ts shadows, it is as
though it were not. Here is an orb that has risen up into the horizon,
but all eyes are shut.

For, no thoughtful observer fails to perceive that an earthly, and
unspiritual mode of thought and feeling is the prevalent one among men.
No one who has ever endeavored to arrest the attention of a fellow-man,
and give his thoughts an upward tendency towards eternity, will say that
the effort is easily and generally successful. On the contrary, if an
ethereal and holy inhabitant of heaven were to go up and down our earth,
and witness man's immersion in sense and time, the earthliness of his
views and aims, his neglect of spiritual objects and interests, his
absorption in this existence, and his forgetfulness of the other, it
would be difficult to convince him that he was among beings made in the
image of God, and was mingling with a race having an immortal destination
beyond the grave.

In this first feature of the case, then, as we find it in ourselves, and
see it in all our fellow-men, we have the first evidence of the need of
_awakening_ influences from on high. Since man, naturally, is destitute
of a solemn sense of eternal things, it is plain that there can be no
moral change produced in him, unless he is first wakened from this
drowze. He cannot become the subject of that new birth without which he
cannot see the kingdom of God, unless his torpor respecting the Unseen is
removed. Entirely satisfied as he now is with this mode of existence, and
thinking little or nothing about another, the first necessity in his case
is a startle, and an alarm. Difficult as he now finds it to be, to bring
the invisible world before his mind in a way to affect his feelings, he
needs to have it loom upon his inward vision with such power and
impressiveness that he cannot take his eye off, if he would. Lethargic as
he now is, respecting his own immortality, it is impossible for him to
live and act with constant reference to it, unless he is wakened to its
significance. Is it not self-evident, that if the sinner's present
indifference towards the invisible world, and his failure to feel its
solemn reality, continues through life, he will certainly enter that
state of existence with his present character? Looking into the human
spirit, and seeing how dead it is towards God and the future, must we
not say, that if this deadness to eternity lasts until the death of the
body, it will certainly be the death of the soul?

B