and will stand by it, you are consistent in denying that he can be summoned to the bar of God, and be tried for eternal life or death.  But if you concede that he has had one talent, or two talents, committed to his charge; and still more, if you exaggerate his gifts and endow him with five or ten talents, then it is impossible for you to save him from the judgment to come, except you can prove a perfect administration and use of the trust.[3]

2.  In the second place, it follows from the doctrine of the text, that the degraded and brutalized population of large cities is in a state of condemnation and perdition.

There are heathen near our own doors whose religious condition is as sad, and hopeless, as that of the heathen of Patagonia or New Zealand.  The vice and crime that nestles and riots in the large cities of Christendom has become a common theme, and has lost much of its interest for the worldly mind by losing its novelty.  The manners and way of life of the outcast population of London and Paris have been depicted by the novelist, and wakened a momentary emotion in the readers of fiction.  But the reality is stern and dreadful, beyond imagination or conception.  There is in the cess-pools of the great capitals of Christendom a mass of human creatures who are born, who live, and who die, in moral putrefaction.  Their existence is a continued career of sin and woe.  Body and soul, mind and heart, are given up to earth, to sense, to corruption.  They emerge for a brief season into the light of day, run their swift and fiery career of sin, and then disappear.  Dante, in that wonderful Vision which embodies so much of true ethics and theology, represents the wrathful and gloomy class as sinking down under the miry waters and continuing to breathe in a convulsive, suffocating manner, sending up bubbles to the surface, that mark the place where they are drawing out their lingering existence.[4] Something like this, is the wretched life of a vicious population.  As we look in upon the fermenting mass, the only signs of life that meet our view indicate that the life is feverish, spasmodic, and suffocating.  The bubbles rising to the dark and turbid surface reveal that it is a life in death.

But this, too, is the result of sin.  Take the atoms one by one that constitute this mass of pollution and misery, and you will find that each one of them is a self-moving and an unforced will.  Not one of these millions of individuals has been necessitated by Almighty God, or by any of God’s arrangements, to do wrong.  Each one of them is a moral agent, equally with you and me.  Each one of them is self-willed and self-determined in sin.  He does not like to retain religious truth in his mind, or to obey it in his heart.  Go into the lowest haunt of vice and select out the most imbruted person there; bring to his remembrance that class of truths with which he is already acquainted by virtue of his