ignorance; that he knew no one more sinful than himself; and that for this very cause he was chosen, that he might be a living witness of the patience of Jesus and an evidence of the sovereign grace of salvation, that none should ever despair.
What priest can look back without wondering that he should have been called to be a priest? How many of our early companions were every way more fit than we. They never committed a multitude of sins, follies, imprudences, we know of ourselves. Much we did knowing well that we ought not to do it; much we see now in a light which we then, through our own fault, had not. Of no one do we know so much evil as we know of ourselves; not perhaps of literal breaches of the law, but of great spiritual sins in the midst of great spiritual graces. The love, forgiveness, hope, confidence, and salvation we preach to others is to be seen first in ourselves. If His mercy had not been infinite, we should not only not be priests, but we should not even exist.
"What man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of a man that is in him?"[1] They that know most of us know little of the world of inward life reaching back to our earliest consciousness. Our whole life is suspended in it as if now present in one
- ↑ 1 Cor. ii. 11.
