enormous the evils of life, and notwithstanding all our weakness, we know that in Him we are safe and strong. But we must hear Him to follow Him, we must be guided and directed by His gracious commands. This failure to hear and obey the voice of God it is which more explains the falls and sins of men than all their inherited frailty. So long as His words are heard and directions heeded, mistake and error are impossible. We see, therefore, why it is that so many actually do desert Him and are led by evil voices. The cause chiefly lies in the wilfulness of human nature and in the abuse of human liberty. We cannot stand unless God support us, and we shall surely fall if He withdraws His supporting hand. But the choice of evil, the beginning of unfaithfulness comes from ourselves; for Almighty God will never forsake us unless we first forsake Him. If, ever, then, we find our lives to be at variance with God, whether in lesser or in greater matters, if it should ever be our unhappy fortune to wander from Him, like another prodigal, and waste our lives with the enemies of our souls, we can be assured that the desertion is all our own. We forget God, we deliberately wander from His sight and care, and then we fall. Engrossed in worldly affairs, taken up with present vanities, with ourselves, our ease, our temporal advancement, we begin to neglect prayer and communion with God, we begin to rely on ourselves and to forge ahead of our own accord, only to encounter complete defeat and be shorn of all our strength. The secret of our power and success is to keep close to Him, to speak to Him lovingly and often, to seek guidance and protection from Him, and habitually to live in His comforting presence. But such is the boundless kindness of our heavenly Shepherd that, no matter how often we may have wandered from Him, or how seriously we may have grieved Him, He is ever ready to pursue our wanderings, and to seek until He finds us. He does not stop to consider the enormity of our guilt, or our unreasonableness, or our ingratitude, but He seeks us. He does not pause to take an account of all He has done for us, of the many graces He has given us, of the tears and blood He has shed in our behalf; but He goes after our straying souls, and He will not be appeased until He restore us. God does not will the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live.(23) He knows all our frailties and our diverse temptations; He knows how alluring are the things of sense to a nature perverted like ours; He knows how easy it is for us, blind and ignorant as we are, to forget Him and our dearest interests, and to obey the call of other voices; all this He understands, and He has pity on us. “He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust.”(24)