hteousness,
and you are to take care every day to walk abroad under His beams. You
are to emigrate south for your life, as our well-to-do invalids do, to
where the sun shines in his strength all the day. You are to choose such
a minister, buy and read such a literature, cultivate such an
acquaintanceship, and follow out such a new life of habits and practices
as shall bring you into the full sunshine, till your heart of ice is
melted, and your stupefied soul is filled with spiritual sensibility.
For, "were a man a mountain of ice," said Old Honest, "yet if the Sun of
Righteousness will arise upon him his frozen heart shall feel a thaw; and
thus hath it been with me." Your poets and your philosophers have no
resource against the stupidity that opposes them. "Even the gods," they
complain, "fight unvictorious against stupidity." But your divines and
your preachers have hope beside the dullest and the stupidest and even
the most imbruted. They point themselves and their slowest and dullest-
witted hearers to Old Honest, this rare old saint; and they set up their
pulpit with hope and boldness on the very causeway of the town of
Stupidity itself.

2. In the second place,--on this fine old pilgrim's birth and boyhood
and youth. The apostle says that there is no real difference between one
of us and another; and what he says on that subject must be true. No;
there is really no difference compared with the Celestial City whether a
pilgrim is born in Stupidity, in Destruction, in Vanity, or in Darkland.
At the same time, nature, as well as grace, is of God, and He maketh,
when it pleaseth Him, one man to differ in some most important respects
from another. You see such differences every day. Some children are
naturally, and from their very infancy, false and cruel, mean and greedy;
while their brothers and sisters are open and frank and generous. One
son in a house is born a vulgar snob, and one daughter a shallow-hearted
and shameless little flirt; while another brother is a born gentleman,
and another sister a born saint. Some children are tender-hearted,
easily melted, and easily moulded; while others in the same family are
hard as stone and cold as ice. Sometimes a noble and a truly Christian
father will have all his days to weep and pray over a son who is his
shame; and then, in the next generation, a grandson will be born to him
who will more than recover the lost image of his father's father. And so
is it s