rfect tempest of undying efforts. It seeks its centre
and it cannot reach it. It bounds up towards God, and is dashed down
again. It thrusts and beats against the granite walls of its prison with
such incredible force, that the planet must be strong indeed whose
equilibrium is not disturbed by the weight of that spiritual violence.
Yet the great law of gravitation is stronger still, and the planet
swings smoothly through its beautiful ether. Nothing can madden the
reason of the disembodied soul, else the view of the desirableness of
God and the inefficacious attractions of the glorious Divinity would do
so.

Up and down its burning cage the many-facultied and mightily
intelligenced spirit wastes its excruciating immortality in varying and
ever varying still, always beginning and monotonously completing, like a
caged beast upon its iron tether, a threefold movement, which is not
three movements successively, but one triple movement all at once. In
rage it would fain get at God to seize Him, dethrone Him, murder Him,
and destroy Him; in agony it would fain suffocate its own interior
thirst for God, which parches and burns it with all the frantic horrors
of a perfectly self-possessed frenzy; and in fury it would fain break
its tight fetters of gnawing fire which pin down its radical love of the
beautiful Sovereign Good, and drag it ever back with cruel wrench from
its desperate propension to its uncreated Centre. In the mingling of
these three efforts it lives its life of endless horrors. Portentous as
is the vehemence with which it shoots forth its imprecations against
God, they fall faint and harmless, far short of His tranquil,
song-surrounded throne.

Pour views of its own hideous state revolve around the lost soul, like
the pictures of some ghastly show. One while it sees the million times
ten million genera and species of pains of sense which meet and form a
loathsome union with this vast central pain of loss. Another while all
the multitude of graces, the countless kind providences, which it has
wasted pass before it, and generate that undying worm of remorse of
which Our Saviour speaks. Then comes a keen but joyless view, a
calculation, but only a bankrupt's calculation, of the possibility of
gains for ever forfeited, of all the grandeur and ocean-like vastness of
the bliss which it has lost. Last of all comes before it the immensity
of God, to it so unconsoling and so unprofitable; it is not a picture,
it is onl