e no trouble at the last. You
told me if I did so and so, you would do so and so. Now you corner me,
and hedge me up, and submerge me in everything evil." "Ha! ha!" says
Satan, "I was only fooling you. It is mirth for me to see you suffer.
I have been for thirty years plotting to get you just where you are.
It is hard for you now--it will be worse for you after awhile. It
pleases me. Lie still, sir. Don't flinch or shudder. Come now, I will
tear off from you the last rag of expectation. I will rend away from
your soul the last hope. I will leave you bare for the beating of the
storm. It is my business to strip the slain."

While men are in robust health, and their digestion is good, and their
nerves are strong, they think their physical strength will get them
safely through the last exigency. They say it is only cowardly women
who are afraid at the last, and cry out for God. "Wait till I come to
die. I will show you. You won't hear me pray, nor call for a minister,
nor want a chapter read me from the Bible." But after the man has been
three weeks in a sick-room his nerves are not so steady, and his
worldly companions are not anywhere near to cheer him up, and he is
persuaded that he must quit life: his physical courage is all gone.

He jumps at the fall of a teaspoon in a saucer. He shivers at the idea
of going away. He says: "Wife, I don't think my infidelity is going to
take me through. For God's sake don't bring up the children to do as I
have done. If you feel like it, I wish you would read a verse or two
out of Fannie's Sabbath-school hymn-book or New Testament." But Satan
breaks in, and says: "You have always thought religion trash and a
lie; don't give up at the last. Besides that, you can not, in the hour
you have to live, get off on that track. Die as you lived. With my
great black wings I shut out that light. Die in darkness. I rend away
from you that last vestige of hope. It is my business to strip the
slain."

A man who had rejected Christianity and thought it all trash, came to
die. He was in the sweat of a great agony, and his wife said: "We had
better have some prayer." "Mary, not a breath of that," he said. "The
lightest word of prayer would roll back on me like rocks on a drowning
man. I have come to the hour of test. I had a chance, and I forfeited
it. I believed in a liar, and he has left me in the lurch. Mary, bring
me Tom Paine, that book that I swore by and lived by, and pitch it in
the fire, an