02.4. Illusive Pleas Examined

Section II.

Illusive Pleas Examined

Here, then, there is a palpable want of congruity between religion and your feelings. Is the fault with you or with religion? Is religion that harsh, cheerless, morose system which you have imagined it to be, or are your faculties so disordered that you have entirely mistaken its nature? For the sake of argument, let us assume that you are right in your estimate of religion. Let us suppose that it ic a scheme of faith and morals adverse to present enjoyment; that it forbids even what we are accustomed to regard as innocent pleasures; that the life to which it calls us is a gloomy life; that its paths are full of thorns, with only here and there a flower, and that whatever it may promise for the future, it has little or nothing to recommend it in so far as this world is concerned.

Conceding all this, of what avail would it be in justifying or even extenuating your neglect of religion? The vital question is, whether Christianity is of God. If it is, all arguments drawn from its nature, with a view of discrediting its claims to our obedience, must be inconclusive and impertinent. For if Christianity is true, it proposes to us the only method of reconciliation to God, and the only means by which we can escape everlasting torments. What could be more idle, then, than to talk of the “inconveniences and, trials” to which the reception of its doctrines might subject us? If a profession of Christianity even involved imminent personal peril; like as in the early days of the church, we were liable to be hurried off from the Lord’s Supper to the dungeon, or the stake, — what then? Is the rage of them who, at most, can only kill the body, to be more dreaded than His wrath who can destroy both soul and body in hell? Make the way to heaven as rough and thorny as you choose; multiply its obstacles; magnify its dangers; add any practicable amount of actual suffering, as the indispensable portion of every traveler, — so it really conducts to heaven, all these hinderances combined are not of the weight of a grain of sand, contemplated in their bearing upon the question, “What ought I to do?" The instant you concede the truth of the Bible, you are shut up to a foregone conclusion. It is at once the height of arrogance, and the extreme of folly, to admit that God has spoken to us, and then to palter about “considering and obeying” his commands, because the tone of them does not suit us, or obedience to them may expose us to trouble. But we can stand upon firmer ground than this. The concession just made is a sheer gratuity. Religion is no such gloomy and prison like system. Its mission in our world is one of God-like beneficence. Its hands are full of blessings. Its paths are peace. It confers substantial happiness here, as well as a title to perfect and eternal happiness hereafter. The evidences of this are within your reach. They are to be found in the Bible itself, and in the united testimony of all who have had experience of its benefits. Not indeed that a religious life involves no difficulties. It is justly represented as a warfare—an exterminating warfare. It must needs be a road somewhat rough and dangerous which leads from a revolted world to heaven. But the very fact that you can conceive of this system as one hostile to your present enjoyment, and adapted to throw the somber hues of the grave over all that is bright and cheerful in life, illustrates the evil tendency of your inconsideration. You are repelled from the consideration of it because it wears to your eye so lowering an aspect. If you must barter away your cheerfulness, you will at least postpone the sacrifice as long as possible. Do you not believe that God is a Being of infinite goodness and mercy, and that he delights, not in the misery, but in the happiness of his creatures? Does not this very scheme of religion, about which we are arguing, attest his concern for our welfare, in a manner adapted to silence all doubts and extinguish all skepticism? Is the sentiment to be tolerated for one moment, that he who so loved the world, as to give his only-begotten Son to die for it, could frame a system of religion, in any the least particular unfavorable to our wellbeing? Can you persuade yourself; that he who spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, will not with him also freely give us all things?

