I ask you solemnly, my friends, each one of you, which would you sooner do—stay here on earth, or go to heaven? You need not answer _me_. I am afraid many of you would not dare answer me as you really felt, because you would be ashamed of not liking to go to heaven. But answer God. Answer yourselves in the sight of God. When you keep yourselves back from doing a wrong thing, because you know it is wrong, is it for love of heaven, or for mere fear of being punished in hell? Some of you will answer boldly at once: “For neither one nor the other; when we keep from wrong, it is because we hate and despise what is wrong: when we do right it is because it is right and we ought to do it. We can’t explain it, but there is something in us which tells us we ought to do right.” Very good, my friends, I shall have a word to say to you presently; but in the meantime there are some others who have been saying to themselves: “Well, I know we do right because we are afraid of being punished if we do not do it, but what of that? at all events we get the right thing done, and leave the wrong thing undone, and what more do you want? Why torment us with disagreeable questions as to _why_ we do it?” Now, my friends, to make the matter simpler, I will take you at your words, for the sake of argument. Suppose you do avoid sin from the fear of hell, does that make what you do _right_? Does that make _you_ right? Does that make your heart right? It is a great blessing to a man’s neighbours, certainly, if he is kept from doing wrong any how—by the fear of hell, or fear of jail, or fear of shame, or fear of ghosts if you like, or any other cowardly and foolish motive—a great blessing to a man’s neighbours: but no blessing, that I can see, to the man himself. He is just the same; his heart is not changed; his heart is no more right in the sight of God, or in the sight of any man of common sense either, than it would be if he did the wrong thing, which he loves and dare not do. You feel that yourselves about other people. You will say “That man has a bad heart, for all his respectable outside. He would be a rogue if he dared, and therefore he _is_ a rogue.” Just so, I say, my friends, take care lest God should say of you, “He would be a sinner if he dared, and therefore he is a sinner.”