if I did from that moment forth, I should have no hope, but only a fearful looking forward to judgment and fiery indignation.  And have you never felt, when you were tempted to do wrong:  ’I dare not do it for my own sake; for if I did this one wickedness, I feel sure that I never should be an honest man again?’ If you have felt that, thank God, indeed; for then you have seen the things which belong to your peace; you have known the day of your visitation; and you will be a better man as long as you live, for having fought against that one temptation, and chosen the good, and refused the evil, when God put them unmistakeably before you.

No; the real danger is, lest a man should be as those Jews, and not know the day of his visitation.  Ah, that is ruinous indeed, when a man’s eyes are blinded as those Jews’ eyes were; when a great temptation comes on him, and he thinks it no temptation at all; when hell is opening beneath him, with the devils trying to pluck him down, and heaven opening above him, with God’s saints and martyrs beckoning him up, looking with eyes of unutterable pity and anxiety and love on a poor soul; and that poor soul sees neither heaven nor hell, nor anything but his own selfish interest, selfish pleasure, or selfish pride, and snaps at the devil’s bait as easily as a silly fish; while the devil, instead of striking to frighten him, lets him play with the bait, and gorge it in peace, fancying that he is well off, when really he is fast hooked for ever, led captive thenceforth from bad to worse by the snare of the devil.  Oh miserable blindness, which comes over men sometimes, and keeps them asleep at the very moment that they ought to be most wide awake!

And what throws men into that sleep?  What makes them do in one minute something which curses all their lives afterwards?  Love of pleasure?  Yes:  that is a common curse enough, as we all know.  But a worse snare than even that is pride and self-conceit.  That was what ruined those old Jews.  That was what blinded their eyes.  They had made up their minds that they saw; therefore they were blind:  that they could not go wrong; therefore they went utterly and horribly wrong thenceforth:  that they alone of all people knew and kept God’s law; therefore they crucified the Son of God himself for fulfilling their law.  They were taken unawares, because they were asleep in vain security.

And so with us.  By conceit and carelessness, we may ruin ourselves in a moment, once and for all.  When a man has made up his mind that he is quite worldly-wise; that no one can take him in; that he thoroughly understands his own interest; then is that man ripe and ready to commit some enormous folly, which may bring him to ruin.

When a man has made up his mind that he knows all doctrines, and is fully instructed in religion, and can afford to look down on all who differ from him; then is that man ripe and ready for doing something plainly wrong and wicked, which will blunt his conscience from that day forth, and teach him to call evil good, and good evil more and more; till, in the midst of all his fine religious professions, he knows not plain right from plain wrong—­full of the form of godliness, but denying the power of it in scandal of his every-day life.