where saints and angels seek not their own will,
labour not for their own profit or promotion, listen not for their own
praises, but find their blessedness, the half of which had not here been
told them, in glorifying God and in enjoying Him for ever.

You must all have heard the name of a book that has helped many a saint
now in glory to the examination and the keeping of his own heart. I
refer to Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_. Take two or three of
Taylor's excellent rules with you as you go down from God's house
to-night. 'If you would really live a holy life and die a holy death,'
says Taylor, 'learn to reflect in your every action on your secret end in
it; consider with yourself why you do it, and what you propound to
yourself for your reward. Pray importunately that all your purposes and
all your motives may be sanctified. Renew and rekindle your purest
purposes by such ejaculations as these: "Not unto us, O God, not unto us,
but to Thy name be all the praise. I am in this Thy servant; let all the
gain be Thine." In great and eminent actions let there be a special and
peculiar act of resignation or oblation made to God; and in smaller and
more frequent actions fail not to secure a pious habitual intention.' And
so on. And above all, I will add, labour and pray till you feel in your
heart that you love God with a supreme and an ever-growing love. And,
far as that may be above you as yet, impress your heart with the
assurance that such a love is possible to you also, and that you can
never be safe or happy till you attain to that love. Other men once as
far from the supreme love of God as you are have afterwards attained to
it; and so will you if you continue to set it before yourself. Think
often on God; read the best books about God; call continually upon God;
hold an intimate communion with God, till you feel that you also actually
and certainly love God. And though you begin with loving God because He
first loved you, you will, beginning with that, rise far above that till
you come to love Him for what He is in Himself as well as for what He has
done for you. 'I have done this in order to have a seat in the Academy,'
said a young man, handing the solution of a problem to an old
philosopher. 'Sir,' was the reply, 'with such dispositions you will
never earn a seat there. Science must be loved for its own sake, and not
for any advantage to be derived from it.' And much more is that true of