The act in this instance was performed blindly, without self-inspection, and therefore without self-conviction.  Ten years, we will say, have intervened,—­years of new activity, and immensely varied experiences.  And now the magic power of recollection sets us back, once more, at that point of responsible action, and bids do what we did not do at the time,—­analyze our performance and feel consciously guilty, experience the first sensation of remorse, for what we did ten years ago.  Have we not, sometimes, been vividly reminded that upon such an occasion, and at such a time, we were angry, or proud, but at the time when the emotion was swelling our veins were not filled with, that clear and painful sense of its turpitude which now attends the recollection of it?  The re-exhibition of an action in memory, as in a mirror, is often accompanied with a distinct apprehension of its moral character that formed no part of the experience of the agent while absorbed in the hot and hasty original action itself.  And when we remember how immense are the stores of memory, and what an amount of sin has been committed in hours of thoughtlessness and moral indifference, what prayer is more natural and warm than the supplication:  “Search me O God, and try me, and see what evil ways there are within me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

But the careless, unenlightened man, as we have before remarked, leads a life almost entirely destitute of self-inspection, and self-knowledge.  He sins constantly.  He does only evil, and that continually, as did man before the deluge.  For he is constantly acting.  A living self-moving soul, like his, cannot cease action if it would.  And yet the current is all one way.  Day after day sends up its clouds of sensual, worldly, selfish thoughts.  Week after week pours onward its stream of low-born, corrupt, unspiritual feelings.  Year after year accumulates that hardening mass of carnal-mindedness, and distaste for religion, which is sometimes a more insuperable obstacle to the truth, than positive faults and vices which startle and shock the conscience.  And yet the man thinks nothing about all this action of his mind and heart.  He does not subject it to any self-inspection.  If he should, for but a single hour, be lifted up to the eminence from which all this current of self-will, and moral agency, may be seen and surveyed in its real character and significance, he would start back as if brought to the brink of hell.  But he is not thus lifted up.  He continues to use and abuse his mental and his moral faculties, but, for most of his probation, with all the blindness and heedlessness of a mere animal instinct.

There is, then, a vast amount of sin committed without self-inspection; and, consequently, without any distinct perception, at the time, that it is sin.  The Christian will find himself feeling guilty, for the first time, for a transgression that occurred far back in the past, and will need a fresh application of atoning blood.  The sinner will find, at some period or other, that remorse is fastening its tooth in his conscience for a vast amount of sinful thought, feeling, desire, and motive, that took origin in the unembarrassed days of religious thoughtlessness and worldly enjoyment.