the closeness of the similarity that the mistaken identity may be pardoned.

And as the several virtues are sick and bedridden, so the whole heart is faint, and a slight temptation or trial might end our spiritual career. We may, indeed, be deeply thankful to God that in critical hours He has spared us even slight temptations. We owe our escape more to the absence of provocation than to the lack of disposition. Water, even in open vessels, may be lowered many degrees below its freezing temperature, and still remain liquid; it may also be raised to a temperature far higher than its boiling-point, and still resist boiling. This is due, Faraday held, to the mutual cohesion of the water particles, which resist the change of the liquid into either the solid or the vaporous condition. But if a particle of ice is thrown into the overchilled water, the cohesion is ruptured, and freezing immediately sets in; and if a bubble of air or steam is introduced into the superheated water, cohesion is likewise ruptured, and boiling immediately commences. Just as the water is below the freezing-point, or above the boilingpoint, without doing either until a particle of matter or a bubble of air disturbs it and effects its transformation, so dangerous states of the soul may long remain latent until a trifling incident reveals the fact and precipitates the catastrophe. How often have we been in the mood of worldli

ness or of passion, without the faithlessness of the soul becoming manifest in act or deed, when a very slight provocation would have revealed the inner susceptibility, and ranked us with the worldling and licentious!

There ought not in spiritual things to be a step between us and death; we too possess a fullness of life and the security that goes with such fullness. An American physician addressing his professional brethren says: "Which of us does not know patients who have lived for twenty years and more with incurable disease; and which of us has not seen upon the post mortem tables viscera so reduced in size and so altered in structure that it is incomprehensible how life was maintained? There is, it must seem, an immense surplus within us. That men can live with renal tissues of three ounces weight shows us that for the condition of their life ten ounces was but an insurance against loss. We are fortified for attack." And he goes on to observe that although a man may live, and live long, whose organs are greatly altered and reduced, he cannot live the life he would. He is in reduced circumstances, and must forego various gratifications; he must deny himself as one who leads a prison life; he can have no holidays; he can afford no mistakes; -a pauper cannot live like a prince. Nor can such an ailing one stand the chance of life like his neighbors. He is unable to resist the bac

teria. Chill gives a healthy man a cold, but brings pneumonia and death to his neighbors with Bright's disease. Slight accidents, slight wounds, kill such men by erysipelas, peritonitis, and other similar ways. They are bad subjects for insurance.

How full of instruction is all this in regard to our moral and spiritual constitution! We may exist long with a faint soul and anæmic virtues, until it is a mystery how, spiritually speaking, we live at all. But such a condition is not one of freedom, assurance, and enjoyment: nor have such invalids the same chance of life with the healthy; a slight accident puts them in the moral cemetery. "There is an immense surplus in a healthy man." He may live with tissues weighing three ounces, but nature has given seven ounces more as "an insurance against loss"; it has fortified him with a fullness of health and energy. Is not this the ideal of the spiritual life? Will not grace give us a similar superfluity in the health of the soul, making our whole life free and joyous, and fortifying us against moral disease and death? Let us earnestly seek it in Him who makes "whole."

XXIII

CRAFT AND CHARACTER

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: and if Satan casteth out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then shall his kingdom stand ?-Matt. 12: 25, 26.

T

HUS our Lord exposes the fallacy

which so frequently betrays men-that evil may be counteracted by evil, that one vice may be employed to drive out another, that the path of salvation and progress lies along the line of diplomatically playing off one equivocal thing, principle, practice, or institution against a diverse manifestation of iniquity. Our Lord graphically shows the impossibility of doing anything of the sort. Unbroken unity prevails in the world of evil; one form of wickedness is sympathetic with every other form; the realm of darkness is not a chaos, but a kingdom; and supreme folly alone can suppose that the vices in any combination are mutually destructive. Wherever the homeopathic principle that "like cures like" may prevail, it is not in the sphere of unrighteousness.

Let us remember this in our personal life. Science assures us that in the system of a living

creature there is often an internecine warfare of germs, different kinds of microbes being involved in deadly conflict; a real antagonism is maintained between disease germs, that results, when they are brought into contact, in the mutual destruction of each. The son of a Russian doctor was attacked by diphtheria, and finally his case was pronounced hopeless. When death seemed imminent, however, the patient was attacked by erysipelas. For a time he was worse, then recovered completely. His father, the doctor, was somewhat puzzled by the turn of affairs; but suddenly the facts of the case struck him, and he began the cultivation of erysipelas germs, with which he inoculated diphtheria patients with startling success. The doctor claims that the erysipelas germ attacks the diphtheria germ, the result being their mutual destruction. This battle of the microbes must not tempt us to believe that by cunning selection and strategy we can coerce one base passion or principle to annihilate another. No fault of character can be really extinguished by giving encouragement to another fault which may, perhaps, appear less vicious and dangerous. Sins, whether of the mind or flesh, are not antagonistic as erysipelas and diphtheria germs are supposed to be, but kindred and sympathetic; they do not consume one another, they consume the sinner. By no cleverness of gradation or antithesis can we expel one demon by