,--what a deep-seated, long-lived, and suicidal passion is
that! How it hunts down him it hates, and how surely it shuts the door
of salvation against him who harbours it! Forgive us our debts, the
resentful man says in his prayer, as we forgive our debtors. And
detraction,--how some men's ink-horns are filled with detraction for ink,
and how it drops from their tongue like poison! At their every word a
reputation dies. Life and all its opportunities of doing good and having
good done to us is laid like a bag of treasure at our feet, but, like the
prodigal son in the Interpreter's House, with all those passions raging
in our own hearts at other men, and in other men's hearts at us, we have
soon nothing left us but rags. God be thanked for every man here who
sees and feels that he has nothing left him but rags; and, still more,
thanks for all those who see and feel how, by their bad passions, sensual
and spiritual, they have left on other people nothing but rags.

Now, from all this let us lay it to heart that our sanctification and
salvation lie in our mastery over all these and over many other passions
that have not even been named. He is an accepted saint of God, who,
taking his and other people's rags to God's mercy every day, every day
also in God's strength grapples with, bridles, and tames his own wild and
ungodly passions. Be not deceived, my friends; he alone is a saint of
God who is a sanctified man; and his passions,--as they are the spring of
his actions, so they are the sphere and seat of his sanctification. Be
not deceived; that man, and no other manner of man, is, or ever will be,
a partaker of God's salvation. You often hear me recommending those
students who have first to subdue their own passions and then the
passions of those who hear them to study Jonathan Edwards' ethical and
spiritual writings. Well, just at this present point, to show you how
well that great man practised what he preached, let me read to you a few
lines from his biographer: 'Few men,' says Henry Rogers, 'ever attained a
more complete mastery over their passions than Jonathan Edwards did. This
was partly owing to the ascendency of his intellect; partly, and in a
still greater degree, to the elevation of his piety. For the subjugation
of his passions he was no doubt very greatly indebted to the prodigious
superiority of his reason. Such was the commanding attitude his reason
assumed, and such the tremendous power with whi