e which make them the
lights of the world. We advance no claims to any illumination as to
other than moral or religious truth. We leave all the other fields
uncontested. We bow humbly with confessed ignorance and with unfeigned
gratitude and admiration before those who have laboured in them, as
before our teachers, but if we are true to our Master, and true to the
position in which He has placed us, we shall not be ashamed to say that
we believe ourselves to know the truth, in so far as men can ever know
it, about the all-important subject of God and man, and the bond between
them.

To-day there is need, I think, that Christian men and women should not
be reasoned or sophisticated or cowed out of their confidence that they
have the light because they do know God. It is proclaimed as the
ultimate word of modern thought that we stand in the presence of a power
which certainly is, but of which we can know nothing except that it is
altogether different from ourselves, and that it ever tempts us to
believe that we can know it, and ever repels us into despair. Our answer
is Yes! we could have told you that long ago, though not altogether in
your sense; you have got hold of half a truth, and here is the whole of
it:--'No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him!' (a Gospel of
despair, verified by the last words of modern thinkers), 'the only
begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared
Him.'

Christian men and women, 'Ye are the light of the world.' Darkness in
yourselves, ignorant about many things, ungifted with lofty talent, you
have possession of the deepest truth; do not be ashamed to stand up and
say, even in the presence of Mars' Hill, with all its Stoics and
Epicureans:--'Whom ye ignorantly'--alas! not 'worship'--'Whom ye
ignorantly speak of, Him declare we unto you.'

And then there is the other side, which I only name, moral purity. Light
is the emblem of purity as well as the emblem of knowledge, and if we
are Christians we have within us, by virtue of our possession of an
indwelling Christ, a power which teaches and enables us to practise a
morality high above the theories and doings of the world. But upon this
there is the less need to dwell, as it was involved in our consideration
of the previous figure of the salt.

II. And now the next point that I would make is this, following the
words before us--the certainty that if we are light we shall shine.

The nature and property of