etter
reading for an ill-conditioned heart begun to look to itself than just a
good, out-and-out party newspaper. And if it is a church paper all the
better for your purpose. If you read with your fingers in your ears; if
you read with a beam in your eye, you had better confine yourself in your
reading; if you feel that your prejudices are inflamed and your
partiality is intensified, then take care what paper you take in. But if
you read all you read for the love of the truth, for justice, for fair-
play, and for brotherly love, and all that in yourself; if you read all
the time with your eyes on your own ill-conditioned heart, then, as James
says, count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations. Take up
your political and ecclesiastical paper every morning, saying to
yourself, Go to, O my heart, and get thy daily lesson. Go to, and enter
thy cleansing and refining furnace. Go to, and come well out of thy
daily temptation.--A nobler school you will not find anywhere for a
prejudiced, partial, angry, and ill-conditioned heart than just the party
journals of the day. For the abating of prejudice; for seeing the
odiousness of partiality, and for putting on every day a fair, open,
catholic, Christian mind, commend me to the public life and the public
journals of our living day. And it is not that this man may be up and
that man down; this cause victorious and that cause defeated; this truth
vindicated and that untruth defeated, that public life rolls on and that
its revolutions are reported to us. Our own minds and our own hearts are
the final cause, the ultimate drift, and the far-off end and aim of it
all. We are not made for party and for the partialities and prosperities
of party; party and all its passions and all its successes and all its
defeats are made, and are permitted to be made for us; for our
opportunity of purging ourselves free of all our ill-conditions, of all
our prejudices, of all our partialities, and of all the sin and misery
that come to us of all these things.

6. 'It is the work of a philosopher,' says Addison in one of his best
_Spectators_, 'to be every day subduing his passions and laying aside his
prejudices.' We are not philosophers, but we shall be enrolled in the
foremost ranks of philosophy if we imitate such philosophers in their
daily work, as we must do and shall do. Well, are we begun to do it? Are
we engaged in that work of theirs and ours every day? Is God our witne