Meditation I

My Friends: I have been sorely troubled in my mind; and why? It is because I have seen that many who have professed the name of Christ are not careful to discharge their duty faithfully to their dying fellow immortals around them. I have been considering that it will be but a poor excuse for me to say, when I appear at the awful bar of God, that the reason I neglected my duty was because I was fearful that this one would frown upon me and that one would smile. Religion has become too unfashionable and too unpopular even among the professing followers of Christ. O, how will they feel in that day to see their skirts filled with the blood of souls? Will not their eye-balls start from their sockets to see sinners who have stumbled into hell over them? and will not their hearts be rent in twain to hear them in anguish condemn them? "If thou warn not the wicked man to flee from his ways and he die in his sins, his blood will I require at thy hand, saith the Lord of hosts." O, the value of time! O, the worth of immortal souls! The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray ye, therefore, to the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth faithful laborers into his vineyard.

My respected friends, I have indeed found that the Christian life is a life of warfare; for the spirit wars against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit; and I am forced to cry out with St. Paul, from time to time, "O, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of sin and death! for the good that I would do, that I do not; and the evil that I would not do, that I do!"