until forty-five a man says, 'What can I do to advance myself?' After
or his wife considers his merits. It is a most subtle danger, and through it many an Officer's splendid spiritual career has come to an end, while he still went on in a perfunctory performance of his official duties, beating time, moving but not progressing, doing no vital and lasting work for God and souls; of whom it could be written, 'You have a name that you livest, and are dead.' I have met Officers who spent more time repining and complaining and inwardly rebelling about not being promoted than they did in studying and working and fitting themselves for the work that promotion would thrust on them. 'For men to search their own glory, is not glory,' wrote Solomon, but such men quite overlook such texts as that, and while they may attain the desire of their heart, they miss the glory that God gives. Personally, an awful fear has shaken me at times in the thought that a man may get in this world all the honour and glory that he seeks, and find in the next world that there is nothing further coming to him, like a man who draws his salary in advance and at the end of the week or month or year has nothing to receive. Abraham said to the rich man 'Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things'; and there was nothing due to him in that new world to which his soul had been so suddenly snatched away. He had not put first things first, and he who proudly scorned the poor beggar Lazarus at his gate now found himself an eternal pauper and beggar in Hell. 3. An Officer may gradually put his family first. It has been said that until forty-five a man says, 'What can I do to advance myself?' After forty-five he says, 'What can I do to provide for and advance my children? ' But to an Officer this may become a deadly snare. Sometimes it is the wife and mother whose ambition or anxiety overrides the sober judgement of the father and husband, and he bends before her insistence and falls from his splendid integrity and devotion to God's cause. Oh, the pity of it! 'He that loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me,' said Jesus. 4. A man may put his own culture first. This is not a widespread danger among us, and yet it may become to some a very subtle danger. Study, reading, travel, the cultivation of the mind and the gratifying of taste, may lead to the neglect of God's work and the drying up of the fountains of spiritual power. Personal culture is not to be despised,