How noble might his life have been! But it was not noble. It was a drunken life; it was a sensual life; and he was one of the many who laid his incense on unhallowed altars, and polluted the vestal flame of genius with alien fires. And what was the result? The result was that the shame and the torment of this divided life-of this consciousness that he was false to himself—simply killed him. Again and again he refers to it in those glorious poems of his. He confesses it in those exquisite lines to the little field-mouse that his plough had disturbed :

Still thou art blest, compared with me,

The present only toucheth thee;

But oh! I backward cast my ee
On prospects drear;

And forwards, tho' I canna see,
I guess and fear."

And again :

"Is there a man whose judgment clear

Can others teach the course to steer,

Yet runs himself his mad career

Wild as the wave ?

Here pause-and through the starting tear
Survey this grave."

Believe me, this dual life will not do. You cannot be pardoned and yet retain the offence. You cannot keep both your sin and your Saviour. Man is one. The "I" means one being, and that being is not saved unless the sanctification of the spirit has included that of the soul and body—unless the body have been weaned from corruption, and the soul drawn up from its natural estrangement into the life that is of God.

CHAPTER IV.

GREAT PRINCIPLES (continued).

2. A SECOND truth on which we should meditate is, that for this "I," this "I am," this one being, this undivided individuality, which is either pure or impure either at peace or not at peace with God-we are responsible. It' is in our own power and care and charge. Each of us, we are sometimes told, is the architect of his own fortunes; but it is a very far more awful truth that each of us is the creator of his own destiny. "I am" implies not only what God made us, but what we make ourselves. Have you ever seen a potter at his wheel? He puts a lump of clay upon the wheel, and as the wheel whirls round, his hands can make it, and mar it, and fashion it as he pleases. But not more surely can the potter, as he chooses, make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour than we can so make our

lives. Our lives are the plastic clay placed upon the whirling wheel of time and circumstance, and it is neither time nor accident, nor friends, nor good fortune, nor evil fortune, nor our home, nor any of our surroundings, which fashion that clay into our "I am." It is nothing external ; it is we ourselves who fashion ourselves into the final result which is the sum total of our character and our lives. Never try to lay on your circumstances the blame of what you are. Never say 'I might have been a good man if I had not met that companion;' or 'if I had not gone to that school;' or if I had not been in that office;' or 'if I had not read that book.' Joseph in the idolatrous household is pure and faithful; Hophni and Phinehas in the very Temple are foul and false. It is not even God who moulds us; we mould ourselves. For God has left us free; and it is not God who chooses the good and refuses the evil for us, but we must do it each for ourselves. There are motives to good, there are temptations to evil, around us : which of them we obey,

which of them we follow, depends on our own will. If it did not, virtue would involve no merit, and vice no blame; but both would be mere necessities. But God made us (and we know it) quite strong enough to have resisted evil if we choose, and He never yet sent us a temptation without sending us also therewith the way of escape. Others have met with companions as bad, have been placed amid surroundings as evil, and have not fallen as we

fell. Remember that it is absolutely in the power of every one, by using the means which God has given him, to grow up a good and holy man, free from the faults which poison life and degrade humanity-such a man as God's saints have been-noble, loving, unselfish, calm, happy, pure; or else to grow up mean, corrupt, detestable, a curse to himself and to all who come within the circle of his life. Each soul born into the world may grow up to be as vile as Judas the traitor, or as saintly as John the divine. It rests with him, and with him alone, whether he shall grow up to be a