02.6. Religion Must and Will Be Considered

Section V.

Religion Must and Will Be Considered

Up to this point, we have proceeded on the assumption that it was optional with you, whether to consider the subject of personal religion or not. In this manner the Bible treats the question. It addresses us throughout as intelligent and responsible agents, and leaves us to decide on our own course after listening to its appeals and arguments. Your own conscience assures you that you can either choose or refuse to take up the plan of salvation and examine it with a paramount reference to your own duty. God does not compel you to examine it. He commands, expostulates, invites, and points out the consequences involved in your disobedience. But lie uses no coercion. You can still refuse. You often have refused. Instead of bringing your mind into contact with religion, when its claims were urged upon you, you have purposely directed it to something else. I on have chosen rather to think of business or pleasure, or of any one of an endless variety of objects. It has not been at all to your taste to think about repentance and being born again, and renouncing the world and taking up. the cross to follow Christ. And so you have shut these topics out of your breast arid turned to more engaging themes.. And thus far you have seen no very serious evil resulting from this habit, for a habit it has become. Your inconsideration, you are apt to imagine, has not materially injured either your character or your prospects, and you are slow to believe there is so much danger attending it as has been represented. You are still disinclined, therefore, (for this is the case we are now to deal with,) to combat the repugnance you feel to spiritual religion, and to commence a new life.

Now, if this could last, there would be less room to remonstrate. You might be allowed to neglect religion just as long as your antipathy to it continued. I do not say that this would be wise, much less that it would involve no criminality. I speak only of safety. But it is of the highest moment for you to know that it cannot last. However your inconsideration may be a matter of option now, it will not be so always. There is a period coming, and it may be just at hand, when all discretionary control of this subject will be t an end, and you will be compelled to consider it. It belongs to the genius of the probationary dispensation under which we live, that no one should be forced into earnest and prolonged reflection upon the themes of the Bible. But “in the later days ye shall consider it perfectly.” On a death-bed it may be; certainly, after death, these august and solemn topics will engross your thoughts. They will gather around you then, not because they are more grateful than you find them now, nor because they are pressed upon you by more faithful and eloquent preachers. No preacher’s voice will then be needed to awaken you to deep and. anxious meditation. Nor will transitory impressions any more be obliterated, as so often happens with you here, by the returning waves of frivolity and worldliness. Alien as conviction of sin is from all your present tendencies and associations, it will then be your established condition. From never tolerating, much less fostering it, you will never be free from it. It will be your one dismal and terrible occupation, the very sum of your being, to dwell with sorrow and remorse upon those subjects which all the arguments of reason and Scripture, fortified by the warnings of Providence and the reproaches of conscience, cannot prevail upon you to admit into your bosom now.

It is due to you to place this fact distinctly before you. You should understand, that when the Scriptures exhort you to give attention to these subjects, and when the ministers of Christ enforce the exhortation with whatever skill or tenderness they can command, it is simply a question of time and place. It is as certain that you will be brought to consider them, as that you exist; and that, whatever your creed or character may be now. The whole solicitude of your Christian friends in urging the matter upon you is, that you may begin this work of consideration at once. They know you will do it sooner or later. And they know, with equal certainty, that every thing depends upon your doing it now:

If you ask what are the grounds of this representation, the answer is at hand. One of the chief reasons why you cannot be prevailed upon to apply your mind to the subject of religion is, that you are engrossed and captivated with worldly objects. At the period referred to, this temptation will be effectually removed. For “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” This change virtually takes place with every individual at his death; for his relations with this world are then terminated, as really as though the globe should at that moment be destroyed. How fearful the transition must be to an unconverted sinner, no human pen may attempt to describe. But consider what is involved in being violently torn away from all the scenes and pursuits with which you are now occupied. When the claims of Christianity are pressed upon you, you turn to your business and, your amusements, to your household cares, to your books, to your newspapers, to public events, to politics, aid upon these interests you lavish the attention which is properly due to religion. Imagine yourself to be transported to some spot on the globe where none of these things would he within your reach—no business, no recreation, no reading, no cognizance of passing events, no opportunity for the exercise of ambition, of avarice, of enterprise, no means of personal culture, no congenial society; but, on the contrary, an unavoidable and intimate fellowship with companions scarcely removed from demons in character and behavior. Can you picture to yourself any thing more horrible than this? And yet it could approximate only in the faintest degree to the actual condition upon which every unrenewed person enters at death. For the instant the soul quits the body, its severance from all things terrestrial is complete and final. There is not even left the spectacle of the earth itself to look upon; its sands and its seas, its herbage and its flowers, its forests and its mountains, all will have disappeared forever. How impossible will it be then for any man to drive away religion from his thoughts by inviting the world to come in and preoccupy them! The world, in so far as he is concerned, will have ceased to be. And, unless he has some other resource, for aught that the world can do for him, the unwelcome themes of religion will have undisputed possession of his breast.

