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mighty Boon. Come with strong desire. Let the heart speak, rather than the mouth. Come in stedfast faith, fastening the whole soul upon that solemn asseveration,- Yea, let God be true, and every man a liar!" And lo! your word is a word of power. It has unlocked Heaven. Before you call, He answers; and while you are yet speaking, He hears.

CHAPTER IV.

OF SELF-EXAMINATION.

"And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: but the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up and it grew up together with him, and with his children: it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity. And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man."-2 SAM. xii. 1-7.

IN this striking passage of Holy Scripture we see King David in disguise brought before his own judgment-seat. His judgment, as chief magistrate of his realm, is demanded upon an imaginary case of wanton

and cruel oppression, the exact counterpart of that which he had himself committed. David, not recognizing himself under the disguise which the prophet had thrown over him, passes sentence of death and fourfold restitution upon the imaginary offender. No sooner had the sentence gone out of the king's mouth than the prophet unmasks the muffled and mysterious figure which stood at the bar, tears away the disguise, and shows to the astonished king himself: "Thou art the man." How came it to pass that David was so incensed with cruelty and oppression in a supposed case, though he had remained so long (since his child was born when Nathan came to him, it cannot have been much short of a year) insensible to the far more heinous cruelty and oppression of his own conduct? The reason is, of course, that we never judge of our own conduct in any affair, as we do of an abstract case in which we are not ourselves mixed up, and in which our feelings, passions, and prejudices are not interested. Moralists have questioned, and there seems every reason to question, whether a man can do a bad action without justifying it to his own conscience as at least excusable under the circumstances, or, in other words, whether evil, without a certain colour, pretext, and palliation, can ever be accepted by the human will; but the colours and pretexts which serve for our own conduct are never available for that of other men. We judge them, as David judged the imaginary offender in the parable, nakedly, truly, and severely enough.

It is the object of these pages to give some thoughts, which may be practically useful on the subject of Personal Religion. Now the chief devotional exercise which turns Religion into a personal thing, which brings it home to men's business and bosom, is Self-examination. A man's religion cannot well be one of merely good impressions, the staple of it cannot well be an evaporating sentiment, if he have acquired the habit of honestly and candidly looking within. The subject, therefore, which we treat to-day, has the closest bearing upon the general argument of the work.

Self-examination may be called an arraignment of ourselves at our own bar, according to that word of our Eucharistic Service: "Judge therefore yourselves, brethren, that ye be not judged of the Lord." It is an exercise most essential to our spiritual health; and the more earnestly to be pressed on all Protestants, because there exists in the Reformed Churches no security but that of right principle for its ever being practised. In the Roman Church you are aware it is otherwise. The system of the confessional, with all its evils and abominations, may at least fairly lay claim to the advantage of exacting a certain amount of introspection from those who honestly conform to it. We who have not this

check, and among whom the work of probing the conscience with the Word of God is done from the pulpit, must at least see to it that we make such work personal, by applying to ourselves in Self-examination the Sermons which we hear and read.

It is easy,-fatally easy, with Self-examination as with Prayer, to allow the exercise to be drawn down from its high moral and spiritual aim to the level of a form. A string of questions put to the conscience every evening before our evening prayer, never varying with the circumstances of the day, turning principally upon outward conduct, and answered almost mechanically-this, if the truth must be confessed, is what the Self-examination of devout and well-intentioned people too often reduces itself to. Not that we at all counsel the abandonment of such a practice, where it is done with real seriousness and attention. It is almost a principle of the spiritual life that ground is never gained, always lost, by giving up forms through a dread of formality; the way to gain ground is to quicken and vitalize the forms. Nightly examination of the conscience is any how a safeguard for the performance of the duty, and a most excellent preparative for evening prayer. But while we continue it, let us strive to throw reality and life into it by regarding the great duty on a large, comprehensive, and spiritual scale.

Consider first, the necessity for all of us, in respect

both of our sins and of our good works, of an exercise like Self-examination. This necessity arises from the fact, so distinctly stated in Scripture, that "the heart is deceitful above all things," and that "he that trusteth in his own heart," in its dictates respecting himself and his own spiritual condition,-" is a fool." It has pleased God to illustrate this cardinal truth by two grand examples, one in the Old and one in the New Testament. It must have been by trust in the subtle evasions and plausible shifts of his own heart, that David, after committing two of the worst crimes of which our nature is capable, so long contrived to keep his conscience quiet, but at length was convicted of the desperate folly of severely condemning in another man, the very faults, which, in an infinitely aggravated form, he had been palliating and excusing in himself. And it was by trusting in the assurances which his heart gave him of his own strong attachment to his Master, that St. Peter, secure of himself, was betrayed into the weakness and folly of denying Christ.

May we say that, while all characters are liable to the snare of self-deception, those are more particularly exposed to it, who, like St. Peter and David, are persons of keen sensibilities, warm temperaments, quick affections ? Probably we may; for affectionateness of disposition readily commends itself to the conscience as a thing which cannot be wrong, and secretly whispers to one, who is conscious of possessing it, "This generous trait in you will cover and excuse many sins.' An acrid, soured character cannot flatter itself that it is right with half the facility of a warm and genial character. A man, who sins by passions the reverse of malignant, is apt to thank God secretly that he is not malignant, totally forgetting that, although not malignant, he follows his own impulses as entirely, and so is as purely selfish as the malignant man.

But how shall we bring home to ourselves the dangerousness of trusting, without due examination, to the verdict of our own hearts? We will do so by supposing a parallel case in a matter, where we are all

peculiarly apt to be cautious and suspicious,-the goods of this world. Suppose then (and, in a commercial country like this, the supposition has been not unfrequently realized) that the chief agent in some great speculation is a man, who, though most untrustworthy, has all the art of conciliating trust. Suppose him to be fluent, fair-spoken, prepossessing in manners and appearance, and to be especially plausible in glossing over a financial difficulty. Advance one more step in the hypothesis, and suppose him to be a private friend of many of those who are embarked with him in the same speculation; allied to some of them by marriage, and, more or less, in habits of intimacy with all. If such a person is at the head of affairs, and entrusted with the administration of the funds contributed by all, it is evident that he might impose upon the contributors to almost any extent. His artful representations would quiet their little panics, when such arose; and he would have it in his power to keep them still, while embezzling their resources, until the great crash comes, which announces to many of them, as with a clap of thunder, that they are bankrupts. Now the peril of such trust in worldly matters supplies a very fair image of the peril of a still more foolish and groundless trust in spiritual things. Our hearts are notoriously most untrustworthy informants in any case where we are ourselves interested. It is not only Scripture which assevers this. We confess it ourselves, and re-echo the verdict of Scripture, when we say of any slight matter, with which we happen to be mixed up, "I am an interested party, and therefore I had better not be a judge." But while our hearts are thus, by our own confession, untrustworthy, there is no one in whose assertions we habitually place more trust. We think we cannot be deceived respecting ourselves; we know at all events our own motives and intentions, if we know any thing. The unkind, the insincere, the ungenerous, the ungrateful, never, we think, had any affinity with our nature; for we have never, as I observed above, admitted these forms of evil, without