den conversions. I
venture to say that there are types of character and experience which
will never be turned to good, unless they are turned suddenly; while
there are others, no doubt, to whom the course is a gradual one, and you
cannot tell where the dawn broadens into perfect day. But, in the case
of men who have grown up to some degree of maturity of life, either in
sensuous sin or crusted over with selfish worldliness, or in any other
way, by reason of intellectual pursuits, or others have become forgetful
of God and careless of religion--unless such men are in a moment
arrested and wheeled round at once, there is very little chance of their
ever being so at all.

I am sure I am speaking to some now who, unless the truth of Christ
comes into their minds with arresting flash, and unless they are in one
moment, into which an eternity is condensed, changed in their purposes,
will never be changed.

Do not, my friend, listen to the talk that sudden conversion is
impossible or unlikely. It is the only kind of conversion that some of
you are capable of. I remember a man, one of the best Christian men in a
humble station in life that I ever knew--he did not live in
Manchester--he had been a drunkard up to his fortieth or fiftieth year.
One day he was walking across an open field, and a voice, as he
thought, spoke to him and said, naming him, 'If you don't sign the
pledge to-day you will be damned!' He turned on his heel, and walked
straight down the street to the house of a temperance friend, and said,
'I have come to sign the pledge.' He signed it, and from that day to the
day of his death 'adorned the doctrine of Jesus Christ' his Saviour. If
that man had not been suddenly converted he would never have been
converted. So I say that this story of the text is a crucial instance of
Christ's power to lay hold upon a man, and wheel him right round all in
a moment, and send him on a new path. He wants to do that with all of
you to whom He has not already done it. I beseech you, do not stick your
heels into the ground in resistance, nor when He puts His hand on your
shoulder stiffen your back that He may not do what He desires with you.

May we not see here, too, a demonstration of Christ's power to make a
life nobly and blessedly new, different from all its past, and adorned
with strange and unexpected fruits of beauty and wisdom and holiness?
This man's account of his future, from the moment of that incident on
the Damasc