he while, we had no sort of purpose of performing. We
should be ready to go off by next ship to New Zealand rather than calmly
own to all this, or rather than ever face our friends again after we had
owned it. And yet we are not ashamed (some of us) to say that we are
always dealing treacherously with our Lord; nay, more, we own it with an
inexplicable complacency, as if there were a kind of virtue in saying how
fickle and faithless and desperately wicked our hearts are; and we
actually plume ourselves on the easy confession, which we think proves
our humility, and which does not lower us in the eyes of others, nor in
our own eyes, half so much as if we had to say, 'I have told a story,'
or, 'I have broken my promise.' Nay, more, we have not the slightest
hope, and therefore not the smallest intention of aiming at an utterly
different state of things. Well for us if we do not go a step farther,
and call those by hard and false names who do seek to have an established
heart, and who believe that as the Lord meant what He said when He
promised, '_No_ good thing will He withhold from them that walk
uprightly,' so He will not withhold _this_ good thing.

Prayer must be based upon promise, but, thank God, His promises are
always broader than our prayers. No fear of building inverted pyramids
here, for Jesus Christ is the foundation, and this and all the other
'promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him amen, unto the glory of God
by us.' So it shall be unto His glory to fulfil this one to us, and to
answer our prayer for a 'kept' or 'established' heart. And its fulfilment
shall work out His glory, not in spite of us, but '_by_ us.'

We find both the means and the result of the keeping in the 112th Psalm:
'His heart is fixed.' Whose heart? An angel? A saint in glory? No! Simply
the heart of the man that feareth the Lord, and delighteth greatly in His
commandments. Therefore yours and mine, as God would have them be; just
the normal idea of a God-fearing heart, nothing extremely and hopelessly
beyond attainment.

'Fixed.' How does that tally with the deceitfulness and waywardness and
fickleness about which we really talk as if we were rather proud of them
than utterly ashamed of them?

Does our heavenly Bridegroom expect nothing more of us? Does His mighty,
all-constraining love intend to do no more for us than to leave us in
this deplorable state, when He is undoubtedly able to heal the
desperately wicked heart (compare ve