Oh, dear brethren, will you take this lesson of the last part of my
text, that nothing so tends to harden a man's heart to the gospel of
Jesus Christ as religious formalism? If Jesus Christ were to come in
here now, and stand where I am standing, and look round about upon
this congregation, I wonder how many a highly respectable and
perfectly proper man and woman, church and chapel-goer, who keeps the
Sabbath day, He would find on whom He had to look with grief not
unmingled with anger, because they were hardening their hearts against
Him now. I am sure there are some of such among my present audience. I
am sure there are some of you about whom it is true that 'the
publicans and the harlots will go into the Kingdom of God before you,'
because in their degradation they may be nearer the lowly penitence
and the consciousness of their own misery and need, which will open
their eyes to see the beauty and the preciousness of Jesus Christ.

Dear brother, let no reliance upon any external attention to religious
ordinances; no interest, born of long habit of hearing sermons; no
trust in the fact of your being communicants, blind you to this, that
all these things may come between you and your Saviour, and so may
take you away into the outermost darkness.

Dear brother or sister, you are a sinner. 'The God in whose hand thy
breath is, and whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified.' You
have forgotten Him; you have lived to please yourselves. I charge you
with nothing criminal, with nothing gross or sensual; I know nothing
about you in such matters; but I know this--that you have a heart like
mine, that we have all of us the one character, and that we all need
the one gospel of that Saviour 'who bare our sins in His own body on
the tree,' and died that whosoever trusts in Him may live here and