Whence, then, these most unwarrantable suspicions about the proper effects of religion? Whence these injurious prejudices against it, as being adverse to rational and elevated happiness? If; as you admit, it bears GOD’S image and superscription, how can you think of it as a sour arid ascetic scheme, or suppose it would require of you any sacrifice which is not demanded by your own good? If you will but reason a little on the subject, you will find ample cause to distrust your impressions as to its nature, as you will certainly see both the injustice and the impolicy of being deterred by such a prejudice, from a careful consideration of its claims. Nay, if you are disposed to deal honestly with yourself, you will find material for sober reflection, in the very fact that religion should wear this forbidding guise; that adapted and intended, as your reason no less than revelation assures you it must be, to comfort and bless you, it should suggest to your minds only images of sadness or terror. How unavoidable the presumption, that you must be laboring under some gross hallucination; that some violent disease has impaired and confounded your faculties; that the defects you attribute to religion are in your own character; and that your repugnance to it is a startling proof; how much you stand in need of its healing power. This neglect of it, however, is to be but temporary. You find a shelter from the reproaches of the Bible, and of your own conscience, in the reflection that by-and-by the subject shall be considered; that you will take it up, and make amends, by a thorough examination, for your present indifference to it. But why should you do this? Why not dismiss the subject altogether? If it is so unwelcome to you, why let it project its dark shadows athwart your future path, and obscure the serenity of your declining years? You are ready with your answer: — “It would be madness to banish finally a subject which involves my well-being for eternity. I must attend to it sooner or later, or be lost forever.” Will you do yourself the justice to weigh the import of this answer? You “must consider the subject of religion hereafter, because it involves your well-being for eternity.” Give me leave to put this in another form, without altering the sense. “On my reception or rejection, of the gospel offer, is suspended my everlasting destiny. If, through the mercy and grace of God, I embrace it, I shall at my death ascend to heaven, and be perfectly holy and happy forever. If I refuse or neglect to embrace it, I must, at death, be cast into outer darkness, Hell will be my home; the devils and, lost spirits my companions; I must lie down in the unquenchable fire, and endure the gnawings of the worm that dies. This doom may overtake any moment, since nothing is more fragil than life. Therefore, in order so horrible a destiny, I must hereafter, at some undefined period, when my antipathy to religion shall have vanished, give attention to the sujbect, and make preparation for a change of worlds!" Such is the import of your language, without the slightest coloring. And in what light does it present your inconsideration? Did you ever hear of so impotent a conclusion, from such majestic premises? Were logic and reason ever before so put to shame? Were eternal things ever treated with such grave trifling? You will consider of religion hereafter, because if you die, (which you may do to-day,) without having attended to it, you are lost beyond redemption! And in this purpose you rest, simply from “the want of a disposition” to apply your mind to the subject now. You “feel no interest” in the matter at present, and you must wait until you do; when that auspicious day arrives, that you are disposed to hear what God has to say to you, you will listen to his communications!

Reference has already been made to the indignity which this conduct casts upon the Supreme Being. Not to revert to that topic here, do you not perceive, in the state of feeling in question, a most cogent argument why you should bring your mind into instant and earnest contact with the gospel? The greater your aversion to this, the more palpable your need of it. This aversion is the vital principle of the malady you are seized with, and for which the gospel is the only antidote. It stands forth, a convincing and solemn memento of that violent disjunction between your soul and God, which can be removed only through your sincere repentance and faith in the Redeemer. And when you talk of waiting until you feel sufficient “interest” in the matter to give heed to it, can you suppose that the course you are pursuing is adapted to bring about this desired change in your feelings? Will your love of the world be diminished, by a continued devotion to the world? Will the power of sin over you be abated by indulgence in sin? Will your wayward passions and attachments be weakened by gratification? Are you so thoughtless or unknowing, as to fancy that a long course of estrangement from your higher interest, of aversion to it, of resistance against its claims, of suppression of the remonstrances of conscience in its behalf; is to leave you in a kind of mental state, impartial to admit at length the conviction, that now it is high time, and easily convertible into a Christian spirit? Consider that all this time you are forming the habits, which, when inveterately established, will either be invincibly upon you through life, or require a mighty wrench to emancipate you. This refusal to think; this revolting from any attempt at self-examination; this averting of your attention from serious books; this declining to seek the Divine favor and assistance by prayer; this projecting of schemes bearing no regard to that favour, and which are not to need that assistance; this eagerness to seize each transitory pleasure; this preference of companions, who, perhaps, would like you the worse, if they thought you feared God, or cared for your eternal welfare; — these dispositions, prolonged in a succession of your willing acquiescences in them, will grow into a settled constitution of your soul, which will thus become its own inexorable tyrant. The habit so forming will draw in to it all the affections, the workings of imagination, and the trains of thought; will so possess itself of them, that in It alone they will live, and move, and have their being. It will have a strong, unremitting propensity to grow entire, so as to leave nothing unpreoccupied in the mind, for any opposing agent to take hold on, in order to counteract it, as if it were instinctively apprehensive of the effect of protests from conscience, or visiting’s from the powers of heaven, or intimations from the realm of death; and, therefore, intent on forming the sentiments of the soul to such a consistence and coalition, as shall leave none of them free to desert at the voice of these summoners.”

