who earnestly desires to see himself as he is. It is by turning the soul towards God. It is by communing with the Eternal Purity, whose spirit ever broods over the chaos within us, and seeks to separate its elements into determinate form and order. Before the Divine nature, all that is wrong in our own is revealed by contrast, and appears black in the light. The Eternal Law shines down through our being, and shows our desires and aims, in opposition to its own sanctity. It is the hatefulness of the selfish will in the presence of the All-Pure. Doubtless, the revelation is at first humiliating and painful. In that hour of self-conviction, the burden of our most inherent corruption hangs heavy on our souls. Two ideas, for the time, take sole possession of our minds, and fill the whole scope of our vision. Our inmost self how alienated! The Divine nature how dazzling and dreadful in its holiness' The contrast between these two makes us veil our faces in tears, and exclaim, "I shall die, for I have seen the Lord!" We cannot bear that "noon of living rays," when searched and laid open beneath it. He who thought himself rich and in need of nothing, now finds himself poor and in need of every thing. He who before was complacent and satisfied with the shows of a seeming morality, is startled and dismayed, as a light from out of himself is let down through the central places of his being, and reveals the secret corruption that lurks through all its winding recesses. How false has been his standard of right, how low have been his aims, and what impu

rities have tainted the springs of his conduct! "I thought myself alive without the law," said the great Apostle, "but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died." When the Eternal Law shone forth, the sin that was in me came full into the range of my consciousness, and instead of spiritual life, I found there a mass of death. Thus God, by his immanence in man, reveals, when invoked and welcomed, the afflicting contrast between human corruption and the Everlasting Purity.

What we have now described, is sometimes called "conviction of sin." But it is more than that. Sin pertains only to what is wrong in our volitions and actions. But now the sources of sin, lying deeper than all volition and action, are shown to us; for the vain disguises of our self-love having withered away under the beams of the Divine countenance, the diseased mass whose hidden motions had swayed our volitions and conduct is disclosed, and makes us cry, "Who shall deliver us from this body of death?" The Apostle, as above quoted, is not using the words sin and death as the synonyma of moral guilt, but rather of moral disease, from which guilty conduct flows as from a turbid spring. How often had our endeavors after holiness been defeated and baffled! how had the means of grace been repeated till they had become state formalities! how had our vague dissatisfactions and our daily unrest prevented the peace of God and our sweet repose on the bosom of his love! The source of all our trouble has now been shown to us, as a new page in the book of our life has opened to our sight.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BOOKS OPENED.

"O, what a sight were man, if his attires
Did alter with his mind,

And, like a dolphin's skin, his clothes combined
With his desires!

"Surely, if each one saw another's heart,
There would be no commerce,

No sale or bargain pass: all would disperse
And live apart!

"Lord, mend, or rather make us; one creation
Will not suffice our turn:

Except thou make us daily, we shall spurn
Our own salvation."-GEORGE HERBERT.

THERE is a legend of one of the ancient kings of England, that, returning from the Crusades, he was taken captive by his enemies, and confined in a German fortress. Languishing there in the darkness of his solitary cell, he was lost to his people and dead to the world, and fast perishing from the memory of mankind. But there was a minstrel of his court by the name of Blondel, who sought to find him. He wandered in disguise through Europe, and played and sung under the windows of every prison, the airs which he and his master had sung together in days of old. At the last trial, after the first strain

had died away, the second strain awoke from within the fortress, and rolled responsive from the prison cells. The lost monarch was found.

Precisely such is the office which temptation performs for us. It reveals us. We mean by temptation, such surroundings as make us conscious of wrong desires, and draw us vehemently towards forbidden objects. Any one seeking in good faith to know himself, may find all the shadings of his inmost being reflected back upon him, from the objects that lie along his path. For temptation puts nothing new into us. It only brings out before the sun something which existed there already. We are enticed by the lusts that are within, and it is the lust which gives to the object without all its meretricious and seducing charms. The corruption within corresponds to the object without, and they call and answer to each other. If there were no lurking evil in our nature, there could be no temptations. They are the Blondels, whose songs and harpings are of the same air and dialect of some corruption within; and so they respond to each other, strain for strain. Hence there is a meaning in the discipline of life, the myriad-toned language that comes to us from without, which we do not always seek to comprehend. One of the first designs of Providence in leading us through the paths of our probation here, is to show us to ourselves. The guilty man says, in extenuation of his crime, "If I had not been sorely tempted, I should not have fallen." So neither would you have known

ness.

the evil that is in you. Providence led you into the midst of these surroundings, for the purpose, not of causing you to sin, but of showing you your propensities to sin, as if he had said, "Behold, I show you a mystery!" How often has a man thought himself immaculate, until the attractive power of some object out of him caused the lurking corruption to leap up in his bosom. So it is with all the passions that lie coiled within. Circumstances do not create them; they only evoke them from their mystic places into the light of our self-consciousOne person brings into the world a revengeful temper. But who knew it while the infant was smiling in the cradle? It is along with the provocatives of opposition, that it discovers its full strength and malignity. Another inherits a selfish love for acquisition. But it is not the infant brow that is pursed with calculation. It is amid competitions and scrambles for gain, it is among lands and stocks and treasures, that he feels the gnawings of the accursed hunger for gold. The lust for place and power does not point to its unscrupulous arts, and the depths of its cringing baseness, until occasion and circumstance have uncoiled it, and we see its amazing possibilities. Thus are we led along the paths where the objects of our selfish love stir up the passions of the heart; and then, if we will but watch its motions, we shall find those passions unwinding, one after another, until our inward life has been imaged back upon us, and then we have seen ourselves! All the corruption of our natures