books shall be opened till we shall cry to the mountains to fall on us and to the rocks to cover us?  Oh no! the truth is, the half has not been told us of the speechless stupefaction that shall fall on us when the trumpet shall sound and when Alp upon Alp of aggravated guilt shall rise up high as heaven between us and our salvation.  Difficulty is not the name for guilt like ours.  Impossibility is the better name we should always know it by.

2.  Another difficulty or impossibility to our salvation rises out of the awful corruption and pollution of our hearts.  But is there any use entering on that subject?  Is there one man in a hundred who even knows the rudiments of the language I must now speak in?  Is there one man in a hundred in whose mind any idea arises, and in whose heart any emotion or passion is kindled, as I proceed to speak of corruption of nature and pollution of heart?  I do not suppose it.  I do not presume upon it.  I do not believe it.  That most miserable man who is let down of God’s Holy Spirit into the pit of corruption that is in his own heart,—­to him his corruption, added to his guilt, causes a sadness that nothing in this world can really relieve; it causes a deep and an increasing melancholy, such as the ninety and nine who need no repentance and feel no pollution know nothing of.  All living men flee from the corruption of an unburied corpse.  The living at once set about to bury their dead.  ’I am a stranger and a sojourner among you,’ said Abraham to the children of Heth; ’give me a possession of a burying-place among you that I may bury my dead out of my sight.’  But Paul could find no grave in the whole world in which to bury out of his sight the body of death to which he was chained fast; that body of sin and death which always makes the holiest of men the most wretched of men,—­till the loathing and the disgust and the misery that filled the apostle’s heart are to be understood by but one in a thousand even of the people of God.

3.  And then, as if to make our salvation a very hyperbole of impossibility, the all but almighty power of indwelling sin comes in.  Have you ever tried to break loose from the old fetter of an evil habit?  Have you ever said on a New Year’s Day with Thomas A Kempis that this year you would root that appetite,—­naming it,—­out of your body, and that vice,—­naming it,—­out of your heart?  Have you ever sworn at the Communion table that you would watch and pray, and set a watch on your evil heart against that envy, and that revenge, and that ill-will, and that distaste, dislike, and antipathy?  Then your minister will not need to come back from his death-bed to preach to you on the difficulty of salvation.