4.  ‘A sober and a judicious man’ it is said of Mr. Prywell also.  To a certainty that.  It could not be otherwise than that.  For Mr. Prywell’s office, its discoveries and its experiences, would sober any man.  ’I am sprung from a country,’ says Abelard, ’of which the soil is light, and the temper of the inhabitants is light.’  So was it with Mr. Prywell to begin with.  But even Abelard was sobered in time, and so was Mr. Prywell.  Life sobered Abelard, and Mr. Prywell too; life’s crooks and life’s crosses, life’s duties and life’s disappointments, especially Mr. Prywell.  ‘The more narrowly a man looks into himself,’ says A Kempis, ‘the more he sorroweth.’  Not sober-mindedness alone comes to him who looks narrowly into himself, but great sorrow of heart also.  And if you are not both sobered in your mind and full of an unquenchable sorrow in your heart, O yes! attend to it, for you are not yet begun to be what God would have you to be.  Dr. Newman, with all his mistakes and all his faults, was a master in two things:  his own heart and the English language.  And in writing home to his mother a confidential letter from college on his birthday, he confides to her that he often ’shudders at himself.’  ‘No,’ he answered to his mother’s fears and advices about food and air and exercise:  ’No, I am neither nervous, nor in ill-health, nor do I study too much.  I am neither melancholy, nor morose, nor austere, nor distant, nor reserved, nor sullen.  I am always cheerful, ready and eager to join in any merriment.  I am not clouded with sadness, nor absent in mind, nor deficient in action.  No; take me when I am most foolish at home and extend mirth into childishness; yet all the time I am shuddering at myself.’  There spake the future author of the immortal sermons.  There spake a mind and a heart that have deepened the minds and the hearts of Christian men more than any other influence of the century; a mind and a heart, moreover, that will shine and beat in our best literature and in our deepest devotion for centuries to come.  You must all know by this time another classical passage from the pen of another spiritual genius in the Church of England, that greatly gifted church.  Let me repeat it to illustrate how sober-mindedness and great sorrow of heart always come to the best of men.  ’Let any man consider that if the world knew all that of him which he knows of himself; if they saw what vanity and what passions govern his inside, and what secret tempers sully and corrupt his best actions; and he would have no more pretence to be honoured and admired for his goodness and wisdom than a rotten and distempered body is to be loved and admired for its beauty and comeliness.  And, perhaps, there are very few people in the world who would not rather choose to die than to have all their secret follies, the errors of their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness of their pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions, their uneasinesses, hatreds, envies, and vexations made known to the world.  And shall pride be entertained in a heart thus conscious of its own miserable behaviour?’ No wonder that Mr. Prywell was sober-minded!  No wonder that Dr. Newman shuddered at himself!  And no wonder that William Law chose strangling and the pond rather than that any other man should see what went on in his heart!