lped
him up branded on it from top to bottom? Take _this_ staff and lean on
it. Live your creed, and you will believe your creed as you never will
until you do. Obedience takes a man up to an elevation from which he
sees further into the deep harmonies of truth. In all regions of life
the principle holds good: 'To him that hath shall be given.' And it
holds eminently in reference to our grasp of Christian principles. Use
them and they grow; neglect them and they perish. Sometimes a man dies
in a workhouse who has a store of guineas and notes wrapped up in rags
somewhere about him; and so they have been of no use to him. If you want
your capital to increase, trade with it. As the Lord said when He gave
the servants their talents: 'Trade with them till I come.' The creed
that is utilised is the creed that grows. And that is why so many of you
Christian people have so little real intellectual grasp of the
principles of Christianity, because you have not lived upon them, nor
tried to do it.

And, in like manner, another side of this thought is, be true to your
convictions. There is no such barrier to a larger and wholesomer view of
our duty as the neglect of anything that plainly is our duty. It stands
there, an impassable cliff between us and all progress. Let us live and
be what we know we ought to be, and we shall know better what we ought
to be at the next moment.

II. Secondly, let me put the Apostle's meaning in another exhortation,
Go on as you have begun.

'Whereunto we have already attained, by the same let us walk.' The
various points to which the men have reached are all points in one
straight line; and the injunction of my text is 'Keep the road.' There
are a great many temptations to stray from it. There are nice smooth
grassy bits by the side of it where it is a great deal easier walking.
There are attractive things just a footstep or two out of the path--such
a little deviation that it can easily be recovered. And so, like
children gathering daisies in the field, we stray away from the path;
and, like men on a moor, we then look round for it, and it is gone. The
angle of divergence may be the acutest possible; the deviation when we
begin may be scarcely visible, but if you draw a line at the sharpest
angle and the least deviation from a straight line, and carry it out far
enough, there will be space between it and the line from which it
started ample to hold a universe. Then, let us take care of small
dev