1 Thessalonians 2:3-6 For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile:… When Henry Martyn went in for and obtained the high distinction of senior wrangler at Cambridge, his mind was kept, he tells us, in a state of calmness by the recollections of a sermon he had heard from the text, "Seekest thou great things for thyself, seek them not, saith the Lord." James Brainerd Taylor was announced as being Number One in the class of students at college. The emptiness of honours struck him as it had done Henry Martyn. "What are honours?" he said. "What is fame? These are not my God." In such a spirit, the soul, while using honours to God's glory, is freed from that vexation of spirit which chafes some men of the world in high life, because a few inches of riband have been bestowed upon a favoured rival. How touching, we may add, it is to see the vain pursuit of human ambition acknowledge its emptiness when gratified. Madame Maintenon, when elevated to the throne of France as wife of Louis XIV, wrote to her friend Madame de la Mainford: "Do you not see that I am dying with melancholy, in a height of fortune which my imagination could scarcely have conceived?" When sick, too, of high society, the wife of Thomas Carlyle wrote to her gifted husband: "Ah! if we had been left in the sphere of life we belonged to, how much better it would have been for both of us!" (Sunday at Home.) Parallel Verses KJV: For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile:WEB: For our exhortation is not of error, nor of uncleanness, nor in deception. |
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