God’s deep purposes with His people to teach them watchfulness in this life, then here is a field for watchfulness, a field of divine depth and scope and opportunity.  There used to be a divinity question set in the schools in these terms:  Where, in the regenerate, hath sin its lodging-place?  For that sin does still lodge in the regenerate is too abundantly evident both from Scripture and from experience.  But where it so lodges is the question.  The Dominican monks, and some others, were of opinion that original sin is to be found only in the inferior part of the soul, but not in the mind or the will.  Which, I suppose, we shall soon find contrary both to Scripture and reason and experience.  Old Andrew Gray speaks feelingly and no less truly concerning the heart, when he says, ‘I think,’ he says, ’that if all the saints since Adam’s day, and who shall be to the end of the world, had but one deceitful heart to guide they would misguide it.’  What a plot of God, then, it is to seat grace, a little saving grace, in the midst of such a sea of corruption as a human heart is, and then to set a sinful man to watch over that spark and to keep the boiling pollutions of his own heart from extinguishing that spark!  Well may Paul exclaim:  Yea, what carefulness it calls forth in us; yea, what indignation; yea, what fear; yea, what vehement desire; yea, what zeal; yea, what revenge!  And, knowing to what He has left our hearts, well may Emmanuel say to us from His ascending steps, ’Watch ye, therefore; and what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!’

3.  It is to keep thee watchful and to teach thee war also, the Prince went on.  Bishop Butler is about the last author that we would think of going to for light on any deep and intricate question in the evangelical and experimental life.  But Butler is so deeply seen into much of the heart of man, as also into many of the ways of God, that even here he has something to say to the point.  ‘It is vain to object,’ he says in his sober and sobering way, ’that all this trouble and danger might have been saved us by our being made at once the creatures and the characters which we were to be.  For we experience that what we are to be is to be the effect of what we shall do.  And that the conduct of nature is not to save us trouble and danger, but to make us capable of going through trouble and danger, and to put it upon us to do it.’  The Apostle Peter has the same teaching in a passage too little attended to, in which he tells us that we are set here to work out our own salvation, and that our salvation will just be what, with fear and trembling, or, as Butler says, with trouble and danger, we work out.  No man, let all men understand, is to have his salvation thrust upon him.  No man need expect to waken up at the end of an idle, indifferent, inattentive life and find his salvation superinduced upon all that.  No man shall wear the crown of everlasting life who has not for himself won it.  As every man soweth to the Spirit so