"You have put on malediction as a vestment, and it has entered like water into your veins, and as oil into your bones." [Footnote 39]
[Footnote 39: Psalms cviii., 18.]
[Transcriber's note: Psalms cviii ends at verse 14.]
Yes; corruption has commenced; you have become offensive as a corpse, of bad odor, and scandalous to the Christian community. The finger is pointed at you, your bad life is every where spoken of, but you do not believe it; like a corpse, you are not sensible of the disgust you excite. As the sister of Lazarus said to the Lord: "It is now four days since he died, and already he stinketh." Four days! Why, it is four months—four years—forty years, since you died—since you committed mortal sin, and continued in it, oh! unrepentant sinner; and you have become insupportable. You have reaped the blasting curse you sowed: "For he that soweth in the flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption," the words of this day's Epistle. [Footnote 40]
[Footnote 40: Gal. vi., 8.]
Your dead soul is in the hands of the bearers, your companions in sin, your fellow cursers and blasphemers. The grog-shop keepers have got hold of you, and every step is a closer approach to the tomb, the gates of hell, the last home of fornicators, liars, and drunkards. How insensible you lie in their hands! The multitude may weep, in company with your poor mother, piercing cries and sobs which are heard throughout heaven and hell, but make no impression on your dull ears. No! there is no sound [that] can wake you now, but the voice of Jesus Christ, or the last trump which will summon your guilty soul to judgment.
Will that voice of Jesus Christ be heard? I know not. Will the Lord be moved to pity toward his weeping Church? I know not. Will he touch the bier upon which you are stretched stark dead, and command those companions of yours in sin to stop? I know not. Will Jesus arrest the steps of that infamous woman, of those debased, pitiless, heartless, unfeeling dram-sellers? (Did I not say that the widow was right—that they are heartless and unfeeling?) I know not. What I do know is that, if Jesus is not moved to pity, if he does not strike fear into the heart of that young man or woman, your companion in sin, if the arm of the vengeance of Christ does not fall upon that grog-shop keeper,—no other sound will waken you, so dead in sin, but that one upon the Last Day, which rather than to hear, it were better for you to sleep in eternal oblivion.
"Ah! father," you say, "that's dreadful doctrine." Yes; and there is something more dreadful about it. It is true. What saith the Apostle? "It is impossible for those who were once illuminated and have tasted the heavenly gift, and are fallen away, to be renewed again to penance, crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making him a mockery." [Footnote 41]
[Footnote 41: Heb. vi., 4-6.]
What does this mean but that, when one has fallen away into mortal sin, it is as impossible for him to do any thing toward the salvation of his soul, as it is for a dead man to raise himself to life. Lay it to heart—a most important truth—that Almighty God owes you nothing; is not bound, nor has he promised, to give you grace beyond a certain degree; while he has most emphatically warned the sinner that the time will come, and who knows—oh! dreadful thought—but that it has already arrived for you, when he will withdraw his countenance from you, and leave you to the fate you have chosen, and so justly merited. Every child has amused himself on the banks of the river or brook, watching the eddies caused by the meeting of contrary currents, and observing how the brown leaves which have fallen from the trees into the stream are suddenly caught in the circling current and whirled about, approaching at each revolution nearer the centre of it. Now, we are told by travellers, that in the vast ocean there are powerful and dangerous eddies of this sort, called whirlpools; and that large ships, if allowed to sail within their influence, are drawn in, and carried round and round, no longer obedient to the sails or rudder, and at last are completely swallowed up in the yawning vortex of whirling waters.