This, however, is but a small part of the truth. Not only will he be cut off from all access to this world, but there will be every thing in his situation to force these repulsive topics upon his attention. Even here a rich man feels lost, if he is stripped of his wealth; and a scholar when deprived of his books; and a merchant when obliged to leave his business for a season; and a mother when separated from her children; and a child when removed from its parents, its school, or its play. But there, superadded to these privations, then become absolute and immitigable, there will be objects and associations too closely linked with eternal realities for the soul to elude or resist their influence. The rich man in the parable was taken up with his luxury, and feasting, and self- indulgence, until death snatched him away. Every one is ready to ask, what ensued after death. In this single instance, our Savior has lifted the curtain and given us a glimpse of a .lost soul after its discharge from the body. For although it is a parable, we cannot suppose that he would so construct it as to produce an impression upon our minds contrary to the truth. We follow this unconverted sinner, then, as the immortal spirit hastens away, and we find him presently “in hell, being in torments,” and pleading with Abraham to send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool his tongue—for he was tormented in the flame. (Luke 16:1-31) We have no reason to doubt, that a similar doom, of which this may be but a faint and imperfect symbol, is experienced by every sinner dying in impenitency. And if this be so, you may judge whether it will be possible for one in these circumstances to avoid “considering” the serious topics which were so constantly repelled during this life. Will he be able to shut out the thought of eternity from his mind, now that he finds himself in eternity? Can he refuse to think of his soul, when his soul is disengaged from its clay tabernacle, and still preserves a conscious existence? Can he say in his heart “There is no God,” when the vengeance of God is eating up his spirits? Can he treat hell as a chimera, when his ears have no respite from its weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth? Can he flatter himself; that Christ is too compassionate to allow a sinner like him to perish, when the “wrath of the Lamb” descending all around him, as “hailstones and coals of fire?" Oh, no, no! There will be no alternative left to you then. You will be compelled to think of religion. You will be no more able to thrust its solemn verities from you, than to compass your own annihilation. So far from being allowed only an occasional and transient hearing, as they are here, they will cleave to you with an invincible tenacity, and fill up all your waking and your sleeping moments. Your sleeping moments, did I say? Alas, there will be no sleep for the lost soul. That is. a night which brings no repose; a sorrow which knows no respite. Could the unhappy sinner cease from thinking, could he have even his intervals of mental torpor and forgetfulness, half the bitterness of his cup were gone. But this cannot be. He must think oh, and think on, and think on; and forever think of the subjects which are most painful to him.

These subjects, I have said, are the great themes of religion, which are so often pressed upon your attention, and to so little purpose now. Of course you are not to infer from this that they will come up before the mind of a lost sinner in the same aspect as they do here. The invisible barrier which separates time from eternity, makes an infinite difference in the relations which we sustain to the Christian revelation and its Divine Author. So long as we are in this world, the Bible addresses us in accents of mercy. The very word gospel, like the Greek term of which it is the translation, means glad tidings. It is God’s proclamation of pardon. It is a display of his benevolence and pity, which hath filled all heaven with adoring wonder. It is a free tender of forgiveness and salvation to the very chief of sinners. And this proffer he continues to urge upon us, down to the very moment of death, by motives drawn from his own perfections, from the love of Christ, from the necessities of our own souls, from the ruined condition of the world, and from many other sources. But here he stops. The change which death produces in the outward condition of the imperntent sinner, is not greater than the revolution it effects in his relations to the system of redemption. To him, it ceases to be a system of redemption. There is no offer of pardon; no call to repentance; no striving of the Spirit. The Bible and the Sabbath, the ministry of reconciliation, and even the throne of grace, disappear. Instead of mercy there is judgment. For pity, there is vengeance. For “COME UNTO ME,” there is “DEPART YE!" For the fountain opened for sin and uncleanness, there is the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. All the objects which crowd upon the disembodied spirit breathe of retribution, and anguish, aid despair. And every thing around and within conspires to fasten the thoughts, as by an inexorable necessity, upon that cross which has now ceased to be a symbol of mercy; and those abused privileges and warnings which come back with their scorpion stings to agonize the soul.

