I am not ashamed to be a Christian.  I would as soon be known to be a Christian as anything else.  Indeed, I wish I was, but I have not the least power to become one.  Don’t you know that with some persons there is a tide in their spiritual natures which, if taken at the flood, leads on to salvation?  Such a tide I felt two years ago.  I want you to pray for me, not that I may be led to Christ—­for that prayer would not be answered—­but that I may be kept from the temptation to suicide!”

What I had to say to the author of that I said in a private letter; but what I have to say to this audience is:  Beware lest you grieve the Holy Ghost, and He be gone, and never return.  Next Wednesday, at two or three o’clock, a Cunard steamer will put out from Jersey City wharf for Liverpool.  After it has gone one hour, and the vessel is down by the Narrows, or beyond, go out on the Jersey City wharf, and wave your hand, and shout, and ask that steamer to come back to the wharf.  Will it?  Yes, sooner than the Holy Ghost will come back when once He has taken his final flight from thy soul.  With that Holy Spirit some of you have been in treaty, my dear friends.

The Holy Spirit said:  “Come, come to Christ.”  You said:  “No, I won’t.”  The Spirit said, more importunately:  “Come to Christ.”  You said:  “Well, I will after awhile, when I get my business fixed up; when my friends consent to my coming; when they won’t laugh at me—­then I’ll come.”  But the Holy Spirit more emphatically said:  “Come now.”  You said:  “No, I can’t.  I can’t come now.”  And that Holy Spirit stands in your heart to-night, with His hand on the door of your soul, ready to come out.  Will you let Him depart?  If so, then, with a pen of light, dipped in ink of eternal blackness, the sentence may be now writing:  “Ephraim is joined to his idols.  Let him alone!  Let him alone!” When that fatal record is made, you might as well brace yourselves up against the sorrows of the last day, against the anguish of an unforgiven death-bed, against the flame and the overthrow of an undone eternity; for though you might live thirty years after that in the world, your fate would be as certain as though you had already entered the gates of darkness.  That is the dead line.  Look out how you cross it!

    “’There is a line by us unseen,
      That crosses every path;
    The hidden boundary between
      God’s patience and His wrath.’”

And some of you, to-night, have come up to that line.  Ay, you have lifted your foot, and when you put it down, it will be on the other side!  Look out how you cross it!  Oh, grieve not the Spirit of God, lest He never come back!