It is clear from the words which she has chosen for her "Epistle" for the First Sunday of Advent that the Church intends us during this solemn season to think about sin,--the darkness of the past night and the light of the day that is coming and our duty with regard to both. It is not sin in the abstract, but our own personal sins that we are to consider. "Let _us_ cast off the works of darkness." If the Apostle Paul included himself in that "_us_," we need not fear to do the same. It is meet, when we are thinking on the one hand of Him Who is coming to save us from our sins and on the other of His coming to judge us "according to our works," that we should give some thought to those sins. Nothing will better help us to understand the mercy of the Saviour and the justice of the Judge than a meditation upon our own sins. God _forgets_ the sins He has forgiven, but it is better for us, more wholesome and more humiliating, to remember them sometimes. David says: "My sin is always before me" (Ps. L. 5). The object of this meditation, then, is not to cause trouble in the soul--trouble about sins that are _forgiven_ can only come from the devil--but to excite in us a deeper contrition, more gratitude and a greater watchfulness. POINT I. A TRIPTYCH--MY SINS. Am I to consider all the sins of my life? The subject seems so vast, it is difficult to know how to condense it so that I may be able to bring it within my grasp. All sin may be summed up in one word--disobedience--_non serviam_. It was the sin of the Angels, it was the sin of our first parents and it is at the root of every sin that has ever been committed. God says: Thou shalt not, the sinner says: I will. God says: Do this and thou shalt live; the sinner says: I will not, I would rather die. Sin is man's will in opposition to God's Will. This thought simplifies the subject and makes it easier for me to call up the sins of my life and look at them. Let me make a picture of them--a triptych, a picture, that is, with three panels side by side, the middle one shall be called _Places_, that on the right hand _Persons_ and that on the left _Work_.