If it be disagreeable to you to think of religion here; if you have a conscious antipathy toward it when it is robed in light aid loveliness, and seeks you out, only to extricate you from the toils of sin, and conduct you in triumph up to the realms of bliss, how will you bear the contemplation of it when it stands before you, arrayed in the terrors of vindicatory justice? If you cannot endure its offers of pardon and of heaven, how will you endure it when it forces itself upon you, as an ever-present, harrowing memorial, that those offers are withdrawn forever? If it is irksome to you to hear of Christ as a SAVIOR, what would you lot give to have the rocks and the mountains to fall on you and cover you, when the archangel’s trump summons you to appear before him, as a JUDGE!

It would, perhaps, be some slight alleviation of the anguish of that day, were the whole race to encounter a common doom. So it will certainly aggravate the misery of the lost, to reflect, that to a portion of the race, this is a day of joy and triumph.

"* * * * On the right hand of bliss, Sublime in glory, talking with their peers Of the incarnate Savior’s love” they will see a multitude which no man can number, who once dwelt with them in this vale of tears. Among them may be some whom they had known as neighbors, friends, fellow-worshippers, who sat side by side with them in the sanctuary, listened to the same sermons, sang the same hymns of praise, and united, outwardly at least, in the same prayers. Nay, there may be those who were bound to them by much more endearing ties,—a wife, a parent, a child, a sister, a household group, who used to sit around the same table, and with whose lives, theirs were interlaced like the reticulations of the vine, which spread its drapery over their family mansion. These are saved, and they are lost! They journeyed through life together, and at its close, they parted, never to meet, except as they meet now, one on the right hand of Christ, the other on his left; one never jo weep, the other never to smile again. How inevitable and how poignant the conviction, that but for their own obduracy in refusing to come to Christ, they too might have been among that radiant company!

It will, indeed, be an overwhelming reflection, that they were fully instructed in their duty, and admonished of the consequences of neglecting it. Life and death were set before them. They knew, that unless they were born of the Spirit, they could not enter into the kingdom of God; that except they repented, they must perish; that if they refused to believe in Christ, they must be damned. (John 3:5, Luke 13:3, Mark 16:16) All this was distinctly presented to them. With many of them, it was instilled, into their infant minds, and reiterated by pious parents, and proclaimed in their hearing by the ministers of the gospel, through the whole course of their lives. And if the consciousness that he once had “Moses and the prophets” augmented the suffering of the rich man in hell, what pangs of sorrow must they experience who had not only Moses and the prophets, but Christ and the apostles.

“Ye knew your duty, but ye did it not!

These are the words to which the harps of grief Are strung; and to the chorus of the damned, The rocks of hell repeat them, evermore;

Loud echoed through the caverns of despair, And poured in thunder on the ear of Woe.”

