root out of you the mischiefs that you do not know are there, and live
humbly and self-distrustfuliy, and feel that your only strength is:
'Hold Thou me up, and I shall be saved.' 'Hast thou seen what they do in
the _dark_?'

Still further, we may take another part of this description with
possibly permissible violence as a symbol of another characteristic of
our inward nature. The walls of that chamber were all painted with
animal forms, to which these men were bowing down. By our memory, and by
that marvellous faculty that people call the imagination, and by our
desires, we are for ever painting the walls of the inmost chambers of
our hearts with such pictures. That is an awful power which we possess,
and, alas! too often use for foul idolatries.

I do not dwell upon that, but I wish to drop one very earnest caution
and beseeching entreaty, especially to the younger members of my
congregation now. You, young men and women, especially you young men,
mind what you paint upon those mystic walls! Foul things, as my text
says, 'creeping things and abominable beasts,' only too many of you are
tracing there. Take care, for these figures are ineffaceable. No
repentance will obliterate them. I do not know whether even Heaven can
blot them out. What you love, what you desire, what you think about, you
are photographing on the walls of your immortal soul. And just as
to-day, thousands of years after the artists have been gathered to the
dust, we may go into Egyptian temples and see the figures on their
walls, in all the freshness of their first colouring, as if the painter
had but laid down his pencil a moment ago; so, on your hearts, youthful
evils, the sins of your boyhood, the pruriences of your earliest days,
may live in ugly shapes, that no tears and no repentance will ever wipe
out. Nothing can do away with 'the marks of that which once hath been.'