of our text in Judge Jeffreys’ and Judge Hate-good’s courts, all go to show that the better a man is the more sometimes will we hate him.  Good men, better men than we are, men who in public life and in private life pursue great and good ends, of necessity cross and go counter to us in our pursuit of small, selfish, evil ends, and of necessity we hate them.  For, cross a selfish sinner sufficiently and you have a very devil—­as many good men, if they knew it, have in us.  Again, good men who come into contact with us cannot help seeing our bad lives, our tempers, our selfishness, our public and private vices; and we see that they see us, and we cannot love those whose averted eye so goes to our conscience.  And not only in the hatred of good men, but if you know of God how to watch yourselves, you will find yourselves out every day also in the hatred of good movements, good causes, good institutions, and good works.  There are doctors who would far rather hear of their rival’s patient expiring in his hands than hear their rival’s success trumpeted through all the town.  There are ministers, also, who would rather that the masses of the city and the country sank yet deeper into improvidence and drink and neglect of ordinances than that they were rescued by any other church than their own.  They hate to hear of the successes of another church.  There are party politicians who would rather that the ship of the state ran on the rocks both in her home and her foreign policy than that the opposite party should steer her amid a nation’s cheers into harbour.  And so of good news.  I will stake the divine truth of this evening’s Scriptures, and of their historical and imaginative illustrations, on the feelings, if you know how to observe, detect, characterise, and confess them,—­the feelings, I say, that will rise in your heart to-morrow morning when you read what is good news to other men, even to good men, and to the families and family interests of good men.  It does not matter one atom into what profession, office, occupation, interest you track the corrupt heart of man, as sure as a substance casts a shadow, so sure will you find your own selfish heart hating goodness when the goodness does not serve or flatter you.

Now, though they will never be many, yet there must be some men among us, one here and another there, who have so looked at and found out themselves.  I can well believe that some men here came up to this house to-night trembling in their heart all the way.  They felt the very advertisement go through them like a knife:  they felt that they were summoned up hither almost by name as to judgment.  For they feel every day, though they have never told their feelings to any, that they have this horrible heart deep-seated within them to love evil and to hate good.  They gnash their teeth at themselves as they catch themselves rejoicing in iniquity.  They feel their hearts expanding, and they know that their faces shine, when you tell them evil tidings.  They