lions, cruel rackings, stonings, starvings, nakedness? So willing had
they been made in the day of His power. And see, on the other side, the
children of the devil, because they are not willing, how many shifts and
starting-holes they will have! I have married a wife; I have a farm; I
shall offend my landlord; I shall lose my trade; I shall be mocked and
scoffed at, and therefore I cannot come. But, alas! the thing is, they
are not willing. For, were they once soundly willing, these, and a
thousand things such as these, would hold them no faster than the cords
held Samson when he broke them like flax. I tell you the will is all.
The Lord give thee a will, then, and courage of heart.'

2. Let that, then, suffice for this man's name and nature, and let us
look at him now when his name and his nature have both become evil; that
is to say, when Willbewill has become Illwill. You can imagine; no, you
cannot imagine unless you already know, how evil, and how set upon evil,
Illwill was. His whole mind, we are told, now stood bending itself to
evil. Nay, so set was he now upon sheer evil that he would act it of his
own accord, and without any instigation at all from Diabolus. And that
went on till he was looked on in the city as next in wickedness to very
Diabolus himself. Parable apart, my ill-willed brethren, our ill-will
has made us very fiends in human shape. What a fall, what a fate, what a
curse it is to be possessed of a devil of ill-will! Who can put proper
words on it after Paul had to confess himself silent before it? Who can
utter the diabolical nature, the depth and the secrecy, the subtlety and
the spirituality, the range and the reach-out of an ill-will? Our hearts
are full of ill-will at those we meet and shake hands with every day. At
men also we have never seen, and who are totally ignorant even of our
existence. Over a thousand miles we dart our viperous hearts at innocent
men. At great statesmen we have ill-will, and at small; at great
churchmen and at small; at great authors and at small; at great, and