sicken and lose heart and sit solitary when you carry to them a good report.  They feel as John Bunyan felt, that no one but the devil can equal them in pollution of heart.  And their wonder sometimes is that the Searcher of Hearts does not drive them down where devils dwell and hate God and man and one another.  They look around them when the penitential psalm is being sung, and they smile bitterly to themselves.  O people of God, they say, you do not know what you are saying.  Leave that psalm to me.  I can sing it.  I can tell to God what He knows about sin, and about sin in the heart.  Stand away back from me, that man says, for I am a leper.  The chief of sinners is beside you.  A whited sepulchre stands open beside you.—­Stop now, O hating and hateful man, and let me speak for a single moment before we separate.  Before you say any more about yourself, and before you leave the house of God, lift up your broken heart and with all your might bless God that He has opened your eyes and taught you how to look at yourself and how to hate yourself.  There are hundreds of honest Christian men and women in this house at this moment to whom God has not done as, in His free grace, He has done to you.  For He has not only begun a good work in you, but He has begun that special and peculiar work which, when it goes on to perfection, makes a great and an eminent saint of God.  To know your own heart as you evidently know it, and to hate it as you say you hate it, and to hunger after a clean heart as, with every breath, you hunger,—­all that, if you would only believe it, sets you, or will yet set you, high up among the people of God.  Be comforted; it is your bounden duty to be comforted.  God deserves it at your hands that you be more than comforted amid such unmistakable signs of His eminent grace to you.  And be patient under your exceptional sanctification.  Rome was not built in a day.  You cannot reverse the awful law of your sanctification.  You cannot be saved by Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit without seeing yourself, and you cannot see yourself without hating yourself, and you cannot begin to hate yourself without all your hatred henceforth turning against yourself.  You are deep in the red-hot bosom of the refiner’s fire.  And when you are once sufficiently tried by the Divine Refiner of Souls, He will in His own good time and way bring you out as gold.  Be patient, therefore, till the coming of the Lord.  And say continually amid all your increasing knowledge of yourself, and amid all your increasing hatred of yourself, ’As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.’

FAITHFUL IN VANITY FAIR {2}

   ’Be thou faithful.’—­Rev. 2. 10.