glories all its own, but it is not strong enough to do the work of the noon-day rays, its heat is not able to penetrate beneath the surface of the earth and wake up the life out of the seed-corn hidden there; its brightness touches the mountain-tops, but does not scatter the shadows in the valleys. But when the sun reaches its meridian "there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." So with the children of wisdom. When they first set out upon their journey their godliness is not so manifest to others, nor does it yield so much comfort to themselves as when they have trodden the path for years. But it must, from a necessity of nature, go on unto perfection. "Just men will be made perfect" (Heb. xii. 3). "They go from strength to strength" (Psa. lxxxiv. 7). They come "to the perfect day." +II. The wicked man's way.+ It is in every point the converse of that which has just been sketched. 1. _It is his own way_ (chap. i. 31): _not God's way, not the way in which he was destined to walk_. It is an _old_ way (Job. xxii. 15), but not the _oldest_ way; it is a path cast up by the will of man and pre-Adamite sinners. 2. _It is a way of darkness, because it is a way of blindness._ Blindness puts a man in the dark, and, being in the dark, he has only the experience that springs from darkness. Wickedness puts out the eyes of the soul, and, like a blind Samson, it sits in darkness and the shadow of death. A state of blindness is a state of _ignorance_. A blind man cannot avoid objects that come in his way, and when he falls in consequence, he knows not the object that caused him to fall. So the wise man here describes the ungodly as one "who knows not at what he stumbles" (verse 19). He has no realisation of the real character of his tempters, no insight into the sinfulness of sin; the lack of a guiding principle turns his walk into a series of stumblings. It follows of necessity that such a path is one of _danger_. It is more dangerous to walk in the night than in the day. The footpad or the highwayman can hide himself from our view in the darkness, and come upon us unawares. We may fall over the precipice at night that we could easily avoid in the day. So it is in a course of sin. A man who shuts his eyes to the light within him, and rejects the light which is to "lighten every man" (John i. 9), will, unawares, be overtaken by retribution, and fall into depths of remorse upon which he little counts. 3. _Like the path of the just, it is a progressive path._ No man stands still in it. The darkness thickens as the blindness increases, and the blindness grows the longer men refuse to "come to the light" (John iii. 20). Men do not at once come to the height or descend to the depth of iniquity described in verse 16, when, unless they have done some iniquitous act, they feel that they have lost a day. The merchant may feel he has lost a day when he has failed to make a good bargain; the scholar feels it when he has not added to