Again, we may learn from St. Paul this lesson.  That though God has forgiven a man, that is no reason that he should forgive himself.  That may seem a startling saying just now.  For the common teaching now is, that if a man finds, or fancies, that God has forgiven him, he may forgive himself at once; that if he gets assurance that his sins are washed away in Christ’s blood, he may go swaggering and boasting about the world (I can call it no less), as if he had never sinned at all; that he may be (as you see in these revivals, from which God defend us!) one moment in the deepest agonies of conscience, and dread of hell-fire, and the next moment in raptures of joy, declaring himself to be in heaven.  Alas, alas! such people forget that sin leaves behind it wounds, which even the grace of Christ takes a long time in healing, and which then remain as ugly, but wholesome scars, to remind us of the fools which we have been.  They are like a man who is in great bodily agony, and gets sudden relief from a dose of laudanum.  The pain stops; and he feels himself, as he says, in heaven for the time:  but he is too apt to forget that the cause of the pain is still in his body, and that if he commits the least imprudence, he will bring it back again; just as happens, I hear, in too many of these hasty and noisy conversions now-a-days.

That is one extreme.  The opposite extreme is that of many old Roman Catholic saints and hermits who could not forgive themselves at all, but passed their whole lives in fasting, poverty, and misery, bewailing their sins till their dying day.  That was a mistake.  It sprang out of mistaken doctrines, of which I shall not speak here:  but it did not spring entirely from them.  There was in them a seed of good, for which I shall always love and honour them, even though I differ from them; and that was, a noble hatred of sin.  They felt the sinfulness of sin; and they hated themselves for having sinned.  The mercy of God made them only the more ashamed of themselves for having rebelled against him.  Their longing after holiness only made them loathe the more their past unholiness.  They carried that feeling too far:  but they were noble people, men and women of God; and we may say of them, that, ’Wisdom is justified of all her children.’

But I wish you to run into neither extreme.  I only ask you to look at your past lives, if you have ever been open sinners, as St. Paul looked at his.  There is no sentimental melancholy in him; no pretending to be miserable; no trying to make himself miserable.  He is saved, and he knows it.  He is an apostle, and he stands boldly on his dignity.  He is cheerful, hopeful, joyful:  but whenever he speaks of his past life (and he speaks of it often), it is with noble shame and sorrow.  Then he looks to himself the chief of sinners, not worthy to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of Christ.  What he is, he will not deny.  What he was, he will not forget, he dare not forget, lest he should forget that the good which he does, he does not—­for in him (that is, in his flesh, his own natural character), dwelleth no good thing—­but Christ, who dwells in him; lest he should grow puffed up, careless, self-indulgent; lest he should neglect to subdue his evil passions; and so, after having preached to others, himself become a castaway.