ho can
heal, since in reality it is He, and not the quarrelsome king of
Assyria, who has inflicted the sickness.

Thus understood, the text carries wide lessons, and may serve us as a
starting-point for considering man's discovery of his 'sickness,' man's
mad way of seeking healing, God's way of giving it.

I. First, then, man's discovery of his sickness.

The greater part of most lives is spent in mechanical, unreflecting
repetition of daily duties and pleasures. We are all apt to live on the
surface, and it requires an effort, which we are too indolent to make
except under the impulse of some arresting motive, to descend into the
depths of our own souls, and there to face the solemn facts of our own
personality. The last place with which most of us are familiar, is our
innermost self. Men are dimly conscious that things within are not well
with them; but it is only one here and there that says so distinctly to
himself, and takes the further step of thoroughly investigating the
cause. But that superficial life is at the mercy of a thousand
accidents, each one of which may break through the thin film, and lay
bare the black depths.

But there is another aspect of this discovery of sickness, far graver
than the mere consciousness of unrest. Ephraim does not see his sickness
unless he sees his sin. The greater part of every life is spent without
that deep, all-pervading sense of discord between itself and God. Small
and recurrent faults may evoke recurring remonstrances of conscience,
but that is a very different thing from the deep tones and the clear
voice of condemnation in respect to one's whole life and character which
sounds in a heart that has learned how 'deceitful and desperately
wicked' it is. Such a conviction may flash upon a man at any moment, and
from a hundred causes. A sorrow, a sunset-sky, a grave, a sermon, may
produce it.

But even when we have come to recognise clearly our unrest, we have gone
but part of the way, we have become conscious of a symptom, not of the
disease. Why is it that man is alone among the creatures in that
discontent with externals, and that dissatisfaction with himself? 'Foxes
have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places': why is it
that amongst all God's happy creatures, and God's shining stars, men
stand 'strangers in a strange land,' and are cursed with a restlessness
which has not 'where to lay its head'? The consciousness of unrest is
but the agitation of t