'Seriousness is necessary to the reception of the word': a William Paley sermon

From Sermon III from Volume V of Paley's Works - 'Fear a Religious Principle', on the text Proverbs 14.16 - another example of how Paley's preaching contradicts notions of what Newman described as the "false cheerfulness" of Georgian Anglicanism. As this extract demonstrates, it is "seriousness", not a lazy cheerfulness, which we see in Paley.

Note, too, how Paley is explicit about the call to be "disciples of Christianity" and entirely unembarrassed about Christ's words regarding riches. This, in other words, is serious Christianity.

Ease, and prosperity, and wealth, and pleasure, and gaiety, and diversion, are sadly unfavourable to the impressions of religion; they are not inconsistent with these impressions; to say that, would be to say more than the truth; but they are adverse to them. "How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven;" that is, one either intent upon acquiring riches, or addicted to the pleasures which riches procure, and lost in them altogether: and it may, perhaps, be difficult to find a person who is not in fault by one or other of these means. However, what ease and wealth efface, the troubles of adversity write and engrave deeply on the heart. Seriousness is, above all things, necessary to the reception of the word; therefore, whatever makes men serious, prepares them for becoming disciples of Christianity. Sickness, poverty, disappointment, the house of mourning, the loss of our family, the death of our friends, do tend powerfully to produce seriousness, to show us the folly, and unreasonableness, and end of that levity and giddiness which have taken up our time, from which we have drawn our delights.

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