It is, indeed, a monstrous deception you practice upon yourself; when you fancy that a course of implicit submission to these earth-born propensities will ultimately generate a disposition to break away from the bondage they impose. As well might the inebriate pretend that prolonged indulgence in his cups would by-and-by evolve a disgust for the poison which is consuming him; or the husbandman, that a thorough seeding his plantation with thistles, would guarantee a generous harvest of grain. It is a strange way of insuring the renovation of your character, to foster principles and habits which are in flagrant antagonism to all holiness. These very habits and principles constitute the grand hinderance to your salvation now; they operate with such potency as even to inspire an antipathy to all reflection on your spiritual state. By what alchemy are they to be transmuted into monitors to repentance and stimulants to a holy life? How is an ever-increasing alienation from God to facilitate your return to him? If you have no inclination to return now, why should you have when the distance which separates you from him has been indefinitely increased? The conclusions to which, so many lines of abstract argument conduct us, may be tested by observation and experience. You will be able, without going beyond the sphere of your daily walks, to find individuals who have long occupied the ground you stand upon. Twenty, thirty, forty years ago, when pressed with the obligation of immediate repentance, they resisted and deferred it on the ground that they then “felt no disposition” to consider it. They had the full purpose of complying with it, but deemed it advisable to wait until their indifference had passed away. Has it passed away, or are they waiting still? To your eyes, however it may be to their own, the case is too plain and too affecting to need an interpreter. You see how, during all this period, they have been heaping up obstacles between themselves and heaven. By a silent and gradual process, they have invigorated their secular principles, and become more completely saturated with the spirit of the world. The net-work of earthly passions and projects which encloses them, once so fragile, is intricate and compact. Avenues to their consciences, which were once open, are shut up. They are less sensitive to the appeals of Scripture. It is more difficult to arouse them to wholesome meditation upon their prospects for eternity. They have the same latent intention, of repentance; but when you look at the superincumbent mass of earthliness and sin which has accumulated upon it, you feel that nothing short of a miracle can ever vitalize it, so as to convert the purpose to repent into actual repentance.

All this is as clear as the meridian sun to your eyes, in respect, to many persons whom you have seen growing old or approximating to old age in the neglect of religion. And is there not something still nearer home to corroborate it? Can you not refer to a period in your own experience, when the ascendency of the world over you was less complete than it is now? Has the result justified your calculation, that the lapse of time would abate your disinclination to serious thought? Is your repugnance to prayer and to the study of the Scriptures diminished? Do you find it more difficult to ward off the shafts of divine truth, as they reach you in the sanctuary? Have you a keener sense of the vanity of earth, and a growing disposition to engage in the service of God? Or is the reverse of all this true? Is the tide of worldliness rising higher and higher, and gradually filling up every interstice of your heart? Has the broad current of your thoughts and affections become thoroughly impregnated with a mere earthly spirit? Are you living for this world alone? Are your avocations, your plans, your pleasures, your hopes, your associations, absorbed with the things which are seen and temporal, to the exclusion of the things which are unseen and eternal? And when, in some better moment, a stroke of Providence, a sermon, or some other agency happens to disturb your spiritual torpor, and awaken a feeling of remorse and uneasiness, do you find it a lighter task than it once was to smother these self-reproaches and resume your wonted levity? Surely, then, you can interpret these omens also. You require no prophet from heaven to assure you that they bear the same evil significancy with the kindred portents you so readily decipher in the case of your friends and neighbors. They are the handwriting on the wall over against you; and they admonish you, in no ambiguous symbols, of impending destruction, if you go on trusting to a life of worldliness to extinguish your repugnance to the gospel.

