by way of remedy, that we may all of us be enabled to avoid secret sins.
6. I. First, then, THE FOLLY OF SECRET SINS.
7. Pretender, you are fair to look upon; your conduct is outwardly upright, amiable liberal, generous and Christian, but you do indulge in some sin which the eye of man has not yet detected. Perhaps it is private drunkenness. You do revile the drunkard when he staggers through the street; but you can indulge yourself in the same habit in private. It may be some other lust or vice; it is not for me just now to mention what it is. But, pretender, we say to you, you are a fool to think of harbouring a secret sin; and you are a fool for this one reason, that your sin is not a secret sin; it its known, and shall one day be revealed; perhaps very soon. Your sin is not a secret; the eye of God has seen it; you have sinned before his face. You have shut the door, and drawn the curtains, and kept out the eye of the sun, but God’s eye pierces through the darkness; the brick walls which surrounded you were as transparent as glass to the eye of the Almighty; the darkness which surrounded you was as bright as the summer’s noon to the eye of him who beholds all things. Do you not know, oh man, that “all things are naked and open to the eyes of him with whom we have to do?” As the priest ran his knife into the entrails of his victim, exposed the heart and liver, and whatever else lay within, so are you, oh man, seen by God, cut open by the Almighty; you have no secret chamber where you can hide yourself; you have no dark cellar where you can conceal your soul. Dig deep, indeed, deep as hell, but you cannot find earth enough upon the globe to cover your sin; if you could heap the mountains on its grave, those mountains would tell the tale of what was buried in their bowels. If you could cast your sin into the sea, a thousand babbling waves would tattle the secret. There is no hiding it from God. Your sin is photographed in high heaven; the deed when it was done was photographed upon the sky, and there it shall remain, and you shall see yourself one day revealed to the gazing eyes of all men, a hypocrite, a pretender, who sinned in fancied secret, observed in all your acts by the all seeing Jehovah. Oh what fools men are, to think they can, do anything in secret. This world is like the glass hives in which bees sometimes work: we look down upon them, and we see all the operations of the little creatures. So God looks down and sees all. Our eyes are weak; we cannot look through the darkness; but his eye, like an orb of fire, penetrates the blackness; and reads the thoughts of man, and sees his acts when he thinks himself most concealed. Oh; it would be a thought enough to curb us from all sin, if it were truly applied to us — “You, God, see me!” Stop thief! Drop what you have taken for yourself. God sees you! No eye of detection of earth has discovered you, but God’s eyes are now looking through the clouds upon you. Swearer! scarcely any for whom you care heard your oath; but God heard it; it entered into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth. Ah! you who lead a filthy life, and yet are a respectable merchant bearing among men a fair and goodly character; your vices are all known; written in God’s book. He keeps a diary of all your acts; and what will you think on that day when a crowd shall be assembled, compared with which this immense multitude is only a drop in a bucket, and God shall read out the story of your secret life, and men and angels shall hear it. I am certain there are none of us who would like to have all our secrets read, especially our secret thoughts. If I should select out of this congregation the most holy man, should bring him forward and say, “Now, sir, I know all your thoughts, and am about to tell them,” I am sure he would offer me the largest bribe that he could gather if I would be pleased to conceal at least some of them. “Tell,” he would say, “of my acts; of them I am not ashamed; but do not tell my thoughts and imaginations — of them I must for ever stand ashamed before God.” What, then, sinner, will be your shame when your private lusts, your closet transgressions, your secret crimes shall be broadcasted from God’s throne, published by his own mouth, and with a voice louder than a thousand thunders preached in the ears of an assembled world? What will be your terror and confusion then, when all the deeds you have done shall be published in the face of the sun, in the ears of all mankind. Oh renounce the foolish hope of secrecy, for your sin is recorded this day, and shall one day be published upon the walls of heaven.
8. II. In the next place, let us notice THE MISERY OF SECRET SINS.
9. Of all sinners the man who makes a profession of religion, and yet lives in iniquity, is the most miserable. A downright wicked man, who takes a glass in his hand, and says, “I am a drunkard, I am not ashamed of it,” he shall be unutterably miserable in worlds to come, but brief though it is, he has his hour of pleasure. A man who curses and swears, and says, “That is my habit, I am a profane man,” and makes a profession of it, he has, at least, some peace in his soul; but the man who walks with God’s minister, who is united with God’s Church, who comes out before God’s people, and unites with them, and then lives in sin, what a miserable existence he must have of it! Why, he has a worse existence than the mouse that is in the parlour, running out now and then to pick up the crumbs, and then back again to his hole. Such men must run out now and then to sin; and oh! how fearful they are to be discovered! One day, perhaps, their character turns up; with wonderful cunning they manage to conceal and gloss it over; but the next day something else comes, and they live in constant fear, telling lie after lie, to make the last lie appear truthful, adding deception to deception, in order that they may not be discovered.
Oh! ’tis a tangled web we weave,
When once we venture to deceive,
If I must be a wicked man, give me the life of a roistering sinner, who sins before the face of day; but, if I must sin, let me not act as a hypocrite and a coward; let me not profess to be God’s, and spend my life for the devil. That way of cheating the devil is a thing which every honest sinner will be ashamed of. He will say, “Now, if I do serve my master I will serve him out and out, I will have no sham about it; if I make a profession, I will carry it out; but if I do not, if I live in sin, I am not going to gloss it over by deception and hypocrisy.” One thing which has hamstrung the church, and cut her very sinews in two, has been this most damnable hypocrisy. Oh! in how many places have we men whom you might praise to the very skies, if you could believe their words, but whom you might cast into the nethermost pit if you could see their secret actions. God forgive any of you who are acting like this! I had almost said, I can scarcely forgive you. I can forgive the man who riots openly, and makes no profession of being better, but the man who fawns, and deceives, and pretends, and prays, and then lives in sin, that man I hate, I cannot bear him, I abhor him from my very soul. If he will turn from his ways, I will love him, but in his hypocrisy he is to me the most loathsome of all creatures. It is said the toad wears a jewel in her head, but this man has none, but bears filthiness about him, while he pretends to be in love with righteousness. A mere profession, my hearers, is only painted pageantry to go to hell in; it is like the plumes upon the hearse and the trappings upon the black horses which drag men to their graves, the funeral array of dead souls. Take heed above everything of a waxen profession that will not stand the sun; take care of a life that needs to have two faces to carry it out; be one thing, or else the other. If you make up your mind to serve Satan, do not pretend to serve God; and if you serve God, serve him with all your heart. “No man can serve two masters”; do not try it, do not endeavour to do it, for no life will be more miserable than that. Above all, beware of committing acts which it will be necessary to conceal. There is a singular poem by Hood, {a} called “The Dream of Eugene Aram” — a most remarkable piece it is indeed, illustrating the point on which I am now dwelling. Aram has murdered a man and cast his body into the river — “a sluggish water, black as ink, the depth was so extreme.” The next morning he visited the scene of his guilt —
And sought the black accursed pool,
With a wild misgiving eye;
And he saw the dead in the river bed,
For the faithless stream was dry.
Next he covered the corpse with heaps of leaves, but a mighty wind swept through the wood and left the secret bare before the sun —
Then
