For this is being confounded; this is shame itself.  This is the intolerable, horrible, hellish shame and torment, wherein is weeping and gnashing of teeth; this is the everlasting shame and contempt to which, as Daniel prophesied, too many should awake in that day—­to be found guilty in that day before God and Christ, before our neighbours and our relations, and worst of all, before ourselves.  Worst of all, I say, before ourselves.  It would be dreadful enough to have all the bad things we ever did or thought told openly against us to all our neighbours and friends, and to see them turn away from us;—­dreadful to find out at last (what we forget all day long) that God knows them already; but more dreadful to know them all ourselves, and see our sins in all their shamefulness, in the light of God, as God Himself sees them;—­more dreadful still to see the loving God and the loving Christ turn away from us;—­but most dreadful of all to turn away from ourselves; to be utterly discontented with ourselves; ashamed of ourselves; to see that all our misery is our own fault, that we have been our own enemies; to despise ourselves, and hate ourselves for ever; to try for ever to get rid of ourselves, and escape from ourselves as from some ugly and foul place in which we were ashamed to be seen for a moment:  and yet not to be able to get rid of ourselves.  Yes, that will be the true misery of a lost soul, to be ashamed of itself, and hate itself.  Who shall deliver a man from the body of that death?

I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  I thank God, that at least now, here, in this life, we can be delivered.  There is but one hope for us all; one way for us all, not to come to utter shame.  And this is in the Lord Jesus Christ, who has said, ’Though your sins be red as scarlet they shall be white as wool; and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’  One hope, to cast ourselves utterly on His boundless love and mercy, and cry to Him, ’Blot these sins of mine out of Thy book, by Thy most precious blood, which is a full atonement for the sins of the whole world; and blot them out of my heart by Thy Holy Spirit, that I may hate them and renounce them, and flee from them, and give them up, and be Thy servant, and do Thy work, and have Thy righteousness, and do righteous things like Thee.’  And then, my friends, how or why we cannot understand; but it is God’s own promise, who cannot lie, that He will really and actually forgive these sins of ours, and blot them out as if we had never done them, and give us clean hearts and right spirits, to live new lives, right lives, lives like His own life; so that our past sinful lives shall be behind us like a dream, and we shall find them forgotten and forgiven in the day of judgment;—­wonderful mercy! but listen to it—­it is God’s own promise—­’If the wicked man turneth away from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die.  All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned to him:  in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live.’