These vanities are ‘lying vanities.’  There is only one aim of life which, being pursued and attained, fulfils the promises by which it drew man after it.  It is a bald commonplace, reiterated not only by preachers but by moralists of every kind, and confirmed by universal experience, that a hope fulfilled is a hope disappointed.  There is only one thing more tragic than a life which has failed in its aims, and it is a life which has perfectly succeeded in them, and has found that what promised to be bread turns to ashes.  The word of promise may be kept to the ear, but is always broken to the hope.  Many a millionaire loses the power to enjoy his millions by the very process by which he gains them.  The old Jewish thinker was wise not only in taking as the summing up of all worldly pursuits the sad sentence, ‘All is vanity,’ but in putting it into the lips of a king who had won all he sought.  The sorceress draws us within her charmed circle by lying words and illusory charms, and when she has so secured the captives, her mask is thrown off and her native hideousness displayed.

II.  The hard service which lying vanities require.

The phrase in our text is a quotation, slightly altered, from Psalm xxxi. 6:  ’I hate them that regard lying vanities; but I trust in the Lord.’  The alteration in the form of the verb as it occurs in Jonah expresses the intensity of regard, and gives the picture of watching with anxious solicitude, as the eyes of a servant turned to his master, or those of a dog to its owner.  The world is a very hard master, and requires from its servants the concentration of thought, heart, and effort.  We need only recall the thousand sermons devoted to the enforcement of ‘the gospel of getting on,’ which prosperous worldlings are continually preaching.  A chorus of voices on every side of us is dinning into the ears of every young man and woman the necessity for success in life’s struggle of taking for a motto, ‘This one thing I do.’  How many a man is there, who in the race after wealth or fame, has flung away aspirations, visions of noble, truthful love to life, and a hundred other precious things?  Browning tells a hideous story of a mother flinging, one after another, her infants to the wolves as she urged her sledge over the snowy plain.  No less hideous, and still more maiming, are the surrenders that men make when once their hearts have been filled with the foolish ambitions of worldly success.  Let us fix it in our minds, that nothing that time and sense can give is worth the price that it exacts.

    ’It is only heaven that can be had for the asking;
     It is only God that is given away.’

All sin is slavery.  Its yoke presses painfully on the neck, and its burden is heavy indeed, and the rest which it promises never comes.

III.  The self-inflicted loss.

Our text suggests that there are two ways by which we may learn the folly of a godless life—­One, the consideration of what it turns to, the other, the thought of what it departs from.