ltogether 'men of the
world, whose portion is in this life,' is for us broken, and we are
strangers, scattered abroad, solitary, not by reason of the inevitable
loneliness in which, after all love and companionship, every soul lives;
not by reason of losses or deaths, but by reason of the contrariety
between the foundation of our lives, and the foundation of the lives of
the men round us; therefore we stand lonely in the midst of crowds;
strangers in the ordered communities of the world.

Ah, there is no solitude so utter as the solitude of being the only man
in a crowd that has a faith in his heart, and there is no isolating
power like the power of rending all ties that true attachment with Jesus
Christ has. 'Think not that I am come to bring peace on earth, but a
sword'--to set a man against his own household, if they be not of the
household of faith. These things are the inevitable issues of
religion--to make us strangers, isolated in the midst of this world.

And now let us think of--

II. Some of the plain consequent duties that arise from this
characteristic of the Christian Life.

Let me put them in the shape of one or two practical counsels. First let
us try to keep up, vivid and sharp, a sense of separation. I do not mean
that we should withdraw ourselves from sympathies, nor from services,
nor from the large area of common ground which we have with our fellows,
whether they be Christians or no--with our fellow-citizens; with those
who are related to us by various bonds, by community of purpose, of aim,
of opinion, or of affection. But just as Abraham was willing to go down
into the plain and fight for Lot, though he would not go down and live
in Sodom, and just as he would enter into relations of amity with the
men of the land, and yet would not abandon his black camels'-hair tent,
pitched beneath the terebinth tree, in order to go into their city and
abide with them, so one great part of the wisdom of a Christian man is
to draw the line of separation decisively, and yet to keep true to the
bond of union. Unless Christian people do make a distinct effort to keep
themselves apart from the world and its ways, they will get confounded
with these, and when the end comes they will be destroyed with them.

Sometimes voyagers find upon some lonely island an English castaway, who
has forgotten home, and duty, and everything else, to luxuriate in an
easy life beneath tropical skies, and has degraded himself to the