ll this, the work of becoming like God, the man who delays is
crowding into the space of a few years, or a few months. When we have
lived long a life of sin, do we think that repentance and forgiveness
will obliterate all the traces of sin upon the character? Be sure that
every sin pays its price: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap."

Oh! there are recollections of past sin which come crowding up to the
brain, with temptation in them. There are old habits which refuse to
be mastered by a few enthusiastic sensations. There is so much of the
old man clinging to the penitent who has waited long--he is so much as
a religious man, like what he was when he was a worldly man--that it
is doubtful whether he ever reaches in this world the full stature of
Christian manhood. Much warm earnestness, but strange inconsistencies,
that is the character of one who is an old man and a young Christian.
Brethren, do we wish to risk all this? Do we want to learn holiness
with terrible struggles, and sore affliction, and the plague of much
remaining evil? Then _wait_ before you turn to God.

XXI.

_Preached May 15, 1853._

JOHN'S REBUKE OF HEROD.

"But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodias, his
brother Philip's wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done,
added yet this above all, that he shut up John in prison,"--Luke
iii. 19, 20.

The life of John the Baptist divides itself into three distinct
periods. Of the first we are told almost nothing, but we may
conjecture much. We are told that he was in the deserts till his
showing unto Israel. It was a period probably, in which, saddened by
the hollowness of all life in Israel, and perplexed with the
controversies of Jerusalem, the controversies of Sadducee with
Pharisee, of formalist with mystic, of the disciples of one infallible
Rabbi with the disciples of another infallible Rabbi, he fled for
refuge to the wilderness, to see whether God could not be found there
by the heart that sought Him, without the aid of churches, rituals,
creeds, and forms. This period lasted thirty years.

The second period is a shorter one. It comprises the few months of his
public ministry. His difficulties were over; he had reached conviction
enough to live and die on. He knew not all, but he knew something. He
could not baptize with the Spirit, but he could at least baptize with
water. It was not given to him to