Nay, there are seasons of recollection, in which the memory of their past lives afflicts and torments them; there are hours of melancholy, or ill health, in which the necessity of repentance seems pressing and instant; there are certain moments of terror, in which the final resolution is on the point of being taken: yet still, this delusive idea of _to-morrow_ steps in: the memory, the necessity, the terror, are over-ruled: the ungrateful task is, for the present, deferred; to-morrow laid aside, and the next day forgotten. This was the case of Felix in the text. When bad men are clothed with power, it is not easy for truth of any kind, especially for moral truth, to gain access to them. Yet it made its way to this potent governor, and with a force which nothing could resist. It borrowed the thunder of Paul’s rhetoric to speak home and loudly to his affrighted conscience. It shook his guilty mind with the sense of his crimes, his incontinence and injustice, his riot and rapine, his lust and cruelty; and still more, with the apprehension of _a judgment to come_, armed with terror, and ready to take vengeance of his multiplied iniquities. You expect now, that, in this agony, he should take the part, which duty and prudence, his conviction and his fears, equally recommended to him. You expect, that he should apply to his instructor, who had raised this storm, to compose it; and that, leaving his chair of state, he should spring forth and accost his prisoner, as the honest jaylor at Philippi had done, on a similar occasion: _What must I do to be saved[4]?_ But, no; it was not yet convenient to put that question. His pleasures, his fortune, his ambition, might be endangered by it. It was not the moment to take this decisive step. Better to think twice of it, and dismiss the preacher _for this time_. And is there nothing in this case which we may apply to ourselves? Is there none here, whom the free remonstrance of a friend, an unexpected sentence in a moral writer, the admonition of a preacher, and, above all, the _word of God_, hath, at any time, awakened to a lively sense of his condition? A reproof from one or other of these sometimes falls in so exactly with a man’s own case, and goes so directly to the heart, that he is more than commonly disturbed and confounded by it. It flashes such conviction on the mind, and shews the sinner to himself in so just a light, that he stands aghast at the deformity of his conduct, and at the peril of it. In the agitation of this distress, he half resolves to repent: nay, he strives for a moment to enforce this good resolution: when, let but that dæmon, which every sinner carries about with him, whisper the word, _to-morrow_, and his conscience revives, his fears disperse, and this precious opportunity is lost, though at the hazard of never returning any more.