Believe me, we are all a riddle to ourselves.  Each man is to himself, and each woman too, the greatest of all mysteries save the one greater mystery, God.  None of us know of what elements he is composed, and how strangely the good and evil mix and mingle and clash and strive in each day’s doings, and through the whole of life.  They who believe that the saint is all saint, and the sinner all sinner, are blindly and pitiably ignorant of human nature.  God has made no man without putting some little bit of the Divine image in him.  The worst has some lingering trace or ruin of it.  And the best is not so entirely the temple of the Holy Ghost that no fouler spirits ever obtain entrance there.  You may say that you do not believe in a devil.  Well, that may be; but there is something like a devil in all of us at certain times, and I would rather believe that it comes from the outside than that it is born and bred and originates within.  At any rate, there are in all of us the strange oppositions, the darkness and the light overlapping each other, the evil and the good ever contending, like Esau and Jacob, in the birth hour.  The awful and the blessed possibilities are there, and which shall get the uppermost depends first on God, and then upon ourselves.

I.

Remember first, then, that we have all a lower side.

There is in us what I may call a lurking, crouching, slumbering devil, which needs constant watching and holding down with the strong hand of self-mastery and prayer.  “Praying always with all prayer, and watching thereunto,” says the apostle.  In every one of us there is the possibility of falling, however high we stand and however near God we walk.  Bunyan says, in his immortal story, “Then I saw in my dream that by the very gate of heaven there was a way that led down to hell.”  No man, however ripe in goodness, however firmly rooted and grounded in faith, love, and Christian qualities, ever gets beyond the need of vigilant sentinel work—­watching himself.  He must always be buffeting himself, and keeping under his body, as Paul did, lest he himself should be a castaway.  Let him grow careless, presumptuous, neglectful of prayer, and all the old tempers and passions slowly steal in, and bit by bit obtain the mastery, and the Christian disgraces his profession, and the saint becomes a sinner again.  Every Christian knows this.  He knows the evil powers that are in him.

It is the man who has never fought with his temptation, never prayed, who especially needs to be reminded of it; young men and women who have been well brought up, who have kept themselves moderately straight so far, and who are full of good resolutions.  I hear them say, “Oh I am strong enough.  I am not such a fool as to throw myself away in the stupid game of the prodigal, in drunkenness, and gambling, and unclean living.  I can hold myself in.  I can go just as far as I please.  I can indulge to a certain extent, and pull myself up just at the moment I please; and as for prayer and seeking God’s help, thank my stars I can clear a safe course without all that.  I shall not overstep the line you may depend upon it.” “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this?”