December 6

'Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil!'—Isaiah 5:20.

I AM ready to call evil good.

I veil my guilt. I deny my misery. I am skilful and emphatic in doing so. Sin—how many softening names I have for it which conceal its deformity! It is error, accident, inexperience, indecision. It is an element in my spiritual education; it is a stage in my upward progress. But I am loth to name it a malign force which asserts itself against God. I will not confess that my mind is dark, and my will disobedient, and my affections idolatrous. What is bitter I describe as though it were sweet.

On the other hand, I am sometimes as ready to call good evil.

The way of holiness, the way which the saints have trod, the way in which God's Son walked when He was on earth, the way of the heavenly country into which there shall enter nothing that defileth—I speak of it as rough, thorny, undesirable. I will not see the freedom of it, the peace of it, the power which is mine when I am in it, the King of it who supplies all my need out of His riches in glory.

"If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face"—

nay, the Ifs must go. I have magnified trifling obstructions. I have talked of duty as insipid. I have abased and impoverished the Tree of Life into a weeping willow, a shivering aspen, a mourning cypress. And this mistake is as fatal as the other.

From both delusions may the Lord deliver me.