music and the
painting are in themselves just what they were, but the man is capable
of something so much better, that his standard of comparison is raised
to a higher level, and his capacity for a true judgment is
correspondingly enlarged.

Even so a child of God who, like Elijah, stands before Him as a waiting,
willing, obedient servant, and has both likeness to God and power with
God, may get under the juniper-tree of despondency, cast down with the
sense of unworthiness and ill desert. As godliness increases the sense
of ungodliness becomes more acute, and so feelings never accurately
gauge real assimilation to God. We shall seem worst in our own eyes when
in His we are best, and conversely.

A Mohammedan servant ventured publicly to challenge a preacher who, in
an Indian bazaar, was asserting the universal depravity of the race, by
affirming that he knew at least one woman who was immaculate, absolutely
without fault, and that woman, his own Christian mistress. The preacher
bethought himself to ask in reply whether he had any means of knowing
whether that was her opinion of herself, which caused the Mohammedan to
confess that there lay the mystery: she had been often overheard in
prayer confessing herself the most unworthy of sinners.

To return from this digression, Mr. Muller, not only during this
illness, but down to life's sudden close, had a growing sense of sin and
guilt which would at times have been overwhelming, had he not known upon
the testimony of the Word that "whoso covereth his sins shall not
prosper, but he that confesseth and forsaketh them shall find mercy."
From his own guilt he turned his eyes to the cross where it was atoned
for, and to the mercy-seat where forgiveness meets the penitent sinner;
and so sorrow for sin was turned into the joy of the justified.

This confidence of acceptance in the Beloved so stripped death of its
terrors that during this illness he longed rather to depart and to be
with Christ; but after a fortnight he was pronounced better, and, though
still longing for the heavenly rest, he submitted to the will of God for
a longer sojourn in the land of his pilgrimage, little foreseeing what
joy he was to find in living for God, or how much he was to know of the
days of heaven upon earth.

During this illness, also, he showed the growing tendency to bring
before the Lord in prayer even the minutest matters which his later life
so signally exhibited. He constantly besought