lected because it is brief and general. Sparta, after all, is
the best place for a man to live in, next to Jerusalem.

But, passing from that, let us turn to the higher subject with which the
Apostle is here evidently mainly concerned. What is the meaning of the
exhortation 'Be sober'? Well, first let me tell you what I think is not
the meaning of it. It does not mean an unemotional absence of fervour in
your Christian character.

There is a kind of religious teachers who are always preaching down
enthusiasm, and preaching up what they call a 'sober standard of
feeling' in matters of religion. By which, in nine cases out of ten,
they mean precisely such a tepid condition as is described in much less
polite language, when the voice from heaven says, 'Because thou art
neither cold nor hot I will spue thee out of My mouth.' That is the real
meaning of the 'sobriety' that some people are always desiring you to
cultivate. I should have thought that the last piece of furniture which
any Christian Church in the twentieth century needed was a refrigerator!
A poker and a pair of bellows would be very much more needful for them.
For, dear brethren, the truths that you and I profess to believe are of
such a nature, so tremendous either in their joyfulness and beauty, or
in their solemnity and awfulness, that one would think that if they once
got into a man's head and heart, nothing but the most fervid and
continuous glow of a radiant enthusiasm would correspond to their
majesty and overwhelming importance. I venture to say that the only
consistent Christian is the enthusiastic Christian; and that the only
man who will ever do anything in this world for God or man worth doing
is the man who is not _sober_, according to that cold-blooded definition
which I have been speaking about, but who is all ablaze with an
enkindled earnestness that knows no diminution and no cessation.

Paul, the very man that is exhorting here to sobriety, was the very type
of an enthusiast all his life. So Festus thought him mad, and even in
the Church at Corinth there were some to whom in his fervour, he seemed
to be 'beside himself' (2 Cor. v. 13).

Oh! for more of that insanity! You may make up your minds to this; that
any men or women that are in thorough earnest, either about Christianity
or about any other great, noble, lofty, self-forgetting purpose, will
have to be content to have the old Pentecostal charge flung at
them:--'These men are full of n