heart?  If not, then weep for that with all your might, night and day.  No mortal man has so much cause to weep as you have.  Go to God on the spot, on every spot, and say with Bishop Andrewes, who is both Mr. Desires-awake and Mr. Wet-eyes in one, say with that deep man in his Private Devotions, say:  ’I need more grief, O God; I plainly need it.  I can sin much, but I cannot correspondingly repent.  O Lord, give me a molten heart.  Give me tears; give me a fountain of tears.  Give me the grace of tears.  Drop down, ye heavens, and bedew the dryness of my heart.  Give me, O Lord, this saving grace.  No grace of all the graces were more welcome to me.  If I may not water my couch with my tears, nor wash Thy feet with my tears, at least give me one or two little tears that Thou mayest put into Thy bottle and write in Thy book!’ If your heart is hard, and your eyes dry, make something like that your continual prayer.

2.  ‘A poor-man,’ said Mr. Desires-awake, about his associate.  ’Mr. Wet-eyes is a poor man, and a man of a broken spirit.’  ’Let Oliver take comfort in his dark sorrows and melancholies.  The quantity of sorrow he has, does it not mean withal the quantity of sympathy he has, and the quantity of faculty and of victory he shall yet have?  Our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobleness.  The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.  Black smoke, as of Tophet, filling all your universe, it can yet by true heart-energy become flame, and the brilliancy of heaven.  Courage!’

   ’This is the angel of the earth,
   And she is always weeping.’

3.  ’A poor man, and a man of a broken spirit, and yet one that can speak well to a petition.’  Yes; and you will see how true that eulogy of Mr. Wet-eyes is if you will run over in your mind the outstanding instances of successful petitioners in the Scriptures.  As you come down the Old and the New Testaments you will be astonished and encouraged to find how prevailing a fountain of tears always is with God.  David with his swimming bed; Jeremiah with his head waters; Mary Magdalene over His feet with her welling eyes; Peter’s bitter cry all his life long as often as he heard a cock crow, and so on.  So on through a multitude whose names are written in heaven, and who went up to heaven all the way with inconsolable sorrow because of their sins.  They took words and turned to the Lord; but,—­better than the best words,—­they took tears, or rather, their tears took them.  The best words, the words that the Holy Ghost Himself teacheth, if they are without tears, will avail nothing.  Even inspired words will not pass through; while, all the time, tears, mere tears, without words, are omnipotent with God.  Words weary Him, while tears overcome and command Him.  He inhabits the tears of Israel.  Therefore, also, now, saith the Lord, turn ye unto Me with all your heart, and with weeping and with mourning.