M I. AN ACT OF SELF-EXAMINATION.* Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.'- LL searching inquiries are anxious things, to the people whose doings and character are to be inquired into. There are many persons, not bad in the main, who have an uneasy feeling that they might not come very well out of a really searching investigation. Of course, if all your doings are straight and fair, you have no need to be afraid though all the world knows what you are doing. But it would be to some a very startling discovery, that for the last six weeks there had been a detective dogging their steps, they being unaware of it. * Town Church, St Andrews: Nov, 10, 1872. It is in human nature, in average human nature, to shrink from examinations. Not many middleaged folk would like to go to a skilful doctor, and have their bodily state thoroughly looked into, to see if heart, and brain, and lungs, and nerves, were sound. Many people fear that such an examination might bring out something seriously amiss; and so they would rather evade it. This may be cowardly, but it is common. There are human beings who would rather shut their eyes, if they fear that on opening them they would see what they would rather not see. There are places, and there are persons, in whose case the mention of an examination suggests some thing quite different. special University sense. The word comes with its You think of a number of young men, with anxious hearts, seated, pretty far apart from one another, at an uninviting table, each man with his writing materials: and each man, too, taking his first look at a printed paper of questions; some unexpectedly easy, and some of heart-sinking difficulty: very much perhaps depending on the result of that examination. Those who have passed through many such, will not cease to remember that they were very anxious, and sometimes very humbling occasions. Sometimes a depth of unsuspected ignorance is brought out, that makes one fear that little good has come of past hard work,-that makes one tremble for the future. And where only through such testing times can entrance be found to one's profession, we can remember the thankful elation with which one thought, when the last was fairly over, that one would never need to be examined any more. This is an age of examination: and of advancement through examination. Friendless talent and industry have fair play at last. Patronage, happily, goes for very little now, at least in this country, whether in Church or State. Happily, that is, for the hard-working and deserving: for patronage means, broadly, that a man be advanced not because he deserves it, but because he has influential friends. And examination, rightly conducted, is a very testing thing. It may not test everything, but it tests what it meddles with. Those who object to it are for the most part people who know that they themselves, or their relations, could not stand any examination at all. Now, looking at my text, and thinking of that grave examination to which it invites us, we are made to feel what a special examination that is: special in various respects. It is easy work to examine in intellectual attainment. It is easy to find out whether or not a man has got a history, or a language, into his mind. You can discover, to entire certainty, whether he possesses that attainment or not,-possesses it for the time: though it may decay, that |