But suppose you escape fatal accident. Suppose you go out by the ordinary process of sickness. I will just suppose now that your last hour has come. The doctor says, as he goes out of the room: "Can't get well." There is something in the faces of those who stand around you that prophesies that you can not get well. You say within yourself: "I can't get well." Where are your comrades now? Oh, they are off to the gay party that very night! They dance as well as they ever did. They drink as much wine. They laugh as loud as though you were not dying. They destroyed your soul, but do not come to help you die.
Well, there are father and mother in the room. They are very quiet, but occasionally they go out into the next room and weep bitterly. The bed is very much disheveled. They have not been able to make it up for two or three days. There are four or five pillows lying around, because they have been trying to make you as easy as they could. On the one side of your bed are all the past years of your life—the Bibles, the sermons, the communion-tables, the offers of mercy. You say: "Take them away." Your mother thinks you are delirious. She says: "There is nothing there, my dear, nothing there." There is something there! It is your wasted opportunities. It is your procrastinations. It is those years you gave to the world that you ought to have given to Christ. They are there; and some of them put their fingers on your aching temples, and some of them feel for the strings of your heart, and some put more thorns in your tumbled pillow, and you say: "Turn me over." And they turn you over, but, alas! there is a more appalling vision. You say: "Take that away!" They say: "There is nothing there, nothing there." There is—an open grave there! the judgment is there! a lost eternity is there! Take it away! They can not take it away.
You say: "How dark it is getting in the room!" Why, the burners are all lighted. Your family come up one by one, and tenderly kiss you good-bye. Your feet are cold, and the hands are cold, and the lips are cold, and they take a small mirror and they put it over your mouth to see if there is any breathing, and that mirror is taken away without a single blur upon it; and they whisper through the room: "She is gone." And then the door of the body opens and the soul flashes out. Make room for the destroyed spirit.
Push back that door! Lost! Let it come into its eternal residence. Woe! woe! No cup of merriment now, but cup of the wrath of Almighty God. The last chance for heaven gone. The door of mercy shut. The doom sealed. The blackness of darkness forever!
Voltaire is there. Herod is there. Robespierre is there. The debauchees are there. The murderers are there. All the rejectors of Jesus Christ are there. And you will be there unless you repent. You can not say, my dear brother, that you were not warned. This sermon would be a witness against you. You can not say that God's Holy Spirit never strove with your heart. He is striving now. You can not say that you had no chance for heaven, for the Omnipotent Son of God offers you His rescue. You can not say: "I had no warning about that world; I didn't know there was any such place," for the Bible distinctly rings in your ears to-day, saying: "At the end of the world the angels shall separate the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire." And again that book says: "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." And again it says: "The smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever."
You can not say that you did not hear about heaven, the other alternative, for you hear of it now: "The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." No sorrow, no suffering, no death. Oh, will you be careless any longer, when I tell you that Christ, the Conqueror of earth and hell, offers you now escape from all peril, and offers to introduce you this very hour into the peace and pardon of the Gospel, preparing you for that good land? The sides of Calvary run blood for you. Jesus, who had not where to lay His head, offers you His heart as a pillow of rest. Christ offers with His own body to bridge over the chasm of death, saying: "Walk over Me; I am the way."
O suffering Jesus! the thief scoffed at Thee, and the malefactor spat on Thee, and the soldiers stabbed Thee; but these who sit before Thee to-day have no heart to do that. O Jesus! tell them of Thy love, tell them of Thy sympathy, tell them of the rewards Thou wilt give them in the better land. Groan again, O blessed Jesus! groan again, and perhaps when the rocks fall, their hard hearts may break.
"Nothing brought Him from above,
Nothing but redeeming love."
The promise is all free, the path all clear. Come, Mary, and sit to-night at the feet of Jesus. Come, Bartimeus, and have your eyes opened. Come, O prodigal! and sit at thy father's table. Come, O you suffering, sinning, dying the soul! and find rest on the heart of Jesus. The Spirit and Bride say "Come," and Churches militant and triumphant say "Come," and all the voices of the past, mingling with all the voices of the future, in one great thunder of emphasis, bid you "Come now!" Are not those of you who are in the third class ready to pass over into the second division, and become seekers after Christ? Ay, are you not ready to pass over into the first division, and become the pardoned sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty? I can do no more than offer you, through Jesus Christ, peace on earth and everlasting residence in His presence.
"When God makes up His last account
Of natives in His holy mount,
'Twill be an honor to appear
As one new-born and nourished there."