October 27

Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

No man can serve two masters: ye cannot serve God and Mammon. S. Matthew 6:24.

IT is impossible at the same time to love two things opposite to each other; to love the ease and honour of the world and the self-denial and humility which is found in the Cross of Christ. You must serve the Lord in and through your worldly calling; you must make your worldly calling subservient to the love of God and His service, or else they are sinful; they prevent you from loving God and cleaving to Him. Remember that One is the Spirit of grace, though manifold His gifts, manifold the things in us which, unless His Divine glow absorb them, will exclude Himself. Uncreated "Wisdom," says the wise man, "will not dwell in the body that is subject unto sin." Spiritual sins may be even in more direct antagonism to the Holy Spirit than grosser offences. For the sins of this poor flesh of ours may be sins of weakness. Spiritual sins are sins of defiance of the human spirit against the Divine. "He errs whoso thinks that he can know the truth while he yet lives wickedly; but it is wickedness to love this world and account highly of the things which come into being and pass away, to covet them and labour to gain them, to be glad when they abound, to fear lest they perish, and when they perish to be saddened. Such a life cannot see that pure, undefiled, and unchangeable Good, and cleave to it, and never be moved."

Here on earth ye can but clasp Things that perish in the grasp; While ye may Lift your faces to the skies, Come away.