the more ready we are to say that we are sound. We preachers have it
for one of our first duties to try to rouse men to the recognition of
the facts of their spiritual condition, and all our efforts are too
often--as I, for my part, sometimes half despairingly feel when I
stand in the pulpit--like a firebrand dropped into a pond, which
hisses for a moment and then is extinguished. Men and women sit in
pews listening contentedly and quietly, who, if they saw themselves, I
do not say even as God sees them, but as others see them, would know
that the leprosy is deep in them, and the taint patent to every eye. I
do not charge you, my brother, with gross transgressions of plain
moralities; I know nothing about that. I know this: 'As face answereth
to face in a glass,' so doth the heart of man to man, and I bring this
message, verified to me by my own consciousness, that we have all gone
astray, and 'wounds and bruises and putrefying sores' mark us all. If
the best of us could see himself for once, in the light of God, as the
worst of us will see himself one day, the cry would come from the
purest lips, 'Oh! wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from
the body of this death?'--this life in death that I carry, rotting and
smelling foul to Heaven, about with me, wheresoever I go.

Note, further, this man's confidence in Christ's power: 'Thou canst
make me clean.' He had heard all about the miracles that were being
wrought up and down over the country, and he came to the Worker, with
nothing of the nature of religious faith in Him, but with entire
confidence, based upon the report of previous miracles, in Christ's
ability to heal. I do not suppose that in its nature it was very
different from the trust with which savages will crowd round a
traveller who has a medicine-chest with him, and expect to be cured of
their diseases. But still it was real confidence in our Lord's power
to heal. As a rule, though not without exceptions, He required (we may