success, we have missed our chance and our
purpose in the world, and can only have at last a desolate and a ruined
life.

But how is it, then, one may ask, that man can be so deceived? How is it
that we do not learn from others' disasters to avoid, every one of us,
those deceiving, ruinous masters, those false gods that can lead us away
from the one true Shepherd of our souls? It is, indeed, a curious fact
that our deception is so easy. Surely a rational, intelligent being, who
stops to consider, ought easily to distinguish between the great God of
Heaven and the creatures of His hands. It ought not to be difficult for us
to see the transient vanity of human things when compared with the eternal
mansions. But the truth of the matter is, that we _are_ deceived, we do
not at all times see the objects of our choice as they really are
objectively. Our vision is defective and blurred. If God stood out in our
lives as He really ought to stand, if He occupied that place in our
thoughts and plans which belongs to Him by right, it would not be possible
that we should ever be led astray. And that God does not always hold in
our lives the place which is His due is partly the result of our fallen
nature; partly, therefore, in a way, excusable; but more frequently and
chiefly from our own perversity--from wilful neglect of our highest duties.

The blindness and perversity of our nature, which have come from the
wounds of original sin, make it easy for us, if we are neglectful and
careless of our higher spiritual obligations, to mistake the false for the
true, evil for good, the creature for the Creator. In the midst of the
world and its allurements, it behooves us to be ever watching, if we are
never to stumble and to fall. Had our nature never been corrupted by
original unfaithfulness, had our first parents never turned away from God
and transgressed His sacred precept, all our present ills would never have
existed. But now it is different. We are born into the world a weakened
people; each one of us has had an implicit part in the first
transgression; we all, like erring sheep, have gone astray. And while this
tendency to evil is part of our natural condition, and therefore less
imputable to us, it nevertheless is true that our actual sins and
evil-doing are the work of our deliberate choice. If, at any time, we
really turn away from God and break His law, it is because we have freely
chosen so to act. The native perversity of nat