some.  Till Alcibiades ends the splendid eloge that Plato puts into his mouth with these words, “All my master’s vice and stupidity and worship of wealthy and great men is counterfeit.  It is all but the Silenus-mask which conceals the features of the god within; for if you remove the covering, how shall I describe to you, my friends and boon companions, the excellence of the beauty you will find within!  Whether any of you have seen Socrates in his serious mood, when he has thrown aside the mask and disclosed the divine features beneath it, is more than I know.  But I have seen them, and I can tell you that they seemed to me glorious and marvellous, and, truly, godlike in their beauty."’

Well, now, I gather out of all that this great lesson:  that it is, to begin with, a mere matter of temperament, or what William Law would call a mere matter of complexion and sensibility, whether, to begin with, a man is hard, and dry, and narrow, and stiff, and proud, and scornful, and cruel; or again, whether he is soft and tender, broad and open, and full of sympathy and of the milk of human kindness.  At first, and to begin with, there is neither praise nor blame as yet in the matter.  A man is hard just as a stone is hard; it is his nature.  Or he is soft as clay is soft; it is again his nature.  But, inheriting such a nature, and his inherited nature beginning to appear, then is the time when the true man really begins to be made.  The bad man dwells in contentment, and, indeed, by preference, at home in his own hard, proud, scornful, resentful heart; or, again, in his facile, fawning, tide-waiting, time-serving heart; and thus he chooses, accepts, and prefers his evil fate, and never seeks the help either of God or man to enable him to rise above it.  Paul was not, when we meet him first, the sweet, humble, affable, placable, makeable man that he made himself and came to be after a lifetime of gospel-preaching and of adorning the gospel he preached.  And all the assistances and all the opportunities that came to Paul are still coming to you and to me; till, whether naturally pliable and affectionate or the opposite, we at last shall come to the temperament, the complexion, and the exquisite sensibility of Paul himself.  Are you, then, a hard, stiff, severe, censorious, proud, angry, scornful man?  Or are you a too-easy, too-facile man-pleaser and self-seeker, being all things to all men that you may make use of all men?  Are you?  Then say so.  Confess it to be so.  Admit that you have found yourself out.  And reflect every day what you have got to do in life.  Consider what a new birth you need and must have.  Number your days that are left you in which to make you a new heart, and a new nature, and a new character.  Consider well how you are to set about that divine work.  You have a minister, and your minister is called a divine because by courtesy he is supposed to understand that divine work, and to be engaged on it night and day in himself, and