to him.  But, then, there are splendid compensations.  And, better than that, there are some good, and indeed compelling, reasons that begin to rise up in our minds when we need them and begin to look for them, till what at first seemed so mean and so contemptible, and so ungrateful, and so dishonourable, as well as so spiritually perilous, comes to be faced and gone through with positively on a ground of high principle, and, indeed, of stern moral necessity.  So deceitful is the human heart that you could not believe what compelling reasons such a mean-spirited man will face you with as to why he should leave all the ways he once so delighted in for a piece of bread, and for the smile of the open enemies of his church, and his faith, not to say his Saviour.  You will meet with several such men any afternoon coming home from their business.  Sometimes they have still some honest shame on their faces when they meet you; but still oftener they pass you with a sullen hatred and a fierce defiance.  This is he who heard the word, and anon with joy received it.  Yet had he not root in himself, but dured for a while; for when tribulation or persecution arose because of the word by and by he was offended.  They went out from us, says John, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us they would no doubt have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

2.  Guilt, again, Hopeful went on, and to meditate terror, are so grievous to most men, that they rather choose such ways as will but harden their hearts still more and more.  You all know what it is to meditate terror?  “Thine heart shall meditate terror,” says the prophet, “when thou sayest to thyself, who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” The fifty-first Psalm is perhaps the best meditation both of guilt and of terror that we have in the whole Bible.  But there are many other psalms and passages of psalms only second to the fifty-first Psalm, such as the twenty-second, the thirty-eighth, the sixty-ninth, and the hundred-and-thirtieth.  Our Lord Himself also was meditating terror in the garden of Gethsemane, and Paul both guilt and terror when he imagined himself both an apostate preacher and a castaway soul.  And John’s meditations of terror in the Revelation rose into those magnificent pictures of the Last Judgment with which he has to all time covered the walls of the Seven Churches.  In his own Grace Abounding there are meditations of terror quite worthy to stand beside the most terrible things of that kind that ever were written, as also in many others of our author’s dramatical and homiletical books.  I read to you the other Sabbath morning a meditation of terror that was found among Bishop Andrewes’ private papers after his death.  You will not all have forgotten that meditation, but I will read it to you to-night again.  “How fearful,” says