“The wages of sin--the eternal torment of a conscience never sleeping, never weary!” It was of that he went on to speak. I can scarcely remember so much as a single sentence of that sermon, although its effect upon myself and those who formed the congregation of listeners, is a memory which even now thrills me. From those few opening words, pregnant as they were with dramatic force, and lit with the fire of true eloquence, not for one moment did the attention of the little congregation wander. A leaf could have been heard to drop in the church, the rustle of a pocket handkerchief was a perfectly audible sound. Not even a child looked sideways to watch the dark ivy waving softly against the stained glass windows or wondered at the strange pattern which a ray of dying sunlight had traced upon the bare stone aisles. There was something personal--something like the cry of human sorrow itself in that slow, passionate outpouring. Was it by any chance a confession or an accusation to which we were listening? It was on the universality of sin of which my father spoke with such heart-moving emphasis. Our lives were like cupboards having many chambers, some of which were open indeed to the daylight and the gaze of all men, but there were others jealously closed and locked. We could make their outside beautiful, we could keep the eyes of all men from penetrating beneath that fair exterior. We could lock them with a cunning and secret key, so that no hand save our own could lay bare the grisly spectre that lurked within. Yet our own knowledge, or what we had grown to call conscience, sat in our hearts and mocked us. Sometime the great white light swept into the hidden places, there was a tug at our heartstrings, and behold the seal had fallen away. And in that church, my father added slowly, “he doubted whether any one could say that within him those dark places were not.”