gain, whereby to gratify your animal appetites you forfeited your heavenly heritage. Like tigers long pent up, the pains of conscience will then spring upon you. Your life, which seemed before as calm and clear as a mountain lake, will then be lashed to fury by the storm that is to rend apart your soul and body, and all the sinful refuse that lay hidden will be cast up at your feet. The guilty prisoner is never so agitated as on the eve of trial. Your presumptuous habit of relying on God's mercy will not avail you then, for the hope of the virtuous is as the sun of their lives which reaches its zenith at their death, but the sinner's hope, though strong through life, gradually declines and disappears at the moment of his greatest need. Peter's salutary sorrow will not be yours, unless you bitterly weep whenever, as now, the Saviour glances toward you; but if His frequent appeals to you are all in vain, be sure your final state will be a Judas-like despair.
Brethren, if neither the nearness of death nor the misery of a sinful life can drive you to repentance, remember this, that the result of deferring your conversion will be an inability to repent at all. God said to Pharao: " Let My people go," and when he would not, God sent the plagues on Egypt. When grievously oppressed by each, Pharao would send for Moses and bid him remove the scourge on promise of freedom for his people, but when Moses would say: " When, when, set me a time," Pharao would always answer: " To-morrow." Set me a time, ye sinners, set me a time now. You know not if there be a
