One day a light will flash in upon all the dark cells.  We must all be manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ.  Do you like that thought?  Can you stand it?  Are you ready for it?  My friend! let Jesus Christ come to you with His light.  Let Him come into the dark corners of your hearts.  Cast all your sinfulness, known and unknown, upon Him that died on the Cross for every soul of man, and He will come; and His light, streaming into your hearts, like the sunbeam upon foul garments, will cleanse and bleach them white by its shining upon them.  Let Him come into your hearts by your lowly penitence, by your humble faith, and all these vile shapes that you have painted on its walls will, like phosphorescent pictures in the daytime, pale and disappear when the ’Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His beams, floods your soul, leaving no part dark, and turning all into a temple of the living God.’

A COMMON MISTAKE AND LAME EXCUSE

’...  He prophesieth of the times that are far off.’—­Ezekiel xii. 27.

Human nature was very much the same in the exiles that listened to Ezekiel on the banks of the Chebar and in Manchester to-day.  The same neglect of God’s message was grounded then on the same misapprehension of its bearings which profoundly operates in the case of many people now.  Ezekiel had been proclaiming the fall of Jerusalem to the exiles whose captivity preceded it by a few years; and he was confronted by the incredulity which fancied that it had a great many facts to support it, and so it generalised God’s long-suffering delay in sending the threatened punishment into a scoffing proverb which said, ’The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth.’  To translate it into plain English, the prophets had cried ‘Wolf! wolf!’ so long that their alarms were disbelieved altogether.

Even the people that did not go the length of utter unbelief in the prophetic threatening took the comfortable conclusion that these threatenings had reference to a future date, and they need not trouble themselves about them.  And so they said, according to my text, ’They of the house of Israel say, The vision that he sees is for many days to come, and he prophesieth of the times that are far off.’  ’It may be all quite true, but it lies away in the distant future there; and things will last our time, so we do not need to bother ourselves about what he says.’

So the imagined distance of fulfilment turned the edge of the plainest denunciations, and was like wool stuffed in the people’s ears to deaden the reverberations of the thunder.

I wonder if there is anybody here now whom that fits, who meets the preaching of the gospel with a shrug, and with this saying, ’He prophesies of the times that are far off.’  I fancy that there are a few; and I wish to say a word or two about this ground on which the widespread disregard of the divine message is based.