opposite effects proceed from similar operations? Time was the turning
point. In the one case the weed was torn out at an early period of the
summer; in the other case it was torn out too late.

We have often seen a soul placed in imminent danger by the overgrowth of
cares or pleasures that threatened by their rankness to choke the seed
of the word; and we have afterwards seen that soul delivered from the
danger, by a stroke of God's providence that plucked out the weeds in
time. Many of the saved both in earth and in heaven now praise the Lord,
because he tore the idols from their hearts and spared not for their
crying. The love of Christ that had been planted in their youth, and
had, though hard pressed, still kept hold, soon spread again and
occupied all the empty space, whence the fortune, or fame, or living
treasures dearer still, had been plucked. When he came to himself, that
disciple, afflicted sore but comforted again, clearly saw and gladly
sang the mercy and judgment joined together that had cleared the room
for Christ in his heart. But examples of an opposite experience, here
and there one, stand on the edge of life's crowded highway, ghastly as
the pillar of salt on the plain of Sodom, burning into the soul of the
passenger the warning word, "Be in time." An old man has, by the hand of
the Lord in providence, been stripped of all his treasures. These
treasures, whether they were in themselves the noblest or the
meanest,--for when a man made in the likeness of God abandons himself to
the worship of an idol, it matters little whether the idol be made of
fine gold or of dull clay,--these treasures possessed and filled his
heart. Round them his understanding and affections had closely clasped,
so that his whole nature had taken the mould of the object which it
grasped. In this attitude the man grew old: the faculties of his mind
became hard and rigid like the members of his body. The bosom, no
longer pliable to open by gentle pressure, was rudely rent, and its
portion in one lump wrenched away. A deep, broad, dark chasm, like the
valley of the shadow of death, was left: and the chasm remained dark and
empty to the end; for neither the affections of the old man's soul nor
the joints of the old man's frame would fold round another portion now.
Ah! the cares and pleasures that drove Christ from the heart may be cast
out too late for letting Christ come in again to occupy the empty room.
"Now is the accepted time;