ighteousness' -- I do desire it -- I
do not '_hunger and thirst_.' I don't think I do -- and it is
those and those only to whom the promise is given. I am so
miserable that I cannot even wish enough for what I need most.
O God, help me to know what I am seeking, and to seek it more
earnestly! --"

"'Merciful?'" she went on with tears in her eyes -- "I think
I am merciful. -- I haven't been tried, but I am pretty sure I
am merciful. But there it is -- one must have all the marks, I
suppose, to be a Christian. Some people may be merciful by
nature -- I suppose I am. --"

"Blessed are the _pure in heart_."

She stopped there, and even shut up her book, in utter sorrow
and shame, that if 'pure in heart' meant pure to the All-
seeing eye, hers was so very, very far from it. There was not
a little scrap of her heart fit for looking into. And what
could she do with it? The words of Job recurred to her, -- "Who
can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one."

Elizabeth was growing 'poor in spirit' before she knew what
the words meant. She went on carefully, sorrowfully,
earnestly -- till she came to the twenty-fourth verse of the
sixth chapter. It startled her.

"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one
and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and
despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon."

"That is to say then," said Elizabeth, "that I must devote
myself _entirely_ to God -- or not at all. All my life and
possessions and aims. It means all that! --"

And for 'all that' she felt she was not ready. One corner for
self-will and doing her own pleasure she wanted somewhere; and
wanted so obstinately, that she felt, as it were, a mountain
of strong unwillingness rise up between God's requirements and
her; an iron lock upon the door of her heart, the key of which
she could not turn, shutting and barring it fast against his
entrance and rule. And she sat down before the strong mountain
and the locked door, as before something which must, and could
not, give way; with a desperate feeling that it _must_ -- with
another desperate feeling that it would not.

Now was Elizabeth very uncomfortable, and she hated
discomfort. She would have given a great deal to make herself
right; if a movement of her hand could have changed her and
cleared away the hindrance, it would have been made on the
instant; her judgment and her wish were clear; but her will
was not. Unconditional su