We have shown in the last discourse that a close examination of the question of the birthright lightens some of the deeper shadows which lie upon it. Comparing the outward and visible aspect of the two men—the man who sold the birthright and lost the blessing, and the man who won them both—it would appear that the balance of worldly prosperity was altogether on Esau's side. Esau lost just that which his soul despised, and he won what his soul lusted after, wealth, power, and the position of a prince. He lived prosperously and splendidly, and died peacefully we may believe, with few regrets. There is certainly nothing in the few words which are devoted to his subsequent history to suggest that he lived a disappointed ruined man. On the contrary, he seems to have displayed on his meeting with Jacob that magnanimity and generosity which shallow natures are wont to manifest in a prosperous lot. It is just the glow of the sunlight reflected from their lives: the rippling shallows make a braver show in the sunlight than the still deep pools; and Esaus are gayer objects to look at, when all goes well with them, than the careworn halting pilgrim, who bears on his brow, and no sunlight can efface it, the marks of many toils and tears. But be that as it may, there can be no question that the Bible does not picture the life of Esau as a broken and ruined life, as far as this world is concerned. The man grew rich and powerful, so rich that he could afford to make light of Jacob's presents, so powerful that Jacob's company was helpless in his hand. It is written that once the children of Israel cried for flesh, and "God gave them flesh, but sent leanness into their souls." Something like this was the history of Esau, and of how many a worldly-hearted man whom fortune loads with gifts, while the springs of his higher life sink low and die. And his race prospered. As Jacob was to Esau, quite the weaker and more dependent of the two, so when centuries passed was Israel to Edom. The descendants of Esau had attained to such strength and political influence that they were able to bar the gates of their land against the elect host, pilgrims through the wilderness like their sire, angel-led, and saved by hope. On the whole then, for himself and his descendants, his life must be pronounced a worldly success.

Jacob, on the other hand, had to reap life-long the bitter fruits of his craft and fraud. His life was a weary, wasting struggle with selfish craft and evil passion in all who surrounded him. He spent the best years of his life in exile, and stood before Pharaoh, in his own judgment prematurely aged and decayed. He won a name and a place which called him to submit to a searching discipline, to live the life of a pilgrim, to dwell as a stranger in his promised land, and to die in exile at last. The world was fuller to him of sorrows and toils than of benedictions, and the crown which the Prince of God at last was able to bind around his brow was set with many a thorn. But he won the power to follow the Angel, the Angel which redeemed him from all evil; his life, halting as was his step, was a noble spiritual progress from strength to strength, from victory to victory, till he passed up to receive the prize of his conflict in a world and from a hand which Esau "despised."

Looked at in the light of this world's interests then, some of the darkest difficulties vanish as we read the record of this birthright lost and won. But then there is Esau himself, the man who despised his birthright, who counted himself unworthy of the honour to which God had ordained him, incapable of the glorious toil and patience to which God had called him, and careless of the prize which God had placed within reach of his hand. The life of this man, from the higher point of view, was as sad, wretched, and faithless, as was the pilgrim Jacob's from the lower. He won his wealth and his princedom by his energy of hand and will in all things that pertained to this life; but he let all the interests and hopes of the higher life fade out of the horizon, and the crown of his spiritual manhood slip from the grasp of his careless hand. He touched it, but he could not hold it. What good shall this birthright do to me, he moaned when the mess of pottage steamed before his hungry senses; and the crown rolled in the dust. There is the man Esau, under all his possession and princedom, in the sight of God a very wretched and poverty-stricken outcast of the kingdom whose citizens believe in truth, duty, spiritual effort, conflict, prayer, self-sacrifice, heaven, and God. About the case of Esau personally there are many heavy difficulties. His course seems to have been in a measure marked out from his birth: "The elder shall serve the younger" was said of the twin brethren while they were yet in the womb: and some such relation of the two seems to be involved in the destiny which a higher Will had from the first decreed. And this opens the vision of an abyss of mystery, into the depths of which no finite intellect can search—the relation of connate constitution and temperament to character, and the measure in which this bears on the supreme fact of man's being, responsibility. Responsibility, implying freedom in the largest sense, we hold to be the corner stone of our dignity as men. If man be not free, with the everlasting crown of freedom within his reach as the prize of all his toils and struggles, why! there is not a cur that prowls about the streets whose lot is not more enviable. In that case man would be a combatant by a profound instinct of his nature, struggling sternly life-long against innumerable evils, with nothing after all to struggle for; pressed, crushed, by the weight of intolerable ills, with no hope to sanctify and no harvest to repay his pain. Who would not "rather be a dog and bay the moon," than such a creature? For freedom, and the responsibility which it brings, as the fundamental spiritual fact of our nature, we contend earnestly, yea vehemently, as for the only justification of God's constitution of the human world, the only key to the woes which He lets loose to afflict it and the discords with which He allows it to be torn. And for the reality of this moral freedom we shall have to do stern battle with the school who are urging now, with great subtilty and force, that all the moral phenomena of man's nature are just the finest efflorescence of the nerve matter of which his intelligence is manufactured, the cream of the milk of his natural law.

