From the annual meeting he shrank with an instinctive horror, and made up his mind _utterly to avoid it_. Well aware of this resolve, his tempters determined he should have no choice. How potent, how active, is the spirit of evil! How feeble is _unassisted_, _Christless_, _unprayerful_ man! Boyle found himself, he could not tell how, seated at that table on that very day, where he had sworn to himself a thousand and a thousand times nothing on earth should make him sit. His ears tingled, and his eyes swam, as he listened to the opening sentence of the president's address--"Gentlemen, this is leap year; therefore, it is _a year and a day_ since our last annual meeting." Every nerve in Boyle's body twanged in agony at the ominous, the well-remembered words. His first impulse was to rise and fly; but then--the sneers! the sneers! How many in this world, as well as poor Boyle, have dreaded a sneer, and dared the wrath of an almighty and eternal God, rather than encounter the sarcastic curl of a fellow-creature's lip! The night was gloomy, with frequent and fitful gusts of chill and howling wind, as Boyle, with fevered nerves and a reeling brain, mounted his horse to return home. The following morning, the well-known black steed was found, with saddle and bridle on, quietly grazing on the road-side, about half-way to Boyle's country-house, and a few yards from it lay the stiffened corpse of its master. Reader, the dream is horrible--truly horrible--yet not half so horrible as the reality. Ah! no. No dream can picture the full, long misery of "the worm that dieth not," "the fire that is never quenched," the woe that never ends. Oh, reader, if, under the poison of infidelity, you have been led to doubt the existence of hell, I pray God you may believe the awful reality ere you are in it! If God did not punish sin, His indifference to it would encourage it. If God did not punish sin, where were His holy abhorrence of it? If God did not punish sin, His kingdom would be a moral chaos. But His Word declares that "we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Cor. v. 10). Reader, as in the days of Noah, so now. Death threatens all who are out of Christ, and, therefore, in their sins. There was then only one place of safety; there is only one place of safety now--that is, in the Ark, Christ. "YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN." The horror you have felt in reading this dream will be no benefit to you if it is not made, in the hands of the Spirit, the means of your flying to Christ for refuge.