a sermon by Thomas Chalmers on the nature of the sin unto death narrated October 15th 2007 there is a sin unto death I do not say that he shall pray for it first John 516 if we assume that the sin unto death is the same with the sin against the Holy Ghost then from what has been said in previous discourse it will follow that If we regard those people to be on a wrong track of inquiry, who with a view to ascertain whether they have committed this sin, look back to their bygone history and rummage the depositories of their vast experience, and try to find among all the deeds that they have ever committed, that one deed of particular enormity to which the forgiveness of the gospel will not and cannot be extended, There is in truth no such deed within the reach of human performance. The blood of Christ can wash away the guilt of all the sins of all the individuals in the assemblage before us. And in the hearing of every one of you do we make this free and open announcement of the gospel remedy and all the power and preciousness which belong to it. It is a manner of our occurrence, but it does occur, that the imagination of the sin fills the heart of some melancholy patience with the agitations of despair, and spreads a dark and mournful complexion over the secret history of him who is the victim of it, and keeps the comfort of the gospel far away from him, and fixes in his mind the obstinate delusion that there is something about him which renders him an exception to those wide and universal calls which are made to circulate at large among all the other sons and daughters of the species. Now this is a misapprehension. The Offer is still unto all, and upon all who believe, and he is not excluded from the Offer. And there is not a single iniquity of his past life that will exclude him. And if he only will come to Christ in his appointed way, and do honor to the power of his sacrifice by resting on it, and show respect to his authority by putting forth all the energy that is in him, to act up to its requirements, and evidence his humble submission to the doctrine of the Spirit, by praying for faith in him, and give proof of the general honesty which run through all his principles on the subject of the Christian religion by his diligent use of every revealed expedient, in a way of reading and acting and devoutly observing the appointed ordinances, then do we say to him what we say to you all, that you have taken such a step, and entered upon such a career, and committed yourself to such an infallible guidance. as in spite of all the manifold deformities of your past life, and under all that guilt of rebelliousness which now lies upon you, will translate you into acceptance with the God whom you have so deeply offended, and carry you forward by the ascending march of a progressive and ever-advancing sanctification to all the glories and all the perfections of a blissful eternity. But though this retrospective examination of the past is not the way of ascertaining whether you have committed the unpardonable sin, there is a way, not perhaps of ascertaining, but of gathering much both of probability and of most valuable and important information respecting it. The question we put to you is not what you have done through the life that is past, but what do you feel at present? How is the call we have now sounded in your ears telling upon your purposes? How is this wondrously free invitation of the Gospel entertained by you at this moment? Tell us, if the proclamation of an open path to return to the God from whom you were alienated, is it all disposing you to bestir yourselves and moving you towards Him? Let us know if it be your intention now to abandon every one of the things which you know to be the will of Christ that you should abandon, or, in other words, to turn you from all your iniquities. Let us know if you wish to submit your hearts to the power and the vitality of the spiritual law. Let us know if you wish for acceptance on the simple footing of His righteousness, and if you wish for holiness through the operation of that Spirit, which is alone able to revolutionize your inner man and bring it into an entire and an altogether devoted conformity to the will of a heart-searching God. Tell us whether the earnest aspiration and honest intention towards all this be in you, or tell if the urgency of these invitations be now falling without power and without fruit upon your unstimulated consciences, then know that if in the struggle of your opposing purposes and your conflicting inclinations a world shall prevail, we will not say, if you have yet so grieved the Holy Spirit of God as to determine Him to leave you forever, but you have at least heightened the provocation and brought it nearer to the point of His final abandonment. We cannot say of any of you that you have come this length already, but we can say of all who retire from us this day without an effective purpose of immediate repentance, that by this single act of resistance you have brought yourselves nearer to it. The sin against the Holy Ghost is not a point of mysterious speculation, it is a point of practical importance. It is a point of plain and impressive application to every ordinary conscience. And what a fearful importance does it confer on every call to turn to God! What a mighty reinforcement to every argument that can be addressed to you for turning immediately that by every resistance to every single impulse that is made upon you, you are working up the sin against the Holy Ghost, nearer and nearer to that point of aggravation at which He takes His final departure away from you, and that you are making further approaches to a state of desperate impenitency. that you are getting forward to such a pitch of hardened opposition as constitutes a sin unto death, a sin for which no intercession will avail, no prayer of weeping relative will be lifted with efficacy to heaven. No earthly expedient will ever woo that spirit back again whom your manifold provocations and your oft-repeated contempt have determined to let you forever