ters and failings; the other is the
feeling that follows upon that recognition. The one is the prophet's
clear-sighted 'I am a man of unclean lips'; the other is the same
prophet's contemporaneous wail, 'Woe is me, for I am undone!'

And surely, brethren, if you and I have ever had anything like a glimpse
of what we really are, and have brought ourselves into the light of
God's face, and have pondered upon our characters and our doings in
that--not 'fierce' but all-searching, 'light' that flashes from Him,
there can be no attitude, no disposition, more becoming the best, the
purest, the noblest of us, than that 'Woe is me, for I am undone!'

Oh, dear friends, if--not as a theological term, but as a clinging,
personal fact--we realise what sin against God is, what must necessarily
come from it, what aggravations His gentleness, His graciousness, His
constant beneficence cause, how facilely we do the evil thing and then
wipe our lips and say, 'We have done no harm,' we should be more
familiar than we are with the depths of this experience of mourning for
sin.

I cannot too strongly urge upon you my own conviction--it may be worth
little, but I am bound to speak it--that there are few things which the
so-called Christianity of this day needs more than an intenser
realisation of the fact, and the gravity of the fact, of personal
sinfulness. There lies the root of the shallowness of so much that calls
itself Christianity in the world to-day. It is the source of almost all
the evils under which the Church is groaning. And sure I am that if
millions of the people that complacently put themselves down in the
census as Christians could but once see themselves as they are, and
connect their conduct with God's thought about it, they would get shocks
that would sober them. And sure I am that if they do not thus see
themselves here and now, they will one day get shocks that will stupefy
them. And so, dear friends, I urge upon you, as I would upon myself, as
the foundation and first step towards all the sunny heights of
God-likeness and blessedness, to go down, down deep into the hidden
corners, and see how, like the elders of Israel whom the prophet beheld
in the dark chamber, we worship creeping things, abominable things,
lustful things, in the recesses within. And then we shall possess more
of that poverty of spirit, and the conscious recognition of our own true
character will merge into the mourning which is altogether blessed.