less. The opportunity offered you to-day of
speaking conscientiously, however trifling it may in itself appear, may
possibly be the turning point of your life; may lead you on to future
habits of cowardice and deceit, or may impart to you new vigilance and
energy for future victories over temptation.

You may, also, during the course of this day, be strongly tempted as to
the mode of repeating what another has said in conversation: the
slightest turn in the expression of the sentence, the insertion or
omission of one little word, the change of a weaker to a stronger
expression, may exactly adapt to your purpose the sentence you are
tempted to repeat. You may also often be able to say to yourself that
you are giving the impression of the real meaning of the speaker, only
withheld by herself because she had not courage to express it.
Opportunities such as these are continually offering themselves to you,
and you have ingenuity enough to make the desired change in the repeated
sentence so effectual, that there will be no danger of contradiction,
even if the betrayed person should discover that she is called upon to
defend herself. I have heard this so cleverly done, that the success was
complete, and the poor slandered one lost, in consequence, her admirer
or her friend, or at least much of her influence over them. You, too,
may in like manner succeed: but what is the loss of others in comparison
of the penalty of your success? The punishment of successful sin is not
to be escaped.

In any of the cases I here bring forward as illustrations, as helps to
your self-examination, I am not supposing that there is any tangible,
positive, wilful deceit in your heart, or that you deliberately
contemplate any very serious injury being inflicted on the persons whose
conversations and actions you misrepresent. On the contrary, I know that
you are not thus hardened in sin. With regard, however, to the deceit
not assuming any tangible form in your own eyes, you ought to remember
the solemn words, "Thou, O God I seest me;" and what is sin in his eyes
can only fail to be so in ours from the neglect of strict
self-examination and prayer that the Spirit of the Lord may search the
very depths of the heart. Sins of ignorance seem to assume even a deeper
dye than others, when the ignorance only arises from wilful neglect of
the means of knowledge so abundantly and freely bestowed. When you once
begin in right earnest to try to speak the truth