alone. The sin against the Holy Ghost is not some obscure and useless doctrine which occupies its hidden corner in the field of revelation, and forms a legitimate topic of speculation only to those who have attained some rare and monstrous distinction by a daring feat of impiety. It carries a lesson along with it which applies to you all at this very moment. If there be some old among you upon the obduracy of whose hackneyed conscience the call we have now lifted in your hearing makes no practical impression, Then look not for the sin against the Holy Ghost in any guilty act by which some passage of your former history is deformed. It consists in that repeated act by which you have turned the very call of the Gospel away from you, every call of the Gospel. And the evidence of it does not lie in anything that memory can furnish you with out of the materials of the history that is past. The evidence of it lies in the present condition of your soul as to its moral and religious sensibility, and if that sensibility is so far deranged as to beget in you at this moment no impulse towards your returning to God in that way of appointed mediatorship that is made known to us in the New Testament, this is a fail and an alarming symptom as to you, and will have you reason to suspect and to anticipate and to tremble. Again, if there be some old among you who, after a sleep so long and so profound that it bore a resemblance to the irrecoverable sleep of death, are now vitiated with a movement and a desire and a concern after these things, and feel a readiness in you to be all that Christ would have you to be, and are looking earnestly towards the way of His salvation, and long to be established upon it, then we have no power of divination into the way or the mind of the unsearchable Spirit. All that we can do is to put a fair interpretation upon the facts that are before us. And the fact of an arrested conscience, even on the eleventh hour of an indolent and a rebellious day, speaks for itself and tells you that he has not yet left you. And we feel not that we are exceeding our warrant by a single inch when we try to cheer you on by the language of encouragement and call upon you not to quench the Spirit. not to let this movement in your hearts pass unproductive away from you, not to make of it but one transitory glimpse previous to an everlasting departure. But do follow out the impulse that you have gotten, and drink in all the comfort that the free grace of the gospel is fitted to inspire, and aspire after all the strictness of walk and conversation which becomes the profession of it. And let not the imploring cry for the clean heart and the right spirit cease to ascend to the throne of God, through the channel of a son, till the answer come down upon you in all its fullness, and your repentance be perfected. But let the youngest also among you, and by addressing ourselves both to old and young, we comprehend all who now hear us. Learn what a fearful thing it is to tamper with conscience, to stifle any of its movements, to suppress the dictates of your inward monitor on any temptation whatever, or to suffer the small, still voice within you to be deafened and overborne by the maddening outcry of those lawless, those deriding those profligate scorners with whom you may have unhappily associated. By so doing you commit an offence against the light of conscience, you commit an offence against that present agent who makes the light to shine upon it. And one such offence facilitates a way to another, and you enter on a career of defiance to principle. And the matter aggravates, and the sin accumulates upon you till it arrives at that fatal point in the history of every man who walks the whole of the broad way which leadeth to destruction, even to that point where the Holy Ghost abandons him forever. And that just because the sin against the Holy Ghost is now wrought up to that degree of enormity which provokes him to take his final and irrecoverable leave of you. Every slighted call brings you nearer to this point. Every neglected warning brings you nearer to it. Every sermon, however much it may be talked of and liked and acquiesced in by the understanding, if it till not on the practical powers brings you nearer to it, the history of this very day may bring you nearer to it. And therefore it is that we never can consent to repentance on any other terms than repentance now. We never can listen without alarm to all the misapplied phraseology about the eleventh hour. We never can speak to you in any other language than today while it is called today. We never can lay before you the gift of an offered Savior, but we must speak of now as your accepted time, and now as the day of your salvation. And we have but one object, and all our explanation has been thrown away on him who retires from us this evening, and who, if hitherto a stranger to the power and significance of these things, does not from this time forward begin and carry on that good work of turning to the Lord, which shall terminate in the secure and everlasting enjoyment of his presence in Paradise. Now, to turn all this to the practical account of regulating our intercessions in behalf of others, suppose in the first instance that I possessed in a perfect degree a gift that we know to have been miraculously conferred in the first age of Christianity, the discerning of spirits. Suppose me endowed with a faculty of looking to another man, and taking as accurate a note of the movements of his heart, as if I could perceive through a window the secrecy of all its operations. Give me the power in particular of estimating all the degrees of his actual resistance to the voice of conscience, and furnish me at the same time with the knowledge of what point of resistance it is, that the Holy Spirit gives up the man with whom he has been striving, to the infatuation of his own perverse and determined willfulness. And then would I know at what instant of time it was that he had committed a sin unto death. Then I would know how long he remained a