* * * * *

Time is the great avenger as well as educator; only the education is
usually deferred until it no longer avails in this incarnation, and is
valuable only for advice--and nobody wants advice. Deathbed repentances
may be legal-tender for salvation in another world, but for this they are
below par, and regeneration that is postponed until the man has no further
capacity to sin is little better. For sin is only perverted power, and the
man without capacity to sin neither has ability to do good--isn't that so?
His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither ameba nor fish, neither
noxious bacilli nor useful life. Happy is the man who conserves his
God-given power until wisdom and not passion shall direct it. So, the
younger in life a man makes the resolve to turn and live, the better for
that man and the better for the world.

Once upon a time Carlyle took Milburn, the blind preacher, out on to
Chelsea embankment and showed the sightless man where Franklin plunged
into the Thames and swam to Blackfriars Bridge. "He might have stayed
here," said Thomas Carlyle, "and become a swimming-teacher, but God had
other work for him!" Franklin had many opportunities to stop and become a
victim of arrested development, but he never embraced the occasion. He
could have stayed in Boston and been a humdrum preacher, or a thrifty
sea-captain, or an ordinary printer; or he could have remained in London,
and been, like his friend Ralph, a clever writer of doggerel, and a
supporter of the political party that would pay the most.

Benjamin Franklin was twenty years old when he returned from England. The
ship was beaten back by headwinds and blown out of her course by
blizzards, and becalmed at times, so it took eighty-two days to make the
voyage. A worthy old clergyman tells me this was so ordained and ordered
that Benjamin might have time to meditate on the follies of youth and
shape his course for the future, and I do not argue the case, for I am
quite willing to admit that my friend, the clergyman, has the facts.

Yes, we must be "converted," "born again," "regenerated," or whatever you
may be pleased to call it. Sometimes--very often--it is love that reforms
a man, sometimes sickness, sometimes sore bereavement.

Doctor Talmage says that with Saint Paul it was a sunstroke, and this may
be so, for surely Saul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus to persecute
Christians was not in love. Love forgives