er of the process, and a
distinct perception of the dreadful issue of it, are concerned, is much
of the time as destitute of self-knowledge as an irrational brute itself.
For, were sinful men constantly self-examining, they would be constantly
in torment. Men can be happy in sin, only so long as they can sin without
thinking of it. The instant they begin to perceive and understand _what_
they are doing, they begin to feel the fang of the worm. If the frivolous
wicked world, which now takes so much pleasure in its wickedness, could
be forced to do here what it will be forced to do hereafter, namely, to
_eye_ its sin while it commits it, to _think_ of what it is doing while
it does it, the billows of the lake of fire would roll in upon time, and
from gay Paris and luxurious Vienna there would instantaneously ascend
the wailing cry of Pandemonium.

But it is not so at present. Men here upon earth are continually thinking
sinful thoughts and cherishing sinful feelings, and yet they are not
continually in hell. On the contrary, "they are not in trouble as other
men are, neither are they plagued like other men. Their eyes stand out
with fatness; they have more than heart could wish." This proves that
they are self-ignorant; that they know neither their sin nor its bitter
end. They sin without the _consciousness_ of sin, and hence are happy in
it. Is it not so in our own personal experience? Have there not been in the
past ten years of our own mental history long trains of thought,--sinful
thought,--and vast processions of feelings and imaginings,--sinful
feelings and imaginings,--that have trailed over the spaces of the soul,
but which have been as unwatched and unseen by the self-inspecting eye of
conscience, as the caravans of the African desert have been, during the
same period, by the eye of our sense? We have not felt a pang of guilt
every single time that we have thought a wrong thought; yet we should
have felt one inevitably, had we _scrutinized_ every such single thought.
Our face has not flushed with crimson in every particular instance in
which we have exercised a lustful emotion; yet it would have done so had
we carefully _noted_ every such emotion. A distinct self-knowledge has by
no means run parallel with all our sinful activity; has by no means been
co-extensive with it. We perform vastly more than we inspect. We have
sinned vastly more than we have been aware of at the time.

Even the Christian, in whom this u