man all our days?  What more doctrine, argument, proof, authority, persuasion should a sane man need beyond a little envy in his heart at his best friend to make him an evangelical believer and an evangelical preacher?  How, in the name of wonder, is it that men can be so ignorant of the plague of their own hearts as to remain indifferent, and, much more, hostile, to the gospel of love and holiness?  Pride, also,—­what a hateful and intolerable passion is that!  How stone-blind to his own state must that sinner be whose heart is filled with pride, and how impossible it is for that man to make any real progress in any kind of truth or goodness!  And resentment,—­what a deep-seated, long-lived, and suicidal passion is that!  How it hunts down him it hates, and how surely it shuts the door of salvation against him who harbours it!  Forgive us our debts, the resentful man says in his prayer, as we forgive our debtors.  And detraction,—­how some men’s ink-horns are filled with detraction for ink, and how it drops from their tongue like poison!  At their every word a reputation dies.  Life and all its opportunities of doing good and having good done to us is laid like a bag of treasure at our feet, but, like the prodigal son in the Interpreter’s House, with all those passions raging in our own hearts at other men, and in other men’s hearts at us, we have soon nothing left us but rags.  God be thanked for every man here who sees and feels that he has nothing left him but rags; and, still more, thanks for all those who see and feel how, by their bad passions, sensual and spiritual, they have left on other people nothing but rags.

Now, from all this let us lay it to heart that our sanctification and salvation lie in our mastery over all these and over many other passions that have not even been named.  He is an accepted saint of God, who, taking his and other people’s rags to God’s mercy every day, every day also in God’s strength grapples with, bridles, and tames his own wild and ungodly passions.  Be not deceived, my friends; he alone is a saint of God who is a sanctified man; and his passions,—­as they are the spring of his actions, so they are the sphere and seat of his sanctification.  Be not deceived; that man, and no other manner of man, is, or ever will be, a partaker of God’s salvation.  You often hear me recommending those students who have first to subdue their own passions and then the passions of those who hear them to study Jonathan Edwards’ ethical and spiritual writings.  Well, just at this present point, to show you how well that great man practised what he preached, let me read to you a few lines from his biographer:  ‘Few men,’ says Henry Rogers, ’ever attained a more complete mastery over their passions than Jonathan Edwards did.  This was partly owing to the ascendency of his intellect; partly, and in a still greater degree, to the elevation of his piety.  For the subjugation of his passions he was no doubt very greatly indebted to the prodigious