'The straight, right-onward path of virtue': a Hackney Phalanx sermon on the moral life shaped by the Commandments

Today we continue with the series of extracts from an 1814 collection of sermons by Christopher Wordsworth (senior, d.1846), associated with the Hackney Phalanx. In this extract from a sermon on 2 Kings 5 on the actions of Gehazi, servant of Elisha. Here we see a Hackney Phalanx sermon emphasising a characteristic Old High concern with a moral life shaped by the Commandments and the spiritual dangers arising from the absence of this concern.

The history forcibly illustrates another important truth, that vices seldom go single, but one transgression commonly opens the way to another. The love of money, especially, is, as the Apostle says, "the root of all evil." The commandment has said, "Thou shalt not covet." But he did covet. Gehazi disobeyed that precept, and having so done, he was brought under a kind of necessity of breaking two other commandments of the decalogue. The presents which he obtained at the hand of Naaman, he got by fraud, and so he transgressed the eighth commandment, "Thou shalt not steal:" and also, both to procure this object of his desire, and to keep it when procured, he spake falsely, and so transgressed the ninth commandment, which says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness."

How much better then is it to keep innocency? When once you deviate from the straight, right-onward path of virtue, no one can tell how many doublings you will have to make; no one can tell into what numerous offences you may fall; into what temptations you are leading yourselves; no one can tell, how long you may wax worse and worse; how perilous therefore your condition is! and no one can tell whether you may recover the straight way, that leadeth unto life, even for ever.

You see therefore, in general, what an evil sin is how it deforms and defiles the world; that it is contagious in its nature; that it spreads over the moral frame of the universe, eating, as it goes, like a canker, and tainting all it touches, like the leprosy.

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