There is also implied, in this inconsideration, a very inadequate conception of the work we have to do, and of the time demanded to do it properly. We find in the Bible expressions like these:

“Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” “Giving all diligence, make your calling and election sure.” “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.” “If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" Salvation; then, is a difficult work. It is a great thing to be a Christian. Colossal obstructions bar the way to heaven. Every step has its dangers.

“Tis but a few that find the gate, While crowds mistake and die.” Could we see things as they are, — the deliverance of a soul from spiritual death, its liberation from the bondage of Satan, its enfranchisement with the rights and privileges of Christ’s kingdom, its gradual transformation into the divine image, its triumph over all its enemies, and its final entrance into the realms of glory, we should be no less awe-struck with the difficulty and grandeur of this achievement, than filled with admiration at the boundless wisdom, power, and grace displayed in accomplishing it. Marathon and Thermopylie, Trafalgar and Waterloo, the proudest of earth’s battle-fields, wheresoever they may be found, dwindle into insignificance when compared with the mighty conflict involved in the salvation of a single individual. Yet this sublime and most arduous undertaking, you would thrust into a mere corner of human life. Instead of making every thing give way to it, you allow every thing to take precedence of it. You make it wait on business, on study, on pleasure, on social engagements, on indolence, on indifference. There is absolutely nothing in life, however insignificant and contemptible, that this vast interest, which comprehends eternity in its issue, is not, with one person or another, compelled to wait on it. Life were short enough to do it justice, had you taken it up with the dawn of your moral agency and prosecuted it until you fell asleep in death. But it has been pushed along, year after year, — the difficulty of the work increasing as the space for performing it has been diminished, — until to-day you have more work to do and less time to do it in, than you ever had before. Nay, you are possibly even now parleying with yourself whether you shall not postpone its claims still longer. Does it at all occur to you what these questions are, which you adjourn with so fatal a facility to all the trivialities of the passing moment, which you even dismiss because you happen not to be in a mood to consider them? Alas! it is this very inconsideration which betrays you into the infatuated course we are deploring. It is not that you do not know, but because you do not consider that it is your own SALVATION which is at stake. It is the question, “How may I escape from hell and fly to heaven?" that you are forcing into some little parenthesis of your little future,—handing it over, peradventure, to the puerilities of a miserable dotage, or to the weakness, the sufferings, and the dismay of an unexpected death-bed. And wherefore? Is there any invincible necessity laid upon you to submit to this strari ge mal-adjustment of your concerns, this transfer of the very greatest and most momentous of your affairs, to the very worst season in your whole life for attending to them? No, you might just as well— yea, ten thousand times better—provide for these interests sooner. But you must needs use the vigor of your faculties and the flower of your time for other ends. This world is to be looked after. First the body, then the soul. Time first, eternity afterward, Thus the soul is robbed and ruined. What ought to be the prime business of life is delayed till the spark of life is about going out. What ought to engross all the powers of mind and body throughout the entire limit of our mortal probation, is assigned to the hapless decrepitude of old age. With the ocean of eternity before you, instead of employing the time God has given you in making preparation for your endless voyage, you waste it upon comparative trifles, and leave your whole preparation to the moment when you may be summoned to embark! This is not the design, but this is, in every instance of delay, the possible, as it is in innumerable instances the actual, result. To neglect to prepare to-day, abridges by so much your time and opportunity for preparing, and may preclude it altogether. You will not admit this. You have no thought of going into eternity unprepared. You almost resent the suggestion that you may be so infatuated as to reserve for it only the closing days or hours of life. But if this is not your purpose, what is? If you are resolved not to remit the serious consideration of religion to a death-bed, when is it to be taken up? Is the day marked in your diary? Is the purpose drawn up and put on file with the plans you have framed respecting your worldly affairs? If you were pressed to answer these questions, would not the humiliating confession be extorted from you, that this is a matter about which you have no plan; that while every possible arrangement is made concerning your earthly interests, you have fixed upon no period for looking after your immortal interests; that you have, in fact, simply a general purpose of making your Peace with God; but whether it is to be undertaken on this day twelve- month, or this day ten years, or at any other specific date, is a point you have not settled.

