust thereof.' Let us lay the handful of snow on our
fevered foreheads and cool our desires.

Now there are but two things set forth in this text, which is a great
and wonderful antithesis between something which is in perpetual flux
and passage and something which is permanent. If I might venture to
cast the two thoughts into metaphorical form, I should say that here are
a river and a rock. The one, the sad truth of sense, universally
believed and as universally forgotten; the other, the glad truth of
faith, so little regarded or operative in men's lives.

I ask you, then, to look with me for a few moments at each of these
thoughts.

I. First, then, the river, or the sad truth of sense.

Now you observe that there are two things in my text of which this
transiency is predicated, the one 'the world,' the other 'the lust
thereof'; the one outside us, the other within us. As to the former, I
need only, I suppose, remind you in a sentence that what John means by
'the world' is not the material globe on which we dwell, but the whole
aggregate of things visible and material, together with the lives of the
men whose lives are directed to, and bounded by, that visible and
material, and all considered as wrenched apart from God. That, and not
the mere external physical creation, is what he means by 'the world,'
and therefore the passing away of which he speaks is not only (although,
of course, it includes) the decay and dissolution of material things,
but the transiency of things which are or have to do with the visible,
and are separated by us from God. Over all these, he says, there is
written the sentence, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.'
There is a continual flowing on of the stream. As the original implies
even more strongly than in our translation, 'the world' is in the act of
'passing away.' Like the slow travelling of the scenes of some moveable
panorama which glide along, even as the eye looks upon them, and a