lessens the longer we look. Their goodness is magnetic. Before the former we uncover our heads, and kneel down; the latter we embrace as friends. We need not say to which class Doddridge belongs.

CHAPTER V.

HIS SPIRITUAL LIFE.

RICH, ripe fruits of holy, Christ-like labour borne by Doddridge, plainly indicated the existence and vigour of a corresponding inward life. It is not necessary for our satisfaction respecting the vital grace of Christian character, that there should be disclosed to us the secret processes of the soul's experience, any more than that for us to know that a tree is living we should see its roots. But the penetralia of the inner man has been opened in the case of Doddridge, and the sacred things there disclosed are too precious to be passed by without some looks of lingering admiration. His private papers reveal the rise and progress of religion in his soul, like a river-course cleansing itself from its first impure admixtures, and swelling into a broad, deep flood of silvery splendour. As we turn

over his diary and letters, his growth in grace is manifest: from year to year he increases in Christian stature. He puts away childish things; he drops his boyish follies, and rises into the grave, earnest, strong-willed, consistent man of God. No man ever became what Doddridge was by accident. The methods he adopted for the growth and government of spiritual life are noteable. Taking God's written word as his Magna Charta law, he, like many other good men, and not unwisely, enacted for himself, in harmony with these, certain bye-laws for the better carrying out the spirit of his supreme obligations. He framed rules for the employment of time, the order of business, his reading, his prayers, his selfexamination, and the whole range of his daily conduct. These were reduced to writing, and in them were embodied the definite standard he meant to aim at the minute laws he meant to work by. If the ideal excellence proposed be not defined and lofty, and the rules adopted in its pursuit strict and exact, the actual excellence attained will be irregular and low. Material builders work by lines of mathematical correctness, and spiritual

builders must work by lines of moral perfection. When we forget Divine rules, and go on building without reference to them, such faith and holiness as we so erect, soon become

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as a bowing wall and tottering fence." Deviating from the perpendicular, the work falls down, and our labour is all lost. And never does the spiritual workman, any more than the mechanical one, in his happiest efforts attain to the ideal standard at which he aims; yet it would be idle and foolish on that account, in either case, to throw aside the plumb-line, and say, aiming at perfect exactitude is useless. Rather, after failure, whatever its degree, should we not return to the reconstruction of our spiritual life task according to the original rule-persuaded that, though approximation to faultlessness is all we can expect to secure in this life, the standard of perfection must be kept in view, or even approximation will be impossible? So did Doddridge. He aimed and strove, and when he failed, he sought forgiveness of the Divine Master under whom he worked, and returned to his work anew, according to the old rules. Many a lamentation do you find in his diary

over follies and failures, over purposes broken, and temptations yielded to; but the end of all is a fresh visit to the cross, and renewed cries for spiritual succour. His papers show how he was ever striving to bring his thoughts and affections under the mastery of his will. He instituted a kind of spiritual police, to keep in order the refractory, and too often mob-like, dwellers in the soul's republic; a method by no means to be despised, for it is one which has proved astonishingly effective in the experience of certain hard-willed men. Doddridge seems to have been benefited by the expedient, though, like so many of us, he had immense trouble with some of the vagrant thoughts which frequent and hang about the mental thoroughfares. He had still more trouble with those vigorous affections of his ; and, after pruning their wild luxuriance, he often had to lament their rapid re-growth. Like the mariner, who ever and anon takes the sounding of the sea, and looks at the bright stars overhead, to ascertain where he is, and whither he is going,—so did this divine mariner, in his heavenward voyage, carefully at the same time noting down in his spiritual log-book the