Finally; I wish to warn you against believing those who tell you that
such minute analysis of motives, such scrutiny into the smallest details
of daily conduct, has a tendency to produce an unhealthy
self-consciousness. This might, indeed, be true, if the original state
of your nature, before the examination began, were a healthy one. "If
Adam had always remained in Paradise, there would have been no anatomy
and no metaphysics:" as it is not so, we require both. Sin has entered
the world, and death by sin; and therefore it is that both soul and body
require a care and a minute watchfulness that cannot, in the present
state of things, originate either disease or sin. They have both existed
before.

No one ever became or can become selfish by a prayerful examination into
the fact of being so or not. In matters of mere feeling, it is indeed
dangerous to scrutinize too narrowly the degree and the nature of our
emotions. We have no standard by which to try them. If a medical man
cannot be trusted to ascertain correctly the state of his own pulse,
how much more difficult is it for the amateur to sit in judgment on the
strength and number of the pulsations of his own heart and mind.

The case is quite different when feelings manifest themselves in overt
acts: then they become of a nature requiring and susceptible of minute
analyzation. This is the self-scrutiny I recommend to you.

May you be led to seek earnestly for help from above to overcome the
hydra of selfishness, and may you be encouraged, by that freely offered
help, to exert your own energies to the utmost!

Let me urge on your especial attention the following verses from the
Bible on the subjects which we have been considering. If you selected