Look out from your window again, at the snow sheet which has silently, deeply, fallen upon the earth. Let it be very early in the morning, while the world is asleep and the broad moon and the glittering stars watch alone over the smooth, sparkling, white face of the land. Not a footstep, so far as you see, has impressed the smooth, pure snow; not a dark cart-track has yet left a long stain on the spotless road. No thawing penitential drippings have made dark wells in it here and there; no rude sweeping has piled the snow in stained heaps hither and thither by the path. All is yet pure, untouched, undefiled. This is the New Year upon which we have entered, as we look at it from the casement of the Old Year, before yet one step has been placed on its first moment. All as yet unstained, and white, and calm. For how short a time to remain so! Can we set our first step upon it without somewhat marring its virgin beauty? And then the traffic, the hurrying of many feet, the crushing of many wheels; thought, word, and deed, too often unwatched and unsanctified by prayer; oh, what a change soon, and how short a time that purity and calm has lasted! New Year; clean New Year; how dark, how defiled, how changed will you be, when you also are now waxing old, and ready to vanish away! The white virgin opportunity all passed by, leaving dark, dreary, sodden fields, and roads churned up into yellow mud. The clinging spotless moments--flakes that, in innumerable combination, made up the great stainless carpet of the untrodden New Year; for them there will be many a trickling rivulet of penitential tears; and the steam and mist of heavy sighs that go up to God because of life’s work too faintly, slackly done. Well then, that is well. Better, of course, if this could have been, that the pure year had remained unstained. “My little children, these things write I unto you, _that ye sin not_.” But well, if we are indeed humbly striving, and if hearty repentance, and a true, lively, cleansing faith follow upon our many, many sad failings, faults, and shortcomings. For, sweet words!-- “_If any man sin_, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and He is the propitiation for our sins.” And, glorious thought! if we are indeed loving and seeking after purity and holiness, striving because of the hope within us, to purify ourselves, even as He is pure--then know this, we shall not love, and seek, and strive in vain. “When He shall appear, _we shall be like Him_.”