what was conduct; and the hardest rule of conduct came to appear to him infinitely reasonable and natural, and therefore infinitely prepossessing. A return upon themselves, and a consequent intuition of the truth and reason of the matter of conduct in question, gave men for right action the clearness, spirit, energy, happiness, they had lost.
This power of returning upon themselves, and seeing by a flash the truth and reason of things, his disciples learnt of Jesus. They learnt too, from observing him and his example, much which, without perhaps any conscious process of being apprehended in its reason, was discerned instinctively to be true and life-giving as soon as it was recommended in Christ's words and illustrated by Christ's example. Two lessons in particular they learnt in this way, and added them to the great lesson of self-examination and an appeal to the inner man, with which they started. 'Whoever will come after me, let him renounce himself and take up his cross daily and follow me! he that will save his life shall lose it, he that will lose his life shall save it.'[1] This was one of the two. 'Learn of me that I am mild and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls!'[2] was the other. Jesus made his followers first look within and examine themselves; he made them feel that they had a best and real self as opposed to their ordinary and apparent one, and that their happiness depended on saving this best self from being overborne. Then to find his own soul,[3] his true and permanent self, became set up in man's view as his chief concern, as the secret of happiness; and so it really is. 'How is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and forfeit himself?'[4]—was the searching question which Jesus made men ask themselves. And by recommending, and still more by himself exemplifying in his own practice, by showing active in himself,
