and murder, and make all Israel blush for him, and he will be indignant enough to strike you to the ground. Speak to the fisherman, Peter, of the commanding influence which awaits him in some coming kingdom of God, and he will think you are beside yourself: and then tell him that he will one day deny and curse his sworn Master and kindest Friend, and he will ask you, Do you think I am a dog or a devil that I should do this? Impossible! And yet the thing comes off. Why do the sacred writers give us so many stories of this kind? Surely it is because we need both the warning and encouragement. It is to prove to us that on one side of our nature we are greater than we think, and on the other side weaker and lower than we believe. It is to inspire the diffident with courage, and the despairing with hope, while it pulls up the forward, the careless, and the over-confident with the wholesome and humbling word, "_Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall_." These men of the Bible were strangely mixed. They were conspicuous instances of the contradictions and surprises which are in us all. For that is the point: the thing comes home to us. Believe me, we are all a riddle to ourselves. Each man is to himself, and each woman too, the greatest of all mysteries save the one greater mystery, God. None of us know of what elements he is composed, and how strangely the good and evil mix and mingle and clash and strive in each day's doings, and through the whole of life. They who believe that the saint is all saint, and the sinner all sinner, are blindly and pitiably ignorant of human nature. God has made no man without putting some little bit of the Divine image in him. The worst has some lingering trace or ruin of it. And the best is not so entirely the temple of the Holy Ghost that no fouler spirits ever obtain entrance there. You may say that you do not believe in a devil. Well, that may be; but there is something like a devil in all of us at certain times, and I would rather believe that it comes from the outside than that it is born and bred and originates within. At any rate, there are in all of us the strange oppositions, the darkness and the light overlapping each other, the evil and the good ever contending, like Esau and Jacob, in the birth hour. The awful and the blessed possibilities are there, and which shall get the uppermost depends first on God, and then upon ourselves. I. Remember first, then, that we have all a lower side.