members of the Church go mourning from day to day, because their hearts are still so far from their God and Saviour, and their lives fall so far short of what they desire them to be.[2] Their experience is not a positively wretched one, like that of an unforgiven sinner when he is feeling the stings of conscience.  They are forgiven.  The expiating blood has soothed the ulcerated conscience, so that it no longer stings and burns.  They have hope in God’s mercy.  Still, they are in grief and sorrow for sin; and their experience, in so far, is not a perfectly happy one, such as will ultimately be their portion in a better world.  “If in this life only,”—­says St. Paul,—­“we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. xv. 19).

But the stupid and impenitent man, a luxurious Dives, knows nothing of all this.  His days glide by with no twinges of conscience.  What does he know of the burden of sin?  His conscience is dead asleep; perchance seared as with a hot iron.  He does wrong without any remorse; he disobeys the express commands of God, without any misgivings or self-reproach.  He is “alive, without the law,"-as St. Paul expresses it.  His eyes stand out with fatness; and his heart, in the Psalmist’s phrase, “is as fat as grease” (Ps. cxix. 70).  There is no religious sensibility in him.  His sin is a pleasure to him without any mixture of sorrow, because unattended by any remorse of conscience.  He is receiving his “good things” in this life.  His days pass by without any moral anxiety, and perchance as he looks upon some meek and earnest disciple of Christ who is battling with indwelling sin, and who, therefore, sometimes wears a grave countenance, he wonders that any one should walk so soberly, so gloomily, in such a cheery, such a happy, such a jolly world as this.

It is a startling fact, that those men in this world who have most reason to be distressed by sin are the least troubled by it; and those who have the least reason to be distressed are the most troubled by it.  The child of God is the one who sorrows most; and the child of Satan is the one who sorrows least.  Remember that we are speaking only of this life.  The text reads:  “Thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things.”  And it is unquestionably so.  The meek and lowly disciple of Christ, the one who is most entitled by his character and conduct to be untroubled by religious anxiety, is the very one who bows his head as a bulrush, and perhaps goes mourning all his days, fearing that he is not accepted, and that he shall be a cast-a-way; while the selfish and thoroughly irreligious man, who ought to be stung through and through by his own conscience, and feel the full energy of the law which he is continually breaking,—­this man, who of all men ought to be anxious and distressed for sin, goes through a whole lifetime, perchance, without any convictions or any fears.