t of sin has been committed in hours of thoughtlessness
and moral indifference, what prayer is more natural and warm than the
supplication: "Search me O God, and try me, and see what evil ways there
are within me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

But the careless, unenlightened man, as we have before remarked, leads a
life almost entirely destitute of self-inspection, and self-knowledge. He
sins constantly. He does only evil, and that continually, as did man
before the deluge. For he is constantly acting. A living self-moving
soul, like his, cannot cease action if it would. And yet the current is
all one way. Day after day sends up its clouds of sensual, worldly,
selfish thoughts. Week after week pours onward its stream of low-born,
corrupt, unspiritual feelings. Year after year accumulates that hardening
mass of carnal-mindedness, and distaste for religion, which is sometimes
a more insuperable obstacle to the truth, than positive faults and vices
which startle and shock the conscience. And yet the man _thinks_ nothing
about all this action of his mind and heart. He does not subject it to
any self-inspection. If he should, for but a single hour, be lifted up to
the eminence from which all this current of self-will, and moral agency,
may be seen and surveyed in its real character and significance, he would
start back as if brought to the brink of hell. But he is not thus lifted
up. He continues to use and abuse his mental and his moral faculties,
but, for most of his probation, with all the blindness and heedlessness
of a mere animal instinct.

There is, then, a vast amount of sin committed without self-inspection;
and, consequently, without any distinct perception, at the time, that it
is sin. The Christian will find himself feeling guilty, for the first
time, for a transgression that occurred far back in the past, and will
need a fresh application of atoning blood. The sinner will find, at some
period or other, that remorse is fastening its tooth in his conscience
for a vast amount of sinful thought, feeling, desire, and motive, that
took origin in the unembarrassed days of religious thoughtlessness and
worldly enjoyment.

For, think you that the insensible sinner is always to be thus
insensible,--that this power of self-inspection is eternally to "rust
unused?" What a tremendous revelation will one day be made to an
unreflecting transgressor, simply because he is a man and not a brute,
has lived a human life,