We have often heard of drowning people on the verge of death having the forgotten memories of half a lifetime flashed back in a moment. An old friend once told me a curious experience. "I was crossing a railway line hurriedly on a wet day. As I rushed over the rails the Express came in view. I slipped and fell--fortunately into a hollow where men had been working, and swift as a flash the Express swept over me. The experience of that half minute I shall never forget. It seemed that my whole life was blazoned before me in thirty seconds. Things that I had not remembered for forty years past flashed back in a moment as if they had happened yesterday." That is what Memory can do even in this life under strong excitation, calling up its forgotten stores. Think what its power may be in that life as a handmaid to Conscience. With all its old lumber rooms of forgotten deeds thrown open--with all the forgotten feelings of my life--boyhood, youth, manhood--open for my contemplation. My impatience and God's patience, my sorrows and why God sent them, my mercies, all the kindly providences of God working unknown to me all my days. And my sins--some sins that I hate to think of, some that I had almost succeeded in forgetting, all standing out clearly before me in the unsparing light of that mysterious life. I sat alone with my Conscience In the place where time had ceased. We discoursed of my former living In the land where the years increased. And I felt I should have to answer The questions it put to me, And to face those questions and answers In that dim eternity. And the ghosts of forgotten actions Came floating before my sight, And things that I thought were dead things Were alive with a terrible might. And the vision of all my past life Was an awful thing to face Alone, alone with my Conscience, In that strange and lonely place. Aye, my Conscience must do its work some day if I keep it from doing it now. But all this will be in the presence of my Saviour. They are "with Christ." Every memory will be more keen and poignant and yet more peaceful and touching in the presence of that dear loving Lord who I feel knows all and yet has loved and received and forgiven me in spite of all, and who is watching over me with deep tenderness like the refiner of silver over His furnace as the dross is cleared away and I grow steadily in fitness for the glorious life of unselfish joy and service in Heaven. But pain! You do not like any thought of pain in connection with that life. Yes surely, more or less, according to one's state, and dying gradually into perfect peace. Growth of holiness does not come to sinful man here or there but through pain, the tender blessed pain of God's purification, the pain of self-reproach, the pain that thou hast sinned,