in Heaven" for "daily bread?" It is according as one set of desires or the other holds the foremost rank in the heart, that the discipline of this day will be most efficient in inflicting pain or in exciting thanksgiving. It is true that both must be united for discipline. It is not by insensibility to the pain you may this day be exposed to that you will prove the most genuine faith, but by recognising the wise and merciful purposes for which that pain is inflicted, and then feeling not only resigned but thankful for any trial, whether permanent or temporary, that will free you from those frequent and weighty hinderances which, if they were not removed, would slacken, perhaps fatally, your "pressing towards the mark for the prize of our high calling." "He who will never leave you nor forsake you" is guiding all your earthly course. Be, then, content with

such things as ye have, "believing of whatever seems most evil" in your earthly lot, that "God means it unto good;"* that it is "by the right way He is leading you to a city of habitation."† + Psalm cvii.~

*Gen. 1. 20.

89

FIFTH DAY.

SELFISHNESS.

"Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”— - PHIL. ii. 4.

BEFORE suggesting means for the detection of the sin of selfishness, it is important to form accurate ideas as to its nature. It proves a source of dangerous perplexity to the moral sense when "bitter is put for sweet, and sweet for bitter;" for in that case the instinct of conscience rises in opposition against an imagined law; the force of each is weakened, and the path of duty becomes confused and uncertain.

The mistake frequently made, relative to the subject now before us, is that of

*Isaiah, v. 20.

using selfishness and self-love as synonymous terms, while they are, in reality, opposed in signification. The one is an instinct of our fallen nature; the other, an essential attribute of the spirit of man, as it was received fresh and pure from the Creator Himself. It follows that the dictates of each will maintain a perpetual opposition. Self-love will direct to the choice of real and permanent good, almost always involving a sacrifice of the temporary gratifications generally chosen by selfishness. Self-love finds its highest enjoyment in working out the happiness of others. Of the nature of this enjoyment selfishness is altogether ignorant. It can conceive nothing better than success in promoting its own personal happiness; and therefore acts, in all points, with exclusive reference to that. Self-love may find its highest gratifications in self-denial, self-renunciation, privations, and disappointments; for the welfare of the real self, of the spirit

of man, being its primary desire, it is thus that the welfare of the spirit is invariably best promoted. Of these exalted feelings selfishness has no apprehending power, for it is an instinct of "the natural man,' and "knoweth not the things of the spirit." It is "of the earth, earthy,"† and the happiness it chooses is that belonging to earth.

There is, however, another point of view in which the opposing qualities of self-love and selfishness must be considered, and it is this that will come most frequently before you in the discipline of daily life. The subject on which I am about to enter is, I confess, difficult: the proof of its being a duty deliberately to choose and pursue our own welfare in preference to that of others requires a patience in following out an action into all its consequences, for which few warm hearts and generous spirits feel much t1 Cor. xv. 47.

* 1 Cor. ii. 14.