of God, and like him, if he has any moral earnestness; if he feels at all the obligation of duty; will go away very sorrowful, because he perceives very plainly the conflict between his will and his conscience.  How many a person, in the generations that have already gone to the judgment-seat of Christ, and in the generation that is now on the way thither, has been at times brought face to face with the great and first command, “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” and by some particular requirement has been made conscious of his utter opposition to that great law.  Some special duty was urged upon him, by the providence, or the word, or the Spirit of God, that could not be performed unless his will were subjected to God’s will, and unless his love for himself and the world were subordinated to his love of his Maker.  If a young man, perhaps he was commanded to consecrate his talents and education to a life of philanthropy and service of God in the gospel, instead of a life devoted to secular and pecuniary aims.  God said to him, by His providence, and by conscience, “Go teach my gospel to the perishing; go preach my word, to the dying and the lost.”  But he loved worldly ease pleasure and reputation more than he loved God; and he refused, and went away sorrowful, because this poor world looked very bright and alluring, and the path of self-denial and duty looked very forbidding.  Or, if he was a man in middle life, perhaps he was commanded to abate his interest in plans for the accumulation of wealth, to contract his enterprises, to give attention to the concerns of his soul and the souls of his children, to make his own peace with God, and to consecrate the remainder of his life to Christ and to human welfare; and when this plain and reasonable course of conduct was dictated to him, he found his whole heart rising up against the proposition.  Our Lord, alluding to the fact that there was nothing in common between His spirit, and the spirit of Satan, said to His disciples, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me” (John xiv. 30).  So, when the command to love God supremely comes to this man of the world, in any particular form, “it hath nothing in him.”  This first and great law finds no ready and genial response within his heart, but on the contrary a recoil within his soul as if some great monster had started up in his pathway.  He says, in his mind, to the proposition:  “Anything but that;” and, with the young ruler, he goes away sorrowful, because he knows that refusal is perdition.

Is there not a wonderful power to convict of sin, in this test?  If you try yourself, as the young man did, by the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” you may succeed, perhaps, in quieting your conscience, to some extent, and in possessing yourself of the opinion of your fitness for the kingdom of God.  But ask yourself the question, “Do I love God supremely, and am