^ A poor little worldly maxim will have no attractions for a man who has been contemplating the Divine ideal. You know the sort of maxim to which I refer, the false lights which are offered me by the treacherous world. " Look after Number One ! " " The devil take the hindermost ! " " In Eome do as Eome does ! " " It does not do to be too particular ! " " You cannot do much unless you have a bit of the devil in you ! " These, I say, are the perilous lights which are born in miasma, and lead men into the sloughs of despond and the mire of wickedness. The godly man will be instinctively aloof from them. By his very diligence in the highest he will have a refined perception which will enable him to discern sin afar off. And he will reject its counsel as an offensive thing.^
1 Ruskin, " Unto This Last" ( Works, xvii. 28). ^ R. L. Stevenson, Aes Triplex.
^ J. H. Jowett, in The British Congrcgationalist, May 28, 1908. JOB-PS. XXX. — 12
178 THE MAN THAT IS BLESSED
II.
The Way of Sinners.
)
1. We are all sinners ; it behoves every one to say, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 0 Lord." But the class of persons here referred to are those who love sin, who roll it under the tongue as a sweet morsel, who not only have sinned, but do sin, and intend to sin, openly, unblushingly, and wittingly, when opportunity arises. These are the persons who "know a thing or two " — alas ! many things they might well be ignorant of. There is a terrible fascination about a man who has seen the world, especially its seamy side ; he is so jovial, so interesting, so charming — to the weak. These are the men who coined that dangerous phrase, " seeing life " — a phrase born not from above, but from below.
2. So another place that the happy man must avoid is " the way of sinners." In Isaiah's prophecy God gives it as one of the first things to do, when a man will turn from wickedness to righteousness and from sorrow to happiness, to get out of the way in which he has been going. He says, " Let the wicked forsake his way." " The way of sinners " is the way of sorrow and unhappiness. Whatever of good it promises, it is a false way. It may seem attractive, but you may be sure that the end of the way is misery.
\ A man who is accustomed to breathe the air of the uplands cannot endure the foulness of these unclean haunts. When our soldiers came back from the South African war, where they had been sleeping on the open veldt, with the wandering air blowing about them while they slept, they could not bear the fusty mustiness of the closed bedrooms at home. There is nothing like the open air to make one recoil from the stench. Let a man leave a crowded meeting, and go for a couple of minutes into the open air, and then let him return, and his revived perception will make a discovery from which he will shrink. And so it is in the life of the spirit ; once we have begun to find our delight in the will of the Lord we shall begin to wonder how we were ever able to " stand " in the ways of the world.^
^ J. H. Jowett, in The. British Congregationalis! , May 28, 1908.
PSALM I. I 179
III.
The Seat of the Scornful.
1. There is still this third place that a man, if he will be really happy, must avoid — " the seat of the scornful." We should notice this evolution in sin ; this going down the three steps. The first is the listening to the counsel of the ungodly until — it may be almost unconsciously — a man begins to walk in that counsel. The next step lower is where a man begins to stand in the way of sinners, and the third and worst of all is where he sits down in the seat of the scornful, God have mercy on the man who has already taken the third step in sin ; who not only walks in the counsel of the ungodly, and stands in the way of sinners, but sits in the seat of scorners ! God have mercy on the boy who has gone so far that he can make a joke of his mother's religion, that he can make a sneer about his father's God, that he can scorn the voice of God's Word that calls him to repentance ! The sarcasm and cynicism and scorn of a sharp wit is often very fascinating to young people, but the man who exercises it is never happy. It is a blossom which grows on a tree that is bitter at the heart.
2. Unless we set our back to the wall, and hit the scornful right from the shoulder, we are lost ; a nervous concession to him is fatal, — there is nothing for it but to stand erect and fight it out. Where an innocent youth who has just left home, and come to the city to mingle in business with all sorts and conditions of men, would despise the ungodly and fear the taint of the sinner, he would probably succumb to the scornful, and surrender under the fire of ridicule. The hardest thing in the world for a young religious person to endure is scorn.