tions of
arbitrary interpretation can knock that solemn significance out of
the dreadful expression. If salvation be the cure of the sickness,
perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation be
the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that
crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their
poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it into
fragments.

Of course that is metaphor, but no metaphor can be half so dreadful
as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact opposite of the salvation,
which consists in the healing from sin and the deliverance from
danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good and beautiful, is
the Christian idea of the alternative 'perishing.' Then it means the
disease running its course. It means the dangers laying hold of the
man in peril. It means the withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all
which is good, whether it be good of holiness or good of happiness.
It does not mean, as it seems to me, the cessation of conscious
existence, any more than salvation means the bestowal of conscious
existence. But he who perishes knows that he has perished, even as he
knows the process while he is in the process of perishing. Therefore,
we have to think of the gradual fading away from consciousness, and
dying out of a life, of many things beautiful and sweet and gracious,
of the gradual increase of distance from Him, union with whom is the
condition of true life, of the gradual sinking into the pit of utter
ruin, of the gradual increase of that awful death in life and life in
death in which living consciousness
makes the conscious subject aware that he is lost; lost to God, lost
to himself.

Brethren, it is no part of my business to enlarge upon such awful
thoughts, but the brighter the light of salvation, the darker the
eclipse of ruin which rings it round. This, then, is the first
contrast.

II. Now note, secondly, the progressiveness of both members of the
alternative.

All states of heart or mind tend to increase, by the very fact of
continuance. Life is a process, and every part of a spiritual being
is in living motion and continuous action in a given direction. So
the law for the world, and for every man in it, in all regions of his
life, quite as much as in the religious, is 'To him that hath shall
be given, and he shall have abundance.'

Look, then, at this thought of the process by which these two
conditions become more and