But you have time,—you have all time. When there is a will there is a way. Make up your minds that there shall be a will, and pray earnestly to God to give it you, if it is but for forty days: and in them think seriously, slowly, solemnly, over your past lives. Examine yourselves and your doings. Ask yourselves fairly,—‘Am I going forward or back? Am I living like a child of God, or like a mere machine for making food and wages? Is my conduct such as the Holy Scripture tells me that it should be? You will not need to go far for a set of questions, my friends, or rules by which to examine yourselves. You can hardly open a page of God’s blessed Book without finding something which stares you in the face with the question, ‘Do I do thus?’ or, ‘Do I not do thus?’ Take, for example, the Epistle of this very day. What better test can we have for trying and weighing our own souls? What says it? That though we were wise, charitable, eloquent—all that the greatest of men can be, and yet had not charity—_love_, we are nothing!—nothing! And how does it describe this necessary, indispensable, heavenly love? Let us spend the last few minutes of this sermon in seeing how. And if that description does not prick all our hearts on more points than one, they are harder than I take them for—far harder, certainly, than they should be. This charity, or love, we hear, which each of us ought to have and must have—“suffers long, and is kind.” What shall we say to that? How many hasty, revengeful thoughts and feelings have risen in the hearts of most of us in the last year?—Here is one thought for Lent. “Charity envies not.”—Have we envied any their riches, their happiness, their good name, health, and youth?—Another thought for Lent. “Charity boasts not herself.” Alas! alas! my friends, are not the best of us apt to make much of the little good we do,—to pride ourselves on the petty kindnesses we shew,—to be puffed up with easy self-satisfaction, just as charity is _not_ puffed up?—Another Lenten thought. “Charity does not behave herself unseemly;” is never proud, noisy, conceited; gives every man’s opinion a fair, kindly hearing; making allowances for all mistakes. Have we done so?—Then there is another thought for Lent. “Charity seeks not her own;” does not stand fiercely and stiffly on her own rights, on the gratitude due to her. While we—are we not too apt, when we have done a kindness, to fret and fume, and think ourselves deeply injured, if we do not get repaid at once with all the humble gratitude we expected? Of this also we must think. “Charity thinks no evil,” sets down no bad motives for any one’s conduct, but takes for granted that he means well, whatever appearances may be; while we (I speak of myself just as much as of any one), are we not continually apt to be suspicious, jealous, to take for granted that people mean harm; and even when we find ourselves mistaken, and that we have cried out before we are hurt, not to consider