ar, unless we first understand the prayer
which we offered up last Sunday, "Stir up, O Lord, the wills of Thy
faithful people,"--and we shall understand that prayer just in proportion
as we have in us the Spirit of God, or the spirit of the world, which is
the spirit of unbelief.

Worldly people say--and say openly, just now--that this prayer is all a
dream. They say God will not stir up men's wills to do good any more
than to do harm. He leaves men to themselves to get through life as they
can. This Heavenly Father of whom you speak will not give His holy
spirit to those who ask Him. He does not, as one of your Collects says,
put into men's minds good desires--they come to a man entirely from
outside a man, from his early teaching, his youthful impressions, as they
are called now-a-days. He does not either give men grace and power to
put these desires into practice. That depends entirely on the natural
strength of a man's character; and that, again, depends principally on
the state of his brain. So, says the world, if you wish your own
character to improve, you must improve it yourself, for God will not
improve it for you. But, after all, why should you try to improve? why
not be content to be just what you are? you did not make yourself, and
you are not responsible for being merely what God has chosen to make you.

This is what worldly men say, or at least what they believe and act on;
and this is the reason why there is so little improvement in the world,
because men do not ask God to improve their hearts and stir up their
wills. I say, very little improvement. Men talk loudly of the
enlightenment of the age, and the progress of the species, and the spread
of civilisation, and so forth: but when I read old books, and compare
old times with these, I confess I do not see so much of it as all this
hopeful talk would lead me to expect. Men in general have grown more
prudent, more cunning, from long experience. They have found out that
certain sins do not pay--that is, they interfere with people's comfort
and their power of making money, and therefore they prudently avoid them
themselves, and put them down by law in other men's cases. Men have
certainly grown more good-natured, in some countries, in that they
dislike more than their ancestors did, to inflict bodily torture on human
beings; but they are just as ready, or even more ready, to inflict on
those whom they dislike t