their
ferocious prejudices. Hate is too feeble a word for their gnashing rage
against this man and that cause, this movement and that institution.
There is an absolutely murderous light in their eye as they work
themselves up against the men and the things they hate. Charity rejoices
not in iniquity; but you will see otherwise Christian and charitable men
so jockeyed by the devil that they actually rejoice in iniquity and do
not know what they are doing, or who it is that is egging them on to do
it. You will see otherwise and at other times good men so full of the
rage and madness of prejudice and partiality that they will storm at
every report of goodness and truth and prosperity in the man, or in the
cause, or in the church, or in the party, they are so demented against.
Jockey is not the word. There is the last triumph of pure devilry in the
way that the prince of the devils turns old Prejudice's very best
things--his love of his fathers, his love of the past, his love of order,
his love of loyalty, his love of the old paths, and his very truest and
best religion itself--into so much fat fuel for the fires of hate and
rage that are consuming his proud heart to red-hot ashes. If the light
that is in us be darkness, how great is that darkness; and if the life
that is in us be death, how deadly is that death!

4. Old, angry, and ill-conditioned. Ill-conditioned is an old-fashioned
word almost gone out of date. But, all the same, it is a very
expressive, and to us to-night a quite indispensable word. An
ill-conditioned man is a man of an in-bred, cherished, and confirmed ill-
nature. His heart, which was a sufficiently bad heart to begin with, is
now so exercised in evil and so accustomed to evil, that,--how can he be
born again when he is so old and so ill-natured? All the qualities, all
the passions, all the emotions of his heart are out of joint; their bent
is bad; they run out naturally to mischief. Now, what could possibly be
more ill-conditioned than to judge and sentence, denounce and execute a
man before you have heard his case? What could be more ill-conditioned
than positively to be afraid lest you should be led to forgive, and
redress, and love, and act with another man? To be determined not to
hear one word that you can help in his defence, in his favour, and in his
praise? Could a human heart be in a worse state on this side hell itself
than that? Nay, that is hell itself in your evil heart al