e are progressive deterioration and
approximation to disintegration and ruin. How many men there are
listening to me now who were far nearer being delivered from their
sins when they were lads than they have ever been since! How many in
whom the sensibility to the message of salvation has disappeared, in
whom the world has ossified their consciences and their hearts, in
whom there is a more entire and unstruggling submission to low things
and selfish things and worldly things and wicked things, than there
used to be! I am sure that there are not a few among us now who were
far better, and far happier, when they were poor and young, and could
still thrill with generous emotion and tremble at the Word of God,
than they are to-day. Why! there are some of you that could no more
bring back your former loftier impulses, and compunction of spirit
and throbs of desire towards Christ and His salvation, than you could
bring back the birds' nests or the snows of your youthful years. You
are perishing, in the very process of going down and down into the
dark.

Now, notice, that the Apostle treats these two classes as covering
the whole ground of the hearers of the Word, and as alternatives. If
not in the one class we are in the other. Ah, brethren! life is no
level plane, but a steep incline, on which there is no standing
still, and if you try to stand still, down you go. Either up or down
must be the motion. If you are not more of a Christian than you were a
year ago, you are less. If you are not more saved--for there is a
degree of comparison--if you are not more saved, you are less saved.

Now, do not let that go over your head as pulpit thunder, meaning
nothing. It means _you_, and, whether you feel or think it or
not, one or other of these two solemn developments is at this moment
going on in you. And that is not a thought to be put lightly on one
side.

Further, note what a light such considerations as these, that
salvation and perishing are vital processes--'going on all the time,'
as the Americans say--throw upon the future. Clearly the two
processes are incomplete here. You get the direction of the line, but
not its natural termination. And thus a heaven and a hell are
demanded by the phenomena of growing goodness and of growing badness
which we see round about us. The arc of the circle is partially
swept. Are the compasses going to stop at the point where the grave
comes in? By no means. Round they will go, and will c