will which will enter into it, and the
energy of will depends upon the strength of the motives resisted. An
act, therefore, which concludes an earnest and protracted conflict,
which has not been reached without a stormy debate in the soul, which
marks the victory of evil over the love of character, sensibility to
shame, the authority of conscience and the fear of God, an act of this
sort concentrates in itself the essence of all the single determinations
which preceded it, and possesses power to generate a habit and to
derange the constitution, equal to that which the whole series of
resistances to duty, considered as so many individual instances of
transgression, is fitted to impart. By one such act a man is impelled
with an amazing momentum in the path of evil. He lives years of sin in a
day or an hour. It is always a solemn crisis when the first step is to
be taken in a career of guilt, against which nature and education,
or any other strong influences protest. The results are unspeakably
perilous when a man has to fight his way into crime. The victory creates
an epoch in his life. He is from that hour, without a miracle of grace,
a lost man. The earth is strewed with wrecks of character which were
occasioned by one fatal determination at a critical point in life, when
the will stood face to face with duty, and had to make its decision
deliberately and intensely for evil.

[Footnote 13: A Presbyterian divine, and professor of Theology, in South
Carolina, his native state: a distinguished theological writer of the
South.]

* * * * *

=_Charles P. McIlvaine,[14] 1799-1873._=

From a Sermon on the Resurrection of Christ.

=_37._=. ATTESTATIONS OF THE RESURRECTION.

Here we remark, in general, that his resurrection was the great sign
and crowning miracle to which our Lord, all the way of his ministry, to
the day of his crucifixion, referred both friends and opposers, for the
final confirmation of all his claims and doctrines. He staked all on the
promise that he would rise from death. The Jews asked of him a sign,
that they might believe. He answered, "There shall no sign be given, but
the sign of the prophet Jonas. For as Jonas was three days and nights
in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three
nights in the heart of the earth." Thus on that single; event, the
resurrection of Christ, the whole of Christianity, as it all centres in,
and depends on him,