,--naming it,--out of your body, and
that vice,--naming it,--out of your heart? Have you ever sworn at the
Communion table that you would watch and pray, and set a watch on your
evil heart against that envy, and that revenge, and that ill-will, and
that distaste, dislike, and antipathy? Then your minister will not need
to come back from his death-bed to preach to you on the difficulty of
salvation.

4. And yet such is the grace of God, such is the work of Christ, and
such is the power and the patience of the Holy Ghost that, if we had only
an adequate ministry in our pulpits, and an assisting literature in our
homes, even this three-fold impossibility would be overcome and we would
be saved. But if the ministry that is set over us is an ignorant,
indolent, incompetent, self-deceived ministry; if our own chosen, set-up,
and maintained minister is himself an uninstructed, unspiritual,
unsanctified man; and if the books we buy and borrow and read are all
secular, unspiritual, superficial, ephemeral, silly, stupid, impertinent
books, then the impossibility of our salvation is absolute, and we are as
good as in hell already with all our guilt and all our corruption for
ever on our heads. Now, that was the exact case of Mansoul in the
allegory of the Holy War at one of the last and acutest stages of that
war. Or, rather, that would have been her exact case had Diabolus got
his own deep, diabolical way with her. For what did her ancient enemy do
but sound a parley till he had played his last card in these glozing and
deceitful words;--'I myself,' he had the face to say to Emmanuel, 'if
Thou wilt raise Thy siege and leave the town to me, I will, at my own
proper cost and charge, set up and maintain a sufficient ministry,
besides lecturers, in Mansoul, who shall show to Mansoul that
transgression stands in the way of life; the ministers I shall set up
shall also press the necessity of reformation according to Thy holy law.'
And even now, with the two pulpits, God's and the devil's, and the two
preachers, and the two pastors, in our own city,--how many of you see any
difference, or think that the one is any worse or any better than the
other? Or, indeed, that the ministry of the last card is not the better
of the two to your interest and to your taste, to the state of your mind
and to the need of your heart? Let us proceed, then, to look at
Mansoul's two pulpits and her two lectureships as they stand portrayed on
the dev