assurance of a second and more important trial in the subsequent life,
and all the preparation for eternity would be _post-mortem_,
post-funeral, post-sepulchral, and the world with one jerk be pitched
off into impiety and godlessness.

Furthermore, let me ask why a chance should be given in the next world
if we have refused innumerable chances in this? Suppose you give a
banquet, and you invite a vast number of friends, but one man declines
to come, or treats your invitation with indifference. You in the
course of twenty years give twenty banquets, and the same man is
invited to them all, and treats them all in the same obnoxious way.
After awhile you remove to another house, larger and better, and you
again invite your friends, but send no invitation to the man who
declined or neglected the other invitations. Are you to blame? Has he
a right to expect to be invited after all the indignities he has done
you? God in this world has invited us all to the banquet of His grace.
He invited us by His Providence and His Spirit three hundred and
sixty-five days of every year since we knew our right hand from our
left. If we declined it every time, or treated the invitation with
indifference, and gave twenty or forty or fifty years of indignity on
our part toward the Banqueter, and at last He spreads the banquet in a
more luxurious and kingly place, amid the heavenly gardens, have we a
right to expect Him to invite us again, and have we a right to blame
Him if He does not invite us?

If twelve gates of salvation stood open twenty years or fifty years
for our admission, and at the end of that time they are closed, can we
complain of it and say, "These gates ought to be open again. Give us
another chance"? If the steamer is to sail for Hamburg, and we want to
get to Germany by that line, and we read in every evening and every