But it is one thing to acknowledge this in theory, and even to feel the need of Christ’s atonement, and still another thing to really appropriate it.  Unbelief and despair have great power over a guilt-stricken mind; and were it not for that Spirit who “takes of the things of Christ and shows them to the soul,” sinful man would in every instance succumb under their awful paralysis.  For, if the truth and Spirit of God should merely convince the sinner of his guilt, but never apply the atoning blood of the Redeemer, hell would be in him and he would be in hell.  If God, coming forth as He justly might only in His judicial character, should confine Himself to a convicting operation in the conscience,—­should make the transgressor feel his guilt, and then leave him to the feeling and with the feeling, forevermore,—­this would be eternal death.  And if, as any man shall lie down upon his death-bed, he shall find that owing to his past quenching of the Spirit the illuminating energy of God is searching him, and revealing him to himself, but does not assist him to look up to the Saviour of sinners; and if, in the day of judgment, as he draws near the bar of an eternal doom, he shall discover that the sense of guilt grows deeper and deeper, while the atoning blood is not applied,—­if this shall be the experience of any one upon his death-bed, and in the day of judgment, will he need to be told what he is and whither he is going?

Now it is with reference to these disclosures that come in like a deluge upon him, that man needs the aids and operation of the Holy Spirit.  Ordinarily, nearly the whole of his guilt is latent within him.  He is, commonly, undisturbed by conscience; but it would be a fatal error to infer that therefore he has a clear and innocent conscience.  There is a vast amount of undeveloped guilt within every impenitent soul.  It is slumbering there, as surely as magnetism is in the magnet, and the electric fluid is in the piled-up thunder-cloud.  For there are moments when the sinful soul feels this hidden criminality, as there are moments when the magnet shows its power, and the thunder-cloud darts its nimble and forked lightnings.  Else, why do these pangs and fears shoot and flash through it, every now and then?  Why does the drowning man instinctively ask for God’s mercy?  Were his conscience pure and clear from guilt, like that of the angel or the seraph,—­were there no latent crime within him,—­he would sink into the unfathomed depths of the sea, without the thought of such a cry.  When the traveller in South America sees the smoke and flame of the volcano, here and there, as he passes along, he is justified in inferring that a vast central fire is burning beneath the whole region.  In like manner, when man discovers, as he watches the phenomena of his conscience, that guilt every now and then emerges like a flash of flame into consciousness, filling him with fear and distress,—­when he finds that he has no security against this invasion, but that in an hour when he thinks not, and commonly when he is weakest and faintest, in his moments of danger or death, it stings him and wounds him, he is justified in inferring, and he must infer, that the deep places of his spirit, the whole potentiality of his soul is full of crime.