O God, O
wretched man that I am! "Let a man," says William Law when he is
enforcing humility, "but consider that if the world knew all that of him
which he knows of himself: if they saw what vanity and what passions
govern his inside, and what secret tempers sully and corrupt his best
actions, he would have no more pretence to be honoured and admired for
his goodness and wisdom than a rotten and distempered body to be loved
and admired for its beauty and comeliness. This is so true, and so known
to the hearts of almost all people, that nothing would appear more
dreadful to them than to have their hearts fully discovered to the eyes
of all beholders. And, perhaps, there are very few people in the world
who would not rather choose to die than to have all their secret follies,
the errors of their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness
of their pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions,
their uneasinesses, hatreds, envies, and vexations made known to all the
world." Where did William Law get that terrible passage? Where could he
get it but in the secret heart of the miserable author of the _Serious
Call_?

6. The half cannot be told of the guilt and the corruption, the pain and
the shame and the manifold misery of secret sin; but all that will be
told, believed, and understood by all men long before the full
magnificence of their sanctification, and the superb transcendence of
their blessedness, will even begin to be described to God's secret
saints. For, all that sleepless, cruel, and soul-killing pain, and all
that shameful and humbling corruption,--all that means, all that is, so
much holiness, so much heaven, working itself out in the soul. All that
is so much immortal life, spotless beauty, and incorruptible joy already
begun in the soul. Every such pang in a holy heart is a death-pang of
another sin and a birth-pang of another grace. Brotherly love is at last
being born never to die in that heart where envy and malice and
resentment and revenge are causing inward agony. And humility and
meekness and the whole mind of Christ are there where pride and anger and
ill-will are felt to be very hell itself. And holiness, even as God is
holy, will soon be there for ever where the sinfulness of sin is a
sinner's acutest sorrow. "As for me," said one whose sin was ever before
him, "I will behold Thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when
I wake with Thy likeness."