fill and inflame and poison a man’s mind and heart and conscience for months and for years, to the total destruction of all that for which churches and creeds exist; to the total suspense, if not the total and lasting destruction, of sobriety of mind, balance and breadth of judgment, humility, charity, and a hidden and a holy life.  The penny of a perverted, partial, and fanaticised conscience has swallowed up the pound of instruction, and truth, and justice, and brotherly love.

2.  ‘Nor is the man with the long name at all inferior to the other,’ said Lucifer, in laying his infernal plot against the peace and prosperity of Mansoul.  Now, the man with the long name was just Mr. Get-i’-the-hundred-and-lose-i’-the-shire.  A hundred in the old county geography of England was a political subdivision of a shire, in which five score freemen lived with their freeborn families.  A county or a shire was described and enumerated by the poll-sheriff of that day as containing so many enfranchised hundreds; and the total number of hundreds made up the political unity of the shire.  To this day we still hear from time to time of the ‘Chiltern Hundreds,’ which is a division of Buckinghamshire that belongs, along with its political franchise, to the Crown, and which is utilised for Crown purposes at certain political emergencies.  This proverb, then, to get i’ the hundred and lose i’ the shire, is now quite plain to us.  You might canvass so as to get a hundred, several hundreds, many hundreds on your side, and yet you might lose when it came to counting up the whole shire.  You might possess yourself of a hundred or two and yet be poor compared with him who possessed the whole shire.  And then the proverb has been preserved out of the old political life of England, and has been moralised and spiritualised to us in the Holy War.  And thus after to-night we shall always call this shrewd proverb to mind when we are tempted to take a part at the risk of the whole; to receive this world at the loss of the next world; or, as our Lord has it, to gain the whole world and to lose our own soul.  Lot’s choice of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Esau’s purchase of the mess of pottage in the Old Testament; and then Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, and Ananias and Sapphira’s part of the price in the New Testament, are all so many well-known instances of getting in the hundred and losing in the shire.  And not Esau’s and Lot’s only, but our own lives also have been full up to to-day of the same fatal transaction.  This house, as our Lord again has it, this farm, this merchandise, this shop, this office, this salary, this honour, this home—­all this on the one hand, and then our Lord Himself, His call, His cause, His Church, with everlasting life in the other—­when it is set down before us in black and white in that way, the transaction, the proposal, the choice is preposterous, is insane, is absolutely impossible.  But preposterous, insane, absolutely impossible,