suicidal folly is but one illustration of a universal madness which drives men to seek for the healing of their misery, and the alleviation of their discomfort, in the repetition of the very acts which brought these about.  The attempt to get relief in such a fashion, of course, fails; for as the verse before our text emphatically proclaims, it is God who has been ’as a moth unto Ephraim,’ gnawing away his strength:  and it is only He who can heal, since in reality it is He, and not the quarrelsome king of Assyria, who has inflicted the sickness.

Thus understood, the text carries wide lessons, and may serve us as a starting-point for considering man’s discovery of his ‘sickness,’ man’s mad way of seeking healing, God’s way of giving it.

I. First, then, man’s discovery of his sickness.

The greater part of most lives is spent in mechanical, unreflecting repetition of daily duties and pleasures.  We are all apt to live on the surface, and it requires an effort, which we are too indolent to make except under the impulse of some arresting motive, to descend into the depths of our own souls, and there to face the solemn facts of our own personality.  The last place with which most of us are familiar, is our innermost self.  Men are dimly conscious that things within are not well with them; but it is only one here and there that says so distinctly to himself, and takes the further step of thoroughly investigating the cause.  But that superficial life is at the mercy of a thousand accidents, each one of which may break through the thin film, and lay bare the black depths.

But there is another aspect of this discovery of sickness, far graver than the mere consciousness of unrest.  Ephraim does not see his sickness unless he sees his sin.  The greater part of every life is spent without that deep, all-pervading sense of discord between itself and God.  Small and recurrent faults may evoke recurring remonstrances of conscience, but that is a very different thing from the deep tones and the clear voice of condemnation in respect to one’s whole life and character which sounds in a heart that has learned how ’deceitful and desperately wicked’ it is.  Such a conviction may flash upon a man at any moment, and from a hundred causes.  A sorrow, a sunset-sky, a grave, a sermon, may produce it.

But even when we have come to recognise clearly our unrest, we have gone but part of the way, we have become conscious of a symptom, not of the disease.  Why is it that man is alone among the creatures in that discontent with externals, and that dissatisfaction with himself?  ’Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places’:  why is it that amongst all God’s happy creatures, and God’s shining stars, men stand ‘strangers in a strange land,’ and are cursed with a restlessness which has not ‘where to lay its head’?  The consciousness of unrest is but the agitation of the limbs which indicates disease.  That disease