shonoured Me in your sin, and wounded and crucified Me afresh. Your
love demands an opportunity for reparation and my answering love will
give it you. Go forth to this renewed battle; show that you can be a
good soldier of the Cross. Fight valiantly that you may win even
greater glory for My Name than that which was lost by your failure."

{195}

What more can the generous heart ask of God? Suppose when we came to
Him in deep sorrow for our fault, He should say to us, "I will pardon
you, but never will I give you the opportunity of serving me again. I
trusted you once and you failed me. I will not trust you again."

Would our hearts desire heaven on such a condition? I think there is
not one of us who would not feel that to stand in His presence among
the redeemed on such terms would be the veriest hell. But the love of
God deals not thus with sinners. "Though you have failed Me," He says,
"I will trust you again. Go forth once more. My grace will make you
strong; My love will hedge you round about."

IV. _The Work of Amendment_

The true test of penitence is amendment of life, but God does not
require actual amendment before receiving us back into His service.
What He demands is that we have a firm purpose of amendment. No man
can say what he will do in the future. The future belongs to God. It
may never be ours at all. It is ours at the present moment to make a
resolution of amendment, and then to trust in God to fulfil in us this
resolve.

From the nature of things we can never arrive {196} at any mathematical
demonstration of having amended. On the contrary, it is the invariable
experience of those who are striving most earnestly in God's service,
that the more they strive the less they think they are accomplishing.

St. Paul did not think when he was persecuting the Church that he was
the chief of sinners. But when he had seen the Lord in the way, after
he had been rapt to the third heaven, after he had suffered hunger and
thirst, cold and nakedness, stripes and imprisonment, for His Name's
sake, after he had given up everything that the world counted dear,
after men saw he had attained to such sanctity that his name was one of
power in all the Churches, then came to him the deep sense that he had
accomplished nothing. He thought of himself as the chief of sinners,
and counted that he had laid hold of nothing for God; that he must
forget the things that were behind and reach forth unto t