But the majority are not thus favored. Notwithstanding all their graces, they have been subject to falls—perhaps to many grievous falls; they have suffered many wounds and bruises, they have had many tears to shed. Multitudes there are, in fact, who come down to the verge of life, to the very gate of death, sin-stained, racked and wounded, their life blood ebbing out through sores and wounds which they themselves have made by wilful open friendship with sin and vice, the deadly foes of their souls. We have many varying examples of these straying souls. There is the type of Mary Magdalen, of St. Peter, of St. Paul, of St. Augustine, who passed a portion, brief or prolonged, of their mortal days far from the Father’s home, feeding on the husks of swine; but who, while yet in the vigor of life, felt the touch of the merciful hand and heard the sound of the loving voice, leading them, calling them back to God, back to the “beauty ever ancient and ever new.” Such souls as these, it is true, constitute one class of erring, but repenting sinners; but there is another class whose plight is far more pitiable. They are those long-delayed, but finally repentant sinners, men and women who have lived their lives away from the Church and its sacraments, who have grown old and gray in the sins of their youth, and now, at the last, when death is coming, are moved, by a special grace from Heaven, to weep for their sins and wasted years before they enter their eternal abode. For each and all of these how important it is that the Shepherd should stand at the door of the fold and bind up their wounds with His tender grace before they pass through the portals of death! Scarred and wayward children, victims of evil circumstances, creatures of vanity and of folly, they realize at the end how impotent they are, how helpless in the presence of the coldness of death to redeem or make sure the years that are fled, unless He draw near and assist them who has sustained them in life, and who is at once the author and the master of both life and death!