This, again, is a great mystery. Yet our own hearts will tell us, if we will look at them, that it is true. Are there not, as it were, two different persons in us, fighting for the mastery? Are we not so different at different times, that we seem to ourselves, and to our neighbours, perhaps, to be two different people, according as we give way to the better nature or to the worse? Even as David—one year living a heroic and noble life by faith in God, writing Psalms which will live to the world’s end, and the next committing adultery and murder. Were those two Davids the same David? Yes; and yet No. The good and noble David was David when he obeyed the grace of God. The base and foul David was David when he gave way to his fallen and corrupt nature. Even so might we be. Even so, in a less degree, are we sometimes so unlike ourselves, so ashamed of ourselves, so torn asunder with passions and lusts, delighting in God’s law and all that is good in our hearts, and yet finding another law in us which makes us slaves at moments to our basest passions—to anger, fear, spite, covetousness—that when we think of it we are ready to cry with St. Paul, ‘Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Who? Who but he of whom St. Paul tells us, gives the answer in the very next verse, ‘I thank God, that God himself will, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Oh, my friends, whosoever of you have ever felt angry with yourselves, discontented with yourselves, ashamed of yourselves (and he that has not felt so knows no more about himself than a dumb animal does)—you that have felt so, listen to St. Paul’s glorious news and take comfort. Do you wish to be right? Do you wish to be what God intended you to be before all worlds? Do you wish that of you the glorious words may come true, ‘And God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good?’