it. I do not see it. It stands to reason--if a man loses
his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way,
surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the way.

And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember that
the prodigal son is punished most severely. He does not get off freely
the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you. Even
after he does repent and resolves to go back to his father's house he has
a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry, and all but
despairing. But when he does get home; when he shows he has learnt the
bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, "Make me as one of thy hired
servants,"--he is received as freely as the rest.

_Water of Life Sermons_. 1864.

Silent Depths. February 21.

Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken. The
most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think,
written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in
fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate
to be spoken of in the first person.

_MS._ 1843.

True Justification. February 22.

God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith,
by being made just persons by faith,--who cannot satisfy either their
conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right
when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting that
union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not merely
a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric.

_MS._ 1854.

A Present Hell. February 23.

"Ay," he muttered, "sing awa', . . . wi' pretty fancies and gran' words,
and gang to hell for it."

"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"

"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than any
fiend's kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the
pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a
useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and
kenning it--and not being able to get oot o' it for the chains of vanity
and self-indulgence."

_Alton Locke_, chap. viii. 1849.

Time and Eternity. February 24.

Eternity does not mean merely some future endless duration, but that ever-
present _moral_ world, governed by ever-living and absolutely necessary
laws, in which we and all spirits are now; and in which we should be