And if there may be some readers who know this experience in all its horror, there are a multitude who know it in its more modified forms, and who find it terrible enough even then. Who has not had forced upon him the misery of regrets or remorse, the causes of which remain unalterable, fixed as the stars in their orbits, and the fruits of which leave deep traces on the experience and the destiny through time, yes, and through eternity? Did David, think you, ever look coldly or carelessly on his bold soldier’s bloody grave? Was there no sad shadow, to his eye, around the beauty of Bathsheba’s child, which no murmured “Jedidiah” could chase away? Was his home ever free from the shadow, from the hour when Nathan’s “Thou art the man” drove conviction home, and wrung from him the most bitter cry of a sinner’s anguish which has found record in the literature of our world? Few things in the book of history are more terrible than the sorrow which entered David’s home, the discord which rent his kingdom, the anguish which pierced his heart, from the hour of his great transgression. A sad, careworn, broken man, he finished his course and went down to his grave. Compare the David of 1 Kings i., ii., with the young shepherd in his early prime, if you would estimate the havoc which one great sin may make in a noble life. Ah! in a measure we all know it, in some form or other; words, deeds, outbursts of passion, which have wrung dear hearts with anguish, sundered precious bonds of love, have sullied reputation, clouded prospects, withered hopes, or blighted the promise of lives which we were bound to cherish, or of our own. And we would give worlds to blot out their record, and to repair the evil which has been wrought; but it remains engraven with an iron pen in the rock for ever: man cannot obliterate it, and God will not. To complete the subject, let me ask you to consider two thoughts. 1. These dread seasons of crucial trial, on which the future of life, nay of eternity, is hanging, never come upon us in a moment.