seemed to me a distressing position, and one to be avoided.  Worthless and ridiculous in my own eyes I have always been,—­but that is not your affair.  It is strictly mine!  And though I feel I am not worthy ’to loose the seals of the book or look thereon,’ there is one passage in it which strikes me as particularly applicable to the present day, and from it I will endeavour to draw a lesson for your instruction, though perhaps not for your entertainment.”

Here he paused and glanced at his hearers with an indefinable expression of mingled scorn and humour.

“What an absurdity it is to talk of giving a ‘lesson’ to you!—­you who will barely listen to a friend’s advice,—­you who will never take a hint for your mental education or improvement, you who are apt to fly into a passion, or take to the sulks when you are ever so slightly contradicted.  Tiens, tiens! c’est drole!  Now the words I am about to preach from, are supposed to have been uttered by Divine lips; and if you thoroughly believed this, you would of your own accord kneel down and pray that you might receive them with full comprehension and ready obedience.  But you do not believe;—­so I will not ask you to kneel down in mockery, or feign to pray when you are ignorant of the very spirit of prayer!  So take the words,—­ without preparation, without thought, without gratitude, as you take everything God gives you, and see what you can make of them.  ’The light of the body is the eye,—­if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.  But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.  If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’”

Here he closed the Testament, and rested it edgewise on the pulpit cushion, keeping one hand firmly clasped upon it as he turned himself about and surveyed the whole congregation.

“What is the exact meaning of the words, ‘if thine eye be single’?  It is an expressive term; and in its curt simplicity covers a profound truth.  ‘If thine eye,’ namely,—­the ability to see,—­’be single,’ that is straight and clear, without dimness or obliquity,—­ ‘thy whole body shall be full of light.’  Christ evidently did not apply this expression to the merely physical capability of sight,—­ but to the moral and mental, or psychic vision.  It matters nothing really to the infinite forces around us, whether physically speaking, we are able to see, or whether we are born blind; but spiritually, it is the chief necessity of our lives that we should be able to see straight morally.  Yet that is what we can seldom or never do.  Modern education, particularly education in France, provides us at once with a double psychic lens, and a side-squint into the bargain!  Seeing straight would be too primitive and simple for us.  But Christ says, ’If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’  Now this word ‘evil,’ as set in juxtaposition to