shaped the image which there reveals itself, and on which is moulded the everlasting destiny. The little sins of life are busily, hour by hour, creating the great sins. The small habits and actions, which we allow to pass unrebuked—they seem to be such trifles—soon pass away beyond the power of memory to recall; but they leave their ineffaceable trace on our constitution and character, and lay silently the train of some great outburst of lust, passion, or wickedness, like Esau’s or David’s. Then is written a record on our nature and destiny which one day we shall agonize to blot out; but the inexorable eye looks coldly down on the frenzied pleader, and the stony lips fashion themselves into a voiceless “Too late!” Meet sin, meet all the devil’s seductions and enticements, sternly on the threshold, and the citadel remains for ever sure. 2. The irrevocable is not the irreparable, through the abounding mercy and grace of God. _Things_ cannot be obliterated or abolished. They remain, and their record remains, for ever. But, blessed be God, they may be transmuted, and wear Divine forms of beauty and joy. And this is what redemption means. Eden is closed for ever. To abolish the condition of man as a sinner, otherwise than by one grand sentence of doom which would abolish his existence as a creature, is beyond the power even of heaven. A sinner’s lot you inherit, a sinner’s experience you must know, a sinner’s agony you must taste, a sinner’s horror of darkness you must pass through—to the pit, if the birthright never again seems to you beautiful and glorious, a thing to be won by toil and tears and prayers; but if your soul pines in its rioting, if it sickens in its worldly wealth and splendour, if the question forces itself upon you as it never seems to have forced itself upon Esau, “_What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?_” then the sinner’s anguish, from which there is no escape for any one of us, may be made by Christ’s dear love the strait gate to the splendour, the glory, the bliss of heaven. And this is Redemption. Divine love, love that could die, love that _did_ die, that its beloved ones might not die, is the solvent which transmutes all the shame and pain of sin to heavenly glory and bliss. “_Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin had reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord._” Here is no reversal, no obliteration of the past, mark you; the thing that was is and shall be; no power in the universe can blot out its trace. The experience of a sinner is part of your being, and in its transmuted form must remain part of your being, through eternity. These wounds and sores of sin, suffused by Christ’s great love, become the lustrous pearls of heaven. Nothing in the past, I care not how dark or damning it may be, is irreparable by