ct that you have rejected the mission of the Son
of God is enough to condemn you forever, pushing you off into
bottomless darkness, struck by ten thousand hissing thunder-bolts of
Omnipotent wrath.

You are a sinner. The Bible says it, and your conscience affirms it.
Not a small sinner, or a moderate sinner, or a tolerable sinner, but a
great sinner, a protracted sinner, a vile sinner, an outrageous
sinner, a condemned sinner. As God, with His all-scrutinizing gaze,
looks upon you to-day, He can not find one sound spot in your soul.
Sin has put scales on your eyes, and deadened your ear with an awful
deafness, and palsied your right arm, and stunned your sensibilities,
and blasted you with an infinite blasting. The Bible, which you admit
to be true, affirms that you are diseased from the crown of your head
to the sole of your foot. You are unclean; you are a leper. Believe
not me, but believe God's Word, that over and over again announces, in
language that a fool might understand, the total and complete
depravity of the unchanged heart: "The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked."

In addition to the sins of your life there are uncounted troubles in
pursuit of you. Bereavements, losses, disappointments are a flock of
vultures ever on the wing. Did you get your house built, and
furnished, and made comfortable any sooner than misfortune came in
without knocking, and sat beside you--a skeleton apparition? Have not
pains shot their poisoned arrows, and fevers kindled their fire in
your brain? Many of you, for years, have walked on burning marl. You
stepped out of one disaster into another. You may, like Job, have
cursed the day in which you were born. This world boils over with
trouble for you, and you are wondering where the next grave will gape,
and where the next storm will burst. Oh, ye pursued, sinning, dying,
troubled, exhausted souls, are you not ready now to hear me while I
tell you of Christ, the Refuge?

A soldier, during the war, heard of the sickness of his wife and
asked for a furlough. It was denied him, and he ran away. He was
caught, brought back, and sentenced to be shot as a deserter. The
officer took from his pocket a document that announced his death on
the following morning. As the document was read, the man flinched not
and showed no sorrow or anxiety. But the officer then took from his
pocket another document that contained the prisoner's pardon. Then he
broke down with deep