not preserve them. Their safety is in watchfulness and prayer : in watchfulness, that they give not occasion to Satan to inflame their souls with evil : and in prayer, that, as soon as any spark shall light upon them, it may be extinguished. To all, without exception, of whom it may be said, " Ye were some- times darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord," the exhortation that is added must be addressed ; " Walk as children of light."
In discoursing on these words, we shall be led to shew,
1. The change which all true Christians have expe- rienced—
" They once were darkness" —
[The term, " darkness," in Scripture language, imports ignorance, sin, and misery : and therefore most fitly expresses the state of unconverted men. The mind of the natural man is blind to the things of God : they are spiritual, and he can- not comprehend them for want of a spiritual discern mentb. He knows not the spirituality of God's law, or the total aliena- tion of his heart from God. He has no just views of the Divine perfections, no adequate sense of his need of a Re- deemer; no true perception of the beauty of holiness, or of the excellency of a life entirely devoted unto God. To himself he lives, and not to God: he is a law unto himself, and does nothing but with a view to the gratification of his own feelings. Pleasure, interest, and honour, are the gods whom he serves : and beyond the things of time and sense he has no object of ambition or pursuit. In this state he may find what the world calls happiness ; but to real happiness he is a stranger. What- ever satisfaction he feels, it is in a forgetfulness of eternal things that he feels it, and not in the contemplation of them. The thought of death and judgment is appalling to him ; and is sufficient to make him, like Belshazzar, tremble in the midst of all his mirth ; so that " his countenance shall change, and his knees smite one against the other0." It is the heart- searching God who says, that there is " no real peace to such persons'1," but that "destruction and misery are in their wayse."
Nor let it be thought that this is the character of some only whose wickedness has been of a more flagrant nature : for
b 1 Cor. ii. 14. c Dan. v. 6.
* Isai. lvii. 20, 21. e Rom. iii. 1G, 17.