y solemn and terrible reality in the thought of the irrevocable past.
Whether life has achieved the ends for which it was given or no, it has
achieved some ends. It may have made us into characters the very
opposite of God's intention for us, but it has made us into certain
characters which, so far as the world sees, can never be unmade or
re-made. The world harshly preaches the indelibility of character, and
proclaims that the Ethiopian may as soon be expected to change his skin
or the leopard his spots as the man accustomed to do evil may learn to
do well. That dreary fatalism which binds the effects of a dead past on
a man's shoulders, and forbids him to hope that anything will
obliterate the marks of 'what once hath been,' is in violent
contradiction to the large hope brought into the world by Jesus Christ.
What we have written we _have_ written, and we have no power to erase
the lines and make the sheet clean again, but Jesus Christ has taken
away the handwriting 'that was against us,' nailing it to His cross.
Instead of our old sin-worn and sin-marked selves, He proffers to each
of us a new self, not the outcome of what we have been, but the image of
what He is and the prophecy of what we shall be. By the great gift of
holiness for the future by the impartation of His own life and spirit,
Jesus makes all things new. The Gospel recognises to the full how bad
some who have received it were, but it can willingly admit their past
foulness, because it contrasts with all that former filth their present
cleanness, and to the most inveterately depraved who have trusted in
Christ rejoices to say, 'Ye were washed, ye were sanctified, ye were
justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.'

THE UNIVERSAL PRISON

'But the Scripture hath concluded all under sin,
that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be
given to them that believe.'--GAL. iii. 22.

The Apostle uses here a striking and solemn figure, which is much veiled
for the English reader by the ambiguity attaching to the word
'concluded.' It literally means 'shut up,' and is to be taken in its
literal sense of confining, and not in its secondary sense of inferring.
So, then, we are to conceive of a vast prison-house in which mankind is
confined. And then, very characteristically, the Apostle passes at once
to another metaphor when he goes on to say 'under sin.' What a moment
before had presented itself to his vivid imaginat