"You are surprised at finding me here in hell, because you have always believed me to be one who thought much and felt deeply on religious subjects. But you forget that to have religious feeling, and to act upon religious principle, are in many ways distinct. There are men who, though they are naturally incapable of lofty thought, would scorn to do anything immoral or mean; and, on the other hand, there are men who feel intensely on all religious subjects, who pray fervently and often, sing hymns with eyes streaming with tears of heartfelt earnestness, and yet their actions are not seldom unworthy, and their lives will not bear too close an inquiry. 'There is no self-delusion more fatal,' as Mr. Lowell has said, 'than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiment, while the life is grovelling and sensual.' It is a delusion which bids a man close his eyes lest he see where he is going; it comes to him with its harlot-beauties daintily draped in the robes of an angel of light, and sings hymns before the very gates of hell. It is because I am one who so deluded, or who tried so to delude himself, that you and I meet here to-day. We set out together with the broad path and the narrow path before us. You, by one fatal and irrevocable step, swerved to the broad path from the narrow, and that single step plunged you headlong and hopeless into this abyss. And I, well, I appeared to myself and to others to be walking in the narrow way; and yet, by the making of continual divergences, so trifling as to seem of but little or no account, I find myself eventually in the same awful abyss that you are in, and on a level fully as loathsome as your own. Though I have committed no such crime as you have committed, I was, in the petty details of my daily life, habitually untrue; and so the time came at last, in which, with every desire to serve God faithfully and to follow the dictates of conscience, I found that the power to make my will subservient to my wishes had slipped unnoticed from me. Habit has the strength of a giant, for good as well as for evil, and the will to do right on every occasion is as much a matter of training as is mere physical strength. The man who is habitually untrue in small things, cannot, even though he wish it, do right in great ones, any more than the man of untrained muscle can, by a mere exercise of volition, lift weights which would try the practised athlete. The only way in which to become Christlike is not to endeavour to feel so, not to seek to arouse sentiment or emotion (as drunkards fly for strength to stimulants), but to make Christliness the persistent and unconditional _habit_ of our lives. We must learn day by day to resist the first rising of a desire to do, or to say, or to think, that which we know diverges by the hundredth part of an inch from the path which conscience would have us to walk; and we must so school ourselves that we can, by sheer force of will,