God.  ‘Madame,’ said the solitary, ‘you seek without for what you have within.’  Where do you seek for God when you pray, my brethren?  To what place do you direct your eyes?  Is it to the roof of your closet?  Is it to the east end of your consecrated chapel?  Is it to that wooden table in the east end of your chapel?  Or, passing out of all houses made with hands and consecrated with holy oil, do you lift up your eyes to the skies where the sun and the moon and the stars dwell alone?  ‘What a folly!’ exclaims Theophilus, in the golden dialogue, ’for no way is the true way to God but by the way of our own heart.  God is nowhere else to be found.  And the heart itself cannot find Him but by its own love of Him, faith in Him, dependence upon Him, resignation to Him, and expectation of all from Him.’  ’You have quite carried your point with me,’ answered Theogenes after he had heard all that Theophilus had to say.  ’The God of meekness, of patience, and of love is henceforth the one God of my heart.  It is now the one bent and desire of my soul to seek for all my salvation in and through the merits and mediation of the meek, humble, patient, resigned, suffering Lamb of God, who alone has power to bring forth the blessed birth of those heavenly virtues in my soul.  What a comfort it is to think that this Lamb of God, Son of the Father, Light of the World; this Glory of heaven and this Joy of angels is as near to us, is as truly in the midst of us, as He is in the midst of heaven.  And that not a thought, look, or desire of our heart that presses toward Him, longing to catch one small spark of His heavenly nature, but is as sure a way of finding Him, as the woman’s way was who was healed of her deadly disease by longing to touch but the border of His garment.’

To sum up.  ’There is reared up in the midst of Mansoul a most famous and stately palace:  for strength, it may be called a castle; for pleasantness, a paradise; and for largeness, a place so copious as to contain all the world.  This palace the King intends but for Himself alone, and not another with Him, and He commits the keeping of that palace day and night to the men of the town.’

CHAPTER VI—­MY LORD WILLBEWILL

   —­’to will is present with me.’—­Paul

There is a large and a learned literature on the subject of the will.  There is a philosophical and a theological, and there is a religious and an experimental literature on the will.  Jonathan Edwards’s well-known work stands out conspicuously at the head of the philosophical and theological literature on the will, while our own Thomas Boston’s Fourfold State is a very able and impressive treatise on the more practical and experimental side of the same subject.  The Westminster Confession of Faith devotes one of its very best chapters to the teaching of the word of God on the will of man, and the Shorter Catechism touches