he relations between Him and
us, that that is what He has to do in order to get men to love Him.
He cannot force them. He cannot prise open a man's heart with a
crowbar, as it were, and force Himself inside. The door opens from
within. 'Behold! I stand at the door and knock.' There is an 'if.'
'If any man open I will come in.' Hence the beseeching, hence the
wail of wisdom that cries aloud and no man regards it; of love that
stands at the entering in of the city, and pleads in vain, and says,
'I have called, and ye have refused.... How often would I have
gathered ... and ye would not.' Oh, brethren! it is an awful
responsibility, a mysterious prerogative, which each one of us,
whether consciously or no, has to exercise, to accept or to refuse
the pleadings of an entreating Christ.

And let me remind you that the act of refusal is a very simple one.
Not to accept is to reject; not to yield is to rebel. You have only
to do nothing, to do it all. There are dozens of people in our
churches and chapels listening with self-satisfied unconcern, who
have all their lives been refusing a beseeching God. And they do not
know that they ever did it! They say, 'Oh! I will be a Christian
sometime or other.' They cherish vague ideas that, somehow or other,
they are so already. They have done nothing at all, they have simply
been absolutely indifferent and passive. Some of you have heard
sermons like this so often that they produce no effect. 'It is the
right kind of thing to say. It is the thing we have heard a hundred
times.' Perhaps you wonder why I should be so much in earnest about
the matter, and then you go outside, and discuss me or the weather,
and forget all about the sermon. And thus, once more, you reject
Christ. It is done without knowing it; done simply by doing nothing.
My brother! do not stop your ears any more against that tender,
imploring love.

Then let me remind you that this refusing the beseeching of God is
the climax of all folly. For consider what it is,--a man refusing his
highest good and choosing his certain ruin. I am afraid that people
have been arguing and fighting so much of late years over disputable
points in reference to the doctrine of future retribution that the
indisputable fact of such retribution has lost much of its solemn
power.

I pray you, brethren, to ask yourselves one question: Is there
anything, in the present or in the future condition of a man that is
not reconciled to God, which ex