o far as the flow of the fountain is
concerned. Always having had I may be sure that I always shall have. Of
course I know that, in so far as our physical nature conditions our
spiritual experience, there will be ups and downs, moments of
emancipation and moments of slavery. There will be times when the flower
opens, and times when it shuts itself up. But I am sure that the great
mass of Christian people might have a far more level temperature in
their Christian experience than they have; that we could, if we would,
have far more experimental knowledge of this 'always' of my text. God
means that the basin should be always full right up to the top of the
marble edge, and that the more is drawn off from it, the more should
flow into it. But it is very often like the reservoirs in the hills for
some great city in a drought, where great stretches of the bottom are
exposed, and again, when the drought breaks, are full to the top of the
retaining wall. That should not be. Our Christian life should run on the
high levels. Why does it not? Possibilities are duties.

And now, lastly, we have here what, adhering to my metaphor, I call

III. The stream.

'That ye, always having all-sufficiency in all things, may abound to
every good work.'

That is what God gives us His grace for; and that is a very important
consideration. The end of God's dealings with us, poor, weak, sinful
creatures, is character and conduct. Of course you can state the end in
a great many other ways; but there have been terrible evils arising from
the way in which Evangelical preachers have too often talked, as if the
end of God's dealings with us was the vague thing which they call
'salvation,' and by which many of their hearers take them to mean
neither more nor less than dodging Hell. But the New Testament, with all
its mysticism, even when it soars highest, and speaks most about the
perfection of humanity, and the end of God's dealings being that we may
be 'filled with the fulness of God,' never loses its wholesome, sane
hold of the common moralities of daily life, and proclaims that we
receive all, in order that we may be able to 'maintain good works for
necessary uses.' And if we lay that to heart, and remember that a
correct creed, and a living faith, and precious, select, inward emotions
and experiences are all intended to evolve into lives, filled and
radiant with common moralities and 'good works'--not meaning thereby the
things which go by that