ve. It is
to inspire the diffident with courage, and the despairing with hope,
while it pulls up the forward, the careless, and the over-confident
with the wholesome and humbling word, "_Let him that thinketh he
standeth, take heed lest he fall_." These men of the Bible were
strangely mixed. They were conspicuous instances of the contradictions
and surprises which are in us all. For that is the point: the thing
comes home to us.

Believe me, we are all a riddle to ourselves. Each man is to himself,
and each woman too, the greatest of all mysteries save the one greater
mystery, God. None of us know of what elements he is composed, and how
strangely the good and evil mix and mingle and clash and strive in each
day's doings, and through the whole of life. They who believe that the
saint is all saint, and the sinner all sinner, are blindly and pitiably
ignorant of human nature. God has made no man without putting some
little bit of the Divine image in him. The worst has some lingering
trace or ruin of it. And the best is not so entirely the temple of the
Holy Ghost that no fouler spirits ever obtain entrance there. You may
say that you do not believe in a devil. Well, that may be; but there
is something like a devil in all of us at certain times, and I would
rather believe that it comes from the outside than that it is born and
bred and originates within. At any rate, there are in all of us the
strange oppositions, the darkness and the light overlapping each other,
the evil and the good ever contending, like Esau and Jacob, in the
birth hour. The awful and the blessed possibilities are there, and
which shall get the uppermost depends first on God, and then upon
ourselves.

I.

Remember first, then, that we have all a lower side.

There is in us what I may call a lurking, crouching, slumbering devil,
which needs constant watching and holding down with the strong hand of
self-mastery and prayer. "Praying always with all prayer, and watching
thereunto," says the apostle. In every one of us there is the
possibility of falling, however high we stand and however near God we
walk. Bunyan says, in his immortal story, "Then I saw in my dream that
by the very gate of heaven there was a way that led down to hell." No
man, however ripe in goodness, however firmly rooted and grounded in
faith, love, and Christian qualities, ever gets beyond the need of
vigilant sentinel work--watching himself. He must always