hopeful subject of my intercessions. And then would I know the time of his arrival at that point in the history of impenitence. when the inspired apostle of our text withdraws his positive sanction from my prayers. It is to be observed that he does not speak upon the subject with the tone and in the terms of decision, he does not peremptorily forbid prayer, He speaks in a manner of a man who had received no positive commission upon the subject. He leaves it on the footing of a point of doubtfulness whether a man should pray or not for an acquaintance in these circumstances. He announces himself to his readers very much in the same way in which Paul announced himself, when he ventured to speak in his own person and not with the authority of an inspired messenger. I speak as a man. I give you my own judgment, says Paul, in a matter in which God has not thought fit to favor me with any revelation. In the verse before us, John does not even venture to give us his own judgment. He goes no further than to express his opinion on the inefficacy, and therefore his doubtfulness, as to the propriety of intercession when it was made in behalf of one who had sinned the sin unto death. But he at least supposes that some of those whom he addressed had the means of knowing when a professing Christian committed this sin. Suppose them to have had this knowledge. Suppose that, in virtue of the miraculous gift of discerning spirits, they were made sure of the irrecoverable state of some member of their society. Then they could not pray for his recovery in faith. They could not, along with such a prayer, present that offering to God which is essential to its acceptance. They could not, in this instance, comply with the injunction of the Savior, who tells His disciples that whatever they ask in prayer, let them believe that they are to receive it, and they shall receive it. They could not believe that they were to obtain by the power of their supplications a recovery of the soul of Him, whom they knew that the Holy Spirit had irrecoverably abandoned. They could not therefore do what in the verses immediately preceding the text they were told would give an unfailing success to all their petitions. They could not ask for this thing, knowing at the same time that it was agreeable to the will of God, and therefore knowing that they should have the petitions that they desired of Him. And in these circumstances does John, by expressing his doubtfulness whether such a prayer was right, withdraw at least a sanction of a positive authority from any intercessions delivered for an object so hopeless and so unattainable. This, then, is a practical result that would come out of the circumstances of the first Christians. Those of whom they did not know that they had committed the sin unto death, they would make the subjects of their intercession before God. And as to those of whom they did know that they had been guilty of this sin, they would feel from the want of faith in the possibility of the object, and from the discouragement they received at the mouth of an apostle, that they could not pray for them with any efficacy. Now just conceive them to have no certain way of knowing at all whether any had committed this sin or not. What effect should this have on the practice of intercession? why it would bring the whole human race within the circle of their prayers. It would enable them to fulfill the injunction of pray for all men without laying any such modification on this precept as is pointed out by the apostle in the text. Those whom they thought hopefully and well of, they could, of course, pray for with a higher degree of confidence before God than those of whom they were ignorant or doubtful. But still there was no positive knowledge of their case being irrecoverable that ought at all to restrain them from such petitions as, Lord, if it be thy will, do thou work faith with power in the heart of this particular acquaintance. Lord, if it be possible that the obstinate enmity to the truth which festers in the heart of another can be made to yield to the influences of Thy Divine Spirit, do Thou cause it to pass away from him. Lord, do thou recall my unhappy relative, from those depths of alienation in which he is sunk, and raise him from his death and trespasses and sins to the new obedience of a spiritual resurrection? Yes, and though his depravity should accumulate upon him by every hour of his earthly existence, though the hardness of an impenitent heart should be ever gathering into a temper of still more settled obstinacy than before, Though habit should be compassing him round with the enclosure of a tighter and more inextricable bondage, nay, though in the secret councils of heaven his die should be cast, and months or seasons may have rolled since the Spirit made his last attempt upon him, and then died away into a final and irremediable separation, yet so long as this council is a secret to you, so long as in your mind this question has a slight uncertainty to rest upon it, Then you are not released from the duty that lies upon you, and acting as it is your humble and becoming part to do, on the revealed things which belong to you and to your children, you are at your post when you pray for the man of whose fate you are in the dark, though his fate may have long been fixed and determined on. Now this exhibits to us a kind of intercourse which goes on very extensively between earth and heaven. The intercourse, if we may use the expression of praying at a venture, it is a kind of intercourse warranted by scriptural example. Did not our Savior pray that if possible the cup might pass from Him? And He had to drink it to the very dregs. Did not Peter tell Simon Magus to pray God if perhaps the thought of his heart might be forgiven him? And in the Old Testament, have we not examples of this uncertainty as to the result both of praying and of doing? Does not God call on the people to prove Him, to put Him to the trial by their prayers? And does not the expression repeatedly occur, Let us return unto the Lord, at one