“REPENT YE, THEREFORE, AND BE CONVERTED, THAT YOUR SINS MAY BE BLOTTED OUT, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.” {77c} Repent ye, who have heretofore put conviction far from you, and have refused to receive the Gospel as your standard of faith, your sole rule of life. It may be, that to you, “behold now is the accepted time, behold now is the day of salvation;” it may be, that if ye will not hear His voice, but still harden your hearts, upon you may be passed the terrible and irrevocable sentence—“it is a people that do err in their hearts; for they have not known my ways; unto whom I sware in my wrath, that they should not enter into my rest.” {78} “GO THY WAY FOR THIS TIME, WHEN I HAVE A CONVENIENT SEASON I WILL CALL FOR THEE;” was the language of Felix, when he “_trembled_,” as Paul “reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.” And such is the course adopted by thousands; they do not violently repress the convictions of conscience; but endeavour to lull them by that “deceitful opiate—good resolves.” NOT NOW, is still the cry, when conscience warns them; not now, to-morrow, next year,—and thus repentance determined upon, but still deferred, flits before them like the treacherous light which often misleads unwary travellers, and lures them on with false hopes, until they plunge into the black gulf of horrible anguish and despair. This insane procrastination, which is so common and so fatal, that it has been said, “hell’s road is paved with good resolutions,” arises principally from man’s natural wickedness, indolence, sinfulness, and love of sin; but it is much promoted by mistaken ideas as to the nature of repentance, which, by some, is considered at all times in their own power. This fatal error—the grand cause of which is ignorance of Scripture—is much favoured by the various senses in which the term repentance is employed: it is used to express simply sorrow, sorrow and amendment, change of heart and life. Now this latter sense exactly corresponds with conversion, and the evil might, in some degree, be remedied, if there were adopted, in the case of habitual sinners, the definition of repentance given by Hammond: “A change of mind, or a conversion from sin to God; not some one bare act of change, but a lasting, durable state of new life.” For men would have a difficulty in resting satisfied with indefinitely postponing repentance, if they knew that repentance to consist not merely in sorrow for sin, not merely in external amendment, but in a change of the heart, in a renewal of the mind, wrought by the Holy Ghost, and which man possesses no inherent power to effect, but which is the gift of God through Christ.