t
I will be ready for the next. Are you ready for the emergency? Shall I
tell you when your death hour will come? "Oh, no," says some one, "I
don't want to know. I would rather not know." Some one says: "I would
rather know, if you can tell me." I will tell you. It will be at the
most unexpected moment, when you are most busy, and when you think you
can be least spared. I can not exactly say whether it will be in the
noon, or at the sundown when people are coming home, or in the morning
when the world is waking up, or while the clock is striking twelve at
night. But I tell you what I think, that with some of you it will be
before next Saturday night.

A minister of the Gospel said to an audience: "Before next Sabbath
some of you will be gone." And a man said during the week: "I shall
watch now, and if no one dies in our congregation during this week I
shall go and tell the minister his falsehood." A man standing next to
him said: "Why, it may be yourself." "Oh, no," he replied; "I shall
live on to be an old man." That night he breathed his last.

Standing before some who shall be launched into the great eternity,
what are your equipments? About to jump, where will you land? Oh, the
subject is overwhelming to me; and when I say these things to you, I
say them to myself. "Lord, is it I? Is it I?" Some of us part to-night
never to meet again. If never before, I now here commit my soul into
the keeping of the Lord Jesus Christ. I throw my sinful heart upon His
infinite mercy. But some of you will not do that. You will go over to
the store to-morrow, and your comrades will say: "Where were you
yesterday?" You will say: "I heard Talmage preach, and I don't believe
what he preaches." And you will go on and die in your sins.

Feeling that you are bound unto death eternal I solemnly take leave of
you. Be careful of your health, for when your respiration gives out
all your good times will have ended. Be careful in walking near a
scaffold, for one falling brick or stone might usher you into the
great eternity for which you have no preparation. A few months, or
weeks, or days, or hours will pass on, and then you will see the last
light, and hear the last music, and have the last pleasant emotion,
and a destroyed eternity will rush upon you. Farewell, oh, doomed
spirit! As you shove off from hope, I wave you this last salutation.
Oh, it is hard to part forever and forever! I bid you one long, last,
bitter, eternal adieu!