Let us now ask of the application. That it means something to us when the Lord says about God's not forgetting one of the sparrows sold in the market-place of Jerusalem is a matter of course. What does it mean? The doctrine of God's providence is, we would thus consider it first, a stern and restraining truth. Consider for a moment,--there is nothing about you, or in you, or of you, but God knows and sees it all, the thoughts of your mind, the desires of your heart, the motives of your deeds. He spieth out all your ways, He understandeth your thoughts afar off. Yesterday, for example, He saw you when your eyes first opened to the light, and He traced your steps till they closed once more in sleep. You know what you did, and He also knows. You may have thought yourself unobserved, and some things there are which you should prefer to forget, wish that you could conceal them, ashamed or afraid to have them known. God does not forget, from Him you cannot conceal; all the while you are standing in the concentrated blaze of a light, brighter than the brightest sun, and eyes that see everything are reading you through and through. That is, as stated, a stern and awful truth. But let us not deceive ourselves concerning it. Let us remember that there is no privacy anywhere for us, though we may long for it, and many live as if they had it. Our follies and vanities, our erring steps, our ugly temper and evil disposition, every idle word that you spoke, every oath that has fallen from your lips, every vile action, every dollar you have wasted in luxury, folly, or withheld in miserly selfishness, every influence you have exerted, apt to lead a brother or sister astray,--God sees and knows them all. You are read like a book by the Reader of the lives of all men. Man, my beloved hearers, needs a check upon him, a hand to keep him straight. He has it in this belief. A person cannot go far wrong who believes that God sees and knows all. The sense of His nearness is a moral force, a thousandfold greater than any other that can be named. He that thinks thus of His God is ever putting to himself the question whether God approves what he is about at any given moment. That saves him; it acts as a constant check; it is a lantern to his feet, a light to his paths, a bridle to his lips. And God knows we all need to be so held in. That communities are defiled, that the social order is imperiled, that men are shocked at the growing ravages of sin, and souls are ruined one by one, we may trace these things to their sole cause, the losing sight of the fact that God's eye is on them always, and that they are accountable to Him for what they do. Let the doctrine of God's providence be generally rejected, and it is only a question of time till that comes to pass again which once occurred in the days of Noah, when God saw that the wickedness of man was great, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.