But why talk of refuge?  Who needs it, if the refuge spoken of be a city or a castle, into which men fly for safety?  It is all sunlight here.  No sound of war in our streets.  We do not hear the rush of armed men against the doors of our dwellings.  We do not come with weapons to church.  Our lives are not at the mercy of an assassin.  Why, then, talk of refuge?

Alas!  I stand before a company of imperiled men.  No flock of sheep was ever so threatened or endangered of a pack of wolves; no ship was ever so beaten of a storm; no company of men were ever so environed of a band of savages.  A refuge you must have, or fall before an all-devouring destruction.  There are not so many serpents in Africa; there are not so many hyenas in Asia; there are not so many panthers in the forest, as there are transgressions attacking my soul.  I will take the best unregenerated man anywhere, and say to him, You are utterly corrupt.  If all the sins of your past life were marshaled in single file, they would reach from here to hell.  If you have escaped all other sins, the fact that you have rejected the mission of the Son of God is enough to condemn you forever, pushing you off into bottomless darkness, struck by ten thousand hissing thunder-bolts of Omnipotent wrath.

You are a sinner.  The Bible says it, and your conscience affirms it.  Not a small sinner, or a moderate sinner, or a tolerable sinner, but a great sinner, a protracted sinner, a vile sinner, an outrageous sinner, a condemned sinner.  As God, with His all-scrutinizing gaze, looks upon you to-day, He can not find one sound spot in your soul.  Sin has put scales on your eyes, and deadened your ear with an awful deafness, and palsied your right arm, and stunned your sensibilities, and blasted you with an infinite blasting.  The Bible, which you admit to be true, affirms that you are diseased from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot.  You are unclean; you are a leper.  Believe not me, but believe God’s Word, that over and over again announces, in language that a fool might understand, the total and complete depravity of the unchanged heart:  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”

In addition to the sins of your life there are uncounted troubles in pursuit of you.  Bereavements, losses, disappointments are a flock of vultures ever on the wing.  Did you get your house built, and furnished, and made comfortable any sooner than misfortune came in without knocking, and sat beside you—­a skeleton apparition?  Have not pains shot their poisoned arrows, and fevers kindled their fire in your brain?  Many of you, for years, have walked on burning marl.  You stepped out of one disaster into another.  You may, like Job, have cursed the day in which you were born.  This world boils over with trouble for you, and you are wondering where the next grave will gape, and where the next storm will burst.  Oh, ye pursued, sinning, dying, troubled, exhausted souls, are you not ready now to hear me while I tell you of Christ, the Refuge?