once He has
taken his final flight from thy soul. With that Holy Spirit some of
you have been in treaty, my dear friends.

The Holy Spirit said: "Come, come to Christ." You said: "No, I won't."
The Spirit said, more importunately: "Come to Christ." You said:
"Well, I will after awhile, when I get my business fixed up; when my
friends consent to my coming; when they won't laugh at me--then I'll
come." But the Holy Spirit more emphatically said: "Come now." You
said: "No, I can't. I can't come now." And that Holy Spirit stands in
your heart to-night, with His hand on the door of your soul, ready to
come out. Will you let Him depart? If so, then, with a pen of light,
dipped in ink of eternal blackness, the sentence may be now writing:
"Ephraim is joined to his idols. Let him alone! Let him alone!" When
that fatal record is made, you might as well brace yourselves up
against the sorrows of the last day, against the anguish of an
unforgiven death-bed, against the flame and the overthrow of an undone
eternity; for though you might live thirty years after that in the
world, your fate would be as certain as though you had already entered
the gates of darkness. That is the dead line. Look out how you cross
it!

"'There is a line by us unseen,
That crosses every path;
The hidden boundary between
God's patience and His wrath.'"

And some of you, to-night, have come up to that line. Ay, you have
lifted your foot, and when you put it down, it will be on the other
side! Look out how you cross it! Oh, grieve not the Spirit of God,
lest He never come back!

III. This fatal stroke spoken of in the text may be our exit from this
world. I hear aged people sometimes saying: "I can't live much
longer." But do you know the fact that there are a hundred young
people and middle-aged people who go out of this life to one aged
person, for the simple reason that there are not many aged people to
leave life? The aged seem to stand around like stalks--separate stalks
of wheat at the corner of the field; but when death goes a-mowing, he
likes to go down amid the thick of the harvest. What is more to the
point: a man's going out of this world is never in the way he
expects--it is never at the time he expects. The moment of leaving
this world is always a surprise. If you expect to go in the winter, it
may be in the summer; if in the summer, it may be in the winter; if in
the night, it maybe in the day-time; if you think to