But it cannot be questioned for a moment that men appear to be under various conditions of advantage, as we might call it, with regard to the exercise of their freedom and its fruits. The differences arise partly, but not we believe chiefly, from circumstance. The child of a household of thieves or vagrants, for instance, seems to have but a poor chance in life compared with the children who grow up, pure, cultivated, comely, and pious, in your serene, happy, and orderly homes. But the more serious source of this inequality is to be found in character and temperament, inbred lusts, passions, tempers, and proclivities which may make the life of a man one long agony of struggle and failure, while another man more fairly endowed may find from the first the way of wisdom a way of pleasantness and all her paths paths of peace. A man born with a brutal nature and feeble spiritual energy, or with a native propensity, as far as we can see, to certain forms of sin—the temptation to which exercises the kind of fascination over his will which the serpent's eye is said to exert over the victim bird, but which another man would burst through as easily as Samson flung off the withes of the Philistine harlot—is, one is tempted to think, at a terrible disadvantage in life's battle, compared with the man who has a halo of saintly glory around his brow from his birth. It is a dark, sad mystery, much of which, after all our brooding over it, we must leave in trust with God.

I believe firmly that inequalities arising out of circumstances are after all far less real than they appear. The facilities and opportunities for a fair unfolding of life are not so uneven, in the various classes and callings, as they seem. There must be some deep meaning in the Saviour's words, "Blessed are ye poor," and in the terrible sentence, "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God." There is an amount of practical Christianity—daily, hourly trust in God and ministry to each other—developed by the circumstances of the lot of the poor, which we may fairly set against the intelligent beliefs, the doctrinal correctness, and the measured charities of the richer class, as in the sight of God of equal or of higher price. There is nothing in a workman's lot or toil, to remove him farther from the gate of the kingdom than rich men, nobles, priests, or kings; nay, the balance is altogether in his favour. But, alas! there is a class far below the workman, a vast class, vastest in the great cities where Christian civilization is at the height of its splendour and power, whose lot it is terribly difficult to comprehend in a theodicy, and of whom it is hard to believe that they are not from the first at a fearful disadvantage as respects nearness to the gate of the kingdom of heaven. But the gravest side of the difficulty is not circumstantial; it concerns nature and temperament. Though perhaps, if we could search a little more deeply, we should see that each type of character has its own peculiar class of difficulties and temptations; and that the most beautiful and saintlike have their dread perils of shipwreck, which make their course as arduous as that of the souls which bear about with them a great load of fleshliness and groan under the bondage of tyrannous passions and lusts. Still it is a truth which is not without its awful significance, that temperaments, passions, and powers, are very variously distributed to men, while the burden of existence is laid equally upon all, and "every soul must bear its own burden" in time and in eternity.

These things lend infinite meaning to the word "Father" when uttered by Divine lips. Like as a father pitieth his children, the Father pitieth and beareth with us: "he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust." It is a father's compassion, tenderness, and equity which we need, to be the basis of our confidence and hope. A father considers with fatherly care, interest, and love our individual endowments, difficulties, and temptations, in ruling and in judging us; and He will ordain our eternal state with a merciful wisdom, which has to satisfy not a rigid justice only but the hopes and yearnings of a paternal heart. If it were not for the belief that the bar of judgment before which we shall stand is a wise and righteous fatherly heart, the best endowed might well faint under the burden of existence, while the worst would moan under its agony and curse the day on which they saw the sun. There are some very terrible sentences in the word of God, which utter the moan, not of the worst men, but of the best and noblest with whose history it deals. "After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein." (Job iii. 1-7.) "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul; Which long for death, but it cometh not: and dig for it more than for hid treasures; Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters. For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came." (Job iii. 20-26.) "Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad. And let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew, and repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide. Because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?" (Jer. xx. 14-18.) These were not bad men, crushed under the burden of their own iniquity, but just, upright, and God-fearing men, who felt that existence was too terrible for them under conditions which hid from them the Father's ruling hand. And if they shrank from the burden of conscious responsible being, how shall weaker men escape its terror, but by taking refuge under the shield of a Father's equity and love! But these thoughts lend a most blessed meaning to the words of the Saviour: "Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that himself doeth: and he will show him greater works than these, that ye may marvel. For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son, honoureth not the Father which hath sent him. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; and hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man." (John v. 19-27.) "The Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son." "Because he is the Son of Man." Because He can take a man's measure as well as a Divine measure of a man's weaknesses, perils, and temptations; can measure, as a man, man's need of mercy, and utter the Divine Father's judgment from pitiful human lips. Few words, as we pore over these dark mysteries of existence, are so full of consolation and hope as these words of the Saviour upon judgment. We can bear the darkness, we can bear the anguish, if we are called to pass through it, because we know that the ordering of our destinies is in the hand of One who mingles with a brother's sympathy and tenderness the Divine Father's equity and love.

But the text does not touch upon these difficulties of Esau's history. It treats him broadly as the typical instance of the reprobate, the man who by his own base acts has cast himself out of the position for which he was born and trained; who by one decisive manifestation of his character and propensities has shut himself out from a high career which opened fairly before him, and who finds no means of reversing the decree which excludes him, though he seeks it carefully with tears. It opens a very terrible vision of the inexorable rigour with which deeds done, facts when they are once fairly established, react upon our lives. But the words are often perverted to yet darker meanings—suggesting visions of unpardonable sins, of fruitless agonies of personal repentance,—with which souls under strong conviction not seldom torment themselves, and with which the text has absolutely nothing whatever to do. A man seeking change of heart with an agony of tears, pleading with God to renew him, to restore him, and to cherish him to new life and hope, yet spurned from the gate of mercy, flung forth accursed from the arms of love, is a picture which, blessed be God, has no original in the Divine word. No! thus runs the gospel: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." "For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?" "Whoso cometh unto me I will in no wise cast him out." "This man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood; wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them."

If any who reads these words has ever made this text a stumbling-block, has ever suffered the devil to thrust the thought into his heart that he has sinned too deeply for repentance, and wandered too far for return—that he can but lie moaning and weeping like Esau, and pleading with anguished heart for repentance, to find his moans rained back in anathemas, and his tears with the fire of the wrath of the Lamb,—let him sweep back the thought as an unholy thing to the devil who inspired it, and cling to the outstretched hand of Him who "will not break the bruised reed, who will not quench the smoking flax, but will bring forth judgment unto truth."

The text has literally nothing to do with personal repentance before God. No man can spiritually seek a place of repentance carefully with tears, and fail to find it, for the very act is an act of repentance. I do not care to discuss the question whether the repentance here spoken of is a change in the mind of Isaac, or of Esau himself. In either case the meaning is substantially the same. He found no means of reversing the decree, of winning the blessing of the firstborn, of inducing his father to recall the benediction which had been treacherously diverted to the younger, though he sought it carefully with tears. If it were possible that this text, in all its dreadful meaning, could bear on personal repentance for sin, and frighten men from it lest after all it should be hopeless, it would deny the fundamental ideas and promises of the gospel; nay, it would itself "trample under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and do despite to the Spirit of grace."

No! the text is a very solemn and even terrible warning of the irrevocable character of deeds done in folly or frenzy; the inexorable character of the fate which takes possession of them when once they have gone forth from us, and which makes by them, it may be in spite of our tears and prayers and desperate struggles, a complete revolution in our lives.

Esau's history is but the repetition of the history of the fall. And it is a history which we all constantly repeat in the critical moments of our lives. Esau fell as Adam fell, and fundamentally for the same reason. Adam despised his birthright, and thought that there was a readier way to the satisfaction of the desires of his heart. Esau by one act changed, not his own history and destiny only, but the destiny of a great nation; Adam changed, by his one sin, the destiny of a great world. "Wherefore," says the apostle, "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men." (Rom. v. 12.) Adam, like Esau, saw through the eyes of Eve that the "tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise." What good shall my birth-right do to me, he said practically when he saw the forbidden fruit, and he sold it; and that moment's work for him, for you, for me, for all the myriad human generations, can never be recalled in time or in eternity. There is something very much nobler here than in Esau's profaneness. It was not in a moment of sensual lust that our first father sold his own birthright and ours. The desire of wisdom, or what he took for wisdom, had much to do with the force of the temptation; but the essence of the matter is the same: Adam and Esau both chose, in the place of the good which God had provided for them, a good which they provided for themselves. Bitterly Adam, like Esau, repented of his folly, and sought to undo his work. When the wilderness lay cold and bare before him, and the flaming sword of the cherubim guarded the backward path to the bright abodes which he had lost for ever, he measured for the first time the full significance of his transgression. And when the sun set angry and lurid on the wilderness, and the moaning winds swept hoarsely over the waste, while a shudder shook the breast of nature as the tempest clouds gathered in the sullen sky, Adam caught the infection of the tremor, and watched with quivering eye the awful conflict of the forces which had broken loose from his allegiance, and which seemed to come thundering on as the doomsmen of the death which his Judge had decreed. Think you that then his heart did not cling to the memories of the splendours and serenities of Eden with passionate longing; think you that he did not prostrate himself in an agony of frenzied supplication that the barred portal might be unclosed again, that the fiery sword might be sheathed, that the flowers of Eden might again spring beneath his footsteps, while the balmy breezes whispered a blessing as they played around the field of his labour and his bower of rest?

