n of the mind is not only intense, it is also intelligent. Strange
as it may sound, it is yet a fact, that a review of our past lives
conducted under the eye of God, and with a recognition of His presence
and oversight, serves to deliver the mind from confusion and panic, and
to fill it with a calm and rational fear. This is of great value. For,
when a man begins to be excited upon the subject of religion,--it may be
for the first time, in his unreflecting and heedless life,--he is
oftentimes terribly excited. He is now brought _suddenly_ into the midst
of the most solemn things. That sin of his, the enormity of which he had
never seen before, now reveals itself in a most frightful form, and he
feels as the murderer does who wakes in the morning and begins to realize
that he has killed a man. That holy Being, of whose holiness he had no
proper conception, now rises dim and awful before his half-opened inward
eye, and he trembles like the pagan before the unknown God whom he
ignorantly worships. That eternity, which he had heard spoken of with
total indifference, now flashes penal flames in his face. Taken and held
in this state of mind, the transgressor is confusedly as well as terribly
awakened, and he needs first of all to have this experience clarified,
and know precisely for what he is trembling, and why. This panic and
consternation must depart, and a calm intelligent anxiety must take its
place. But this cannot be, unless the mind turns towards God, and invites
His searching scrutiny, and His aid in the search after sin. So long as
we shrink away from our Judge, and in upon ourselves, in these hours of
conviction,--so long as we deal only with the workings of our own minds,
and do not look up and "reason together" with God,--we take the most
direct method of producing a blind, an obscure, and a selfish agony. We
work ourselves, more and more, into a mere phrenzy of excitement. Some of
the most wretched and fanatical experience in the history of the Church
is traceable to a solitary self-brooding, in which, after the sense of
sin had been awakened, the soul did not discuss the matter with God.

For the character and attributes of God, when clearly seen, repress all
fright, and produce that peculiar species of fear which is tranquil
because it is deep. Though the soul, in such an hour, is conscious that
God is a fearful object of sight for a transgressor, yet it continues to
gaze at Him with an eager straining eye. An