deaf ear to his plainest lessons if they cannot be made to fit into
some favourite formula or theory. But it will be real, practical,
healthy, soul-saving, in the very deepest sense of that word, just
in proportion as your eye is single and your heart pure; just in
proportion as you hunger and thirst after righteousness, and wish
and try simply and humbly to do your duty in that station to which
God has called you, and to learn joyfully and trustingly anything
and everything which God may see fit to teach you. Then as your day
your strength shall be. Then will the Lord teach you, and inform
you with his eye, and guide you in the way wherein you should go.
Then will you obey that appeal of the Psalmist, 'Be ye not like to
horse and mule, which have no understanding, whose mouths must be
held in with bit and bridle, lest they fall upon thee. Great
plagues remain for the ungodly. But whoso putteth his trust in the
Lord, mercy embraceth him on every side.'

For understand this well, young men, and settle it in your hearts as
the first condition of human life, yea, of the life of every
rational created being, that a man is justified only by faith; and
not only a man, but angels, archangels, and all possible created
spirits, past, present, and to come. All stand, all are in their
right state, only as long as they are consciously dependent on God
the Father of spirits and his Son Jesus Christ the Lord, in whom
they live and move and have their being. The moment they attempt to
assert themselves, whether their own power, their own genius, their
own wisdom, or even their own virtue, they ipso facto sin, and are
justified and just no longer; because they are trying to take
themselves out of their just and right state of dependence, and to
put themselves into an unjust and wrong state of independence. To
assert that anything is their own, to assert that their virtue is