is the twitching paralysis of sin.  Like ’the pestilence that walketh in darkness,’ it has a fell power of concealing itself, and the man whose sins are the greatest is always the least conscious of them.  He dwells in a region where the malaria is so all-pervading that the inhabitants do not know what the sweetness of an unpoisoned atmosphere is.  If there is a ‘worst man’ in the world, we may be very sure that no conscience is less troubled than his is.

So the question may well be urged on those so terribly numerous amongst us, whose very unconsciousness of their true condition is the most fatal symptom of their fatal disease.  What is the worth of a peace which is only secured by ignoring realities, and which can be shattered into fragments by anything that compels a man to see himself as he is?  In such a fool’s paradise thousands of us live.  ‘Use and wont,’ the continual occupation with the trifles of our daily lives, the fleeting satisfactions of our animal nature, the shallow wisdom which bids us ‘let sleeping dogs lie,’ all conspire to mask, to many consciences, their unrest and their sin.  We abstain from lifting the curtain behind which the serpent lies coiled in our hearts, because we dread to see its loathly length, and to rouse it to lift its malignant head, and to strike with its forked tongue.  But sooner or later—­may it not be too late—­we shall be set face to face with the dark recess, and discover the foul reptile that has all the while been coiled there.

II.  Man’s mad way of seeking healing.

Can there be a more absurd course of action than that recorded in our text?  ‘When Ephraim saw his sickness, then went Ephraim to Assyria.’  The Northern Kingdom sought for the healing of their national calamities from the very cause of their national calamities, and in repetition of their national sin.  A hopeful policy, and one which speedily ended in the only possible result!  But that insanity was but a sample of the infatuation which besets us all.  When we are conscious of our unrest, are we not all tempted to seek to conceal it with what has made it?  Take examples from the grosser forms of animal indulgence.  The drunkard’s vulgar proverb recommending ‘a hair of the dog that bit you,’ is but a coarse expression of a common fault.  He is wretched until ’another glass’ steadies, for a moment, his trembling hand, and gives a brief stimulus to his nerves.  They say that the Styrian peasants, who habitually eat large quantities of arsenic, show symptoms of poison if they leave it off suddenly.  These are but samples, in the physical region, of a tendency which runs through all lire, and leads men to drown thought by plunging into the thick of the worldly absorptions that really cause their unrest.  The least persistent of men is strangely obstinate in his adherence to old ways, in spite of all experience of their crooked slipperiness.  We wonder at the peasants who have their cottages and vineyards on