under the circumstances to enjoy. It may have been a day's pleasure, or the society of some particular person, or the reading of some forbidden book, or an extravagant and selfish purchase; and we have put ourselves in the way of obtaining our wish quietly and deliberately, not at once promising ourselves that we would obtain it, but thinking about it, talking of it, planning how it might be had, and at last pledging ourselves in some way with others, and in their co-operation finding our support for the sin we have resolved to commit. Now, though it would be quite wrong, one might almost say absurd, to place an act of this kind on a par with a heinous crime like that of Judas, yet it is very necessary for us to consider that it is the germ of the same state of mind. We are extremely particular with children in not allowing them to steal a sugar-plum, because we say that if they begin with small things they will end with large ones, and so will at last come to ruin. It is just the same with ourselves. Sin is a state of mind, not an outward act. The same sinful strength which leads us to crush conscience in small cases, will, if indulged, lead us to crush it also in others. Satan gives us that strength. He does not possess us-that through God's mercy he is not permitted to do, until after a long course of hardness and impenitence-but he assists us to grieve the Holy Spirit, and force Him, if we may venture so to speak, to depart from us. And then, when our weak nature is left to itself, he adds the power of

his own wickedness to our natural inclinations, and the sin is committed:-a small sin possibly, one that the world may never know, and if it did know, might probably laugh us to scorn for regretting but a sin, the memory of which will cling to us through life; which will haunt us in seasons of anguish, and come before us in the watches of the night, and sting us with its reproaches in the brightest hours of day;-a pardoned sin it may be-God grant it to be so-but one which can never be forgotten; because it was cool, deliberate, and wilful, even like the sin of the traitor Judas.

An account was given not very long since by one who had suffered shipwreck, of the state of his mind as he clung to a plank, and was tossed about by the waves. His mother's voice was heard clear and close. She said to him: "Did you take the apples?" That was the voice of conscience, bringing back from the depths of memory the wilful sin of his early years.

Probably there is no such thing as forgetfulness, -if by forgetfulness we mean that which can never be recalled. It has been said that every word we utter causes some change in the elements which surround us, and leaves its trace throughout universal space. Certain it is that the actions which we say we have forgotten, do rise up again unbidden, and when we least expect them. They have been done, and they cannot be undone. wilful sin, whether great or small, is a wilful strug

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gle with the Spirit of God, and it will be an act of His mercy so to leave the burning remembrance of the conflict and the defeat imprinted upon our conscience, as to bring us to repentance and to pardon.

SYMPATHY IN GLADNESS.

ST. LUKE, xxii. 7, 8.

"Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the Passover must be killed. And He sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the Passover, that we may eat."

SORROW and joy met when our Lord was upon earth, even as they do now. The passover was a public feast, a season for recalling great blessings, a period of rejoicing, which must have awakened in the Jewish people a considerable amount of national pride. It reminded them that they were the chosen people of God, and that He had worked specially for their deliverance; and carrying them back through long ages, it gave them that feeling of stability for which the human heart naturally longs. We should feel this latter point ourselves. If we now, as a nation, kept a feast, which had been celebrated ever since the time of Alfred the Great, it would awaken much deeper and more lasting satisfaction than any commemoration of modern greatness, however glorious. And doubtless the Jews, clinging, as they did, to a belief in their own superiority, threw themselves into the spirit of the passover without misgiving, exciting themselves to a proud enjoyment of the blessings

which had been handed down to them from their forefathers. National festivities are very alluring for this very reason, that they satisfy the conscience; there seems no selfishness connected with them; a deep and insidious selfishness may indeed lurk underneath, but it does not appear upon the surface. The better feelings of human nature are called forth by such occasions; closed hearts are opened, stony hearts are touched. We are not likely to suspect evil in ourselves or in others at a period of national joy.

And the passover must have been also a season of social and domestic rejoicing. Friends came from distant quarters; those perhaps who never met at other times, met then. There must have been interchanges of sympathies, and vivid interests awakened for the dwellers in other lands. The Jew, whose ordinary home was away from Judea, must have brought back tales of foreign countries, and new habits of thought; the minds of all would thus be enlarged; curiosity would be aroused and gratified; all this was full of enjoyment, and that of a very innocent kind.

There is no reason to suppose that the disciples of our blessed Lord were unlike other Jews in their feelings at this period. They had indeed been warned that trial was at hand, but it does not appear that they at all understood the real meaning of the warning. Their fears, if they existed, must have been but vague. Every one around them was joyous, their friends and neighbours