and over which He “rejoices?” Has He laid no command upon us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling?” and has He given no intimation of His “working in us to will and do?” Or is it to Him the same whether we are wrong or right?  Surely we can have no difficulty in replying to such all-important questions!  If a man loses faith in the reality and sincerity of God’s wish, that he personally should have his guilty soul freely pardoned, and his unholy soul sanctified, and his whole being renewed after God’s own image,—­that he himself should be a good, a great, a happy man, by knowing and loving his God; and if a man brings himself to such a state of practical atheism as to doubt whether God knows or cares anything about him;—­then it is impossible for such a man to be “a fellow-labourer,” a “worker together” with God in his own soul; for he does not know and has never heard of any work of God required there.  But if he believes that God is indeed his “Father in heaven;”—­that He has goodwill to him, and therefore desires his good by desiring him to be good;—­that, for the accomplishment of this end, all has been done which is recorded in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation;—­that God has been working in him, through agencies innumerable, since his childhood, by parents and friends, by tender mercies and bitter chastisements, by Sabbath ordinances and pulpit ministrations, by the constant witness of conscience and the Word of God, in order that he should know and love God his Father,—­then, seeing this, will he see also how he may be a “fellow-labourer with God.” And have not you, my reader, been conscious of this work? You cannot get quit of the conviction that there is One higher than yourself with whom you have to do,—­One who is ever with you, seeking to deliver you from evil, from your own evil self,—­One whose voice is never silent, and who is righteously judging your daily life.  And have you never been conscious, too, of fighting against what you certainly knew was not self, but a holy, winning, mysterious power or Person, who opposed self, and for that very reason was resisted by self?  And therefore your sin has not been the ignorance of good, but opposing the good,—­not the absence, but the resisting of a good work in you.  It is on this very principle men will be condemned, for “This is the condemnation, that light hath come into the world, and men prefer darkness to light, because their deeds are evil.”  And if this has been your sin, so has it been your misery.  In exact proportion as you thus “hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord,” you become wretched and unsatisfied.  No wonder! for with whom does the man work when he works in opposition to the will of God?  In refusing to serve God, he serves Satan, and becomes a “worker together” with “the spirit who now worketh in the children of disobedience!”