Show me the professing Christian whose social character is as unlovely after profession as it was before, and though there may be an increase of knowledge and of some other things connected with religion, there is no progress.
Here is where a great many professed disciples of Jesus fail of being real disciples. They have regularly enlisted, have put on their uniform, and there they stand before the recruiting office, with knapsacks and blankets on their backs, with muskets at "carry," marking time to the martial music—although some of them don't do even that; and there they have stood since their enlistment, never marching a rod.
Some time ago when in a mine, looking through its dark corridors, I every now and then saw the glimmer of a moving lamp, and I could track it all through the mine. The reason was that the miner carried it on his hat,—it was a part of himself, and it showed where he went. I said, "Would that in this dark world every miner of the Master carried his lamp to show where he walks."
You may be quite sure that if little light comes from a Christian character, little light comes into it. We must have the glory sink into us before it can be reflected from us.
But let the love of Jesus become the master-principle of our hearts, and there will be no halting or irresolution; no parleying with temptation; no seeking to explain away our duty under color of deliberating to discover what it is; no looking one way and walking another; but with undivided souls, and with enthusiastic devotion, we shall do only and always the will of Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us.