time in the way of supplication, at another in the way of obedience? And it is stated, as the effect of it, that it may be the Lord will be gracious. What then should be the practice of the present day? We have no doubt that there are many who have put the final seal upon their own condemnation. But the question is, are there any upon whom that seal is legible to us? Is there a single individual of our acquaintance upon whose forehead we can read the description that he is undone? Is there a mark set upon him by which we can learn that he has rendered himself a fugitive and a vagabond from the mercy of God? Is there any such index that it all offers itself to the eye of our senses? And if there be none, then, is there any one of us who can so weigh the secrets of the heart and so penetrate into the counsels of God as to determine of one single human being who walks abroad on the scene of life and population around us that he is an outcast from prayer? In those days of miracle, when the discerning of spirits was given to apostles and to primitive teachers, there may have been individuals on behalf of whom the duty of prayer ought to be suspended, who had not only thrown themselves irrecoverably out from the mercies of God, but who, certainly known to be so, had arrested that voice of supplication which wont to ascend for them from their fellow men. In those days of wide and visible distinction between the church and the world, when the very profession of Christianity proved a certain degree of sincerity and earnestness, when by the very act of being admitted into the society of disciples it was made evident that there was a certain liking for their doctrine, and a certain sympathy in their feelings and in their faith, and a certain participation in the hopes of the gospel, and a certain taste in the word of God, and a certain habit of living by the powers of a coming world, In those days when men by their very profession proved that they were so far partakers of the Holy Ghost, that to throw him off after all their experience of the power and preciousness of his teaching, that to throw him off after all the fellowship they had with him, and all the favors of light and direction and joy they had gotten from his hand, argued a degree of resistance more hardened and more irrecoverable than even to hold out against his first and his earliest instigations. In such days, and with such a visible landmark before them as the withdrawal of an apostate from their communion, we know not but that even ordinary and unendowed Christians may have been able to judge of some of them that they had so fallen away, and so crucified to themselves the Son of God afresh, And so put them to an open shame, that they had committed the sin unto death, and were beyond the reach of human prayer, because it was impossible to renew again unto repentance. But tell us, if you have attained this certainty of any one man, you can point your finger to. Can you say of any one desperado in wickedness that there goes an outcast from mercy, and that it is in vain to pray for him? Or rather, is it not true of us all that such is our ignorance of the human heart, and so deep is that veil with which the God of wisdom has chosen to shroud the doctrine of individual destiny, that there is not a man within the range of the acquaintance of any of us, of whom it is not our becoming duty to pray in the behalf, lest peradventure God may give him repentance to the acknowledging of the truth? Now mark how the very principle which runs through the subject of praying for others at adventure applies in the whole extent of it to the subject of preaching to others at adventure. He who is put in charge of the gospel knows not to whom it shall be the savor of life unto life, and to whom it shall be the savor of death unto death. He is at his post, and in the exercise of his duty, when he proclaims it in the hearing of all, as that free and unconditional offer of mercy which is at the taking of all. He knows not whether the offer is to light, nor from whose individual bosom it is to chase away his heavy alienation from the God whom he has offended, nor what is the heart that shall be softened by it out of all the obstinacy of its former impenitence, nor in what quarter of the crowd that is before him that man is to be found. whose conscience shall surrender itself to the power and urgency of the preacher's voice, nor into whose conviction the winged messenger shall find its entrance, because the power and demonstration of the Spirit have lent to it all its efficacy. Why, he is like a man drawn a bow at a venture, and he knows not whether the arrow is to speed its uncertain way. But of one thing he is certain, that if the argument by which he is trying now to storm the fortress of human corruption shall frawl fruitless on the soul of any individual amongst you, that soul is strengthening the bulwarks of its future resistance against him. And the weapons of its spiritual warfare are becoming every day more languid and more ineffectual for their purpose. And the Holy Ghost, grieved by this fresh act of contempt and disobedience, is nearer than ever to the step of final abandonment. And thus it is, that a doctrine which, if it only ministered exercise to the understanding, we never should have touched upon, a doctrine which, if only served to regale the curiosity of the speculative, is to him of no more use than any one of the lofty abstractions of philosophy. A doctrine which may be talked about, and controverted, and commented on in a thousand different ways, while no salutary alarm is felt, and no energetic purpose is formed, upon the undoubted truth that every day a procrastination is near you to that point of time at which the Spirit shall cease to strive with you. Thus it is that the doctrine of the sin against the Holy Ghost may be turned to the attainment of a practical end. It should so tell, in fact, on the hearts and the consciences of all men as to help on the business of their immediate repentance, and it leaves everyone without the