mostly fools, Carlyle once said.  And let him in this city whose eyes keep at home cast the first stone at those foreign fools.  I will wager on their side that many of you here to-night know better what went on in Mashonaland last week than what went on in your own kitchen downstairs, or in your own nursery or schoolroom upstairs.  Some of you are ten times more taken up with the prospects of Her Majesty’s Government this session, and with the plots of Her Majesty’s Opposition, than you are with the prospects of the good and the evil, and the plots of God and the devil, all this winter in your own hearts.  You rise early, and make a fight to get the first of the newspaper; but when the minister comes in in the afternoon you blush because the housemaid has mislaid the Bible.  Did you ever read of the stargazer who fell into an open well at the street corner?  Like him, you may be a great astronomer, a great politician, a great theologian, a great defender of the faith even, and yet may be a stark fool just in keeping the doors and the windows of your own heart.  ’You shall see a poor soul,’ says Dr. Goodwin, ’mean in abilities of wit, or accomplishments of learning, who knows not how the world goes, nor upon what wheels its states turn, who yet knows more clearly and experimentally his own heart than all the learned men in the world know theirs.  And though the other may better discourse philosophically of the acts of the soul, yet this poor man sees more into the corruption of it than they all.’  And in another excellent place he says:  ’Many who have leisure and parts to read much, instead of ballasting their hearts with divine truth, and building up their souls with its precious words, are much more versed in play-books, jeering pasquils, romances, and feigned staves, which are but apes and peacocks’ feathers instead of pearls and precious stones.  Foreign and foolish discourses please their eyes and their ears; they are more chameleons than men, for they live on the east wind.’

2.  ’If thine eye offend thee’—­our Lord lays down this law to all those who would enter into life—­’pluck it out and cast it from thee; for it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell-fire.’  Does your eye offend you, my brethren?  Does your eye cause you to stumble and fall, as it is in the etymology?  The right use of the eye is to keep you from stumbling and falling; but so perverted are the eye and the heart of every sinner that the city watchman has become a partaker with thieves, and our trusted guide and guardian a traitor and a knave.  If thine eye, therefore, offends thee; if it places a stone or a tree in thy way in a dark night; if it digs a deep ditch right across thy way home; if it in any way leads thee astray, or lets in upon thee thine enemies—­then, surely, thou wert better to be without that eye altogether.  Pluck it out, then; or, what is still harder to go on all your days doing, pluck the evil thing out of