oment has
drawn a brooding shadow over the once sunlit landscape of their lives.
And you have wept and prayed, lying prostrate on the cold, ground,
beseeching the merciful God that He would blot out the record from your
memory and from the lives which it has embittered and cursed; but "the
heaven has been as brass, the earth beneath has been as iron." The word
"irrevocable" has forced its meaning upon you in all its terrible
sternness, and you have needed no commentary to expound, or preacher to
drive home, the meaning of the sentence, "_Beware lest there be any
fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold
his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have
inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of
repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears._"

And if there may be some readers who know this experience in all its
horror, there are a multitude who know it in its more modified forms,
and who find it terrible enough even then. Who has not had forced upon
him the misery of regrets or remorse, the causes of which remain
unalterable, fixed as the stars in their orbits, and the fruits of which
leave deep traces on the experience and the destiny through time, yes,
and through eternity? Did David, think you, ever look coldly or
carelessly on his bold soldier's bloody grave? Was there no sad shadow,
to his eye, around the beauty of Bathsheba's child, which no murmured
"Jedidiah" could chase away? Was his home ever free from the shadow,
from the hour when Nathan's "Thou art the man" drove conviction home,
and wrung from him the most bitter cry of a sinner's anguish which has
found record in the literature of our world? Few things in the book of
history are more terrible than the sorrow which entered David's home,
the discord which rent his kingdom, the anguish which pierced his heart,
from the hour of his great transgression. A sad, careworn, broken man,
he finished his course and went down to his grave. Compare the David of
1 Kings i., ii., with the young shepherd in his early prime, if you
would estimate the havoc which one great sin may make in a noble life.
Ah! in a measure we all know it, in some form or other; words, deeds,
outbursts of passion, which have wrung dear hearts with anguish,
sundered precious bonds of love, have sullied reputation, clouded
prospects, withered hopes, or blighted the promise of lives which we
were bound to cherish, or of ou