If we would keep people superior to the impulses of appetite, and the solicitations of sensual pleasure, we must attempt servitute corporis uti by imperio animi* [In Sallust’s well known sentence servitute may be the object of utimur, imperio the ablative of the means; or, reversing the construction, the sense may be, by keeping the body in subjection, we better maintain the mind’s supremacy.  Neither, I believe, is the common understanding of the passage.]—­by training the mind to know its capacities and powers.  If this be neglected, purely spiritual influences, supposing them forthcoming, will hardly save the body from unduly controlling the man.  Vulgar ambition is to be forestalled in the same way. Imperium populi may be expected to be attractive, in proportion as imperium animi is unstudied, unknown; and of course the full sense missed, in which knowledge is power.  He who knows the greatness of the world within, hears nothing strange in the declaration-that “greater is he who ruleth his own spirit, than he who taketh a city.”  That the recipients of a (so called) liberal education so often become the votaries of vulgar ambition, and vulgar pleasure too, is to be accounted for on the three-fold consideration:  first, that what passes for a liberal education is often a very illiberal thing, doing very little to unfold the spirit to itself, and so impress the greatness of mastering its capabilities; secondly, that merely intellectual without moral influences, do not suffice; and thirdly, the law is supreme, which binds all to suffer, in their intellectual and spiritual life, from the mental and moral degradation of a part.

Jesus thought it not beneath the dignity of his office, nor the sacredness of the Sabbath, nor the proprieties of the synagogue, to discourse to people on politeness and good breeding; nor to enforce attention to decorum, by the comparatively low consideration, “Then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.”  Unworthy alike, both the lesson and the motive, would cry a false spirituality, if the example of such preaching were set by any lower authority.  A false spirituality it is, for it originates in missing the close connection between the temporal and the spiritual, the outward and the inward, the life that now is, and that which is to come.

In faithfully delivering the whole counsel of God, we may encounter something like the wrath of the ruler of the synagogue, whose spirituality was offended at the restoration of a withered hand on the Sabbath.  We may find, that we have cast pearls before swine.  We may be referred to Paul’s determination to know nothing among the Corinthians, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.  And, if we minister to a people who, like the Corinthians, need to be fed with milk and not meat; like them carnal, factious, party-spirited, and if we would delicately hint to them their character—­let us do it indirectly,