Now, on this admission, it is no in justice to you to allege that you are virtually remitting this great interest to your death-bed. A merciful God may interpose and prevent this procrastination; but, in so far as you are concerned, there is every probability that it will be delayed until the prospect of a speedy dissolution forces it upon your attention. There are thousands of individuals every year who are brought to this result by the identical process through. which you are passing. Relying through life on a vague and delusive purpose of embracing the gospel offer “at some period,” they are astonished, at length, (they need not have been, for it was precisely what they might have expected) to find themselves grappling with death without out any equipment for the encounter. Often are individuals of this kind heard bemoaning their folly and criminality, waking up to the consciousness that it is a sad time to prepare for eternity, when the blood is chilling in the arteries, and the affrighted soul is waiting, trembling and agonized, for the walls of its clay tenement to fall and leave it houseless, portionless, hopeless, under the piercing gaze of an injured and avenging God! And why may it not be so with you? You are treading the same path they trod. You are trusting to the same visionary hopes. You are vindicating or excusing your inconsideration by the same gossamer-like apologies. Like you, they “felt no interest” in religion, and had too little energy to bring themselves to the examination of it. Like you, they were resolved to attend to it long before death should summon them away. Like you, they permitted one earthly object and pursuit after another to beguile their time and steal away their affections. Like you, they grew insensibly hardened by this course of worldliness and this habitual resistance to divine truth. And will it be surprising, if; having thus cast in your lot with them through so large a part of tile way, you should go on with them to the close, and have your dying moments harassed with the gloom and the consternation which marked their passage into eternity? But why argue this point? Everything is conceded, when you admit, what no one has the presumption to deny, that death may come for you at any moment; that your winding-sheet may even now be in the fuller’s hands; and the shaft on its unerring flight, which is to transfix your heart. This fact alone might suffice to show you, that, in neglecting to consider the claims of religion, you are putting your everlasting all in jeopardy; that a single day’s delay may involve an eternity of unavailing remorse and sorrow.

Here then let me pause long enough to inquire whether it is possible for you, even to extenuate the guilt and folly of this inconsideration, by any of those pleas or pretexts which have hitherto satisfied you. Remember that when God charges this neglect upon you as a sin, it is your own happiness, no less than his sovereignty, which is implicated in the allegation. The crime you are guilty of is a crime against your own rational and immortal nature. You ought to be happy. You might be happy. God requires you to be happy; and has placed the means within your reach, at an infinite cost to himself, though as free as the air of heaven to you. Yet you decline his bounty. You even refuse to “consider” the sublime and glorious scheme through which he proposes it to you. And the barrier behind which you shelter yourself when this conduct is brought home to you as a sin, is that “your feelings are not interested in the matter,” and therefore you cannot attend to it. Why should they be interested unless you have tried to have them so? Suppose you deal with this subject as you would deal with a question of commerce or a question of history, with a branch of science or a personal accomplishment. Bring your mind to the patient study of the Bible. Commune with your own heart. Call upon God in prayer. Rouse yourself from your lethargy. Feel that religion is a reality; and that your soul is to be saved through the blood of the cross, or to perish eternally. Do this and see whether you cannot surmount this fearful torpor which threatens to destroy you forever.