himself as the gods, knowing good and evil, he discovers that he is unexpectedly degraded, his health wrecked, and his heart demoralized.  Hence it is almost as often the finer as the baser spirits of our race which are found the victims of such indulgence.  Many will remember while I speak, the names of the gifted of their species, the degraded men of genius who were the victims of these deceptive influences.  The half-inspired painter, poet, musician, who began by soothing opiates to calm the over-excited nerves, or stimulate the exhausted brain, who mistook the sensation for somewhat half divine, and became morally and physically wrecks of manhood, degraded even in their mental conceptions.  It was therefore, no mere play of words which induced the apostle to bring these two things together.  That which might else seem irreverent appears to have been a deep knowledge of human nature; he contrasts, because his rule was to distinguish two things which are easily mistaken for each other.

2.  The second point of resemblance is the necessity of intense feeling.  We have fulness—­fulness, it may be, produced by outward stimulus, or else by an inpouring of the Spirit.  What we want is life, “more life, and fuller.”  To escape from monotony, to get away from the life of mere routine and habits, to feel that we are alive—­with more of surprise and wakefulness in our existence.  To have less of the gelid, torpid, tortoise-like existence.  “To feel the years before us.”  To be consciously existing.

Now this desire lies at the bottom of many forms of life which are apparently as diverse as possible.  It constitutes the fascination of the gambler’s life:  money is not what he wants—­were he possessed of thousands to-day he would risk them all to-morrow—­but it is that being perpetually on the brink of enormous wealth and utter ruin, he is compelled to realize at every moment the possibility of the extremes of life.  Every moment is one of feeling.  This too, constitutes the charm of all those forms of life in which the gambling feeling is predominant—­where a sense of skill is blended with a mixture of chance.  If you ask the statesman why it is, that possessed as he is of wealth, he quits his princely home for the dark metropolis, he would reply, “That he loves the excitement of a political existence.”  It is this too, which gives to the warrior’s and the traveller’s existence such peculiar reality; and it is this in a far lower form which stimulates the pleasure of a fashionable life—­which sends the votaries of the world in a constant round from the capital to the watering place, and from the watering place to the capital; what they crave for is the power of feeling intensely.

Now the proper and natural outlet for this feeling is the life of the Spirit.  What is religion but fuller life?  To live in the Spirit, what is it but to have keener feelings and mightier powers—­to rise into a higher consciousness of life?  What