of His grace.  He invited us by His Providence and His Spirit three hundred and sixty-five days of every year since we knew our right hand from our left.  If we declined it every time, or treated the invitation with indifference, and gave twenty or forty or fifty years of indignity on our part toward the Banqueter, and at last He spreads the banquet in a more luxurious and kingly place, amid the heavenly gardens, have we a right to expect Him to invite us again, and have we a right to blame Him if He does not invite us?

If twelve gates of salvation stood open twenty years or fifty years for our admission, and at the end of that time they are closed, can we complain of it and say, “These gates ought to be open again.  Give us another chance”?  If the steamer is to sail for Hamburg, and we want to get to Germany by that line, and we read in every evening and every morning newspaper that it will sail on a certain day, for two weeks we have that advertisement before our eyes, and then we go down to the docks fifteen minutes after it has shoved off into the stream and say:  “Come back.  Give me another chance.  It is not fair to treat me in this way.  Swing up to the dock again, and throw out planks, and let me come on board.”  Such behavior would invite arrest as a madman.

And if, after the Gospel ship has lain at anchor before our eyes for years and years, and all the benign voices of earth and heaven have urged us to get on board, as she might sail away at any moment, and after awhile she sails without us, is it common sense to expect her to come back?  You might as well go out on the Highlands at Neversink and call to the “Aurania” after she has been three days out, and expect her to return, as to call back an opportunity for heaven when it once has sped away.  All heaven offered us as a gratuity, and for a life-time we refuse to take it, and then rush on the bosses of Jehovah’s buckler demanding another chance.  There ought to be, there can be, there will be no such thing as posthumous opportunity.  Thus, our common sense agrees with my text—­“If the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.”

You see that this idea lifts this world up from an unimportant way-station to a platform of stupendous issues, and makes all eternity whirl around this hour.  But one trial for which all the preparation must be made in this world, or never made at all.  That piles up all the emphases and all the climaxes and all the destinies into life here.  No other chance!  Oh, how that augments the value and the importance of this chance!