SECTION V.

RELIGION MUST AND WILL BE CONSIDERED.

Up to this point, we have proceeded on the assumption, that it was optional with you, whether to consider the subject of personal religion or not. In this manner the Bible treats the question. It addresses us throughout as intelligent and responsible agents, and leaves us to decide on our own course after listening to its appeals and arguments. Your own conscience assures you that you can either choose or refuse to take up the plan of salvation, and examine it with

MATTER OF PRESENT OPTION. 149

a paramount reference to your own duty. God does not compel you to examine it. He commands, expostulates, invites, and points out the consequences involved in your disobedience. But he uses no coercion. You can still refuse. You often have refused. Instead of bringing your mind into contact with religion, when its claims were urged upon you, you have purposely directed it to something else. You have chosen rather to think of business or pleasure, or of any one of an endless variety of objects. It has not been at all to your taste to think about repentance and being born again, and renouncing the world and taking up the cross to follow Christ. And so you have shut these topics out of your breast and turned to more engaging themes. And thus far you have seen no very serious evil resulting from this habit;

Your incon

for a habit it has become. sideration, you are apt to imagine, has not materially injured either your character or your prospects, and you are slow to believe there is so much danger attending it as has been represented. You are still disinclined, therefore, (for this is the case we are now to deal with,) to combat the repugnance you feel to spiritual religion, and to commence a new life.

Now, if this could last, there would be less room to remonstrate. You might be allowed to neglect religion just as long as your antipathy to it continued. I do not say that this would be wise, much less that it would involve no criminality. I speak only of safety. But it is of the highest moment for you to know that it cannot last. However your inconsideration may be a matter of

option now, it will not be so always. There is a period coming, and it may be just at hand, when all discretionary control of this subject will be at an end, and you will be compelled to consider it. It belongs to the genius of the probationary dispensation under which we live, that no one should be forced into earnest and prolonged reflection upon the themes of the Bible. But "in the latter days ye shall consider it perfectly." On a death-bed it may be; certainly, after death, these august and solemn topics will engross your thoughts. They will gather around you then, not because they are more grateful than you find them now, nor because they are pressed upon you by more faithful and eloquent preachers. No preacher's voice will then be needed to awaken you to deep and anxious meditation. Nor will

transitory impressions any more be obliterated, as so often happens with you here, by the returning waves of frivolity and worldliness. Alien as conviction of

sin is from all your present tendencies and associations, it will then be your established condition. From never tolerating, much less fostering it, you will never be free from it. It will be your one dismal and terrible occupation, the very sum of your being, to dwell with sorrow and remorse upon those subjects which all the arguments of reason and Scripture, fortified by the warnings of Providence and the reproaches of conscience, cannot prevail upon you to admit into your bosom now.

It is due to you to place this fact distinctly before you. You should understand, that when the Scriptures exhort you to give attention to these subjects,;