Unspoken Sermons Series I., II., and II. by MacDonald, George, 1824-1905

Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship Mammon, who give their lives, their best energies to the accumulation of wealth: it applies to those equally who in any way worship the transitory; who seek the praise of men more than the praise of God; who would make a show in the world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art, by genius of any kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be treasured in a storehouse of earth.

Nor to such only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of a more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the senses in every direction--whether lawfully or unlawfully indulged, if the joy of being is centred in them--do these words bear terrible warning. For the hurt lies not in this--that these pleasures are false like the deceptions of magic, for such they are not: pleasures they are; nor yet in this--that they pass away, and leave a fierce disappointment behind: that is only so much the better; but the hurt lies in this--that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to them as its good--clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion to the superiority of its kind, that which is mere decay in the one becoming moral vileness in the other, that which fits the one for the dunghill casting the other into the outer darkness; creeps, that it may share with them, into a burrow in the earth, where its budded wings wither and damp and drop away from its shoulders, instead of haunting the open plains and the high-uplifted table-lands, spreading abroad its young pinions to the sun and the air, and strengthening them in further and further flights, till at last they should become strong to bear the God-born into the presence of its Father in Heaven. Therein lies the hurt.

He whose heart is sound because it haunts the treasure-house of heaven may _be tempted of the devil_, but will be first _led up of the Spirit into the wilderness_.

THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS.