many a poor, foolish creature, in misery and shame, with guilty
conscience and sad heart, tries to forget his sin, to forget his sorrow;
but he cannot. He is sick and tired of sin. He is miserable, and he
hardly knows why. There is a longing, and craving, and hunger at his
heart after something better. Then he begins to remember his Heavenly
Father's house. Old words, which he learnt in childhood; good old words
out of his Catechism and Bible, start up strangely in his mind. He had
forgotten them, laughed at them perhaps in his wild days. But now they
come up, he does not know where from, like beautiful ghosts gliding in.
And he is ashamed of them. They reproach him, the dear old lessons; and
at last he says, "Would God that I were a little child again; once more
an innocent little child at my mother's knee! Perhaps I have been a
fool; and the old Sunday books were right after all. At least, I am
miserable! I thought I was my own master, but perhaps He about whom I
used to read in the old Sunday books is my Master after all. At least, I
am not my own master; _I am a slave_. Perhaps I have been fighting
against Him, against the Lord God, all this time, and now He has shown me
that He is the stronger of the two."

And when the Lord has drawn a man thus far, does He stop? Not so. He
does not leave His work half done. If the work is half done, it is that
_we_ stop, not that He stops. Whoever comes to Him, however confusedly,
or clumsily, or even lazily they may come, He will in no wise cast out.
He may afflict them still more to cure that confusion and laziness; but
He is a physician who never sends a patient away, or keeps him waiting
for a single hour.

_National Sermons_.

The blessed St. Augustine found he could never conquer his own sins by
arguing with himself, or by any other means, till he got to know God, and
to see that God was the Lord. And when his spirit was utterly broken,
when he saw himself to have been a fool and blind all along--then the old
words which he learned at his mother's knee came up to his mind, and he
knew that God had been watching, guiding him, letting him go wrong only
to show him the folly of going wrong, caring for him, bearing with him,
pleading with his conscience, alluring him back to the only true
happiness, as a loving father will a rebellious and self-willed child;
and he became a changed man. To that blessed state may God of His great
mercy bring us in His own g