ADVANTAGES OF STUDYING THE

THREE BOOKS.

Morning, July 23rd, 1876.

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind."-LUKE X. 27.*

I SHALL ask you to consider again this morning what it is to love God with the mind.

"Putting your heart into unpleasant duties" is quite possible; but it is a secret which comes late. It is often late in life before a man can say, "Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage." He begins with statutes (and who can fall in love with statutes?), and, by degrees,

* This discourse resumes and continues the last, and the reader must expect a little recapitulation; but the repeated thought is always differently clothed, and it would have been a loss to suppress it.

through putting his mind into it, his heart begins to glow, and that which was a stony table becomes at last a song. But a man must not ask for that in the morning of life. It is afternoon wisdom; evening glory. If you can seldom put your heart in it, therefore, put your mind in it, till by-and-by you learn to love it. Where the heart is in it, the fingers grow nimble, and the brain is quickened.

Christ claims that God is to be loved with all our nature. They who love God, then, with the heart only, do sin. You are to love God with all your mind, with all your brain, and thought, and power; with reason and with argument; with learning and knowledge. No pretence that you love God with your heart, absolves you from loving Him with your mind-your soul and mind, in communion. Did it ever strike you that being ignorant is disservice to God; so much withdrawn from the Almighty? To the degree that you refuse to love the sublime study of nature; to that degree I have no pity for your ignorance. It is a failure in your service; a coldness in your love to God.

To some of you, I expect it will be a new light in which to view this question, that a Christian man should be bound to be a learned man. the wonders of folly are done with; from around

But

There was

the foolish man the halo is departed. that poor boy, who, with his piece of string and his beads, studied Venus and Saturn, and mapped the relative positions of the stars. That boy was very fervent, and pious; he was giving his mind to it; and the string and the beads-ah! they did their work, they sufficed. Therefore, all pleas about opportunities" are of no account. If your knife is blunt, you must put on more force. If you have but a few minutes in which to do a thing, you must put more steam on. Of all whimpering, "I have had such small opportunities" is the most feeble and inexcusable. The time has come when we must utterly refuse to pity people for their ignorance. If you love God with all your mind, you will do what you do when you love a great author. You may say, "Of all authors, I think Shakespeare is the greatest; but I have never read one of his plays, never studied one of his sonnets." Indeed! What do you do, then, to show your love to Shakespeare ? "Oh, I talk about him." He who loves an author well, turns his pages again and again; weighs his words, and marks their construction. If he reads. the "Merchant of Venice," he studies it attentively, and proposes to himself to go back to his labour of love again and again. I don't know who is your

darling; but I know it is the author with whom you are most familiar. And that is what loving God with all your mind is. You must love the actions that He has done. The three great volumes of God which you should study, are before every one of you. There is the splendid volume of Nature; that book over which the great Hebrew writer says, God looked while He rested from His labours, not with the rest of weariness, but with the drawing back of an artist, when the last stroke is struck-looked at it and saw that it was good. They who love God with all their mind, will, as time suffers them, read that great volume of Nature through and through.

The study of science is one of the ways of loving God with your mind. The study of the sciences of the geologist and the physiologist will help you so to love God. All libraries, all learning, all science, all skill, are aids to loving God. If a man looks upon a tree as merely something inanimate, that man is not loving God with all his mind. The instructed man beholds in it blood, pulse, and life; and he knows that that tree has a relationship to all things; that there is only One Spirit in the world, that all things are one, one only, one ever and the same.

This afternoon, if you will take down some book about nature, and study it, you will be learning to love God with all your mind. "But I should not study science on Sunday, should I?" Yes, if I had time, I should. For I should be looking upon the works of God, and looking upon them with love.

And History, the whole of history, is a volume full of the love of God. It should be constantly opened. To read of all the great men who have benefited the world, will help you to love God with your mind. It is this miserable way of saying, “I should like to know these things, but——” Well, know them, then. If you are ignorant, there is no excuse for you.

And we will call this Bible the third volume. For though we recognize all Scriptures, nevertheless, because this book does, more clearly than any other book, affirm the presence of God, as the guide of man's story, we give this Book a place—not putting it altogether in the place of Nature, or in the place of History-but we give it a place of its own, as the companion of man when his heart and eyes are most fixed upon God. It is full of the defects and immoralities of patriarchs, kings, and others; but it is also full of the communicated glories of the Lord God, whom these people served.

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