ourselves,
and that especially because of your by-aims and by-ends. Take up the
touchstone of truth and lay it upon your most secret heart. Do not be
afraid to discover how double-minded and deceitful your heart is. Hunt
your heart down. Track it to its most secret lair. Put its true name,
and continue to put its true name, upon the main motive of your life.
Extort an answer by boot and by wheel, only extort an answer from the
inner man of the heart, to the torturing question as to what is his
treasure, his hope, his deepest wish, his daily dream. Watch not against
any outward enemy, keep all your eyes and all your ears to your own
thoughts. God keeps His awful eye on your thoughts. His eye goes at
every glance to that great depth in you. Even His all-seeing eye can go
no deeper into you than to your secret thoughts. Go you as deep as God
goes, and you will be a wise man; go as deep and as often as He does, and
then you will soon come to see eye to eye with God, not only about your
own thoughts, but about His thoughts too, and about everything else. Till
you begin to watch your own thoughts, and to watch them especially in
their aims and their ends, you will have no idea what that moral and
spiritual life is that all God's saints live; that life that Christ
lived, and which He this night summons you all to enter henceforth upon.

It is such a happy fact that it cannot be too often told, that in the
things of the soul really and truly to know and feel the disease is to
have already entered on the remedy. You will not feel, indeed, that you
have entered on the remedy; but that does not much matter so long as you
really have. And there is nothing more certain among all the certainties
of divine things than that he who feels himself to be in death and hell
with his heart so full of by-ends is all the time as far from death and
hell as any one can be who is still on this side of heaven. When a man's
whole will and desire is set on God, as is now and then the case, that
man is perilously near a sudden and an abundant entrance into that life
and that presence where his heart has for so long been. When a man is
half mad with his own heart, as Thomas Shepard for one was, that stranger
on the earth is at last within a step of that happy coast where all
wishes end. Watch that man. Take a last look at that man. He will soon
be taken out of your sight. Ere ever he is himself aware, he will be
rapt up into that life