3.  ’Oh let not my Lord be angry; and why inquirest Thou after the name of such a dead dog as I am?’ said Desires-awake to his Prince.  ’Behold, now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord which am but dust and ashes,’ said Abraham.  ’If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean, yet shalt thou plunge me into the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me,’ said Job.  ’My wounds stink and are corrupt; my loins are filled with a loathsome disease, and there is no soundness in my flesh,’ said David.  ‘But we are all as an unclean thing,’ said Isaiah, ‘and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.’  ’I am the chief of sinners,’ said the apostle.  ’Hold your peace; I am a devil and not a man,’ said Philip Neri to his sons.  ’I am a sinner, and worse than the chief of sinners, yea, a guilty devil,’ said Samuel Rutherford.  ’I hated the light; I was a chief—­the chief of sinners,’ said Oliver Cromwell.  ‘I was more loathsome in my own eyes than a toad,’ said John Bunyan.  ’Sin and corruption would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain.  I could have changed hearts with anybody.  I thought none but the devil himself could equal me for wickedness and pollution of mind.’  ‘O Despise me not,’ said Bishop Andrewes, ’an unclean worm, a dead dog, a putrid corpse.  The just falleth seven times a day; and I, an exceeding sinner, seventy times seven.  Me, O Lord, of sinners chief, chiefest, and greatest.’  And William Law, ’An unclean worm, a dead dog, a stinking carcass.  Drive, I beseech Thee, the serpent and the beast out of me.  O Lord, I detest and abhor myself for all these my sins, and for all my abuse of Thine infinite mercy.’  From all this, then, you will see that this dead dog of ours with the rope upon his head was no strange sight at Emmanuel’s pavilion.  And you and I shall still be in the same saintly succession if we go continually with his words in our mouth, and with his instrument in our hands and on our heads.

4.  ‘The Prince to whom I went,’ said Mr. Desires-awake, ’is such a one for beauty and for glory that whoso sees Him must ever after both love and fear Him.  I, for my part,’ he said, ’can do no less; but I know not what the end will be of all these things.’  What made Mr. Desires-awake say that last thing was that when he was prostrate in his prayer the Prince turned His head away, as if He was out of humour and out of patience with His petitioner; while, all the time, the overcome Prince was weeping with love and with pity for Desires-awake.  Only that poor man did not see that, and would not have believed that even if he had seen it.  ‘I cannot tell what the end will be,’ said Desires-awake; ’but one thing I know, I shall never be able to cease from both loving and fearing that Prince.  I shall always love Him for His beauty and fear Him for His glory.’  Can you say anything like that, my brethren?  Have you been at His seat with