upon his
enemies, I would have said, Well done, and I would have added that I
always expected as much. But it is far more to my purpose to read that
he had not always got himself off without wounds that left lasting scars
both where they were seen of all, and where they were seen and felt only
by Self-denial himself. And not Self-denial only, but even Paul, in our
flesh, and with like passions with us, had the same experience and has
left us the same record. 'I keep my body under': so our emasculated
English version makes us read it. But the visual image in the masterly
original Greek is not so mealy-mouthed. I box and buffet myself day and
night, says Paul. I play the truculent tyrant over a lewd and lazy
slave. I hit myself blinding blows on my tenderest part. I am ashamed
to look at myself in the glass, for all under my eyes I am black and
blue. If David, after the matter of Uriah, had done that to himself, and
even more than that, we would not have wondered; we would have expected
it, and we would have said, It is no more than we would have done
ourselves. But that a spotless, gentle, noble soul like Paul should so
have mangled himself,--that quite dumfounders us. If Paul, then, who,
touching the righteousness which is in the law, was blameless, had to
handle himself in that manner in order to keep himself blameless, shall
any young man here hope to escape temptation without such blows at
himself as shall leave their mark on him all his days? Nay, not only so,
but after Self-denial had thus exercised himself and subdued himself,
still his enemy sometimes got such an advantage over him as left him as
his history here describes him. All which is surely full of the most
excellent heartening to all who read, in earnest and for an example, his
fine history.

6. The last and crowning exploit of our matchless captain was to
capture, and execute, and quarter, and hang up on a gallows at the market-
cross, the head and the hands and the feet of his oldest, most sworn, and
most deadly enemy, one Self-love. So stout and so insufferable was our
captain in the matter of Self-love that when it was proposed by some of
his many influential friends and high-in-place relations in the city that
the judgment of the court-martial on Self-love should be deferred, our
stout soldier with the cuts on his face and in some other parts of his
body stood up, and said that the city and the army must make up their
mind either to r