self-consciousness; to their own individual existence, apart from the world around them; and their own individual relations to God. {314} A man may even practise his religion, may know a great deal about it, may talk about it, may listen to every word of the sermon in the church, may say his night prayers, may even go through some kind of a confession and communion, without fully awaking to these things. Paradoxical as it may seem, I believe that there are not a few men, who, of all persons in the world of whom they have any knowledge, are on terms of the slightest and most distant acquaintance with themselves. And I will give you one proof that this is true. You know how troubled many men are in sickness, or on a sleepless night, or in times of great calamity. Some persons are greatly troubled in a storm, when the thunder rolls over their heads, and the lightning flashes in their eyes. Now, of course, nervousness, physical causes, mental laws, and social considerations, may enter more or less into the production of this uneasiness, but is there not very often something deeper than any of these? Is it not something that the man has done yesterday, or last week, or last year, and that he has never set right; some unjust transaction, some evil deed, some act of gross neglect of duty, some miserable passion cherished, some impure words spoken, some cruelty or shrinking from what is right, or falsehood, or mischief-making. It is not a matter of imagination. It is not fancy, but fact. He remembers but too well; he knows when it was done, and all the consequences of it, every thing comes up distinctly. He shuts his eyes, but he cannot shut it out. You know the clock ticks all day long; amid the various cares of the day you do not hear it, but oh, how distinct and loud it is at night when your ear catches it. Did you ever have an aching tooth, which you could just manage to bear during the excitement of the day, but which began to throb and become intolerable when all was still at night, and you had gone to bed? So the uneasiness I have denoted is a real pain of the soul, which we manage to keep down and forget, or deaden, during our seasons of business and enterprise, but in hours of loneliness and danger makes itself felt. {315} And what does this show but that you do not attend to your real self; that there is some dark corner of your heart in which you fear to look. You keep the veil down, because you know there is a skeleton behind it and you are afraid to look at it. And so you go through life, playing a part, something that you are not, with smiles on your lips and honeyed words in your mouth, laughing and jesting, eating and drinking and sleeping, working and trading, going in and out, paying visits and receiving them, seeking admiration and flattering others, while all the while, deep down in your soul, there is that nameless something, that grief like lead in the bottom of your heart, that wound that you are afraid