No, madam, no more than a wolf.' That is
quite past all question with all those who either in natural morals or in
revealed religion look to and know and characterise themselves. We have
all an inborn propensity to dislike one another, and a very small
provocation will suddenly blow that banked-up furnace into a flame. It
is ever present with me, says self-examining Paul, and hence its so
sudden and so destructive outbreaks. So the written or the printed name
of our enemy, his image in our mind, his passing step, his figure out of
the window; his wife, his child, his carriage, his cart in the street,
anything, everything will stir up our heart at the man we do not like.
And the whole of our so honest Bible, our present text, and the
illustrations of our text in Judge Jeffreys' and Judge Hate-good's
courts, all go to show that the better a man is the more sometimes will
we hate him. Good men, better men than we are, men who in public life
and in private life pursue great and good ends, of necessity cross and go
counter to us in our pursuit of small, selfish, evil ends, and of
necessity we hate them. For, cross a selfish sinner sufficiently and you
have a very devil--as many good men, if they knew it, have in us. Again,
good men who come into contact with us cannot help seeing our bad lives,
our tempers, our selfishness, our public and private vices; and we see
that they see us, and we cannot love those whose averted eye so goes to
our conscience. And not only in the hatred of good men, but if you know
of God how to watch yourselves, you will find yourselves out every day
also in the hatred of good movements, good causes, good institutions, and
good works. There are doctors who would far rather hear of their rival's
patient expiring in his hands than hear their rival's success trumpeted
through all the town. There are ministers, also, who would rather that
the masses of the city and the country sank yet deeper into improvidence
and drink and neglect of ordinances than that they were rescued by any
other church than their own. They hate to hear of the successes of
another church. There are party politicians who would rather that the
ship of the state ran on the rocks both in her home and her foreign
policy than that the opposite party should steer her amid a nation's
cheers into harbour. And so of good news. I will stake the divine truth
of this evening's Scriptures, and of their historical and imaginative
illu