shelter of a single pretext for delaying to turn to God in His appointed way, and fleeing from all sin to flee for refuge to the hope set before them in the gospel. These explanations may serve perhaps to do away a difficulty which to the eye of a superficial observer hangs over a remarkable passage in the history of our Saviour. On his approach to the city of Jerusalem it is said of him that when he came near and beheld the city, he wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong to your peace, But now they are hid from thine eyes. It looks a mystery that our Saviour should weep for that which he had powered to ward off from the object of his tenderness. That he who created these worlds, and who is now exalted a prince and a saviour, should abandon himself to the helplessness of despair when he contemplated the approaching fate of that city, which after all the wrongs he had sustained from it, and all the perverseness and provocations he had gotten from his hands, He still longed after and sighed over in all the bitterness of grief at the prospect of its coming visitation. Why it may be thought, could not he have fulfilled every desire of his sympathizing heart by introposing the might and sovereignty which belonged to him? Could not he have arrested the progress of the victorious armies? Could not he have been for a wall of defense around his beloved city? And whence that dark and mysterious necessity to which even the power of him, to whom all power was committed both in heaven and earth, was constrained to give away, insomuch that the being in whom was vested an omnipotence over the whole domain of nature and providence felt that he had nothing for it, but to sit him down and weep over the doom that he saw to be irrecoverable? It is true that the inhabitants of this devoted city were the children of darkness. It is true that they still put the calls and the offers of the New Testament away from them. It is true that their yet unpenetrated hearts were shielded round by an obstinacy which had withstood every previous application. But could not he, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, shine in their hearts with such a power and a splendor of conviction, as would have been utterly irresistible? Could not he, who was able to subdue all things unto himself, have subdued his countrymen out of that obstinacy which had hitherto stood immovable to all the influence that was brought to bear upon it? Could not that influence have been augmented? Could it not have been wrought up to such a degree of efficacy as would have overmatched the whole force and tenacity of their opposing prejudices? And had this been done, the people would have been converted, and the threatened vengeance been withdrawn, and the Saviour would have seen in His countrymen the travail of a soul and been satisfied? And a mysterious phenomenon of the greatest and the powerfulest of all beings weeping over a calamity to avert which he had both the power and the inclination, would have not been presented. And how then does all this accord with what we know, or what we can guess, of the character of God's administration? Now this brings us to the limit between those secret things which belong to God, and those things which are revealed, and which belong to us and to our children. It were well for us that we gave up all our guesses, and made no attempt to be wise about that which is written. And it were well for us that we remain satisfied with what God is pleased that we should know, or with being wise up to that which is written. If the question related merely to the power of God, we are apt to think that there is no limit whatever to what He simply can do. We are apt to think, for example, that God could, if He had chosen, have lifted by a single act of remission all the penal consequences that sent away from us, and have treated us as creatures who stood absolved from the guilt of all our transgressions, and have introduced us in this state into heaven, and made each of us live in a state of enjoyment there throughout all eternity. But God has other attributes than those of mere power, and in virtue of them he has chosen to conduct the administration of his government on certain great and unchangeable principles. And he has told us that nothing remains for us but to take the information just as it is given. He has told us that without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins and no forgiveness, without faith in that propitiation which is through the death of Jesus. And thus had the Son of God to bear the burden of all the vengeance that we should have borne, and to take upon His shoulders the whole weight of the world's atonement, and to pour out His soul for us in tears and agonies and cries, and had there been no other attributes in the character of the Godhead but the simple energy of His omnipotence and the longings of His compassion, All these pains and sorrows of suffering, innocence, might have been spared, and without so heavy a sacrifice, the barrier which defended the gate of Paradise might have been opened to a guilty world. But to truth and justice of God demanded an expiation, and we show the docility which belongs to us when we give our unreserved acquiescence to the recorded And like little children in humility, as we are in understanding, it is our part to take the statement as the statement is offered to us. In the same manner, when his Jewish enemies were proceeding to put our Savior to the trial, and were mustering up their witness against him, and were concerting all those measures which led to his execution, he could have interposed and defeated all their policy, and overthrown all the might of that fearful combination that was leagued to destroy him. And had there been nothing but power in the case, and a simple desire to ward off from the Son of God all the disgrace and humiliation and misery he was about to endure, how readily would twelve legions of angels have pulsed every arm and sent consternation into the every heart of his persecutors. But here lay the