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Ingratitude is here reckoned among the fatal steps taken toward degradation and toward gross impiety. The whole world agree to consider that nature base which is not moved by substantial kindness. All agree, too, that gratitude is a manly and noble quality. There is a great difference in this affection. There are some natures that take but the slightest favours to make them exhale thanks and gratitude. There are others that require much. Gratitude works also with different degrees of expression. In some, favours are very soon forgotten. In others, never. With some, gratitude is like the new-fallen snow, exquisite; but, like it, it very soon dissolves and passes away. With others, gratitude is like the diamond, once formed, hard and enduring, brilliant, and from every facet sending radiance. In some, gratitude excites uneasiness and unrestfulness till in some way it can discharge obligation. In others, there is no such thing as discharging the obligation for a favour — a kindness done to them binds them to the doer evermore. It is perfectly fair, then, that God should demand at our hands gratitude for mercies received, and that we should attempt to measure human character and human conduct by this expectation of God.

I. HAS THANKFULNESS TO GOD BEEN IN ANY PROPORTION TO THE BENEFITS RECEIVED? Has it ever been a common experience, lively and quick? Has it acted to promote obedience? The children of unnumbered kindnesses — have these blessings of God that have watched you from youth up to this hour, and that have flowed through all the channels of your life, ever brought forth in you a profound sense of recognition? Is not what the apostle describes applicable to us? But let us more in detail look into this matter. Let us look at —

1. A man's own organisation, and inquire in what way he is wont to receive that ass comprehensive and complex gift of God. It is no small thing that we have an organisation that brings health and strength. There are many that are born to misfortune. They carry organised suffering with them. That, for the most part, is not our condition. The separate elements that go to constitute this gift of our organisation are marvellous. If the eye could keep a journal of all the pleasures that it has brought to us no tongue could measure our obligations. If the ear could give its account of pleasures issued; if not a single sense merely, but the whole of our body, could rise up and bear witness to God's goodness in its organisation, what a complex series of services from God to us would be exhibited! And yet, are not life, and health, and strength, more frequently a reason of indifference? All the senses that God has put together to create the most noble thing made under the heaven — we take them as a gift, of course. We arrogate to ourselves personal beauty, if we are handsome; personal strength, if we are strong; personal skill, if we have a hand to execute. We take all these sovereign gifts of God, not with thanksgiving, not as if they brought us nearer to Him in sweet obedience, not as benefits received, but to set us apart from Him and His service.

2. The gifts of God expressed in the human mind and disposition. We are neither thankful for the casket nor the jewels that God has put within the casket. Indeed, the more men have, usually, the less apt are they to be grateful. Men are apt to become vain, arrogant, worldly, and foolish in the possession of their mental gifts and powers. We carry about, in reason, in imagination, in hope, in love, in sympathy, in everything that goes to make up the human disposition, that wonderful gift of God, the human soul, from the cradle to the grave, and scarcely think to thank God or to love Him for His benefaction.

3. Our social advantages. It is no small thing to have been born in a Christian land. How many of us find occasion for real thankfulness in this? It is no small thing to have been born of Christian parentage — to have been put into this life through a right gate. Have you ever made it an object of thought? Our honourable connections are matters of no small moment, as they stand intimately related to our happiness. The position we are permitted to occupy in society we are apt to ascribe to our own skill and work. But there is not a man living that has really achieved the social advantages which he has. There is a providence in them. And all that which we have of repute, ease, influence, consequence by reason of our social connection — does not this tend to puff us up? How many men requite God by being to others exactly what He is not to them! God bridges the way from His heart to ours by kindnesses without number. We look down upon men less favoured than we, and seem to say, "Stand thou there: come not near to touch our robes."

4. Our relations to the gifts of God in nature and in human society(1) No one can enough appreciate the wonderfulness of God's bounties of love registered for everyone that has an eye to see and an ear to hear in the fulness of nature. Everywhere God makes Himself known to those that have a heart sensitive to His presence. The whole globe is a sacrament, and time is full of the most solemn lessons and the most momentous truths. And yet we let day after day, and year after year, pass over our heads, and our constant thought is — what? That the winter is severe; that the day is inclement; that the rain incommodes our party or mars our pleasure.

(2) The successes of life, by which men attain livelihood and the respect of men, are gifts of God, and not the less subjects of gratitude because they depend upon our activity, since our activity again depends upon God's being ever present with us. God invites us to all the bounties of nature, and we are more vain of their skill to reap them than thankful for the bounties themselves.

5. The work of God in providences toward every one of us. There are gifts of prosperity and gifts of adversity; there are sparing mercies in sickness and danger to us, and, what comes nearer to a sensitive nature, to others. The providence of God that attends our daily walk is marvellous to him that has an eye to discern all its details, and wisdom to comprehend its full meaning. But we walk through the day, the year, often without a thought, or scarcely a reminiscence.

6. God's spiritual dealings with us. The gift of Christ, that richest and Divinest of all gifts, and the premise through Him of eternal life, and of help in every time of need; the gift of the Holy Ghost; His mindfulness of every feeling in us, though we are mindless of any feeling in Him — in all these spiritual blessings, gratitude and thankfulness are the exception, and not the rule.

II. THE SIN OF THIS.

1. There is no one thing that you admit to be a fairer measure of character and life than this principle of gratitude; and when you take it and measure your course of conduct, not toward an inferior, or an equal, or a mere superior, but toward God — the highest, the noblest, the most disinterested, and the best being that ever lived — no man, not even the purest, can help feeling that he has lived a life of ingratitude. God's wonderful bounties have come before you unrecognised. You have made yourself selfish through God's kindnesses. You have made yourself proud through His goodness. The very things that were meant to draw you to God have built around you walls of separation between yourselves and God.

2. It does not need that men should lay to their consciences the charge of theft, of crime. There is no offence anymore guilty than this. If there be a single soul that says, "I need no repentance, no change of heart: I am not a sinner," I lay this charge upon him, and he cannot resist it, We cannot receive from our father and mother a love token and not know it; but from Christ we can. We cannot take a poor gift from a fellow's hand without feeling a sentiment of honour and requital; but from God's hand we take royal bounties without any such consciousness. Ah! when Christ takes His own heart, His sacrifice, and His love, and brings it to us and makes it a present, is there no requital, are there no thanks due? When God requires the service of our life and the fulness of our heart, is it an exacting requisition? Does the mother expect too much when she demands that the child she has reared shall love and serve her? If you have given your time to nurse the sick, is it too much to expect that when they come to health they will kindly remember you? If a man is about to be destroyed, and you step between him and his peril and rescue him, is it strange that you should expect at least kindness and love from him? The untutored savage would never forget such a benefactor. It requires Christians, men educated in the knowledge of the death of Christ, who died that they might live, to refuse to requite service with gratitude.

(H. W. Beecher.)

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KJV: Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

WEB: because that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it to them.