ou can make a splendid use of its gaps and of its
gashes, and of those waste places where great promises at one time stood.
You can make a grand use even of those gaps if you will descend into them
and draw out of them humiliation and repentance, compunction, contrition,
and resignation. And this use also: When you are moved to take some man
who is still young into your confidence, ask him to let you see his Bible
and then let him see yours, and point out to him the rents and wounds and
wilderness places in yours. And thus, by these two uses of a clipped-up
and half-empty Bible, you may make gains that shall yet set you above
those whose Bibles of promises are still as fresh as when they came from
God's own hand. And Samson said, I will now put forth a riddle unto you:
Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth
sweetness.

3. 'Go out,' said the Lord of Mansoul, 'and apprehend Clip-Promise and
bring him before me.' And they did so. 'Go down to Edinburgh to-night,
and go to the door of such and such a church, and, as he comes out arrest
Clip-the-Commandments, for he has heard My word all this day again but
will not do it.' Where would you be by midnight if God rose up in anger
and swore at this moment that your disobedient time should be no longer?
You would be speechless before such a charge, for the shears are in your
pocket at this moment with which you have clipped to pieces this Sabbath-
day: shears red with the blood of the Fourth Commandment. For, when did
you rise off your bed this resurrection morning? And what did you do
when you did rise? What has your reading and your conversation been this
whole Lord's day? How full your heart would have been of faith and love
and holiness by this time of night had you not despised the Lord of the
Sabbath, and cast all His commandments and opportunities to you behind
your back? What private exercise have you had all day with your Father
who sees in secret? How often have you been on your knees, and where,
and how long, and for what, and for whom? What work of mercy have you
done to-day, or determined to do to-morrow? And so with all the divine
commandments: Mosaic and Christian, legal and evangelical. Such as: A
tenth of all I have given to thee; a covenant with a wandering eye; a
mouth once speaking evil, is it now well watched? not one vessel only,
but all the vessels of thy body sanctified till every thought and
imagination is well un