There can be little hazard in saying to the reader of this treatise, that he knows his duty. It is not a thing of yesterday with you, that you have had access to the Bible, or that you have heard the preaching of the gospel. It has probably been your high privilege to grow up in the midst of religious influences, eminently adapted to direct your thoughts and efforts heavenward. So far from not being instructed in the essential doctrines and duties of Christianity, these may have been so vividly impressed upon your mind, that it has more than once cost you a struggle to stifle your convictions, and persist in your devotion to the world. Should you finally perish, (which may a merciful God prevent!) this fact cannot fail to impart new energy to every other element of your misery. It were in that case an unspeakable mitigation, could you be allowed to take your place at Christ’s bar, with the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the besotted Hindus, or with the ferocious cannibals of the South Seas. These must suffer; for they abused the light of nature. But nature is to the written revelation like a twinkling star to the sun; and all who pervert or neglect the Scriptures, must look for a corresponding retribution. There will be no wretchedness there, comparable to that of those who persevered through life, in counting the blood of the covenant an unholy thing, and doing despite to the Spirit of grace. In the parable already mentioned, Abraham begins his reply to the lost sinner with a word of most pregnant signification. “Son, remember!” What unfathomable depths of sorrow are embosomed in this word! In this life you find it convenient, and therefore easy, to forget much that pertains to your spiritual well-being. You forget the pious lessons of the nursery. You forget the beneficent invitations of the Savior. You forget the urgent expostulations of the sanctuary. You forget the serious meditations of the house of mourning. You forget the self-reproaches, and anxious prayers, and sacred promises of the bed of sickness. You forget the purposes of amendment so often formed, and the strivings of the Spirit so often resisted. But memory will be more faithful to its trust in that world. There are numerous facts which favor the belief that nothing once confided to this mysterious faculty is ever lost. Instances have occurred of persons who have been able to recite long passages of the ancient classics, many years after they had lost. all knowledge of the language, and of others who could commit to memory poems of great length in a language they never learned. There is a well-known case of a female servant who, in a fit of delirium during sickness, was heard uttering Hebrew words and sentences: a marvel which was explained when an inquiry into her history brought out the fact, that she had once lived in the family of a learned German divine, whom she had heard reading and talking in Hebrew, as she was at work in his library. And several persons rescued from drowning have testified, that while struggling under the water, their past lives have come up before them with a vividness and minuteness of detail, which they could only describe by saying, “It seemed as though I thought of every thing I had ever said and done, or that had ever happened to me.” These are fearful intimations as to the constitution of our being. They give plausibility to the conjecture, that the memory is like a book written over with sympathetic ink, which appears a blank until exposed to the fire, and then every page is seen covered with penmanship. Whatever vacuity may possess the mind of the unrenewed sinner when summoned before the bar of judgment, it is only necessary for the Judge to touch the secret spring of his memory, and his buried thoughts will start into being, “like the insects that come from an ant hill when it is stirred.” And can we doubt that God will do this? Is it not implied in the statement, that he “shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil?" And are we not warranted in believing, that this transcript of the sinner’s life, so comprehensive and so graphic as to reveal even his most secret thoughts, will not merely be spread before him at the 1st day, but kept before him by a too faithful memory throughout eternity? For myself, I cannot and do not doubt it. And if it shall prove to be so, with how much reason may we contend, that those who refused to consider the subject of religion here, will be compelled to fasten their thoughts upon these unwelcome topics hereafter; and, most of all, upon the gracious dealings of God with them, and their base requital of his kindness. The life you have lived here, must be lived over and over again there. This religious education, these parental counsels. and prayers, these providential warnings, these tranquil Sabbaths, these convictions of sin, these anxious forebodings about eternity, these resolutions of repentance, these secret cries for mercy, this shame of the cross, this fear of the world, these relapses into sin— all, all will recur hereafter, and continue to pass and repass before the mind, so long as the mind itself endures. You will think of God; but it will be as the Psalmist thought of him, “I remembered God, and was troubled.” You will think of the Bible; but it will be as of a book which is now sealed against you. You will think of the Savior; but it will be only to look on him whom you pierced, and whose blood now imprecates vengeance upon you. You will think of heaven; but it will be with the sad conviction that it was once within your reach, and is now separated from you by an impassable gulf. You will think of your Sabbaths; but it will be to reflect that they are gone forever. You will think of your seasons of religious anxiety; but it will be to remember, that when you were “almost persuaded to be a Christian,” you dismissed the subject from your breast, and threw yourself again into the arms of an ungodly world.

