We are prone by nature to do what is wrong rather than what is right; we are born with passions wild and strong, and early give the reins to evil desires. By the strength of our animal propensities we are often carried to ruin unless we are arrested in our headlong and miserable career. Sometimes--nay, thank God, often--we are thus arrested. For a time, the voice of conscience may have been hushed. Our heart is cold and dead, and there is no spring of life in it at all. But something happens. We are led to think. We come to see the evil of our ways, the ruin that we are bringing on others as well as ourselves--on the wife whom we swore to love and cherish, the children whom we are neglecting, perhaps starving. And then, all at once, it is borne in upon us that we must change our life's course. A bolt from heaven descends on us in the shape of some punishment or affliction. Our darkness and distress are revealed to us. We seek the only refuge for the sinner. We flee to Christ, as the belated and weary traveller would flee to a hiding-place from the wind, a refuge from the storm, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. We become converted. In Christ we become a new creation. Oh, happy is it when we do so! Appalling and terrible it is when we do not. How sad and awful is the fate of one given over to the slavery, the bondage, the tyranny of some wicked habit! Unless such an one is visited by the grace of God, unless the heinousness of his guilt is brought home to him, unless divine light strikes in upon his darkened life, he will sink deeper and deeper into degradation, until, perhaps, he is driven to self-destruction like one of whom I lately read, and who left these terribly touching words behind him. "I am now about to finish a revolting, cruel, and wretched existence by an act of my own. I have broken every law of God and man, and can only hope that my memory will rot in the minds of all who knew me. Drink has brought me to this fearful end. I am dying hopeless, friendless, penniless and an outcast." And it might have been so different! Oh, that all who are giving way to any sin would listen to these terrible words of warning, that they would close at once with Christ's offer to make their lives different, to make them new creatures--once more fresh and fair creatures of God, that the old man with his corrupt affections and desires, be put off, and the new man in Christ Jesus be put on, that they would be in Christ!