be lost; and that was, the honest
and good heart, of which our Lord speaks in the parable of the
sower. In that Christ sowed the word of God, even himself, and his
grace and Holy Spirit; and, behold, it sprang up and bore fruit a
hundredfold, over all Christian nations to this day.

Keep, therefore, if you have it, the honest and good heart. If you
have it not, pray for it earnestly. Determine to learn what is
true, whatever be the trouble; and to do what is right, whatever be
the cost; and then, though you may make many mistakes, and have more
than once, perhaps, to change your mind in shame and confusion, yet
all will come right at last, for the grace of Christ, sooner or
later, will lead you into all truth which you require for this world
and all worlds to come.

Again, we may learn from St. Paul this lesson. That though God has
forgiven a man, that is no reason that he should forgive himself.
That may seem a startling saying just now. For the common teaching
now is, that if a man finds, or fancies, that God has forgiven him,
he may forgive himself at once; that if he gets assurance that his
sins are washed away in Christ's blood, he may go swaggering and
boasting about the world (I can call it no less), as if he had never
sinned at all; that he may be (as you see in these revivals, from
which God defend us!) one moment in the deepest agonies of
conscience, and dread of hell-fire, and the next moment in raptures
of joy, declaring himself to be in heaven. Alas, alas! such people
forget that sin leaves behind it wounds, which even the grace of
Christ takes a long time in healing, and which then remain as ugly,
but wholesome scars, to remind us of the fools which we have been.
They are like a man who is in great bodily agony, and gets sudden
relief from a dose of laudanum. The pain stops; and he feels
himself, as he says, in heaven for the time: but he is too apt to
forget that the cause of the pain is still in his body, and that if
he commits the least imprudence, he will bring it back again; just
as happens, I hear, in too many of these hasty and noisy conversions
now-a-days.

That is one extreme. The opposite extreme is that of many old Roman
Catholic saints and hermits who could not forgive themselves at all,
but passed their whole lives in fasting, poverty, and misery,
bewailing their sins till their dying day. That was a mistake. It
sprang out of mistaken doctrines, of which I shall not speak here: