not one plea that we can offer that will stay that awful sentence we feel we have so well deserved? Is there not one plea? Yes, surely there is one, but can we, dare we use it? Can we look up into the Face of our Judge and say, "Thou hast died for me, Thou hast borne my punishment; Thy Precious Blood has washed out the stain of these my sins; I have Thy promise that they shall be blotted out of the book of Thy remembrance for ever?" God of His infinite mercy grant it!

But we dare not look further now, dare not anticipate the nature of the sentence we shall receive as our due. Before we go on further to consider how we may best prepare ourselves for judgment shall we not pour forth our hearts in prayer that God would teach us now so to live that when that hour of shame and fear shall come we may be able to offer that unanswerable plea-Pardon through the Precious Blood?

O my soul! wilt thou not resolve to remember from henceforth that for every word, thought and action of thy life God will bring thee to Judgment?

III. How to Prepare for Judgment.

What question can be of more importance for each of us than this? How am I to prepare for that Great

Day? Am I already prepared? If the voice of the Archangel were to sound in my ears to-night should I feel that I was ready? Let me think of the past. What right does it give me to think so? When I recall what my life has been from my childhood to this hour, with all its sins, its negligences, its forgetfulness of God, I am overwhelmed with terror. How must I prepare?

There are three things necesary.

1. For the past, Repentance.

2. For the present, Faith.

3. For the future, Persevering Watchfulness.

1. Thou must repent, O my soul, thou must have an abiding sorrow for the sins of thy past life by which thou hast so grieved thy God and Saviour; thou must readily confess them, notwithstanding the shame which such confession may bring, and thou must make restitution for the past as far as lies in thy power, and prove by thine after conduct the sincerity of thy profession of repentance. It is by thus condemning thyself that thou canst alone hope to escape the judgment of God. Let neither therefore the fear of man nor the love of ease and selfindulgence hinder thee from the godly exercise of true repentance-from offering up to God the acceptable sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart.

2. But without Faith our repentance however

sincere would be in vain-our conversion imperfect. Without Faith we could never hope that our sins could be forgiven, however bitterly we grieved for them; but Faith unveiling the past lifts our eyes to the Cross of Jesus, and as we see Him suffering there enables us to say, "O my Saviour, I know that Thou hast borne my punishment. I know that though my sins are more in number than the hairs of my head Thy Blood has the power to wash them all away." It is Faith, which makes the things of the invisible world so clearly present to our vision, that amidst all the failings and weaknesses of the present, we are saved from despair by our sight of that same Jesus standing for us at the right Hand of God, and pleading His Great Sacrifice in our behalf. It is Faith which, recognising the saving efficacy of that plea, draws us now with the irresistible force of love to the Blessed Sacrament of His Body and Blood, in which we plead on earth that same all-sufficient Sacrifice which our Saviour pleads in Heaven.

O my soul! wilt thou not cry aloud from the depths of thy troubled heart: "Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief?"

3. Persevering Watchfulness. The history of the past gives us warning enough that we have need to be watchful. How often have all our good resolutions faded absolutely from our minds in the moment of

temptation, and we have once more fallen into those sins which we thought could never again overcome us! And we must persevere. The crown is reserved only for those who continue to the end. Let us not then, when this holy season has passed away, be forgetful of all its good resolutions and all its solemn warnings. Let us use every effort that we may not fall back again into that old dreadful state of carelessness and indifference, lest at any time that which was said of the man in the parable become true of us, "The last state of that man was worse than the first."

O my soul, wilt thou not resolve whilst this thy state of trial lasts, to use most diligently the means of grace which God has provided for thee in His Church, remembering thine own weakness, and the need thou hast ever to be pleading before the Throne of mercy the Great and Prevailing Sacrifice of the Cross?

HEAVEN.

I. Earthly Joys.

If we allow ourselves to reflect for a few moments on the transitory nature of those pleasures which the world has to offer us, it will help us to look forward with more intense longing to the joys which are prepared in Heaven for those that love God.

There are two threads which so to speak run through our earthly life, often broken, often entangled, but still evident in all: the thread of sorrow and the thread of joy. As there is no person that is exempted from the universal lot of sorrow and suffering, so there is no person however miserable be his ordinary state who has not his gleams of sunshine, some moments at least when his troubles and trials are forgotten. Nay in the lives of some these two threads seem so strangely intertwined that their very suffering is to them an unfailing spring of happiness.

It will perhaps assist our meditations on this branch of our subject if we take it in the following subdivision:

:

1. Pleasures of sin.

2. Lawful pleasures.

3. The Happiness of serving God.