Nature had
to do it by her very constitution. It is her defence against waste that
decay of faculty should immediately follow disuse of function. He that
hath ears to hear, he whose ears have not degenerated, let him hear.

Men tell us sometimes there is no such thing as an atheist. There must
be. There are some men to whom it is true that there is no God. They
cannot see God because they have no eye. They have only an abortive
organ, atrophied by neglect.

All this, it is commonplace again to insist, is not the effect of
neglect when we die, but while we live. The process is in full career
and operation now. It is useless projecting consequences into the future
when the effects may be measured now. We are always practicing these
little deceptions upon ourselves, postponing the consequences of our
misdeeds as if they were to culminate some other day about the time of
death. It makes us sin with a lighter hand to run an account with
retribution, as it were, and delay the reckoning time with God. But
every day is a reckoning day. Every soul is a Book of Judgment and
Nature, as a recording angel, marks there every sin. As all will be
judged by the great Judge some day, all are judged by Nature now. The
sin of yesterday, as part of its penalty, has the sin of to-day. All
follow us in silent retribution on our past, and go with us to the
grave. We cannot cheat Nature. No sleight-of-heart can rob religion of
_a present_, the immortal nature of a _now_. The poet sings--

"I looked behind to find my past,
And lo, it had gone before."

But no, not all. The unforgiven sins are not away in keeping somewhere
to be let loose upon us when we die; they are here, within us, now.
To-day brings the resurrection of their past, to-morrow of to-day. And
the powers of sin, to the exact strength that we have developed them,
nearing their dreadful culmination with every breath we draw, are here,
within us, now. The souls of some men are already honey-combed through
and through with the eternal consequences of neglect, so that taking the
natural and rational view of their case _just now_, it is simply
inconceivable that there is any escape _just now_. What a fearful thing
it is to fall into the hands of the living God! A fearful thing even if,
as the philosopher tells us, "the hands of the Living God are the Laws
of Nature."

Whatever hopes of a "heaven" a neglected soul may have, can be shown to
be an ignorant and delusive dream