y painful experience that our best qualities
are tainted, and that actual disaster has entered our life from the very
quarter we least suspected. We may be conscious that the deepest mark
has been made on our life by a sin apparently as alien to our character
as cowardice and lying were to the too venturesome and outspoken
character of Peter. Possibly we once prided ourselves on our honesty,
and felt happy in our upright character, plain-dealing, and direct
speech; but to our dismay we have been betrayed into double-dealing,
equivocation, evasive or even fraudulent conduct. Or the time was when
we were proud of our friendships; it was frequently in our mind that,
however unsatisfactory in other respects our character might be, we were
at any rate faithful and helpful friends. Alas! events have proved that
even in this particular we have failed, and have, through absorption in
our own interests, acted inconsiderately and even cruelly to our friend,
not even recognising at the time how his interests were suffering. Or we
are by nature of a cool temperament, and judged ourselves safe at least
from the faults of impulse and passion; yet the mastering combination of
circumstances came, and we spoke the word, or wrote the letter, or did
the deed which broke our life past mending.

Now, it was Peter's salvation, and it will be ours, when overtaken in
this unsuspected sin, to go out and weep bitterly. He did not
frivolously count it an accident that could never occur again; he did
not sullenly curse the circumstances that had betrayed and shamed him.
He recognised that there was that in him which could render useless his
best natural qualities, and that the sinfulness which could make his
strongest natural defences brittle as an egg-shell must be serious
indeed. He had no choice but to be humbled before the eye of the Lord.
There was no need of words to explain and enforce his guilt: the eye can
express what the tongue cannot utter. The finer, tenderer, deeper
feelings are left to the eye to express. The clear cock-crow strikes
home to his conscience, telling him that the very sin he had an hour or
two ago judged impossible is now actually committed. That brief space
his Lord had named as sufficient to test his fidelity is gone, and the
sound that strikes the hour rings with condemnation. Nature goes on in
her accustomed, inexorable, unsympathetic round; but he is a fallen man,
convicted in his own conscience of empty vanity, of