[Footnote 1:  PENSEES:  Grandeur de l’homme, 6.  Ed. Wetstein.]

[Footnote 2:  CHAPMAN:  Byron’s Conspiracy.]

GOD’S EXHAUSTIVE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN. [continued]

PSALM cxxxix. 1—­6.—­“O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.  Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off.  Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.  For there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.  Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thy hand upon me.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.”

In the preceding discourse upon this text, we directed attention to the fact that man is possessed of the power of self-knowledge, and that he cannot ultimately escape from using it.  He cannot forever flee from his own presence; he cannot, through all eternity, go away from his own spirit.  If he take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, he must, sooner or later, know himself, and acquit or condemn himself.

Our attention was then directed to the fact, that God’s knowledge of man is certainly equal to man’s knowledge of himself.  No man knows more of his own heart than the Searcher of hearts knows.  Up to this point, certainly, the truth of the text is incontrovertible.  God knows all that man knows.

II.  We come now to the second position:  That God accurately and exhaustively knows all that man might, but does not, know of himself.

Although the Creator designed that every man should thoroughly understand his own heart, and gave him the power of self-inspection that he might use it faithfully, and apply it constantly, yet man is extremely ignorant of himself.  Mankind, says an old writer, are nowhere less at home, than at home.  Very few persons practise serious self-examination at all; and none employ the power of self-inspection with that carefulness and sedulity with which they ought.  Hence men generally, and unrenewed men always, are unacquainted with much that goes on within their own minds and hearts.  Though it is sin and self-will, though it is thought and feeling and purpose and desire, that is going on and taking place during all these years of religious indifference, yet the agent himself, so far as a sober reflection upon the moral character of the process, and a distinct perception of the dreadful issue of it, are concerned, is much of the time as destitute of self-knowledge as an irrational brute itself.  For, were sinful men constantly self-examining, they would be constantly in torment.  Men can be happy in sin, only so long as they can sin without thinking of it.  The instant they begin to perceive and understand what they are doing, they begin to feel the fang of the worm.  If the frivolous wicked world, which now takes so much pleasure in its wickedness, could be forced to do here what it will be forced to do hereafter, namely, to eye its sin while it commits it, to think of what it is doing while it does it, the billows of the lake of fire would roll in upon time, and from gay Paris and luxurious Vienna there would instantaneously ascend the wailing cry of Pandemonium.