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the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice." He was a painstaking,
laborious preacher of the Word for fifty-five years.

Yet hear him on his death-bed! How he clings to Christ's righteousness alone, and sees in
himself, even after such a life, only sin and want. The last words he was heard to utter were
about one o'clock in the afternoon, and these words were uttered in a loud voice: "But,
Lord, in special forgive me my sins of omission." It was omissions, says his biographer, he
begged forgiveness of with his most fervent last breath—he who was never known to omit
an hour, but who employed the shred ends of his life for his great Lord and Master! The very
day he took his last sickness, he rose up from writing one of his great works and went out to
visit a sick woman, to whom he spoke so fitly and fully that you would have taken him to
have spoken of heaven before he came there. Yet this man was oppressed with a sense of his
omissions!

Reader, what think you of yourself—your undone duties, your unimproved hours,
times of prayer omitted, your shrinking from unpleasant work and putting it on others,
your being content to sit under your vine and fig tree without using all efforts for the souls of
others? "Lord, in special forgive me my sins of omission!"

Hear the confession of Edwards, in regard both to personal and ministerial sins:
"Often I have had very affecting views of my own sinfulness and vileness; very
frequently to such a degree as to hold me in a kind of loud weeping, sometimes for a
considerable time together, so that I have often been forced to shut myself up. I have had a
vastly greater sense of my own wickedness, and the badness of my heart, than ever I had
before my conversion. My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appeared to me perfectly
ineffable, swallowing up all thought and imagination. I know not how to express better what
my sins appear to me to be than by heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by
infinite. When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss
infinitely deeper than hell. And yet it seems to me that my conviction of sin is exceedingly
small and faint: it is enough to amaze

me that I have no more sense of my sin. I have greatly longed of late for a broken heart, and
to lie low before God."

2. We have been carnal and unspiritual. The tone of our life has been low and earthly.
Associating too much and too intimately with the world, we have in a great measure become
accustomed to its ways. Hence our tastes have been vitiated, our consciences blunted, and
that sensitive tenderness of feeling which, while it turns not back from suffering yet shrinks
from the remotest contact with sin, has worn off and given place to an amount of callousness
of which we once, in fresher days, believed ourselves incapable. Perhaps we can call to mind
a time when our views and aims were fixed upon a standard of almost unearthly
elevation, and, contrasting these with our present state, we are startled at the painful
changes. And besides intimacy with the world, other causes have operated in