and away the best evidence of sanctification that is possible to us in this life.  It is this keen and bitter sensibility that secures, amid all oppositions and obstructions, the true saint’s onward and upward progress.  Were it not for the misery of their own hearts, God’s best saints would fall asleep and go back like other men.  A sinful heart is the misery of all miseries.  It is the deepest and darkest of all dungeons.  It is the most painful and the most loathsome of all diseases.  And the secrecy of it all adds to the bitterness and the gall of it all.  We may know that other men’s hearts are as sinful as our own, but we do not feel their sinfulness.  We cannot sensibly feel humiliation, bondage, sickness, and self-loathing on account of another man’s envy, or ill-will, or resentment, or cruelty, or falsehood, or impurity.  All these things must be our own before we can enter into the pain and the shame of them; but, when we do, then we taste what death and hell are indeed.  As I write these feeble words about it, a devil’s shaft of envy that was shot all against my will into my heart this morning, still, after a whole day, rankles and festers there.  I have been on my knees with it again and again; I have stood and looked into an open grave to-day; but there it is sucking at my heart’s blood still, like a leech of hell.  Who can understand his errors?  Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.  Create in me a clean heart, O God, O wretched man that I am!  “Let a man,” says William Law when he is enforcing humility, “but consider that if the world knew all that of him which he knows of himself:  if they saw what vanity and what passions govern his inside, and what secret tempers sully and corrupt his best actions, he would have no more pretence to be honoured and admired for his goodness and wisdom than a rotten and distempered body to be loved and admired for its beauty and comeliness.  This is so true, and so known to the hearts of almost all people, that nothing would appear more dreadful to them than to have their hearts fully discovered to the eyes of all beholders.  And, perhaps, there are very few people in the world who would not rather choose to die than to have all their secret follies, the errors of their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness of their pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions, their uneasinesses, hatreds, envies, and vexations made known to all the world.”  Where did William Law get that terrible passage?  Where could he get it but in the secret heart of the miserable author of the Serious Call?