.'

I. First, then, consider the true and the false sorrow for sin.

The Apostle takes it for granted that a recognition of our own evil, and
a consequent penitent regretfulness, lie at the foundation of all true
Christianity. Now I do not insist upon any uniformity of experience in
people, any more than I should insist that all their bodies should be of
one shape or of one proportion. Human lives are infinitely different,
human dispositions are subtly varied, and because neither the one nor
the other are ever reproduced exactly in any two people, therefore the
religious experience of no two souls can ever be precisely alike.

We have no right to ask--and much harm has been done by asking--for an
impossible uniformity of religious experience, any more than we have a
right to expect that all voices shall be pitched in one key, or all
plants flower in the same month, or after the same fashion. You can
print off as many copies as you like, for instance, of a drawing of a
flower on a printing-press, and they shall all be alike, petal for
petal, leaf for leaf, shade for shade; but no two hand-drawn copies will
be so precisely alike, still less will any two of the real buds that
blow on the bush. Life produces resemblance with differences; it is
machinery that makes facsimiles.

So we insist on no pedantic or unreal uniformity; and yet, whilst
leaving the widest scope for divergencies of individual character and
experience, and not asking that a man all diseased and blotched with the
leprosy of sin for half a lifetime, and a little child that has grown up
at its mother's knee, 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and
so has been kept 'innocent of much transgression,' shall have the same
experience; yet Scripture, as it seems to me, and the nature of the case
do unite in asserting that there are certain elements which, in varying
proportions indeed, will be found in all true Christian experience, and
of these an indispensable one--and in a very large number, if not in
the majority of cases, a fundamental one--is this which my text calls
'godly sorrow.'

Dear brethren, surely a reasonable consideration of the facts of our
conduct and character point to that as the attitude that becomes us.
Does it not? I do not charge you with crimes in the eye of the law. I do
not suppose that many of you are living in flagrant disregard of the
elementary principles of common every-day morality. Some are, no doubt.
There are, no d