into destructive revolution; and that "altars are spurned, thrones insulted, order mocked at, and law defied."

Thus we might go on and show how temptation attacks us through our best tendencies; how every one has the defects of his qualities, and how no virtue is able to stand alone. Every unbalanced virtue drifts insensibly into a vice. Unbalanced courage ceases to be courage, and becomes rashness; unbalanced caution is not caution, but timidity. The unbalanced love of excellence changes it into a mad ambition.

What is higher, what more all-inclusive, than love? One apostle says of love, that it fulfils every commandment and comprehends every duty. Another tells us that he who loves dwells in God, and God in him. Saint Theresa, that best flower of Spain, "in the midst of all her terrors of sin, could find nothing worse to say of Satan himself than this, 'Poor wretch! he is unable to love!' and her only idea of hell was of a place whence love was banished." And yet, if love be not joined with truth, it ceases to be love. It loses its purity, its energy, its power to correct and reform the world, and passes into some form of weak concession, of passive sympathy. We see in the wonderful majesty of Jesus how in him truth and love were in perfect harmony, neither of them more apparent than the other. His was the truth spoken in love, the truth acted in love. In him mercy and truth

met together, righteousness and peace kissed each other.

But nowhere else, not even in the apostles, do we find such perfect harmony. Peter and Paul had each his own besetting sins, his own peculiar temptations. Peter was bold, hasty, impetuous, rash; and, like other hasty men, he had to pay the penalty by sometimes recanting what he had said. Such a man, under a strong impulse, will scale a height which he is not capable of maintaining. Under the excitement of his Master's arrest, Peter was bold as a lion, and drew his sword and smote the servant of the High Priest. Afterward, calmed down by finding himself alone among his Master's enemies, afraid of ridicule if he confessed the truth, he denied that same Master whom just before he had been ready to defend with his life. When in the presence of Cornelius, and seeing how good a man this heathen was, he rose for an hour to the height of the universal religion of Christ, and declared that "in every nation he who feared God and wrought righteousness was accepted of him." But afterward, in the presence and under the influence of bigoted Jews, he relapsed, and, according to Paul's account, dissimulated his real opinion, and refused to admit Gentiles to full communion. His temptation was to yield too much to the influences around him, and to follow the impulse of the moment. Thus he fell into inconsistencies. Peter was no hypocrite, he was the very opposite of that; but he was some

times inconsistent. And I think you will everywhere find ten or a hundred inconsistent Christians where you discover one hypocrite.

Very different were the characteristics of the Apostle Paul, and his temptations were of another order. Paul was a man of fixed ideas, who lived to propagate his own convictions of truth. To preach these ideas, this new gospel, was his life. "The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God." "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel." The very suggestion that he might be mistaken. about the resurrection filled him with horror. "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable." He could not work with those who did not believe as strongly as himself. He therefore left Judea and the Jews to the apostles, and took the whole Gentile world as his own dominion. He could not work long even with Barnabas. Free in his own intellectual activity, unfettered by any past, he was often impatient with those whose minds were more limited than his own. When he went for the first time to Jerusalem, and met the other apostles there, he was apparently disappointed by the limitation of their thoughts. "Those who seemed to be something," he says, "added nothing to me in conference." Who these were he tells us shortly afterward. He says that when James, Peter, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace given to him, they gave to him and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship,

that they should go to the Gentiles, and the other apostles to the Jews. Then he describes how when Peter came to Antioch he, Paul, withstood him to his face, because he did not walk uprightly. Is there not a slight touch of self-esteem and conscious superiority in the expression "those who seemed to be something," and in his saying that they could tell him nothing about Christianity which he did not know already? There lay his temptation, in the pride of intellect, in conscious mental supremacy. But he fought against this evil. He often reminded himself how he had persecuted the Christian Church. He kept before his mind the humility of Jesus. This grand intellect, this man of mighty intelligence, sacrificed thought and knowledge on the altar of love; said that knowledge was nothing, love everything; that knowledge would pass away, and only faith, hope, and love remain. Among the Corinthians, a people of active intelligence, he declared that God had chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and that the world by wisdom could never know God. He tells them that when he came among them he laid aside his wisdom, his logic, rhetoric, and philosophy, and made up his mind to preach the simple facts of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. "I determined to know nothing among you but Jesus and him crucified." "I fed you with milk, and not meat." "Not with enticing words of men's wisdom, but with demonstration of the Spirit and of power." Paul

knew what was his besetting sin, and resisted it by a noble act of self-denial.

It is curious to see how great men come in pairs, essentially different in their merits and defects, each somehow the supplement of the other. After Peter and Paul came Augustine and Jerome, Bernard and Abelard, Luther and Melanchthon, Wesley and Whitfield. Among the Greeks what a contrast between Aristides and Themistocles, the one sternly just, severely righteous, refusing success and victory if they had to be earned by a single dishonest act; the other infinitely adroit, of vast ambition, brave and generous, but ready to take any advantage whether right or wrong. The result was that the upright Aristides was unpopular with the people. His severe integrity made him enemies, and his great services to the State were forgotten. Themistocles, on the other hand, was admired and loved, and had an unbounded popularity with the multitude. Aristides, strong in his perfect integrity, had little sympathy with weakness. Themistocles, sympathetic and full of kindly impulse, had no foundation of integrity.

John Quincy Adams was the typical Aristides of our time, as perfectly upright as he, and quite as unpopular. He had such a despotic conscience that his biographer says any duty had for him an irresistible attraction; but if it happened to be a disagreeable duty the attraction became an overwhelming enthusiasm. He never seemed able to