, her heart began to swarm, such is her own expression, with
sinful memories, sinful thoughts, and sinful feelings; till she had need
of some one ever near her, like Greatheart, constantly to assure her that
those cruel and deadly swarms, instead of being a bad sign of her
salvation, were the very best signs possible of her good estate. Humility
is the foundation of all our graces, and there is no humility so deep and
so ever-deepening as that evangelical humility which in its turn rises
out of and rests upon secret sinfulness. Not upon acts of secret sin. Do
not mistake me. Acts of secret sin harden the heart and debauch the
conscience. But I speak of that secret, original, unexplored, and
inexpugnable sinfulness out of which all a sinner's actual sins, both
open sins and secret, spring; and out of which a like life of open and
actual sins would spring in God's very best saints, if only both He and
they did not watch night and day against them. Sensibility to sin, or
rather to sinfulness, is far and away the best evidence of sanctification
that is possible to us in this life. It is this keen and bitter
sensibility that secures, amid all oppositions and obstructions, the true
saint's onward and upward progress. Were it not for the misery of their
own hearts, God's best saints would fall asleep and go back like other
men. A sinful heart is the misery of all miseries. It is the deepest
and darkest of all dungeons. It is the most painful and the most
loathsome of all diseases. And the secrecy of it all adds to the
bitterness and the gall of it all. We may know that other men's hearts
are as sinful as our own, but we do not feel their sinfulness. We cannot
sensibly feel humiliation, bondage, sickness, and self-loathing on
account of another man's envy, or ill-will, or resentment, or cruelty, or
falsehood, or impurity. All these things must be our own before we can
enter into the pain and the shame of them; but, when we do, then we taste
what death and hell are indeed. As I write these feeble words about it,
a devil's shaft of envy that was shot all against my will into my heart
this morning, still, after a whole day, rankles and festers there. I
have been on my knees with it again and again; I have stood and looked
into an open grave to-day; but there it is sucking at my heart's blood
still, like a leech of hell. Who can understand his errors? Cleanse
Thou me from secret faults. Create in me a clean heart,