repeating.  ‘We poor creatures,’ he says, ’are commanded by our affections and passions.  They are not at our command.  But the Holy One doth exercise all His attributes at His own will; they are at His command; they are not passions nor perturbations in His mind, though they transport us.  When I would hate, I cannot.  When I would love, I cannot.  When I would grieve, I cannot.  When I would desire, I cannot.  But it is the better for us that all is as He wills it to be.’

And now, to come still closer home, let us look for a moment or two at some of our own ruling and tyrannising passions.  And let us look first at self-love—­that master-passion in every human heart.  Let us give self-love the first place in the inventory and catalogue of our passions, because it has the largest place in all our hearts and lives.  Nay, not only has self-love the largest place of any of the passions of our hearts, but it is out of self-love that all our other evil passions spring.  It is out of this parent passion that all the poisonous brood of our other evil passions are born.  The whole fall and ruin and misery of our present human nature lies in this, that in every human being self-love has taken, in addition to its own place, the place of the love of God and of the love of man also.  We naturally now love nothing and no one but ourselves.  And as long as self-love is in the ascendant in our hearts, all the passions that are awakened in us by our self-love will be selfish with its selfishness, inhumane with its inhumanity, and ungodly with its ungodliness.  And it is to kill and extirpate our so passionate self-love that is the end and aim of all God’s dealings with us in this world.  All that God is doing with us and for us in providence and in grace, in the world and in the church,—­it is all to cure us of this deadly disease of self-love.  We may never have had that told us before, and we may not like it, and we may not believe it; but there can be no better proof of the truth of what is now said than just this, that we do not like it and will not have it.  Self-love will not let us listen to the truth about ourselves; it puts us in a passion both against the truth and against him who tells the truth, as the history of the truth abundantly testifies.  Yes, your indignant protest is quite true.  Self-love has her divine rights,—­no doubt she has.  But you are not commanded to attend to them.  Your self-love will look after herself.  She will manage to have her full share of what is right and proper for any passion to possess even after she cries out that she is trampled upon and despoiled.  My brethren, till you begin to crucify yourselves and to pluck up your self-love by the roots, you will never know what a cruel and hopeless task the Christian life is—­I do not say the Christian profession.  Nor, on the other hand, will you ever discover what a noble task it is—­what a divine task and how divinely assisted and divinely recompensed.