Now just suppose that a spirit should come down from heaven and knock at the gates of woe and say:  “Let that man out!  Let me come in and suffer in his stead.  I will be the sacrifice.  Let him come out.”  The grim jailer would reply:  “No, you don’t know what a place this is, or you would not ask to come in; besides that, this man had full warning and full opportunity of escape.  He did not take the warning, and now a great ransom shall not deliver him.”

Sometimes men are sentenced to imprisonment for life.  There comes another judge on the bench, there comes another governor in the chair, and in three or four years you find the man who was sentenced for life in the street.  You say:  “I thought you were sentenced for life.”  “Oh!” he says, “politics are changed, and I am now a free man.”  But it will not be so for a soul at the last.  There will be no new judge or new governor.  If at the end of a century a soul might come out, it would not be so bad.  If at the end of a thousand years it might come out, it would not be so bad.  If there were any time in all the future, in quadrillions and quadrillions of years, that the soul might come out, it would not be so bad; but if the Bible be true, it is a state of unending duration.

Far on in the ages one lost soul shall cry out to another lost soul:  “How long have you been here?” and the soul will reply:  “The years of my ruin are countless.  I estimated the time for thousands of years; but what is the use of estimating when all these rolling cycles bring us no nearer the terminus.”  Ages!  Ages!  Ages!  Eternity!  Eternity!  Eternity!  The wrath to come!  The wrath to come!  The wrath to come!  No medicine to cure that marasmus of the soul.  No hammer to strike off the handcuff of that incarceration.  No burglar’s key to pick the locks which the Lord hath fastened.  Sir Francis Newport, in his last moment, caught just one glimpse of that world.  He had lived a sinful life.  Before he went into the eternal world he looked into it.  The last words he ever uttered were, as he gathered himself up on his elbows in the bed:  “Oh, the insufferable pangs of hell!” The lost soul will cry out:  “I can not stand this!  I can not stand this!  Is there no way out?” and the echo will answer:  “No way out.”  And the soul will cry:  “Is this forever?” and the echo will answer:  “Forever!”

Is it all true?  “These shall go away into everlasting punishment, while the righteous go into life eternal.”  Are there two destinies? and must all this audience share one or the other?  Shall I give an account for what I have told you to-night?  Have I held back any truth, though it were plain, though it were unpalatable?  Must I meet you there, oh, you dying but immortal auditory?  I wish that my text, with all its uplifted hands of warning, could come upon your souls:  “Beware lest He take thee away with His stroke:  then a great ransom can not deliver thee.”