of every resistance, all the finest shadings on which the moral impulse depends for its defining character, all are most exactly seen by Him. On all, His judgment is ever passing, yea, and in all the incidents of that inward conflict He is, (until His Spirit has been grieved utterly,) Himself taking a part. Over those first highest fountains of life His Spirit broods. The chaos, all unconscious of the Presence, is surging in its blind contentions under a controlling, vivifying power; there in the recesses of personal being is the supreme Lord striving with and for His creature.

Surely such a life as this is in very deed spent with Him alone, under a close clinging law of most real personal responsibility. And if this be true of our life in time, how far more true must it be of our life in eternity. For here, in very compassion to our weakness, His Presence is often veiled from us. Trees of the garden soften for us what, unsheltered, would be its too excessive brightness. Forms of others, shadowy as they are, thronging around us, conceal from us our otherwise too intolerable loneliness. But these mitigating accidents of our life here cannot be with us there, where all who enter see as they are seen, and know as they are known. There every soul must feel for ever either to its woe unutterable or to its bliss infinite, that "of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things." There the loneliness of him who has not learned to know all things in God must be infinite and eternal. There all the life which each one has led here will be open and plain before Him, sharp and clear, veiled by no disguises, softened by no excuses. There each rebel will see, as though it were written with a sunbeam, that he received his being from God to spend it for His glory, and in this light of truth escape will be

impossible from the overwhelming sense of the personal responsibility of every soul to the God who called it into being.

Brethren, if all this be true, surely it is a truth which must swallow up everything beside. All lesser and accidental conditions vanish in the sight of this tremendous reality. The life which looks the poorest and the meanest is lifted up immeasurably, if only it be a due fulfilling of this law of personal responsibility. For every act so done, though in the smallest earthly circle, is the sowing of the life with seeds of eternal endurance. Such a life is a true loyal acceptance of its own personal responsibility to God, and so a yielding it to Him, and therefore a being moulded by Him, a growing fit for a blessedness in His presence, so supreme and entrancing that our poor conceptions here cannot reach even to define its conditions.

And, on the other hand, the life which looks the grandest here, which, it may be, is the noblest in the triumphs of intellect or power, may yet be nothing else than one prolonged rebellion. For notice, that such a life is nothing else than a perpetually augmenting catalogue of sins. Acts which in themselves, taken as mere acts, may have no distinct colour of evil, yet become expressions of the highest evil, if they are wrought as separate resistances of the will of the creature to the will of God. Look in this light at the growth of an ordinary life which, within the Church of Christ, refuses to yield itself to the will of God, and carries out that refusal to its furthest limits. In the earliest stage, there is the self-pleasing of childhood; but if the child is naturally affectionate, sweet-tempered, or high-spirited, there may be nothing to catch attention in that child's life but what is beautiful and

attractive. Yet even at this age the evil may have begun. There may be a turning away of that young heart from the secret drawings of the blessed Spirit, which is beginning to substitute fatally the rule of selfwill for that of obedience to the will of God. And the next stage of life shews the evil advancing: a love of display or the rule of sense begins to shew itself; as yet, perhaps, in no offensive or repulsive outbreaks, but so that the keen eye even of earthly love may trace its presence. Then comes the time when sensual appetite in the one sex and the passion for admiration in the other clamour for indulgence, and when opportunity of gratifying such demands is seldom lacking. And now the blight upon the highest actings of the soul is visible even outwardly. The one character becomes frivolous, vain, and heartless; the other becomes the prey of a gross sensuality which tyrannises over all its nobler impulses. The common poison root of a violated personal responsibility is casting its evil fibres round every natural shoot of spiritual, moral, and even intellectual excellence. Every acting of the curiously composite life is disordered: the sense of truth, the power of sustained exertion, the nobleness of self-sacrifice, the patience of an enduring struggle, all are becoming impossible; whilst to the palled appetite fiercer excitement becomes needful to obtain the gross pleasures for which the soul is bartering its all. Dissipation in its wildness, gambling in its madness, debauchery in its foulness; these are the after stages, and when these have been passed through there break forth every now and then monstrous and unnatural forms of wickedness as though to attest the presence of that principle of rebellion which is in all its fulness possessing the soul; or if these do not appear,

then those darker powers of our nature which are meant to form the deep background of the whole moral being act diseasedly through wrong channels and with disordered violence. Gall and bitterness pervade the character. The pleasant and often attractive sins of youth grow into the repulsive forms of jealousy, envy, hatred, and maliciousness. And this change cannot pass upon the moral nature without a corresponding evil visiting the spiritual. Neglect of God grows through often repeated acts of conscious resistance into wilful rebellion, first against His law, then against His nature, and at last against His being. Alas, the fatal stages may be too surely traced, as one by one they are passed through by falling souls. They are such as these conscience dishonoured, doubts first allowed and then encouraged, the whisper of unbelief first barely listened to and then communed with as a pleasant voice. Then come scoffings and blasphemies, atheism and destruction.

Here is the history of such a course, where all its parts are acted openly and completely out. But this differs only in degree from the history of every selfwilled life. Weaker passions, less opportunity of indulging them, outward restraints, a softer fibre of the moral nature, above all, the cloaking presence of a necessary respectability, hide the process from our eyes. But it is there. Every thoroughly self-willed soul must under the law of personal responsibility have made itself a hater of its God.

In one respect there is a peculiar awfulness in these commoner, and, as they seem, lighter instances of evil, for in them the poison, though it works so thoroughly, works so secretly. They may therefore be fearfully common; and as the last aggravation of their terror

they may be unsuspected not only by others but even by their unconscious victim. The restraint of circumstance, his own decency, his fatal respectability, these hide from him his true condition, until life is spent, until the day of grace is closed, until the possibility of an amendment is gone, until the will in the mystery of its acting under or against grace is irrecoverably hardened. What an awakening must death be from such a life! When the breath of God sweeps away suddenly all the mists which have hindered the soul from seeing its true state; when it wakes up alone with God; when it sees His holiness, and is perfectly conscious of its hatred to that holiness and to Him the Holy One; when it knows within itself that for it under love infinite rejected, and Almighty grace resisted, the mystery of personal being has been brought out so as even of necessity to end in everlasting death.

The sight is horrible, yet let us look at it long enough to have its lineaments so fixed in our memory that they may stand between us and our evil desires. in the hour of strong temptation. For such need not to be the state of any one of us. Christ has redeemed us from all evil. The powers of the Eternal Spirit are with us, the long-suffering love of God yearns over us. In us the good purpose of God in bestowing on us the awful gift of personal being may yet, through His grace, be accomplished in our everlasting blessedness. Only fight against the beginnings of rebelliousness; only pray earnestly against your temptations to it; only keep God's watch against those accesses of appetite and passion by which, as by the sweetness of baits, the great rebel draws you to his side, and all shall be well. Use meditation; daily if possible, and if that be not possible, as frequent as you may, to