accusing conscience for ever; or hinder Christ from coming to judge the world; or fly from the judgment-seat, and by any possibility delay or prevent a minute examination of your life; or stay the sentence which the omniscient and holy Judge shall pronounce upon you? And if you cannot do this,--and if, rather, every power, faculty, and emotion of your heart and soul must one day be roused to the intensest pitch of earnestness about your eternal destiny,--do you not think it wise, my brother, to think about all this now?--_now_, when there is a remedy, rather than _then_, when there is none? This suggests another reason why possibly you hate to think about the future. Not only are you conscious of want of any preparedness for it, but you do not see how it can be much better with you. You have, in a word, lost confidence in God--have no faith in His good-will to _you_. You think of Him--if you think of Him at all--as one who watches you with a jealous or angry eye; who has no wish that you should be better or happier than you are; or who, if He can save you, will not; or who, if He will, offers to do so only on such hard and impossible terms as to make it practically the same as if there was no salvation for _you_. In one word, you suspect God hates you, or at least is indifferent to you--if, indeed, He knows anything at all about you, which you are not quite sure of! It is very shocking to write such things: but it is much more shocking that any one should think or believe such things; for he who so thinks and believes is as yet profoundly ignorant of God. What is called God, is as unlike Him who is the living and true God as is any hideous idol in a heathen temple. But this ignorance breeds fear--and fear, hate--and hate increases the fear, until the future, in which this God must be met, is put away as a horrible thing, or never thought of at all.