id in the _Holy War_ in extenuation of the eye. That heart-
broken prophet does not say that it has been his ear that has made his
head waters. It is his eye, he says, that has so affected his heart. The
Prophet of the Captivity had all the _Holy War_ potentially in his
imagination when he penned that so suggestive sentence. And the Latin
poet of experience, the grown-up man's own poet, says somewhere that the
things that enter by his eye seize and hold his heart much more swiftly
and much more surely than those things that but enter by his ear. I
shall continue, then, to hold by my text, 'Mine eye affecteth mine
heart.'

1. Turning then, to the prophets and proverb-makers of Israel, and then
to the New Testament for the true teaching on the eye, I come, in the
first place, on that so pungent saying of Solomon that 'the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth.' Look at that born fool, says
Solomon, who has his eyes and his heart committed to him to keep. See
him how he gapes and stares after everything that does not concern him,
and lets the door of his own heart stand open to every entering thief.
London is a city of three million inhabitants, and they are mostly fools,
Carlyle once said. And let him in this city whose eyes keep at home cast
the first stone at those foreign fools. I will wager on their side that
many of you here to-night know better what went on in Mashonaland last
week than what went on in your own kitchen downstairs, or in your own
nursery or schoolroom upstairs. Some of you are ten times more taken up
with the prospects of Her Majesty's Government this session, and with the
plots of Her Majesty's Opposition, than you are with the prospects of the
good and the evil, and the plots of God and the devil, all this winter in
your own hearts. You rise early, and make a fight to get the first of
the newspaper; but when the minister comes in in the afternoon you blush
because the housemaid has mislaid the Bible. Did you ever read of the
stargazer who fell into an open well at the street corner? Like him, you
may be a great astronomer, a great politician, a great theologian, a
great defender of the faith even, and yet may be a stark fool just in
keeping the doors and the windows of your own heart. 'You shall see a
poor soul,' says Dr. Goodwin, 'mean in abilities of wit, or
accomplishments of learning, who knows not how the world goes, nor upon
what wheels its states turn, who yet knows more