And what has been the long and bitter cry of man's sad history? O God, reverse the sentence, reopen the gate of paradise, revoke the curse, let the sunlight of Eden shine once more on a holy, peaceful, and happy world! This is the great burden of human literature in all its deeper and more sacred utterances; it is the meaning of all the world's great poems, the refrain of all its immortal hymns. Recall the curse! let life again become pure, peaceful, and blessed! Men, nations, ages have agonized, over the sentence; but they have found no place of repentance, no means to change the mind of the Judge or their own condition as the subjects of it, though they have sought it carefully with tears. Esau was the rejected of the birthright; you and I are the rejected of Eden. Sinners we are by nature and proclivity, with a sinner's burdens, a sinner's experience, and a sinner's doom. And there is no way to change the past, to rid us of the burden, to cancel the sentence, to mitigate the anguish of a life on which the devil has seared the shameful brand; no way to force the barred gates of paradise, even by the banded energies of a pain-racked, sin-tormented world.

And I suppose that the private experience of most men furnishes the key to this. Who has not known something of the agony with which one dark deed of passion, lust, falsehood, knavery, baseness, can torture a human heart? Look back. Is there nothing in the past, rising up at this moment in the full menace of its hateful form, clear as the ghost of Banquo before his murderer's sight, which you would give your wealth, nay, some of you would give worlds if they had them, to undo; if conscience might but recover its serenity, and life its brightness; if the leprous flesh of their experience might again become, like Naaman's, fair, pure, and sweet as the flesh of a little child. It is not every Gehazi whose leprosy comes out in his flesh, and makes him loathsome to his fellows. How many Gehazis move about among us, burying their leprosy within, but none the less plague-stricken and perilous! Happy those who have no dark chambers in their being, haunted by the skeletons of their dead lusts, sins, or crimes—skeletons which never fail to come forth at their banquets to scare them, choosing ruthlessly the hours of their festivity and triumph to murder all their joys. There may be some readers of these words who know this in all its horror, in whom the anguish of the irrevocable and irreparable has killed all the joy of life—a word spoken, a passion indulged, a deed done, which in one brief moment has drawn a brooding shadow over the once sunlit landscape of their lives. And you have wept and prayed, lying prostrate on the cold, ground, beseeching the merciful God that He would blot out the record from your memory and from the lives which it has embittered and cursed; but "the heaven has been as brass, the earth beneath has been as iron." The word "irrevocable" has forced its meaning upon you in all its terrible sternness, and you have needed no commentary to expound, or preacher to drive home, the meaning of the sentence, "Beware lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears."

And if there may be some readers who know this experience in all its horror, there are a multitude who know it in its more modified forms, and who find it terrible enough even then. Who has not had forced upon him the misery of regrets or remorse, the causes of which remain unalterable, fixed as the stars in their orbits, and the fruits of which leave deep traces on the experience and the destiny through time, yes, and through eternity? Did David, think you, ever look coldly or carelessly on his bold soldier's bloody grave? Was there no sad shadow, to his eye, around the beauty of Bathsheba's child, which no murmured "Jedidiah" could chase away? Was his home ever free from the shadow, from the hour when Nathan's "Thou art the man" drove conviction home, and wrung from him the most bitter cry of a sinner's anguish which has found record in the literature of our world? Few things in the book of history are more terrible than the sorrow which entered David's home, the discord which rent his kingdom, the anguish which pierced his heart, from the hour of his great transgression. A sad, careworn, broken man, he finished his course and went down to his grave. Compare the David of 1 Kings i., ii., with the young shepherd in his early prime, if you would estimate the havoc which one great sin may make in a noble life. Ah! in a measure we all know it, in some form or other; words, deeds, outbursts of passion, which have wrung dear hearts with anguish, sundered precious bonds of love, have sullied reputation, clouded prospects, withered hopes, or blighted the promise of lives which we were bound to cherish, or of our own. And we would give worlds to blot out their record, and to repair the evil which has been wrought; but it remains engraven with an iron pen in the rock for ever: man cannot obliterate it, and God will not.

