e's
warning not hold in our case?--his awful warning that we shall all stand
before the judgment-seat? And is it only a strong figure of speech that
the books shall be opened till we shall cry to the mountains to fall on
us and to the rocks to cover us? Oh no! the truth is, the half has not
been told us of the speechless stupefaction that shall fall on us when
the trumpet shall sound and when Alp upon Alp of aggravated guilt shall
rise up high as heaven between us and our salvation. Difficulty is not
the name for guilt like ours. Impossibility is the better name we should
always know it by.

2. Another difficulty or impossibility to our salvation rises out of the
awful corruption and pollution of our hearts. But is there any use
entering on that subject? Is there one man in a hundred who even knows
the rudiments of the language I must now speak in? Is there one man in a
hundred in whose mind any idea arises, and in whose heart any emotion or
passion is kindled, as I proceed to speak of corruption of nature and
pollution of heart? I do not suppose it. I do not presume upon it. I
do not believe it. That most miserable man who is let down of God's Holy
Spirit into the pit of corruption that is in his own heart,--to him his
corruption, added to his guilt, causes a sadness that nothing in this
world can really relieve; it causes a deep and an increasing melancholy,
such as the ninety and nine who need no repentance and feel no pollution
know nothing of. All living men flee from the corruption of an unburied
corpse. The living at once set about to bury their dead. 'I am a
stranger and a sojourner among you,' said Abraham to the children of
Heth; 'give me a possession of a burying-place among you that I may bury
my dead out of my sight.' But Paul could find no grave in the whole
world in which to bury out of his sight the body of death to which he was
chained fast; that body of sin and death which always makes the holiest
of men the most wretched of men,--till the loathing and the disgust and
the misery that filled the apostle's heart are to be understood by but
one in a thousand even of the people of God.

3. And then, as if to make our salvation a very hyperbole of
impossibility, the all but almighty power of indwelling sin comes in.
Have you ever tried to break loose from the old fetter of an evil habit?
Have you ever said on a New Year's Day with Thomas A Kempis that this
year you would root that appetite