ry man keeps
his own account book; and no other man dare or can look into it, except
in as far as the owner opens it of his own accord for the inspection of
his neighbour.

Some teachers adopt this principle, with good effect, in the discipline
of children at school. Each child has a book in which he marks, from day
to day and from hour to hour, his own successes and his own failures;
and according to this record the prizes are awarded or withheld. When
the child is put upon his honour, it is expected that he will be
honourable. Probably a large balance of advantage results from this
contrivance where it is judiciously managed; but it is capable of
telling two ways, and does tell in opposite ways with different persons.
If the child deal fairly, the principle of truth within him will be
strengthened by habit; but if he cheat, all of the sense of honesty that
remained within him will soon be worn away. "To him that hath shall be
given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be
taken, even that which he hath."

But while each man is permitted to keep the account of his own sins
against God, and no human being can rightfully possess a duplicate,
there is a duplicate: another record is kept in the Book of God. That
record is true; and woe to the self-deceiver who made false entries in
his own favour all his life, when it is found that the two accounts will
not tally in the great day.

Simon the entertainer kept account of his own debt to God--his sins of
omission and commission--and balanced them from time to time against a
column of merits which he possessed. The balance, he confesses, was
against himself, and the difference he set down as the amount due: it is
expressed by fifty. The woman, on the other hand, had during a course of
wickedness lost all reckoning, both of her own sins and of God's
mercies. Lately she had obtained a copy of the missing documents. A
reflection of the charge had been suddenly thrown down from the archives
of the Judge, upon the tablet of her own conscience. Without attempting
to tax the account in her own favour, she accepted it in full, and
expressed it by five hundred--ten times as much as the Pharisee had laid
to his own charge. He, taking his own reckoning for authority, counted
his liability light: she, taking her data from God's law, counted her
liability heavy.

In the story, as it is constructed by the Lord for the instruction and
reproof of Simon, the love