of evil tempers,
a slack hand over ourselves, a careless husbandry which leaves furrows
full of weeds, failure to bend the bow to the uttermost, to keep the
mirror bright. It accuses us of undone duties to our neighbours,
unkindness, neglect of opportunities of service, and many another ugly
fault. Duties undone are debts not only to ourselves or to our fellows,
but to God. The great Over-lord reckons offences against His vassals as
crimes against Himself.

That graver aspect of our faults as being sins may seem a gloomy
thought, but it is really one full of blessing, for it lodges the true
power of remission of our burdensome debts in the hands of the one true
creditor, whom the prayer has taught us to call 'Our Father.'

That consciousness of sin should be as universal as the sense of bodily
hunger; but, alas! it is too often dormant. It is especially needful to
try to awake it in this generation, when the natural tendency of the
heart to ignore it is strengthened by talk of heredity and environment,
and by the disposition to think of sin with pity rather than
reprobation. Men are apt to regard a consciousness of sin as morbid.
They will acknowledge failure or imperfection, but there is little
realisation of sin, and therefore little sense of the need for a
deliverer. If men are ever to be brought to a saving grip of Jesus
Christ, they must have learned a far more heart-piercing consciousness
of their sin than this morally relaxed age possesses.

II. The cry to which that consciousness gives voice.

We often ask for forgiveness; have we any definite notion of what we are
asking for? When we forgive one another, he who forgives puts away
alienation of heart, every cloud of suspicion from his mind, and his
feeling and his conduct are as if there had never been a jar or an
offence, or are more tender and loving because of the offence that is
now forgiven. He who is forgiven has, on his part, a deeper shame for
the offence, which looks far darker now, when it is blotted out, than it
did before forgiveness. Both are eager to show love, not in order to
erase the past, but because the past is erased.

When a father forgives his child, does that merely or chiefly mean that
he spares the rod; or does it not much rather mean that he lets his love
flow out to the little culprit, undammed back by the child's fault? And
when God forgives He does so, not so much as a judge but rather as the
Father. It is the father's heart th