denly there is an awful awakening. An awakening to just estimates and to the comparative values of two kingdoms and worlds. An awakening accompanied with emotions-hard, hateful, impenitent, wrathful, despairing, because of the blindness, folly, insensibility, wickedness, which led you, amid all such golden opportunities and influences, to let them pass unheeded, while choosing darkness and death rather than light and life. You are filled with cursing. The intensity of the conscious contrast between what was and is and might have been, only fills your soul with a deeper sense of pain which will engulf you in unutterable wretchedness.

Sin will then appear as an abominable, hateful, damning and damnable thing. You will loathe, condemn and hate yourself, as consciously antagonistic to holiness and a holy God. You will curse the creator and every creature as well as yourself and yet you will realize and acknowledge the righteousness and justice of all that you are experiencing.

According to the light of the present will be the blackness of the darkness beyond. According to the heights of unimproved opportunity and privilege will be the depths of misery into which you will plunge over there. According to the multiplicity of loving influences which, in this life,

would woo you to God, will be the intensity of your self-hatred and condemnation. According to the sweetness, purity and delightsomeness of your earthly life-made so for you because of the presence and operation in others of holy principles— will there be an intensity of painful recoil when confronted with a condition from which all sweetness, purity and delight have gone and there is an onrush of all that is hateful and horrible.

The comparative intensity, then, of the penal results awaiting you is an element in the case which should give you the most solemn and serious pause.

The Scriptures not only justify the worst fears which may be entertained as to this but set forth the awful possibilities in language that goes utterly beyond the present grasp of human apprehension.

If in reference to the joys awaiting the redeemed it is said "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him," it is surely implied, by parity of reasoning, that what awaits those who hate God is also beyond all present human conception.

All the imagery borrowed from material things is indicative of this. The undying worm, the unquenchable fire, the smoke of their torment, weep

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ing and wailing and gnashing of teeth, the raining upon the wicked of "snares, fire and brimstone and an horrible tempest,"-what can all such imagery mean but the infliction and suffering of the penal consequences of sin, by the impenitent, in appalling intensity. Holy men of God were speaking as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, in reference to this, and not following cunningly devised fables.

CHAPTER VII.

PENAL RESULTS (DURATION).

On the subject of the penal results of your sins there still remains another element for your consideration. It is the most appalling of all. It is that of the duration of suffering in the world to come. In view of their certainty, nature and intensity do you inquire with earnest solicitude "what must I do?" There is surely enough and more than enough in those elements of the subject to elicit such an inquiry.

But when it comes to the question as to whether they are to be in the most absolute sense without limit as to duration-ah, that is an awful abyss, the possibility of which should arouse you to the most earnest and ceaseless inquiry and effort if peradventure there might be deliverance for you. Their certainty, nature and intensity possess elements from which you are to recoil and flee as from an evil, overtopping in its manifold terrors the utmost conceptions of the heart of man. What an amazement of fear should then seize you when, in addition to the foregoing, it should be borne in

upon you that from the grasp of these awful horrors there was to be no release "for ever and ever." This is the question that now confronts

you.

Appalling though the results of sin might be in the future as to their certainty, nature and intensity, yet were there a well-grounded hope that they would at length cease, even after the lapse of inconceivable periods, then there would be involved the possibility of measurably comfortable endurance. The "Pleasures of Hope" might be felt with alleviating power, even in hell, and your existence, in view of the eternity of blessedness to follow, would be a boon of unspeakable joy to

you.

But if it is to be otherwise-if no ray of hope is to penetrate the "blackness of darkness" that will envelope you, if your wretched estate is to go on and on and on, "world without end," then your existence will be an unspeakable curse of which you would fain rid yourself, but cannot. Under such a condition "good were it for you if you had never been born."

The possibility of such a result is of too appalling a nature for you to face with nothing stronger to sustain you than a mere presumption that it may not be. To take any chances, to run any risk, where you have no well-grounded assurance