Trouble makes some men mad.  It was so with Job.  He had lost his property, he had lost his physical health, he had lost his dear children, and the losses had led to exasperation instead of any spiritual profit.  I suppose that he was in the condition that many are now in who sit before me.  There are those here whose fortunes have begun to flap their wings, as though to fly away.  There is a hollow cough in some of your dwellings.  There is a subtraction of comfort and happiness, and you feel disgusted with the world, and impatient with many events that are transpiring in your history, and you are in the condition in which Job was when the words of my text accosted him:  “Beware lest He take thee away with His stroke and then a ransom can not deliver thee.”

I propose to show you that sometimes God suddenly removes from us our gospel opportunities, and that, when He has done so, our case is ransomless.  “Beware lest He take thee away with His stroke:  then a great ransom can not deliver thee.”

I. Sometimes the stroke comes in the removal of the intellect.

“Oh,” says some man, “as long as I keep my mind I can afford to adjourn religion.”  But suppose you do not keep it?  A fever, the hurling of a missile, the falling of a brick from a scaffolding, the accidental discharge of a gun—­and your mind is gone.  If you have ever been in an anatomical room, and have examined the human brain, you know what a delicate organ it is.  And can it be possible that our eternity is dependent upon the healthy action of that which can be so easily destroyed?

“Oh,” says some one, “you don’t know how strong a mind I have.”  I reply:  Losses, accident, bereavement, and sickness may shipwreck the best physical or mental condition.  There are those who have been ten years in lunatic asylums who had as good a mind as you.  While they had their minds they neglected God, and when their intellect went, with it went their last opportunity for heaven.  Now they are not responsible for what they do, or for what they say; but in the last day they will be held responsible for what they did when they were mentally well; and if, on that day, a soul should say:  “Oh, God, I was demented, and I had no responsibility,” God will say:  “Yes, you were demented; but there were long years when you were not demented.  That was your chance for heaven, and you missed it.”  Oh, better be, as the Scotch say, a little “daft,” nevertheless having grace in the heart; better be like poor Richard Hampson, the Cornish fool, whose biography has just appeared in England—­a silly man he was, yet bringing souls to Jesus Christ by scores and scores—­giving an account of his own conversion, when he said:  “The mob got after me, and I lost my hat, and climbed up by a meat-stand, in order that I might not be trampled under foot, and while I was there, my heart got on fire with love toward those who were chasing me, and, springing to my feet, I began to exhort and to pray.”  Oh, my God, let me be in the last, last day the Cornish fool, rather than have the best intellect God ever created unillumined by the Gospel of Jesus Christ!