But the next words are of more particular concern to us here.  “The world, and life, and death, and things present, and things to come, are all ours.”  They are all ours, so far as we are Christ’s.  The world is ours; its manifold riches and delights, its various wisdom, all are ours.  They are ours, not as a thing stolen, and which will be taken from us with a heavy over-payment of penalty, because we stole it when it did not belong to us; but they are ours by God’s free gift, to minister to our comfort, and to our good.  And this is the great difference; the good things of this world are stolen by many; but they belong, by God’s gift, to those only who are Christ’s:  and there is the sure sign, generally, to be seen of their being stolen,—­an unwillingness that He to whom of right they belong should see them.  What a man steals, he enjoys, as it were, in fear:  if the owner of it finds him with it, then all his enjoyment is gone; he wishes that he had never touched it; it is no source of pleasure to him, but merely one of terror.  And so it is often with our stolen pleasures,—­stolen, I mean, not in respect of man, but of God,—­stolen, because we do not feel them to be God’s gift, nor receive them, as from him, with thankfulness.  They may be very lawful pleasures, so far as other men are concerned; pleasures bought, it may be, with our own money, or given to us by our own friends, and enjoyed without any injury to any one.  They may be the very simplest enjoyments of life, our health, the fresh air, our common food, our common amusements, our common society; things most permitted to us all, as far as man is concerned, but yet things which are constantly stolen by us, because we take them without God’s leave, and enjoy them not as his gifts.  They are all his, and he gives them freely to his children.  If we are his children, he gives them to us; and delights in our enjoyment of them, as any human father loves to see the pleasure of his children in those things which it is good for them to enjoy.  But then, is any child afraid of his father so seeing him? or is the thought of his father any interruption to his enjoyment?  If it would be, we should be sure that there was something wrong; that the enjoyment, either in itself, or with respect to the particular case of that child, was a stolen one.  And even as simple is the state of our dread of God, of our wish to keep his name and his thought away from us.  It is the sure sign that our pleasures are stolen, either as being wrong in themselves, or much oftener, because we have taken them without being fit for them, have snatched them for ourselves, instead of receiving them at the hands of God.  Two of us may be daily doing the very same thing in most respects,—­enjoying actually the very same pleasures, whether of body or of mind; the same exercises, the same studies, the same indulgences, the same society,—­and yet these very same things may belong rightfully to the one, and be stolen by the other.  To the one they may come with a double blessing, as the assurance of God’s greater love hereafter:  to the other, they are but an addition to that sad account, when all good things enjoyed here, having been not our own rightly, but stolen, shall be paid for in over measure, by evil things to be suffered hereafter.