self, good and evil, heaven and hell, are opposite in nature and principle, and by no skill of the pencil can one be made to shade off into the other. By no contrivance, divine or human, can they be made to dwell together in peace, but they tend to separation by their own elective affinities, and their struggles towards that separation occasion the perturbations of this our state of mingled good and evil. The good angel stands on one side, and the evil genius on the other. We hear the first in a thousand pleadings and calls to duty. We hear the other in the seductions of self-interest and self-indulgence. We follow one or the other, and so our most internal character is changing from glory to glory, or from shade to deeper shade. This power of choice, then, is an awful power. The child, as soon as he can understand the words Right and Wrong, stands between the world of Light and the world of Shadows. He comes into society. Two rules of action are placed before him, that of the Gospel and that of the world. He chooses between them. He makes one supreme and subordinates the other, for there is no middle ground. If he chooses the first, the good angel ever beckons him on in a path that finally opens upward into fields of everlasting fruition. If he chooses the other, the path leads downward,how easy at first to tread! but it grows darker and more rugged, till his feet stumble on the dark mountains, and he falls benighted into the abyss below.

The test here presented, we say, is philosophical, and stands clear of the cabbalistic theologies.

There is no long and crabbed creed to be learned, no mystic experience to be had through charms and conjurations, no faith in mere dogmas to be "imputed for righteousness." Turn where you will, reader, there are two principles of conduct written out and blazing upon you, one of self and one of Christ. On the one hand is the Gospel, and on the other are the world's hollow maxims and shifting expediencies. As soon as you rise in the morning, the right and the wrong present their alternatives in every deed you do. No subtile system of ethics needs unfolding. There is the path on the right, and there on the left. Under one of two ruling motives, every deed ranges itself at once. And though the divergence between these two paths may seem at first slight and unimportant, yet that is the starting-point of all the differences that follow after. They have been compared to two lines starting from the same point. However small the angle they make, they diverge wider and wider the farther they extend. And if infinitely extended, they diverge to an infinite distance. So between two persons choosing, one a right rule of life, and the other the wrong. Their characters at first may not seem so very different, but the fatal angle is there!

So much depends on this fearful power of choice, the first power to be exercised when our regeneration begins. On these silent volitions of the breast hang such amazing and eternal fortunes. No wonder, then, that such powers wait upon us, to bend our will upward or deflect it downward. And no

wonder that, to impress upon us the importance and consequences of moral choice, God has hung down to us out of eternity the roll of destiny, painting on one of its folds the upper world, with its hills and vales reposing in the soft beams of peace, and on the other, that world over which roll the clouds of an unavailing sorrow,-yet clouds which conceal far more than they disclose!

An Eastern monarch, on the eve of battle, stood surveying the countless battalia that swarmed in the plain beneath him, till he burst into a flood of tears. "Why do you weep," said his courtiers, "for the victory will soon be ours." "I weep," said he, "to think that in one hundred years not one of these hostile myriads will be alive." But the Christian imagination forms to itself a conception more august and solemn. The myriads that swarm

the earth's surface! To-day alive and busy; tomorrow brushes them from the scene. And amidst infinite varieties of taste, affection, and motive, two master motives are severally supreme. Every heart has been touched and polarized by one of two opposite magnets: death comes to remove outward and artificial restraints, and lo! this mass of humanity separates and sweeps towards its opposite poles.

If, when these momentous alternatives were first presented, for they are presented to every human being, — if, when first he heard the pleadings of the angel in his breast, or the sorceries of the tempting fiend, this power of choice were exercised with de

cision on the side of right, and the life of regeneration chosen with alacrity and energy, all else would follow in its time and order. This vow once made, and this great work of self-consecration once commenced in good faith, we have the promise that more agencies than we can take notice of wait upon us, that they may smooth out our way before us. This efficient exercise of the power of choice, choice between the motive-powers that shall rule us, choice between the two worlds that draw us contra-wise, and fling over us the alternations of sun and shade, — is the first step in the Christian life, and that step firmly taken, the victory is half won. For the heavens themselves then bend around us to guard us on, and our decision, we are assured, sends through their ranks a wavelet of joy.

CHAPTER III.

THE BOOKS OPENED.

"I presuppose a humble and docile state of mind, and above all the practice of prayer as the necessary condition of such a state, and the best, if not the only, means of becoming sincere to our own hearts; those inward means of grace, without which the language of the Scriptures, in the most faithful translation, and in the purest and plainest English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead language, a sun-dial by moonlight.". COLERIDGE.

*

Ir is an obvious condition of man's regeneration, that he know himself. He must see the evil that is in him, in order to its extrusion. And yet so manifold are the envelopments that infold him, that he bears about unscanned the mysteries that lie within. We live mainly in externals, and hence we are disguised from ourselves. Hence our imperfect view of human nature; hence our shallow culture, so often the outside gilding that conceals a heart uncleansed; hence our surfacemoralities; hence our ignorance of the deepest springs of action in our own bosoms. What is inly wrong, in order to be apprehended and expelled, must come within the clear range of our inward vision. How shall we have these self-revealings? By what means is the book of our life to be opened?

There is a way which is simple and direct, to him