3.  As you remember your sins, consider how very ignorant you are of their number or their heinousness.  But if you could enumerate each sinful thought, word, and action committed during the past year and during your past life, there is something in you worse than sins, and that is sin itself, the evil heart, the wrong mind, out of which sins proceed; for the corrupt tree is worse than any definite quantity of fruit which it has produced; the ever-flowing bitter fountain is worse than any definite quantity of water which has come from it.  But whatever you have been or done in time past, what do you intend to be and to do now?  Is it your intention to continue in sin?  However dreadful the thought is, yet many, if such is your real intention, will sympathise with you.  For many do continue in sin, and resolve to do so, for the present at least.  Will you, then, permit the year to close, and with an unconcerned eye behold all its sin and sins added to those of other impenitent years, finally sealed up for judgment?  How will you then stand the reading of your autobiography?  Read over any page now, peruse the life of any day, and ask, Has this been the life of one who believes there is a God to whom he is responsible?  Point out one solitary proof, and such as you think Christ will accept, in all these twelve chapters of the past year, of a heart which loved God, or had one mark of a sincere though an imperfect follower of Jesus Christ.  And if you cannot do so, will you permit the volume to close for ever without a cry for mercy, without imploring God to wipe out or destroy in the atoning blood of Jesus these pages, which cry “Guilty” in every line?  Will you not resolve rather, through the grace given to every honest man who wishes it, to begin and write a new volume, which shall witness to a changed life, and be inscribed no longer with all that is selfish, and of the earth earthy—­“without God or Christ in the world.”  Let it be so, I beseech of you, my reader.  Have done, now and for ever, with this shocking mutiny against your God.  End the weary, shameful strife.  Be, then, at peace with God, and remember that for you, if you believe in Jesus, there is free pardon, restoration to favour, a new heart, a new life, which is now life eternal.

And for you who have long given up sin as a master—­who know that while the “flesh wars against the spirit, the spirit wars against the flesh,” thank God and take courage!  “Sin shall not have dominion over you; for ye are not under the law, but under grace.”  Hear the words of our invincible Leader, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world;” “Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.”

This year we may die.  Let this mere possibility lead us to redeem with greater earnestness what remains of life to the service of our God; so that when the next year dawns upon this world it will find us, if we are in the other world, remembering our mercies before God’s throne, our sorrows for ever vanished, and our sins for ever blotted out; but that if we are still here, it will see us living more worthy of our mercies, finding true good in our sorrows, and obtaining the victory over our sins!