to you, yet men to whom you entertain feelings, animosities, antipathies, that can be called by no other name than that of ill-will.  Look within and see.  Watch within and see.  And I am sure you will come to subscribe with me to the humbling and heart-breaking truth, that, even where there is no resentment, and no other explanation, excuse, or palliation of that kind, yet that festering, secret, malignant ill-will is working in the bottom of your heart.  If you doubt that, if you deny that, if all that kind of self-observation and self-sentencing is new to you, then observe yourself, say, for one week, and report at the end of it whether or no you have had feelings and thoughts and wishes in your secret heart toward men who never in any way hurt you, which can only be truthfully described as pure ill-will; that is to say, you have not felt and thought and wished toward them as you would have them, and all men, feel and think and wish toward you.

4.  ‘To will is present with me, but how to perform I find not,’ says the apostle; and again, ‘Ye cannot do the things that ye would.’  Or, as Dante has it,

      ’The power which wills
   Bears not supreme control; laughter and tears
   Follow so closely on the passion prompts them,
   They wait not for the motion of the will
   In natures most sincere.’

Now, just here lies a deep distinction that has not been enough taken account of by our popular, or even by our more profound, spiritual writers.  The will is often regenerate and right; the will often bends, as Bunyan has it, to that which is good; but behind the will and beneath the will the heart is still full of passions, affections, inclinations, dispositions that are evil; instinctively, impulsively, involuntarily evil, even ‘in natures most sincere.’  And hence arises a conflict, a combat, a death-grip, an agony, a hell on earth, that every regenerate and advancing soul of man is full of His will is right.  If his will is wrong; if he chooses evil; then there is no mystery in the matter so far as he is concerned.  He is a bad man, and he is so intentionally and deliberately and of set purpose; and it is a rule in divine truth that ‘wilfulness in sinning is the measure of our sinfulness.’  But his will is right.  To will is present with him.  He is every day like Thomas Boston one Sabbath-day:  ’Though I cannot be free of sin, God Himself knows that He would be welcome to make havoc of my sins and to make me holy.  I know no lust that I would not be content to part with to-night.  My will, bound hand and foot, I desire to lay at His feet.’  Now, is it not as clear as noonday that in the case of such a man as Boston his mind is one thing and his heart another?  Is it not plain that he has both a good-will and an ill-will within him?  A will that immediately and resolutely chooses for God, and for truth, and for righteousness, and for love; and another law in his members warring against that law of his mind?  ‘Before conversion,’ says Thomas Shepard, ’the main wound of a man is in his will.  And then, after conversion, though his will is changed, yet, ex infirmitate, there are many things that he cannot do, so strong is the remnant of malignity that is still in his heart.  Let him get Christ to help him here.’  In all that ye see your calling, my brethren.