dialogue.
All sin and all misery; all covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath,--trace
it all back to its roots, travel it all up to its source, and, as sure as
you do that, self and self-love are that source, that root, and that
black bottom. I do not forget that Butler has said in some stately pages
of his that self-love is morally good; that self-love is coincident with
the principle of virtue and part of the idea; and that it is a proper
motive for man. But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at
the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature. He has not as yet
come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow,
dismemberment, and self-destruction. But when he does condescend and
comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men,
even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion
and pathos as if he were an evangelical Puritan. Self-love, Butler
startles his sober-minded reader as he bursts out--self-love rends and
distorts the mind of man! Now, you are a man. Well, then, do you feel
and confess that rending and distorting to have taken place in you?
Butler is a philosopher, and Goodwin is a preacher, but you are more: you
are a man. You are the owner of a human heart, and you can say whether
or no it is a rent and a distorted heart. Is your mind warped and
wrenched by self-love, and is your heart rent and torn by the same wicked
hands? Do you really feel that it needs nothing more to take you back
again to paradise but that your heart be delivered from self-love? Do
you now understand that the foundations of heaven itself must be laid in
a heart healed and cleansed and delivered from self-love? If you do,
then your knowledge of your own heart has set you abreast of the greatest
of philosophers and theologians and preachers. Nay, before multitudes of
men who are called such. It is my meditation all the day, you say. I
have more understanding now than all my teachers; for Thy testimonies are
my meditation. I understand more than the ancients; because now I keep
Thy precepts.

2. 'Self-love has made us all malicious,' says John Calvin. We are
Calvinists, were we to call any man master. But we are to call no man
master, and least of all in the matters of the heart. Every man must be
his own philosopher, his own moralist, and his own theologian in the
matters of the heart. He who has a heart in his bosom and an eye in his
head can ne