Timothy, without prejudice or partiality, then I know no better reading for an ill-conditioned heart begun to look to itself than just a good, out-and-out party newspaper.  And if it is a church paper all the better for your purpose.  If you read with your fingers in your ears; if you read with a beam in your eye, you had better confine yourself in your reading; if you feel that your prejudices are inflamed and your partiality is intensified, then take care what paper you take in.  But if you read all you read for the love of the truth, for justice, for fair-play, and for brotherly love, and all that in yourself; if you read all the time with your eyes on your own ill-conditioned heart, then, as James says, count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations.  Take up your political and ecclesiastical paper every morning, saying to yourself, Go to, O my heart, and get thy daily lesson.  Go to, and enter thy cleansing and refining furnace.  Go to, and come well out of thy daily temptation.—­A nobler school you will not find anywhere for a prejudiced, partial, angry, and ill-conditioned heart than just the party journals of the day.  For the abating of prejudice; for seeing the odiousness of partiality, and for putting on every day a fair, open, catholic, Christian mind, commend me to the public life and the public journals of our living day.  And it is not that this man may be up and that man down; this cause victorious and that cause defeated; this truth vindicated and that untruth defeated, that public life rolls on and that its revolutions are reported to us.  Our own minds and our own hearts are the final cause, the ultimate drift, and the far-off end and aim of it all.  We are not made for party and for the partialities and prosperities of party; party and all its passions and all its successes and all its defeats are made, and are permitted to be made for us; for our opportunity of purging ourselves free of all our ill-conditions, of all our prejudices, of all our partialities, and of all the sin and misery that come to us of all these things.

6.  ‘It is the work of a philosopher,’ says Addison in one of his best Spectators, ’to be every day subduing his passions and laying aside his prejudices.’  We are not philosophers, but we shall be enrolled in the foremost ranks of philosophy if we imitate such philosophers in their daily work, as we must do and shall do.  Well, are we begun to do it?  Are we engaged in that work of theirs and ours every day?  Is God our witness and our judge that we are?  Are we so engaged upon that inward work, and so succeeding in it, that we can read our most prejudiced newspaper with the same mind and spirit, with the same profit and progress, with which we read our Bible?  A good man, a humble man, a man acutely sensible of his ill-conditions, will look on every day as lost or won according as he has lost or won in this inward war.  If his partialities are dropping off his mind; if his prejudices are melting; if he can read