But confession of sin should be but the first step to amendment of life, and for the purpose of that amendment we must endeavour to realize more particularly what the sins are, which in God’s righteous judgment have brought this misery upon us. Many of them we have acknowledged in the Litany in which we have joined. We have prayed for deliverance from those sins wherein as a nation we have grieved God. We have confessed to pride, boasting, and self-sufficiency, to covetousness, worldliness, and indifference to the needs of others, to drunkenness, impurity, and all manner of self-indulgence, to trusting in our own strength and forgetting God, to want of faith in God, to want of love to Him and to one another, to a want of charity towards all men. These are the sins charged upon us by the chief pastors of our Church, and they constitute surely a grievous catalogue of vices, sufficient in themselves to account for the failure of the civilization of which we form a part, and to require us to humiliate ourselves very deeply before God. We are called upon by the Archbishops not merely to pray, as we do in our daily Litany, against those evils, but to acknowledge that they are sins wherein, as a nation, we have grieved God. Now it must be left to our individual consciences to apply those grievous confessions to our own hearts and lives. Of some of them, perhaps, we shall all acknowledge ourselves to have been guilty; and we are bound to put it earnestly to our hearts and consciences how far we have individually been guilty of them. But it is not for the preacher, who is deeply sensible of his own sins, to press such charges upon others. I would rather adopt this evening the more gracious, and, I hope, more helpful course of reminding you of the one supreme and sufficient method by which all such sins, whatever they may have been, may be overcome, and may be averted for the future.