You will not know what a kennel of hell-hounds your own heart is till you have long sought to enter it and cleanse it out.  And after you have done your utmost, and your best, death will hurry you away from your but half-accomplished task.  Only, in that case you will be able to die in the hope that what is impossible with man is possible with God, as promised by Him, and that He will not leave your soul in hell, but will perfect that good thing which alone concerneth you, even your everlasting deliverance from all sinful self-love.

And if self-love is the fruitful mother of all our passions, then sensuality is surely her eldest son.  Indeed, so shallow are we, and so shallow are our words, that when we speak of sinful passion most men instantly think of sensuality.  There are so many seductive things that appeal to our appetites, and our appetites are so easily awakened, and are so imperious when they are awakened, that when passion is spoken about, few men think of the soul, all men think instantly of the body.  And no wonder.  For, stupid and besotted as we are, we must all at some time of our life have felt the bondage and degradation of the senses.  Passion in the Interpreter’s House had soon nothing left but rags.  And in this house to-night there are many men whose consciences and hearts and characters are all in such rags from sensual sin, that when the Scriptures speak of uncleanness, or rags, or corruption, their thoughts flee at once to sensual sin and its conscience-rending results.  Cease from sensuality, said Cicero, for if once you give your minds up to sensuality, you will never be able to think of anything else.

Ambition, emulation, and envy are the leading members of a whole prolific family of satanic passions in the human heart.  Indeed, these passions, taken along with their kindred passions of hatred and ill-will, are, in our Lord’s words, the very lusts of the devil himself.  The Jews hated our Lord the more for what He said about these detestable passions, but His own disciples love Him only the more that He so well knows the evil affections of their hearts, and so well describes and denounces them.  Anybody can denounce sensual sin, and everybody will understand and approve.  But spiritual sin,—­ambition and emulation and envy and ill-will—­these things are more easy to denounce than they are to detect and describe, and more easy to detect and describe than they are to cast out.  These sins seem rather to multiply and to strike a deeper root when you begin to cast them out.  What an utterly and abominably evil passion is envy which is awakened not by bad things but by the best things!  That another man’s talents, attainments, praises, rewards should kindle it, and that the blame, the depreciation, the hurt that another man suffers should satisfy it,—­what a piece of very hell must that be in the human heart!  What more do we need than just a little envy in our hearts to make us prostrate penitents before God and