Your body will soon be taken down, the castle will be destroyed, the tower will be in the dust, the windows will be broken out, and the place where your body sleeps will be forgotten; but your soul, after that, will be living, acting, feeling, thinking—­where? where?  Oh, there must be something of incomputable worth in that for which heaven gave up its best inhabitant, and Christ went into martyrdom, and at the coming of which angels chant an eternal litany and devils rush to the gate.  When everything above you, and beneath you, and around you, is intent upon that soul, you can not afford to be careless, especially when I think, this moment while I speak, there are thousands of souls in heaven rejoicing that they attended to this matter in time, while at this very instant there are souls in the lost world mourning that they did not attend to it in time.  Hark to the howling of the damned!

Oh, if this room could be vacated of this audience, and you were all gone, and the wan spirits of the lost could come up and occupy this place, and I could stand before them with offers of pardon through Jesus Christ, and then ask them if they would accept it, there would come up an instantaneous, multitudinous, overwhelming cry:  “Yes! yes! yes! yes!” No such fortune for them.  They had their day of grace, and sacrificed it.  You have yours; will you sacrifice it?  I wish that I could have you see these things as you will one day see them.

Suppose, on your way home, a runaway horse should dash across the street, or between the dock and the boat you should accidentally slip, where would you be at twelve o’clock to-night or seven o’clock to-morrow morning?  Or for all eternity where would you be?  I do not answer the question.  I just leave it to you to answer.

But suppose you escape fatal accident.  Suppose you go out by the ordinary process of sickness.  I will just suppose now that your last hour has come.  The doctor says, as he goes out of the room:  “Can’t get well.”  There is something in the faces of those who stand around you that prophesies that you can not get well.  You say within yourself:  “I can’t get well.”  Where are your comrades now?  Oh, they are off to the gay party that very night!  They dance as well as they ever did.  They drink as much wine.  They laugh as loud as though you were not dying.  They destroyed your soul, but do not come to help you die.

Well, there are father and mother in the room.  They are very quiet, but occasionally they go out into the next room and weep bitterly.  The bed is very much disheveled.  They have not been able to make it up for two or three days.  There are four or five pillows lying around, because they have been trying to make you as easy as they could.  On the one side of your bed are all the past years of your life—­the Bibles, the sermons, the communion-tables, the offers of mercy.  You say:  “Take them away.”  Your mother thinks you are delirious.  She says:  “There