yourself better in your relation to other people.’  So all the rest of this chapter is devoted to inculcating our duties to one another.  Conduct is all-important.  An orthodox creed is valuable if it influences action, but not otherwise.  Devout emotion is valuable, if it drives the wheels of life, but not otherwise.  Christians should make efforts to attain to clear views and warm feelings, but the outcome and final test of both is a daily life of visible imitation of Jesus.  The deepening of spiritual life should be manifested by completer, practical righteousness in the market-place and the street and the house, which non-Christians will acknowledge.

But now, with regard to these three specific exhortations here, I wish to try to bring out their connection as well as the force of each of them.

I. So I remark first, that the Christian life ought to be joyful because it is hopeful.

Now, I do not suppose that many of us habitually recognise it as a Christian duty to be joyful.  We think that it is a matter of temperament and partly a matter of circumstance.  We are glad when things go well with us.  If we have a sunny disposition, and are naturally light-hearted, all the better; if we have a melancholy or morose one, all the worse.  But do we recognise this, that a Christian who is not joyful is not living up to his duty; and that there is no excuse, either in temperament or in circumstances, for our not being so, and always being so?  ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway,’ says Paul; and then, as if he thought, ’Some of you will be thinking that that is a very rash commandment, to aim at a condition quite impossible to make constant,’ he goes on—­’and, to convince you that I do not say it hastily, I will repeat it—­“and again I say, rejoice."’ Brethren, we shall have to alter our conceptions of what true gladness is before we can come to understand the full depth of the great thought that joy is a Christian duty.  The true joy is not the kind of joy that a saying in the Old Testament compares to the ’crackling of thorns under a pot,’ but something very much calmer, with no crackle in it; and very much deeper, and very much more in alliance with ’whatsoever things are lovely and of good report,’ than that foolish, short-lived, and empty mirth that burns down so soon into black ashes.

To be glad is a Christian duty.  Many of us have as much religion as makes us sombre, and impels us often to look upon the more solemn and awful aspects of Christian truth, but we have not enough to make us glad.  I do not need to dwell upon all the sources in Christian faith and belief, of that lofty and imperatively obligatory gladness, but I confine myself to the one in my text, ‘Rejoicing in hope.’