but never think they have to do with what awfully concerns themselves!  They are words, but not about realities; or if they express realities, yet realities which belong to some world of mist, and cloud, and darkness, far, far away—­one not nearly so real as this world of their own, made up of fields and barns, streets and shops, sea and ships, friends and action!  But what, let me ask, separates us from that world which we think to be so very far off—­so very unreal?  The thin coat of an artery!  No more!  Let the thin pipe burst through which our life-blood is now coursing in the full play of health, and where then will our present world, now so very real, be to us?  In a single second it will have vanished for ever from our grasp, like something we clutch at in the visions of the night.  And where then will that other world be which to many is now so dim and unreal as not to be worth thinking about?  We, the same living persons, will be in it—­in the midst of all its realities; and with these we shall have to do, and with these only, for ever and ever.

But many people do not wish to think about the unseen future.  It is not so much that no thoughts about it intrude themselves upon their minds, as that all such thoughts are deliberately banished.  It is with the eternal future as with anything which here gives them pain,—­they “hate to think about it.”  This, of course, arises from the suspicion, or rather the conviction, that it cannot be a good future to them.  They have read enough about it from the Bible to make it alarming.  At all events, they have no security for its being to them as happy as the present; and so, whether from a fearful looking for of judgment, because of their sins, or from ignorance of the means of salvation, or from unbelief in the good-will of God as ready to save them, the result is, that they voluntarily shut their eyes to, and banish all thought of, eternity.  It pains them—­it agonises them—­to put the question, “What is to become of me when I die?” And the more pain the question gives them, the more they fly to the world, and occupy their minds with its society, its amusements, and even its dissipation and debaucheries, in order to banish care and snatch a fleeting joy.  O my brother, if you so act, from my soul I feel for you and pity you!  For the sick-bed is coming, and you may be compelled to think there; and if so, you are treasuring up tenfold agony for yourself, by your present off-putting apathy and wilful thoughtlessness.  And should you manage, even in the time of sickness, and up to the very hour of death, to shut out the future from your mind; should long and inveterate habit enable you to succeed in the terrible, suicidal experiment, so that you shall die as you have lived—­fearing nothing, because believing nothing,—­can you avoid entering the other world?  Can you prevent a meeting between yourself and your God; or silence an accusing conscience for ever; or hinder Christ from coming to