of God.  This great earth was here thousands and thousands of years before I was born, and it will be here perhaps millions and millions of years after I am dead; but it cannot harm me; it cannot kill me.  When earth, and sun, and stars are past away, I shall live for ever; for I am the immortal child of an Immortal Father, the child of the everlasting God.  These things He only made:  but me He begot unto everlasting life, in Jesus Christ my Lord.  I seem to depend on this earth for food, for clothing, for comfort, for life itself:  and yet I do not do so in reality; for man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God my Father.  In Him I have eternal life:  a life which this earth did not give, and cannot take away; a life which, by the mercy of my Father in heaven, I trust and hope to be living when sun and earth, stars and comets, are returned again to their dust, and blotted from the face of heaven.  For the kingdom, the glory, and the power of this world, and all other worlds, past, present, and to come, belong to Him who spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us, and will with Him freely give us all things.’

And thus, my friends, may God’s praise be perfected out of the mouth of any Christian child, when He declares that God put man a little lower than the angels only to crown him with the glory and worship of having the only-begotten Son of God take man’s nature upon Him, and walk this earth as a man, and live, and die, and rise again as a man, that so He might raise fallen man again to the glory and honour which God appointed for men from the beginning, when He said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:  and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and the beast of the earth; and be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.

SERMON XI.  AHAB AND NABOTH

1 Kings xxi. 2, 3.  And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house:  and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.  And Naboth said unto Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.

You heard to-day read for the first lesson, the story of Naboth and King Ahab.  Most of you know it well.  Naboth’s vineyard has passed into a proverb for something which we covet.

It is good that it should be so.  We cannot know our Bible too well; we cannot have Bible words and Bible thoughts too much worked into our ways of talking and thinking about everyday matters.  As far as I can see, the best days of England, the best days of every Christian country of which I ever read, have been days when men were not ashamed of their Bibles; when they were ready to live by their Bibles; to ask