him to condescend to bless you with his indwelling life, to give power to the right thing in your nature, to irradiate you with his light, to actuate you by his love, and to be an impulse of perfection within you. As you open your nature to receive God, the spirit within you will spring forward; it will respond swiftly to the touch of its original Source; it will rise in protest against the weaknesses and passions that have choked and smothered it. Blessed with the movements of God, it will glow, develop, acquire ascendence; it will bring all your nature into harmony and peace; it will be an impulse to all that is “lovely and of good report.” But observe this, my friend—if you will hearken to your carnal inclination; if you will give heed to the drivelling folly of fools; if you will not receive Christ; if you will have none of his counsels, none of his institutions; if you will choose none of his ways—then in you there never can grow up a spirit trained for perfect bliss. Men object to hell. What is hell, but to be outside the loyalty and love of heaven? It is an infinite right due to the universe to keep out of heaven a spirit that has rejected the aid that would have made it fit for heaven. It may be a mercy to keep a soul, all of whose tastes are carnal and earthly, out of heaven, as it is a mercy to take a creeping worm out of uncongenial sunlight, and place it in darkness. If you have allowed idiots to teach you that it is manly to sneer at prayer to God, what right have you to complain if you remain unblessed by God? If you deliberately choose darkness instead of light, what wrong is done you if you are left in the “outer darkness,” whatever that may be? If a flowering plant should say, “I will not have what heaven’s influences can do for me,” it would be righteously excluded, in its hideous deformity, from the monarch’s banqueting-hall. Ah, that plant _must_ be obedient. But you, akin to the angels, have the awful liberty of disobedience. If you choose not Christ, it will be because you harden your heart against him; because you close your nature to the heavenly drawings that would bless you. There is a passage of Scripture of fathomless significance. The gracious gifts of God to the spirit of man are said to be to eternal life, but “sin” is said to “_reign unto death_.” Yes, the principle of sin in the nature, if yielded to, if not overcome by God’s Spirit, quenches the innocence of infancy and the purity of youth; corrupts the imagination, defiles the affections, inflames the passions, hardens the feelings, degrades soul and spirit to be slaves to the flesh, deadens religious capacity, extinguishes holy susceptibility, darkens the understanding to the things of God, makes gross the heart, dulls the hearing, murders the angel in a man, and kills every heaven-directed aspiration; and then—and then—what remains for such a spirit but to abide in death, and be left to wander for ever in the unknown realms of