I have kept to general language, to general views, perhaps too much; but all the time my mind has been fixed on the particular application of this, which lies scarcely beneath the surface, but which I cannot well bear more fully to unveil.  But whoever has attended to what I have been saying, will be able, I should trust, to make the application, for himself, to those points in our society which most need correction.  He will be able to understand how it is that the influence of the place is not better, while it undoubtedly contains so much of good; how the public opinion of a Christian school may yet be, in many respects, very unchristian.  If he has attended at all to what I have said about our so rarely being in earnest, he will see something of the mischief of some of those publications, of those books, of that tone of conversation, which, I suppose, are here, as elsewhere, in fashion.  Utterly impossible is it to lay down a rule for others in such matters:  to say this book is too light, or this is an excess of light reading, or this laugh was too unrestrained, or that tone of trifling too perpetual.  But, in these things, we should all judge ourselves; and remember that you are so little under outward restraint, your choice of reading is so free, your intercourse with one another so wholly uncontrolled, that, enjoying thus the full liberty of more advanced years, you incur also their responsibility.  There is, doubtless, an excess of light reading, both in kind and in quantity; there is such a thing as a tone of conversation and manner too entirely, and too frequently, trifling.  And you must be quite aware that we are placed here for something else than to indulge such a temper as this.  Cheerfulness and thoughtlessness have no necessary connexion; the lightest spirits, which are indeed one of the greatest of earthly blessings, often play around the most earnest thought and the tenderest affection, and with far more grace than when they are united with the shallowness and hardness of him who is, in the sight of God, a fool.  It were a strange notion, that we could never be merry without intoxication, yet not stranger than to think that mirth is the companion only of folly or of sin.  But, setting God in Christ before us, then the conscience is awake; then we are in earnest; then we measure things rightly; then we feel them strongly; then we love those that are good, and shun those that are evil; then we learn that sin is no matter of laughter, that it ill deserves to be clothed under a ludicrous name; for that thing which we laugh at, that which we so miscall, is indeed the cause of infinite evil; for that Christ died; for that there are some who die that death which lasts for ever.

LECTURE XVIII.

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GENESIS xxvii. 38.

And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father?  Bless me, even me also, O my father.