our own selves to us, trying to make us believe that we are as bad,
ought to be as bad, and must always be as bad as we seem for the
time to be; that we cannot shake off our evil passions, that we
cannot rise again out of the eternal death of sin into the eternal
life of righteousness. And on the other side, the Spirit of God and
of His Christ, the Spirit of eternal life, the Spirit of justice,
and righteousness, love, joy, peace, duty, self-sacrifice, trying to
make us know Him and see His beauty, and obey Him, and be at peace;
trying to raise us again into that eternal life and state of
salvation which the Lord Jesus Christ has bought for us with His
most precious blood.

Oh, awful thought! Life and death, the Devil himself, and the Lord
Jesus Christ Himself, fighting in your heart and in mine, and in the
heart of every human being round us! And yet most blessed thought,
hopeful, glorious,--full of the promise of eternal victory! For
greater is He that is with us, than he that is against us; and He
who conquered Satan for Himself, can and will conquer him for us
also. No thing can separate us from the love of Christ; no thing,
yea no angel, or devil, principality, or power; no thing, but only
ourselves, only our own proud and wayward will and determination to
the Devil's voice in our hearts, and not the voice of Christ, the
Word of Life, who is nigh us, in our hearts, even in our darkest
moments, loving us still, pitying us, ready, able and willing to
help all who cast themselves on Him, and raise us, there and then,
the very moment we cry to Him and renounce the Devil and our own
foolish will, out of self-will into God's will, out of darkness into
light, out of hatred into love, out of despair into hope, out of
doubt into faith, out of tempest into peace, out of the death of sin
into the life of righteousness, the life of love and charity, which