And yet, it is a truth of revelation that God searches the heart of man; that He knows his down-sitting and uprising, and understands his thought afar off; that He compasses his path and his lying-down, and is acquainted with all his ways.  And yet, it is a deduction of reason, also, that because God is the creator of the human mind, He must perfectly understand its secret agencies; that He in whose Essence man lives and moves and has his being, must behold every motion, and feel every stirring of the human spirit.  “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear?  He that formed the eye, shall He not see?” Let us, then, ponder the fact of God’s exhaustive knowledge of man’s soul, that we may realize it, and thereby come under its solemn power and impression.  For all religion, all holy and reverential fear of God, rises and sets, as in an atmosphere, in the thought:  “Thou God seest me.”

I. In analyzing and estimating the Divine knowledge of the human soul, we find, in the first place, that God accurately and exhaustively knows all that man knows of himself.

Every man in a Christian land, who is in the habit of frequenting the house of God, possesses more or less of that self-knowledge of which we have spoken.  He thinks of the moral character of some of his own thoughts.  He reflects upon the moral quality of some of his own feelings.  He considers the ultimate tendency of some of his own actions.  In other words, there is a part of his inward and his outward life with which he is uncommonly well acquainted; of which he has a distinct perception.  There are some thoughts of his mind, at which he blushes at the very time of their origin, because he is vividly aware what they are, and what they mean.  There are some emotions of his heart, at which he trembles and recoils at the very moment of their uprising, because he perceives clearly that they involve a very malignant depravity.  There are some actings of his will, of whose wickedness he is painfully conscious at the very instant of their rush and movement.  We are not called upon, here, to say how many of a man’s thoughts, feelings, and determinations, are thus subjected to his self-inspection at the very time of their origin, and are known in the clear light of self-knowledge.  We are not concerned, at this point, with the amount of this man’s self-inspection and self-knowledge.  We are only saying that there is some experience such as this in his personal history, and that he does know something of himself, at the very time of action, with a clearness and a distinctness that makes him start, or blush, or fear.