he is discourteous to
nobody but to his own wife. Nothing pleases him; he finds nothing at
home to his mind. The furniture, the hours, the habits of the house are
all disposed so as to please him; but he was never yet heard to say to
wife, or child, or servant that he was pleased. He never says that a
meal is to his taste or a seat set so as to shelter and repose him. The
obstinate man makes his house a very prison and treadmill to himself and
to all those who are condemned to suffer with him. And all the time it
is not that he does not love and honour his household; but by an evil law
of the obstinate heart its worst obstinacy and mulishness comes out among
those it loves best.

But, my brethren, worse than all that, we have all what good Bishop Hall
calls 'a stone of obstination' in our hearts against God. With all his
own depth and clearness and plain-spokenness, Paul tells us that our
hearts are by nature enmity against God. Were we proud and obstinate and
malicious against men only it would be bad enough, and it would be
difficult enough to cure, but our case is dreadful beyond all description
or belief when our obstinacy strikes out against God. We know as well as
we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going
every day right in the teeth both of God's law and God's grace; and yet
in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what
we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls. We are told by our
minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this new
year and to break off from doing that; but, partly through obstinacy
towards him, reinforced by a deeper and subtler and deadlier obstinacy
against God, and against all the deepest and most godly of the things of
God, we neither do the one nor cease from doing the other. There is a
sullenness in some men's minds, a gloom and a bitter air that rises up
from the unploughed, undrained, unweeded, uncultivated fens of their
hearts that chills and blasts all the feeble beginnings of a better life.
The natural and constitutional obstinacy of the obstinate heart is
exasperated when it comes to deal with the things of God. For it is then
reinforced with all the guilt and all the fear, all the suspicion and all
the aversion of the corrupt and self-condemned heart. There is an
obdurateness of obstinacy against all the men, and the books, and the
doctrines, and the precepts, and the practices that are