necessity, and a necessity too which, according to our Saviour's own account of the matter, constituted an invincible barrier in the way of His deliverance. This cannot be, says He, for how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled? The truth of God behove to be accomplished. The prophecies of God must obtain their vindication. And dire as the spectacle was, to see perfect innocence so cruelly borne down, It was all forced to give way before a great and unchangeable principle in the divine administration. Now apply this to the mantra before us. Take into account only the power of the Savior to deliver the city of Jerusalem and the strength of His kind and affectionate desires towards it, and you might think that there lay before Him a plain and practicable way for the fulfillment of the object. But there was another principle of the divine administration which overruled the whole of this mantra, and without attempting to dive into the reasons of the counsel of God, or to inquire why He has adopted such a principle, enough for us as the bare announcement of the fact that it is so. He is found out, and he has published a way of salvation, and a message of peace is made to circulate round the world, and all who will are made welcome to partake of it. And the Spirit, urging every one to whom the word of salvation is sent, to turn unto Christ, from their iniquities, plies them with as much argument, and holds out to them as much light, and affects the conscience of one and all of us with as much power, as ought to constrain us to the measure of accepting the Saviour, and relinquishing for Him the idol of every besetting sin. and of every seducing vanity. But if we will not be constrained, it is the motive of his procedure with every human soul gradually to cease from his work of contesting with them. And he will not always strive. And to him who has the prosperity of yielding to his first influences, more will be given. And to him who has not, there will even be taken away from him such influences as he may have already had. And thus it is that the way of the spirit with the conscience of man harmonizes with all that we feel and all that we experience of the workings of this conscience. If often stifled and repressed, it will at length cease to meddle with us, and enough for every practical purpose that we know this to be the fact. enough that it is made known to us as a principle of God's administration, though we know not the reason why it should be so, enough to alarm us into an immediate compliance with the voice of our inward monitor, that should we resist it any longer, the time may come when even omnipotence itself will not interpose to save us, enough to compel our instantaneous respect for all its suggestions, that should we keep unmoved and unawed by them, even the God of love, who wills the happiness of all his children, may find that the wisdom and the purity and the justice of his government require of him our final and everlasting abandonment. And, oh, how we should tremble to presume on the goodness of God when we see the impressive attitude of him, whose, oh, the kindness and gentleness and best of beings look to the great mass of his countrymen, and foresaw the wretchedness that was in reserve for them, and instead of offering to put forth the might of His resistless energy for their deliverance, did nothing but give way to the tenderness of His nature, and weep for it a stress which He would not remedy. They had got beyond that irrecoverable point we have so much insisted on. They had tried the Spirit of God to the uttermost, and He had ceased to strive with them. At that time of their day, When they had minded the things which belonged to their peace, they would have done it with effect. They put away from them his every admonition and his every argument. And now there lay upon them the stern and unrelenting doom that were forever hid from their eyes. Let us once more make the application. The goodness of God lies in the freeness of that offer wherewith He urges you now. And He backs this offer by the call of repentance now. And He tells you that to carry forward and to perfect this repentance, He is willing to minister help to all your infirmities now. And on this your day, He calls you to mind all things. and to proceed upon these things now. But should this goodness not lead you to repentance, then it is not a goodness that you have any warrant to calculate upon at any future stage of your history. And a time may come when all these things shall be hid from your eyes. The goodness of God is perfect, as all His other attributes are. But then it is a goodness exercised in that one way of perfect wisdom, which He has thought fit to reveal to us. It is a goodness which harmonizes in all its displays with such maxims and such principles in the way of God's administration, as God has thought fit to make known to us. It is a goodness that will not survive all the resistance and all the provocations that we may choose to inflict upon it. It is a goodness and virtue of which every one of us now may turn to the God whom we have offended, and be assured of His abundant forgiveness, and be admitted into all the privileges of His reconciled children, and rejoicing in the blood that cleanses from all sin, stand with all the securities of conscience acceptance before Him, and be established in that way of new obedience for which He is both able and willing most abundantly to strengthen us. All this now, all this to-day, while it is called to-day, should you heart and not your heart. All this on that critical and interesting now, which is called the accepted time and the day of salvation. But, oh, forget not that the same Saviour, who sounded just such calls in the ears of His countrymen, and would have gathered them together even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, ere a few years more, had rolled over the city of Jerusalem, wept when he beheld it, and thought of the stern and unalterable necessity of its approaching desolation of the sin unto death.