best friends may have persuaded you that you have elegant manners.  Satan may have told you that you are all right; but bear with me if I tell you that, if unpardoned, you are all wrong.  I have no clinometer by which to measure how steep is the inclined plane you are descending, but I know it is very steep.  “Well,” you say, “if the Bible is true I am a sinner.  Show me some refuge; I will step right into it.”

I suppose every person in this audience this moment is stepping into some kind of refuge.  Here you step in the tower of good works.  You say:  “I shall be safe here in this refuge.”  The battlements are adorned; the steps are varnished; on the wall are pictures of all the suffering you have alleviated, and all the schools you have established, and all the fine things you have ever done.  Up in that tower you feel you are safe.  But hear you not the tramp of your unpardoned sins all around the tower?  They each have a match.  They are kindling the combustible material.  You feel the heat and the suffocation.  Oh, may you leap in time, the Gospel declaring:  “By the deeds of the law shall no flesh living be justified.”

“Well,” you say, “I have been driven out of that tower; where shall I go?” Step into this tower of indifference.  You say:  “If this tower is attacked, it will be a great while before it is taken.”  You feel at ease.  But there is an Abimelech, with ruthless assaults, coming on.  Death and his forces are gathering around, and they demand that you surrender everything, and they clamor for your immortal overthrow, and they throw their skeleton arms in the windows, and with their iron fists they beat against the door; and while you are trying to keep them out you see the torches of judgment kindling, and every forest is a torch, and every mountain a torch, and every sea a torch; and while the Alps, the Pyrenees, and Himalayas turn into a live coal, blown redder and redder by the whirlwind breath of a God omnipotent, what will become of your refuge of lies?

“But,” says some one, “you are engaged in a very mean business, driving us from tower to tower.”  Oh, no.  I want to tell you of a Gibraltar that never has been and never will be taken; of a wall that no satanic assault can scale; of a bulwark that the judgment earthquakes can not budge.  The Bible refers to it when it says:  “In God is thy refuge, and underneath thee are the everlasting arms.”  Oh, fling yourself into it!  Tread down unceremoniously everything that intercepts you.  Wedge your way there.  There are enough hounds of death and peril after you to make you hurry.  Many a man has perished just outside the tower, with his foot on the step, with his hand on the latch.  Oh, get inside!  Not one surplus second have you to spare.  Quick, quick, quick!