To complete the subject, let me ask you to consider two thoughts.

1. These dread seasons of crucial trial, on which the future of life, nay of eternity, is hanging, never come upon us in a moment.

It would appear from the text that one morsel of meat settled the question of the birthright; that one hard, hot morning's chase settled the destinies of peoples for all time. That is one side of it, the outside. But the real settlement of the question was made already; any trifle will serve to disclose what has already established itself as the permanent character within. Esau had nursed his contempt for the birthright by a thousand daily lustings and cravings; many a bitter scoff too he had flung at Jacob's pious and meditative mood. Things like this never stand alone. The life of the chosen family is described in words of wonderful beauty and power in Heb. xi. 8-14. "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised. Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country." This life Jacob believed in profoundly; this life Esau as profoundly despised. He despised it all, and made his contempt abundantly apparent. "And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite. Which were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah" (Gen. xxvi. 34, 35). This shows how thoroughly out of sympathy with the spirit of the chosen race he was from the first, and remained through life. All his sympathies and associations were with the pagans around him. Jacob was the true heir of the promise, for he believed in it; Esau its outcast, for he despised it, and had despised it from the first. His every act had expressed his contempt of it, and the sale of the birthright for a mess of pottage but completed the witness that he was a profane person, a pagan at heart. These moments mark the crises for which a long train of thought and habit has prepared. Many a secret sin, born of luxury and nursed by royal power and splendour, broke out into the daylight when David looked upon Bathsheba, and filled his life with unutterable sorrow and shame. God takes no man in a hasty moment and brands him reprobate. A thousand daily touches through long years have shaped the image which there reveals itself, and on which is moulded the everlasting destiny. The little sins of life are busily, hour by hour, creating the great sins. The small habits and actions, which we allow to pass unrebuked—they seem to be such trifles—soon pass away beyond the power of memory to recall; but they leave their ineffaceable trace on our constitution and character, and lay silently the train of some great outburst of lust, passion, or wickedness, like Esau's or David's. Then is written a record on our nature and destiny which one day we shall agonize to blot out; but the inexorable eye looks coldly down on the frenzied pleader, and the stony lips fashion themselves into a voiceless "Too late!" Meet sin, meet all the devil's seductions and enticements, sternly on the threshold, and the citadel remains for ever sure.

2. The irrevocable is not the irreparable, through the abounding mercy and grace of God.

Things cannot be obliterated or abolished. They remain, and their record remains, for ever. But, blessed be God, they may be transmuted, and wear Divine forms of beauty and joy. And this is what redemption means. Eden is closed for ever. To abolish the condition of man as a sinner, otherwise than by one grand sentence of doom which would abolish his existence as a creature, is beyond the power even of heaven. A sinner's lot you inherit, a sinner's experience you must know, a sinner's agony you must taste, a sinner's horror of darkness you must pass through—to the pit, if the birthright never again seems to you beautiful and glorious, a thing to be won by toil and tears and prayers; but if your soul pines in its rioting, if it sickens in its worldly wealth and splendour, if the question forces itself upon you as it never seems to have forced itself upon Esau, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" then the sinner's anguish, from which there is no escape for any one of us, may be made by Christ's dear love the strait gate to the splendour, the glory, the bliss of heaven. And this is Redemption. Divine love, love that could die, love that did die, that its beloved ones might not die, is the solvent which transmutes all the shame and pain of sin to heavenly glory and bliss. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin had reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." Here is no reversal, no obliteration of the past, mark you; the thing that was is and shall be; no power in the universe can blot out its trace. The experience of a sinner is part of your being, and in its transmuted form must remain part of your being, through eternity. These wounds and sores of sin, suffused by Christ's great love, become the lustrous pearls of heaven. Nothing in the past, I care not how dark or damning it may be, is irreparable by the love which "endured the cross and despised the shame," that it might win the right and the power to redeem. There is no sin whose stains may not be wept out at the Redeemer's feet. There is no life which may not win "She hath loved much, for she hath much forgiven" as its record, earnest of a rapture of eternal bliss. But dream not that the path can be an easy one, and that penitence can transmute the sorrow into joy by a word. You have done that whose issues could only be undone by the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the cross and passion of Calvary; and you too must die, die to sin, that you may live to God. The flesh, which has despised your birthright, must be mortified, crucified, by grace. "I am crucified with Christ" you must learn to say; you must know the fellowship of the sufferings of your Master, and taste the cup of which He drank the dregs, or the lost birthright is lost for ever, and the deed done on earth remains irreparable as well as irrevocable through eternity.