“Wretch that I am!" you may well exclaim, “what shall I do, or whither shall I flee? I am weighed in the balance, and am found wanting. Oh, that I had never been instructed in the will of God at all, rather than that, being thus instructed, I should have disregarded and transgressed it. Would to God I had been allied to the meanest of the human race, to them that come nearest to the state of brutes, rather than that I should have had my lot in cultivated life, amid so many of the improvements of reason, and amid so many of the advantages of religion too! and thus to have perverted all to my destruction. Who can dwell in the devouring flames? Who can lie down in the everlasting burnings? But whom have I to blame in all this but myself? What have I to accuse but my own stupid and incorrigible folly? On what is all this terrible ruin to be charged, but on this one fatal cause, that, having broken God’s law, I rejected his gospel too? And now my doom is sealed, and sealed forever.” (Vide Doddridge’s Rise and Progress.) Would that I could spare you such a recital as this. It is not of choice, but of necessity that I present it. I shrink from this topic, the misery of a lost soul, with a repugnance which is well nigh invincible. There is no theme so repulsive, so appalling to me; none that I so much dread to speak of. We are all liable to contract a subtle unbelief on this subject, which derives shelter and nourishment from our benevolent sympathies. There is something so horrible, so heart-rending in the thought, that one whom we have known and loved may pass out of this world into the abodes of the damned, and become the companion of the devil and his angels for all eternity, that we believe it as though we believed it not. We drive it away from us. We treat it as a phantom which must not be allowed to disturb our peace. But is this right? Is it wise? Is it becoming? Shall we aspire to be more merciful than the God of mercy? Are we to challenge to ourselves more tenderness than the Savior? And did he avoid this subject? Did lie refrain from speaking of “the worm that never dies and the fire that shall never be quenched? It is the awful sanctity and the ineffable gentleness of his character which impart to his utterance on this topic so sublime a pathos, so unearthly a solemnity. No mistaken lenity kept him from proclaiming that there was a hell. Nor did he ever suppress the declaration, that it is the broad road, in which the mass of the race are walking, that leads to it. These truths concern us as deeply as they could the generation among whom he lived. And woe be to us if we deny or dissemble them. Yes, there is a hell. And every one who is neglecting the great salvation, is in imminent peril of it. And now, the momentous alternative submitted to the reader is, Will you consider the subject of religion here, or will you consider it in eternity? One or the other you must do. You can no more elude it than you can cease to be. If you decline the examination of the subject here, “in the latter days you shall consider it perfectly.” Judge for yourself; whether it will not be better, infinitely better, to give your attention to it now. In this world, religion contemplates you as a sinner ruined and condemned, but reprieved. It proposes itself to you as a system of mercy. It comes with the blood of atonement and the ministry of the Spirit, with pardon, and renewal, and holiness, and peace. It breathes of penitence and love, of hope and triumph, of a reconciled God and a glorious heaven. It finds you in circumstances in which you can comply with its demands, not only without compromising any of your interests, spiritual or secular, but with decided advantage to them all. It supplies you with every needful help—with a very profusion of the means of grace. It holds out to you encouragements and inducements to the performance of your duty, of the most engaging character. And it crowns all its appeals with a distinct and monitory exhibition of the fearful consequences which must attend your refusal.

Now, contrast with this, the situation in which you will be compelled to consider the subject, if it is neglected here. No longer in a world of probation, but in a world of retribution—the light of the Sun of righteousness, which is streaming down upon your pathway now, exchanged for the blackness of darkness—all your domestic ties and social affinities dissolved—all the plans and occupations which now engross you annihilated—religion presented to you only in its terrors—the Savior known only in the dreadful anathema denounced against those who do not love him—the Spirit known only with thç anguish of the sinner who has sinned away his day of grace—with no Bible to repair to for counsel—no friend to fly to for sympathy—no God to whom you can cry for mercy—no employments which can mitigate your desolation—no companions but such as will increase your wretchedness,—al possible forms and appliances of misery around you; and, within, the gnawings of the undying worm,—no respite, no peace, no hope— the remorse which knows no cessation— the despair which knows no ebb! And all this, forever—forever—FOREVER and EVER! Oh, my fellow-sinner, can you do this? Can you postpone all serious reflection to such a world? Can you pluck down upon yourself a ruin so awful, so irretrievable? Say not that this is an exaggerated picture, adapted only to harrow up the feelings. What pencil can depict the agonies of a lost soul? If you cannot bear to look upon the canvas, how could you endure the reality? And why will you run the hazard of it, by postponing your repentance? “He that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.” Through the mercy of God, this doom, which so many others have encountered, has not yet overtaken you. You are still within sight of the cross. And the Savior still bids you look to him and live.

“Believe, and take the promised rest;

Obey,—and be forever blest !“