themselves in outward acts? A
base, unloving, impure, acrimonious, untruthful man may crawl through
life, never having been arrested, never having been sentenced to any
term of penal servitude. He can stand erect before all the laws of the
country and say, 'All these have I kept from my youth up.' And unless
there be a higher law than the law of man, unless there be a law
written on our hearts by the Finger of {53} God, unless there be One to
whom, above and beyond all earthly appearances, we can mournfully
declare, 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,' nothing more can be
reasonably demanded. If there is nothing higher than the visible, it
can be only visible results which are of any value. The giving of
money to help the needy, and the giving of money in order to obtain a
reputation for generosity, must stand on the same level. The widow's
mite will be worth infinitely less than the shekels which come from
those who devour widows' houses. If there be none to search the heart,
none save poor frail fellow-mortals to whom we must give account, what
an incentive to purity of motive and loftiness of aspiration is
removed! But let men talk as they will, there is a conscience in them
which whispers, It does matter whether our hearts as well as our
actions are right; it does matter whether we have good motives, good
intentions; there is a scrutiny of hearts, {54} making and to be made
more fully yet; there is One before Whom, even though we have not
broken the law of the land, we confess with anguish, Against Thee have
I sinned and done evil in Thy sight: where I appear most
irreproachable, Thine eye detecteth error: it is not the occasional
trespass that I have chiefly to lament, it is the sin that is almost
part and parcel of my very being, the sin that corrodes even where it
does not glare, the sin that undermines even where it does not crash.

VI

The most thoughtful of those who have lost faith in the Living God and
in fellowship with Him hereafter, look on this life with a pessimistic
eye. Without trust in the Unseen and Eternal, life is worthless, an
idle dream. With its harassing cares, with its petty vexations, with
its turbulence and strife, its sorrows, its breaking up of old
associations, its quenching the light of our {55} eyes, 'O dreary were
this earth, if earth were all!' On the stage of the world, 'the play
is the Tragedy Man, the hero the conqueror worm!'

We cannot but extend the deepes