truths which are to others as music to the deaf or colour to the blind? Why does one man find his greatest joy and his deepest peace in pouring out his soul in prayer, while another cannot so much as open his lips to his Father in heaven? Why to one man is the air full of God's voices, while another finds nothing in the universe but a deadly and maddening silence? Again I say that even this is in a great degree the effect of training; in other words, it is the result of habits, and the result of habit.

Now habit is of two kinds, active and passive; and it works in two ways, by deadening sensations or by strengthening tendencies.

In both ways the law works physically. A sensation constantly repeated becomes obliterated; an act constantly repeated becomes instinctive; and for these reasons the structure of the body is so affected by the habits of the life that it tends to repeat actions with the regularity of a machine, and becomes at last little more than an automaton.

And both kinds of habit, active and pas

sive, work mentally.

Diligence, attention,

forcing the mind to master dry details, is at first difficult, and to some minds almost repulsive. They try to be diligent and attentive because it is a duty, and week by week it becomes first easy, then pleasant, and at last delightful; until a good, healthy, well-trained boy goes as willingly and cheerfully and as naturally to his lessons as he does to his play. And with the passive habit there is formed the active facility, so that the good worker is soon astonished and rewarded by his own happy progress and assured success.

And-which is the most serious consideration of all-in both ways, active and passive, habit works morally. It destroys bad or good instincts; it strengthens bad or good impressions. We are not worst at once. When a boy has been well brought up in a pure and Christian atmosphere, he is shocked at first by every form of low vice or wilful wickedness. "I cannot," is the instinctive utterance of the true nature--the instinctive cry of the outraged conscience. When

a child, new to school, first hears profane swearing he is horrified; but how many an English boy, who has not tried to keep alive his right impressions, passes from horror to familiarity, from familiarity to indifference, from indifference to guilt. While passively the good feeling fades, actively the wrong impulse grows; so that the tendency becomes the disposition, the disposition the habit. And what does the habit do? Thread by thread it weaves the warp and woof of that besetting sin—that εὐπερίστατος ἁμαρτία which clings to the soul like a poisoned garment. Link by link it forges the invisible fetters of adamant wherewith-groaning, it may be, in vain for the old freedom, sighing in vain for the lost and happy innocence-we are tied and bound by the chain of our sins.

But do not think that these facts are in themselves terrible; we may make them terrible; but God meant them to have no terror for the good, and He meant us all to be good. This law of habit and of continuity was intended to be infinitely beneficent, so that for all of us the 'I am’

and I ought' should concide and coalesce not only with 'I can' and 'I will' but also with 'I like,' 'It is all my desire.' If, as we have seen, we make ourselves--i.e. our moral nature -we were meant to make ourselves good, not bad; and the law of habit, which we transform into a curse when we enlist it in the cause of evil, was meant to be the blessing by which virtue and purity might become a second nature-was meant to be that heaven which we attain on this side the grave when we do the thing which is right not only because it is our duty, but because it is our happiness--not only because it is good, but because it is sweet. The element of fire is a gift of heaven when we govern it for the purposes of life and warmth; it becomes a flake of hell when we let it loose over the sleeping city or the fruitful plains. Even so, habit is a blessed angel if we make it the servant of our spirit; it is a malignant demon if we make it the master of our bodies and our souls.

Observe further that habit affects our very constitution. We are the heirs of the nature of

our parents, and the natures of our parents were moulded by their habits. We do not come into the world alike. Some are born with better natures natures nobler, purer, endowed with more affinities to virtue than others. There is a difference between the children of the wicked and the generation of the just. Some natures seem to be born with an original taint; and in this sense it is awfully true that when the fathers eat sour grapes the children's teeth are set on edge. It is not indeed true—and the prophet Ezekiel powerfully repudiates this false notionthat any one is born with a nature so depraved that he must be lost, or that any man is punished because his parents sinned. The great truth holds that each bears only his own iniquity, and that the soul that sinneth, it, and it only, shall die; for it is certain that where God sends more temptation He giveth also more grace. It requires as much moral effort to keep one man from being a flagrant sinner as it does to make another man a great saint. How frightful is the legacy of unhealthy impulse which a bad father