of his heart are out of joint; their bent is bad; they run out naturally to mischief.  Now, what could possibly be more ill-conditioned than to judge and sentence, denounce and execute a man before you have heard his case?  What could be more ill-conditioned than positively to be afraid lest you should be led to forgive, and redress, and love, and act with another man?  To be determined not to hear one word that you can help in his defence, in his favour, and in his praise?  Could a human heart be in a worse state on this side hell itself than that?  Nay, that is hell itself in your evil heart already.  Let prejudice and partiality have their full scope among the wicked passions of your ill-conditioned heart, and lo! the kingdom of darkness is already within you.  Not, lo, here! or, lo, there! but within you.  Look to yourselves, says John to us all, full as we all are of our own ill-conditions.  Look to yourselves.  But we have no eyes left with which to see ourselves; we look so much at the faults and the blames of our neighbour.  ’Publius goes to church sometimes, and reads the Scriptures; but he knows not what he reads or prays, his head is so full of politics.  He is so angry at kings and ministers of state that he has no time nor disposition to call himself to account.  He has the history of all parliaments, elections, prosecutions, and impeachments by heart, and he dies with little or no religion, through a constant fear of Popery.’  Poor, old, ill-conditioned Publius!

5.  And, then, his sixty deaf men under old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice.  We read of engines of sixty-horse power.  And here is a man with the power of resisting and shutting out the truth equal to that of sixty men like himself.  We all know such men; we would as soon think of speaking to those iron pillars about a change of mind as we would to them.  If you preach to their prejudices and their prepossessions and their partialities, they are all ears to hear you, and all tongues to trumpet your praise.  But do not expect them to sit still with ordinary decency under what they are so prejudiced against; do not expect them to read a book or buy a passing paper on the other side.  Sixty deaf men hold their ears; sixty ill-conditioned men hold their hearts.  Habit with them is all the test of truth; it must be right, they’ve done it from their youth.  And thus they go on to the end of their term of life, full of their own fixed ideas, with their eyes full of beams and jaundices and darkness and death.  Some people think that we take up too much of our time with newspapers in our day, and that, if things go on as they are going, we shall soon have neither time nor taste for anything else but half a dozen papers a day.  But all that depends on the conditions with which we read.  If we would read as Jonathan Edwards read the weekly news-letters of his day; if we read all our papers to see if the kingdom of God was coming in reply to our prayer; if we read, observing all things, like