ut a man 'pulling himself
together.' Just as an English workman will draw his belt a hole tighter
when he has some special task to do, so Peter says to us, make a
definite effort, with resolute bracing up and concentration of all your
powers, or you will never see the grace that is hurrying towards you
through the centuries. There are abundance of loose, slack-braced people
up and down the world, in all departments, and they never come to any
good. It is a shame that any man should have his thoughts so loosely
girt and vagrant as that any briar by the roadside can catch them and
hinder his advance. But it is a tenfold shame for Christian people, with
such an object to gaze upon, that they should let their minds be
dissipated all over the trivialities of Time, and not gather them
together and project them, as I may say, with all their force towards
the sovereign realities of Eternity. A sixpence held close to your eye
will blot out the sun, and the trifles of earth close to us will prevent
us from realising the things which neither sight, nor experience, nor
testimony reveal to us, unless with clenched teeth, so to speak, we make
a dogged effort to keep them in mind.

The other preliminary and condition is 'being sober,' which of course
you have to extend to its widest possible signification, implying not
merely abstinence from, or moderate use of, intoxicants, or material
good for the appetites, but also the withdrawing of one's self sometimes
wholly from, and always restraining one's self in the use of, the
present and the material. A man has only a given definite quantity of
emotion and interest to expend, and if he flings it all away on the
world he has none left for Heaven. He will be like the miller that
spoils some fair river, by diverting its waters into his own sluice, in
order that he may grind some corn. If you have the faintest film of dust
on the glass of the telescope, or on its mirror, if it is a reflecting
one, you will not see the constellations in the heavens; and if we have
drawn over our spirits the film of earthly absorption, all these bright
glories above will, so far as we are concerned, cease to be.

So, brethren, there is a solemn responsibility laid upon us by the gift
of that great faculty of looking before and after. What did God make you
and me capable of anticipating the future for? That we might let our
hopes run along the low levels, or that we might elevate them and twine
them round the