ust perfectly
understand its secret agencies; that He in whose Essence man lives and
moves and has his being, must behold every motion, and feel every
stirring of the human spirit. "He that planted the ear, shall He not
hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?" Let us, then, ponder the
fact of God's exhaustive knowledge of man's soul, that we may realize it,
and thereby come under its solemn power and impression. For all religion,
all holy and reverential fear of God, rises and sets, as in an
atmosphere, in the thought: "Thou God seest me."

I. In analyzing and estimating the Divine knowledge of the human soul, we
find, in the first place, that God accurately and exhaustively knows _all
that man knows of himself_.

Every man in a Christian land, who is in the habit of frequenting the
house of God, possesses more or less of that self-knowledge of which we
have spoken. He thinks of the moral character of some of his own
thoughts. He reflects upon the moral quality of some of his own feelings.
He considers the ultimate tendency of some of his own actions. In other
words, there is a part of his inward and his outward life with which he
is uncommonly well acquainted; of which he has a distinct perception.
There are some thoughts of his mind, at which he blushes at the very time
of their origin, because he is vividly aware what they are, and what they
mean. There are some emotions of his heart, at which he trembles and
recoils at the very moment of their uprising, because he perceives
clearly that they involve a very malignant depravity. There are some
actings of his will, of whose wickedness he is painfully conscious at the
very instant of their rush and movement. We are not called upon, here, to
say how many of a man's thoughts, feelings, and determinations, are thus
subjected to his self-inspection at the very time of their origin, and
are known in the clear light of self-knowledge. We are not concerned, at
this point, with the amount of this man's self-inspection and
self-knowledge. We are only saying that there is some experience such as
this in his personal history, and that he does know something of himself,
at the very time of action, with a clearness and a distinctness that
makes him start, or blush, or fear.

Now we say, that in reference to all this intimate self-knowledge, all
this best part of a man's information respecting himself, he is not
superior to God. He may be certain that in no particular does