abides with us! we grieved him, and tried his
long-suffering, but he has not abandoned us to our own evil hearts; we
are receiving him who is the giver of life, and we still live.

But must not we speak of others? is not another case to be supposed
possible? may there not be some who cannot say with truth that they are
receiving the holy Ghost now? They received him once; we doubt it not;
perhaps they were receiving him for some length of time; their early
childhood was watched by Christian care; their youth and early manhood,
when it received freshly things of this world, received also, with
lively thankfulness, the grace of God; they can remember a time when
they were growing in goodness; when they were being renewed after the
image of God. But they can remember, also, that this time passed away;
the grace of early childhood was put out by the temptations of boyhood;
the grace of youth and opening manhood died away amid the hardness of
this life's maturity. It is so, I believe, often; that boyhood, which
is, as it were, ripened childhood, destroys the grace of our earliest
years; that again, when youth offers us a second beginning of life, we
are again impressed with good; but that ripened youth, which is manhood,
brings with it again the reason of hardness, and again our spiritual
growth, is destroyed. We can remember, I am supposing, that this fatal
change did take place; but can we date it to any particular act, or
month, or day, or hour? We can do so most rarely: in this respect the
seed of death can even less be traced to its beginning than the seed of
life. And yet there _was_ a beginning, only we do not remember it. And
why do we not remember it? Because the real beginning was in some act
which seemed of so little consequence that it made no impression; in the
altering some habit which we judged to be a mere trifle; in the
indulging some temper which even at the time we hardly noticed. Some
such little thing,--little in our view of it,--made the fatal turn; we
received the grace of God less and less: we heeded not the change for a
season; and when it was so marked that we could not but heed it, then we
had ceased to regard it; and so it was that the spring of our life was
dried up: and it is of no more avail to our present and future state,
that we once received grace, than the rain of last winter will be
sufficient to ripen the summer's harvest, if from this time forward we
have nothing but drought and cold.