he world operates. Men's opinions are imperceptibly formed by
their wishes. If, for instance, we see our worldly prospects depend,
humanly speaking, upon a certain person, we are led to court him, to
honour him, and adopt his views, and trust in an arm of flesh, till we
forget the overruling power of God's providence, and the necessity of
His blessing, for the building of the house and the keeping of the city.

And moreover, these temporal advantages, as they are considered, have a
strong tendency to render us self-confident. When a man has been
advanced in the world by means of his own industry and skill, when he
began poor and ends rich, how apt will he be to pride himself, and
confide, in his own contrivances and his own resources! Or when a man
feels himself possessed of good abilities; of quickness in entering
into a subject, or of powers of argument to discourse readily upon it,
or of acuteness to detect fallacies in dispute with little effort, or
of a delicate and cultivated taste, so as to separate with precision
the correct and beautiful in thought and feeling from the faulty and
irregular, how will such an one be tempted to self-complacency and
self-approbation! how apt will he be to rely upon himself, to rest
contented with himself, to be harsh and impetuous; or supercilious; or
to be fastidious, indolent, unpractical; and to despise the pure,
self-denying, humble temper of religion, as something irrational, dull,
enthusiastic, or needlessly rigorous!

These considerations on the extreme danger of possessing temporal
advantages, will be greatly strengthened by considering the conduct of
holy men when gifted with them. Take, for instance, Hezekiah, one of
the best of the Jewish kings. He, too, had been schooled by
occurrences which one might have thought would have beaten down all
pride and self-esteem. The king of Assyria had come against him, and
seemed prepared to overwhelm him with his hosts; and he had found his
God a mighty Deliverer, cutting off in one night of the enemy an
hundred fourscore and five thousand men. And again, he had been
miraculously recovered from sickness, when the sun's shadow turned ten
degrees back, to convince him of the certainty of the promised
recovery. Yet when the king of Babylon sent ambassadors to
congratulate him on this recovery, we find this holy man ostentatiously
displaying to them his silver, and gold, and armour. Truly the heart
is "deceitful above all thin