It was said long ago in Vanity Fair about our present Premier that if he were a worse man he would be a better statesman.  Now, I do not repeat that in this place because I agree with it, but because it helps to illustrate, as sometimes a violent paradox will help to illustrate, a truth that does not lie all at once on the surface.  But it is no paradox or extravagance or anything but the simple truth to say that if Little-Faith had had more and earlier discoveries made to him of the innate evil of his own heart, even if it had been by that innate evil bursting out of his heart and laying waste his good life, he would either have been driven out of his little faith altogether or driven into a far deeper faith.  Had the commandment come to him in the manner it came to Paul; had it come so as that the sinfulness of his inward nature had revived, as Paul says, under its entrance; then, either his great goodness or his little faith must have there and then died.  God’s truth and man’s goodness cannot dwell together in the same heart.  Either the truth will kill the goodness, or the goodness will kill the truth.  Little-Faith, in short, was such a good man, and had always been such a good man, and had led such an easy life in consequence, that his faith had not been much exercised, and therefore had not grown, as it must have been exercised and must have grown, had he not been such a good man.  In short, and to put it bluntly, had Little-Faith been a worse sinner, he would have been a better saint. “O felix culpa!” exclaimed a church father; “O happy fault, which found for us sinners such a Redeemer.”  An apostrophe which Bishop Ken has put into these four bold lines—­

   “What Adam did amiss,
   Turned to our endless bliss;
   O happy sin, which to atone,
   Drew Filial God to leave His throne.”

And John Calvin, the soberest of men, supports Augustine, the most impulsive of men, in saying the same thing.  All things which happen to the saints are so overruled by God that what the world regards as evil the issue shows to be good.  For what Augustine says is true, that even the sins of saints are, through the guiding providence of God, so far from doing harm to them, that, on the contrary, they serve to advance their salvation.  And Richard Hooker, a theologian, if possible, still more judicious than even John Calvin, says on this same subject and in support of the same great father, “I am not afraid to affirm it boldly with St. Augustine that men puffed up through a proud opinion of their own sanctity and holiness receive a benefit at the hands of God, and are assisted with His grace, when with His grace they are not assisted, but permitted, and that grievously, to transgress.  Ask the very soul of Peter, and it shall undoubtedly make you itself this answer:  My eager protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am ashamed of; but those crystal tears, wherewith my sin and