an declines
to come, or treats your invitation with indifference. You in the
course of twenty years give twenty banquets, and the same man is
invited to them all, and treats them all in the same obnoxious way.
After awhile you remove to another house, larger and better, and you
again invite your friends, but send no invitation to the man who
declined or neglected the other invitations. Are you to blame? Has he
a right to expect to be invited after all the indignities he has done
you? God in this world has invited us all to the banquet of His grace.
He invited us by His Providence and His Spirit three hundred and
sixty-five days of every year since we knew our right hand from our
left. If we declined it every time, or treated the invitation with
indifference, and gave twenty or forty or fifty years of indignity on
our part toward the Banqueter, and at last He spreads the banquet in a
more luxurious and kingly place, amid the heavenly gardens, have we a
right to expect Him to invite us again, and have we a right to blame
Him if He does not invite us?

If twelve gates of salvation stood open twenty years or fifty years
for our admission, and at the end of that time they are closed, can we
complain of it and say, "These gates ought to be open again. Give us
another chance"? If the steamer is to sail for Hamburg, and we want to
get to Germany by that line, and we read in every evening and every
morning newspaper that it will sail on a certain day, for two weeks we
have that advertisement before our eyes, and then we go down to the
docks fifteen minutes after it has shoved off into the stream and say:
"Come back. Give me another chance. It is not fair to treat me in this
way. Swing up to the dock again, and throw out planks, and let me come
on board." Such behavior would invite arrest as a madman.

And if, after the Gospel ship has lain at anchor before our eyes for
years and years, and all the benign voices of earth and heaven have
urged us to get on board, as she might sail away at any moment, and
after awhile she sails without us, is it common sense to expect her to
come back? You might as well go out on the Highlands at Neversink and
call to the "Aurania" after she has been three days out, and expect
her to return, as to call back an opportunity for heaven when it once
has sped away. All heaven offered us as a gratuity, and for a
life-time we refuse to take it, and then rush on the bosses of
Jehovah's buckler demanding