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There is a very strange and suggestive contrast between the two senses in which it may be said that a man "forgets himself." On the one hand the phrase is sometimes used to mark that high grace of sympathy or love whereby the desire and energy of the heart is transferred from the gratification of a man's own tastes to the pure service of his fellow-men: that true conversion, whereby the will is rescued from its original sin of selfishness and wholly set upon the glory of God and the good of those for whom His Son was crucified. But it is, surely, an inaccurate use of words to say of such an one that he forgets himself. For he only forgets his own wishes and pleasures and comfort, he forgets those things which other men gather round them and delight in until they seem essential to their very life; but all the while his true self is vividly and actively present in the labour which proceedeth of love; it goes freely out in unreserved devotion, only to come again with joy, enriched and strengthened both by the exercise of its affection and the answering love which it has won. So it has been well said that in the life of love we die to self; but the death is one not of annihilation but of transmigration. It is in the other sense of the common phrase that men do more truly forget themselves: when they so surrender their will to some blind impulse, some irrational custom, some animal craving, that for a while they seem driven as autumn leaves before the changing gusts, they know not how or whither. A man can live for days, and months, and years, without ever giving any reality or force to the knowledge that he is himself an immortal soul; without ever really feeling his essential separation from things visible, his independence of them, his distinct existence in himself, his power of acting for himself in this way or in that, his personal responsibility for his every choice end action. As he wakes in the morning, as he is regaining from the blind life of sleep the wonder of self-consciousness, at once the countless interests which await him in the coming day rush in upon him, there, in his own room, during the one half-hour, perhaps, when he can be alone in all his waking time, the distractions of the outer world are already around him. And so he goes forth to his work and to his labour until the evening; and all day long he is looking only at the things about him, he is committing the guidance and control of his ways to that blind and alien life which wavers and struggle around him, and of which he should rather be himself the critic and guide. We can never cancel the act whereby man became a living soul; we can never cease to be ourselves. But we can so turn away from self-knowledge, we can so forget ourselves and our responsibility, that this first and deepest truth of our being will no longer have its proper power in our lives. Such blurring of our own self-consciousness will always obscure and. invalidate for us the evidences of Christianity, always hinder and imperil our progress in the life of faith. Let me try briefly to show the certainty and manner of this result by speaking of three chief points in the Christian revelation which essentially presume, and require for the very understanding of their terms, that we should know ourselves as personal and spiritual beings.

I. First, then, in the very front of Christianity, in the very name of Him whom the Church preaches and adores, is set the thought of our salvation from our sins. The fact of sin is to Christianity what crime is to law, what sickness is to medicine; if sin, it has been truly said, were not an integral feature of human life, Christianity would long ago have perished. Hence the consciousness, the appreciation of sin, is essential to any sufficient estimate of the claim which Christ's message has upon our attention and obedience; even as it is necessary for the interpretation of almost every page throughout the Bible, and presupposed in psalms, and histories, and prophecies, and types. In the recognition of the enfeebled and perverted will, of the early promise unfulfilled, of early hopes obscured or cast away; in the presence of hateful memories; in the sense of conflict with desires which we can neither satisfy nor crush, and pleasures which at once detain and disappoint us; above all, in a certain fearful looking for of judgment, we begin to enter into that great longing, which, through all the centuries of history, has gone before the face of the Lord to prepare His way; and we learn to rise and welcome the witness of Him who cries that our warfare is accomplished end our iniquity is pardoned,

II. And secondly, in proportion as the consciousness of our personal and separate being grows clear and strong within us, we shall be able to enter more readily and more deeply into the Christian doctrine of our immortality; we shall be better judges of the evidence for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come: for it is as personal spirits that we shall rise again with our bodies and give account for our own works. It must be hard for us to give reality to this stupendous and all-transforming truth, so long as our thoughts and faculties are dissipated among things which know no resurrection, and interests which really shall for ever die. The message and the evidences of Christianity presuppose in us the clear sense of our own personality when they speak to us of- sin, and when they point us to a life beyond the grave; and we are fit critics of their claim in proportion as we can realise this, our deep and separate existence. It is when we recall ourselves from the scattered activity of our daily life; it is either when we have courage to go apart and stand alone and hear what the Lord God will say concerning us, or else when sickness or age has forced us into the solitude which we have always shunned: it is then that we know ourselves, and our need of a sufficient object in which the life of the soul may find its rest for ever.

(Prof. F. Paget.)

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KJV: But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.

WEB: But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, deluding your own selves.