Yet we live in a gay world that rings everywhere with hollow laughter. Around us are the sights and sounds of mirth, by which vain men are seeking to cheat away their ever-fretting uneasiness, to soothe their ruffled consciences, or to drown their bitterer sorrows. Oftentimes the saints seem to catch the tone of levity, making mirth with the most mirthful, jesting with the most foolish, singing, perhaps, the world's songs of vanity,
130 THE SOLEMNIZING.
speaking its idle words, walking in its vain paths as if its friendships and pleasures were not forbidden things.
Apart, however, from the contagion of the world's influence, our tone is apt to fall low and our deportment to lose that solidity and seriousness which become the saints. Almost unconsciously and without knowing how, we get light and airy ; we give way to the cur- rent of vain thoughts ; we forget to set a guard upon our lips ; we indulge in foolish talking and jesting in our meetings with each other. Our words are not "with grace, sea- soned with salt." We forget the admonition, " let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouths, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace to the hearers."
This propensity grows upon us. Serious- ness becomes a thing reserved entirely for (he closet or the sanctuary. We forget our character as saints, called out of darkness and " delivered from a present evil world." We lose sight of our heavenly parentage and di- vine adoption. Our whole habits of thought, feeling, speaking and doing, too much resem- ble the flippancy of a heedless3 light-hearted
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world, whose maxim is, "let us eat, drink, and be merry."
Thus our spirituality decays. Heavenly- mindedness is gone. We become of the earth, earthly. Our souls cleave to the dust, and we are content to grovel there. We become lean and barren, neither growing ourselves nor helping the growth of others. Our blos- soms send forth no fragrance, our branches bear no fruit.
> We grieve the Holy Spirit of God whereby i we are sealed unto the day of redemption. i He cannot dwell with levity and mirth any » more than amid profanity and crime. He i retires from the temple into which he had J come, and in which he would fain make his \ abode forever, driven out from it by the laugh-
* ter and jesting with which we were making » its consecrated walls to resound. How can , he dwell in a temple which, from being a
• house of God and a house of prayer, we have » turned into a place of merchandize, a hall of
- revelry, a haunt of mirth and song ?
I do not mean, as I have said before, that the saint is ever to be gloomy. No. Gloom and melancholy are not our portion. " The lines have fallen unto us in pleasant places."
132 THE SOLEMNIZING.
They are not the inmates of a soul that has tasted the joy of pardon and is walking in light, as a happy child with a loving father. But true joy is a serious thing. Its fountains are deep. It is the waking up of the heart's deep springs. Mirth and levity are not joy. They are too shallow to deserve the name. * Like the sun-flash on a stagnant pool, they are a mere surface gleam of light. There is nothing in them of the calm radiance, illumi- nating the ocean depths, many a fathom down, as if the waters themselves were a mass of solid sunshine, and remaining amid the heaving of the billows, unbroken and unobscured. In coming to him, who is the fountain of all gladness, the saint of God bids farewell to gloom. Tribulation he may have, — nay, must have, — but not gloom. That has left him forever since the day he knew the Saviour, and opened his ears to the joyful sound. Peace is now his heritage.
But still it is not levity that is his portion. It is joy. And this joy is not only far superior to this vain mirth, but it is utterly inconsist- ent with it. This levity is as much an enemy to real joy as it is to holiness and spirituality. Hence, it must be rooted up.
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God cannot suffer it in his children. His desire is that they should set their affections on things above. This element of earthliness must be purged out. They must be made solemn and thoughtful. For this end, he visits them with chastisement. In a moment, perhaps, he smites them to the dust; or, by some more slow but withering, crushing calam- ity, he slays and casts out that foolishness which had wrought itself into the very tex- ture of their being.
His purpose is to make them thoughtful and solemn. He lays on them accordingly something that will make them think. The blow prostrates them: and in a moment all levity is put to flight. They cannot laugh and jest now, when their home is desolate, and their hearts are bleeding. They are withdrawn from intercourse with an airy shadowy world, and sent into the very inmost recesses of their spiritual being, or forward to the infinite eter- nity, whose vastness they had been but little alive to.