graciously discover Himself unto him.”  “One day,” he writes, “as I was musing on the wickedness and blasphemy of my heart, that scripture came into my mind, ‘He hath made peace by the Blood of His Cross.’  By which I was made to see, both again and again and again that day, that God and my soul were friends by this blood:  Yea, I saw the justice of God and my sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other.  This was a good day to me.  I hope I shall not forget it.”  At another time the “glory and joy” of a passage in the Hebrews (ii. 14-15) were “so weighty” that “I was once or twice ready to swoon as I sat, not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace.”  “But, oh! now how was my soul led on from truth to truth by God; now had I evidence of my salvation from heaven, with many golden seals thereon all banging in my sight, and I would long that the last day were come, or that I were fourscore years old, that I might die quickly that my soul might be at rest.”

At this time he fell in with an old tattered copy of Luther’s “Commentary on the Galatians,” “so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece if I did but turn it over.”  As he read, to his amazement and thankfulness, he found his own spiritual experience described.  “It was as if his book had been written out of my heart.”  It greatly comforted him to find that his condition was not, as he had thought, solitary, but that others had known the same inward struggles.  “Of all the books that ever he had seen,” he deemed it “most fit for a wounded conscience.”  This book was also the means of awakening an intense love for the Saviour.  “Now I found, as I thought, that I loved Christ dearly.  Oh, methought my soul cleaved unto Him, my affections cleaved unto Him; I felt love to Him as hot as fire.”

And very quickly, as he tells us, his “love was tried to some purpose.”  He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation—­“a freak of fancy,” Mr. Froude terms it—­“fancy resenting the minuteness with which he watched his own emotions.”  He had “found Christ” and felt Him “most precious to his soul.”  He was now tempted to give Him up, “to sell and part with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for the things of this life; for anything.”  Nor was this a mere passing, intermittent delusion.  “It lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month, no, not sometimes one hour in many days together, except when I was asleep.”  Wherever he was, whatever he was doing day and night, in bed, at table, at work, a voice kept sounding in his ears, bidding him “sell Christ” for this or that.  He could neither “eat his food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast his eyes on anything” but the hateful words were heard, “not once only, but a hundred times over, as fast as a man could speak, ‘sell Him, sell Him, sell Him,’” and, like his own Christian in the dark valley, he could not determine whether