ths of his tripled heads. What do
wealth and ambition do for their votaries? And even he who thirsts for
nobler occupations and lives for higher aims is often obliged to admit,
in weariness, that 'this also is vanity.'

But even when the desire is satisfied, the man desiring is not. To feed
their bodies men starve their souls. How many longings are crushed or
neglected by him who pushes eagerly after any one longing! We have
either to race from one course to another, splitting life into
intolerable distractions, or we have to circumscribe and limit ourselves
in order to devote all our power to securing one; and if we secure it,
then a hundred others will bark like a kennel of hounds.

And if you say, 'I know nothing about all this; I have my aims, and on
the whole I secure a tolerable satisfaction for them,' do you not know a
nameless unrest? If you do not, then you are so much the poorer and the
lower, and you have murdered part of yourself. Some one single tyrannous
desire sits solitary in your heart. He has slain all his brethren that
he may rule, as sultans used to do in Constantinople. One big fish in
the aquarium has eaten up all the others.

God only satisfies the soul. It is only the 'bread which came down from
Heaven,' of which if we eat our souls shall live, and be filled as with
marrow and fatness. That One is all-sufficient in His Oneness.
Possessing Him, we know no satiety; possessing Him, we do not need to
maim any part of our nature; possessing Him, we shall not covet divers
multifarious objects. The loftiest powers of the soul find in Him their
adequate, inexhaustible, eternal object. The lowest desires may, like
the beasts of the forest, seek their meat from God. If we take Him for
our own and live on Him by faith, our blessed experience will be, 'I am
full: I have all and abound.'

III. The godless life is one of futile defences.

'Ye clothe you, but there is none warm.' The clothing was to guard
against the nipping air that blew shrewdly on their hills, and it failed
to keep them from the weather. We may be indulging in fancy in this
application of our text, but still raiment is as needful as food, and
its failure to answer its purpose points to a real sorrow and
insufficiency of a life lived without God. In it there is no real
defence against the manifold evils which storm upon all of us. When the
bitter, biting weather comes, what have you to shelter you from the cold
blast? Some rags of stoica