In dealing with temptation and sin, we must always take into account the presence in the human heart of that sad relic of the Fall, which biases men towards evil. Every one that has handled bowls on the green is familiar with the effect of the bias. The bowls are not perfect spheres, and are weighted on one side in such a way that, as they leave the hand, they will inevitably turn off from a straight course; and on this account the greater skill is required from the hands that manipulate and impel them. Such a bias has come to us all: first, from our ancestor Adam; and, secondly, by that law of heredity which has been accumulating its malign and sinister force through all the ages. God alone can compute the respective strength of these forces; but He can, and He will, as each separate soul stands before his judgment bar. Herod was the son of the great Herod, a voluptuous, murderous tyrant; and, from some source or other, he had inherited a very weak nature. Perhaps, if he had come under strong, wholesome influences, he would have lived a passably good life; but it was his misfortune to fall under the influence of a beautiful fiend, who became his Lady Macbeth, his Jezebel, and wrought the ruin of his soul. It is a remarkable thing, how strong an influence a beautiful and unscrupulous woman may have over a weak man. And for this reason, amongst others, weakness becomes wickedness. The man who allows himself to drift weakly before the strongest influence is almost certain to discover that, in this world, the strongest influences are those which make for sin; these touch him most closely, and operate most continuously, and find in his nature the best _nidus_, or nest, in which to breed. The influences that suggest and make for sin in this world are so persistent--at every street corner, in every daily newspaper, among every gathering of well-dressed people, or ill--that if my readers have no other failing than that they are weak, I am bound to warn them, in God's name, that unless they succeed in some way, directly or indirectly, in linking themselves to the strength of the Son of. God, they will inevitably become wicked. Remember that the men, and especially the women, who are filling our gaols as criminals, were, in most cases, only weak, but they therefore drifted before the strong, black current which flows through the world, and have become objects against whom all parents warn their children. With all my soul--and I have had no small experience of myself and of others--I implore that if you are conscious of your weakness, you shall do what the sea-anemone and the limpet do, which cling to the rock when the storms darken the sky. "Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might."