ready. Let
prejudice and partiality have their full scope among the wicked passions
of your ill-conditioned heart, and lo! the kingdom of darkness is already
within you. Not, lo, here! or, lo, there! but within you. Look to
yourselves, says John to us all, full as we all are of our own
ill-conditions. Look to yourselves. But we have no eyes left with which
to see ourselves; we look so much at the faults and the blames of our
neighbour. 'Publius goes to church sometimes, and reads the Scriptures;
but he knows not what he reads or prays, his head is so full of politics.
He is so angry at kings and ministers of state that he has no time nor
disposition to call himself to account. He has the history of all
parliaments, elections, prosecutions, and impeachments by heart, and he
dies with little or no religion, through a constant fear of Popery.'
Poor, old, ill-conditioned Publius!

5. And, then, his sixty deaf men under old, angry, ill-conditioned
Prejudice. We read of engines of sixty-horse power. And here is a man
with the power of resisting and shutting out the truth equal to that of
sixty men like himself. We all know such men; we would as soon think of
speaking to those iron pillars about a change of mind as we would to
them. If you preach to their prejudices and their prepossessions and
their partialities, they are all ears to hear you, and all tongues to
trumpet your praise. But do not expect them to sit still with ordinary
decency under what they are so prejudiced against; do not expect them to
read a book or buy a passing paper on the other side. Sixty deaf men
hold their ears; sixty ill-conditioned men hold their hearts. Habit with
them is all the test of truth; it must be right, they've done it from
their youth. And thus they go on to the end of their term of life, full
of their own fixed ideas, with their eyes full of beams and jaundices and
darkness and death. Some people think that we take up too much of our
time with newspapers in our day, and that, if things go on as they are
going, we shall soon have neither time nor taste for anything else but
half a dozen papers a day. But all that depends on the conditions with
which we read. If we would read as Jonathan Edwards read the weekly news-
letters of his day; if we read all our papers to see if the kingdom of
God was coming in reply to our prayer; if we read, observing all things,
like Timothy, without prejudice or partiality, then I know no b