is nothing there, my dear, nothing there.”  There is something there!  It is your wasted opportunities.  It is your procrastinations.  It is those years you gave to the world that you ought to have given to Christ.  They are there; and some of them put their fingers on your aching temples, and some of them feel for the strings of your heart, and some put more thorns in your tumbled pillow, and you say:  “Turn me over.”  And they turn you over, but, alas! there is a more appalling vision.  You say:  “Take that away!” They say:  “There is nothing there, nothing there.”  There is—­an open grave there! the judgment is there! a lost eternity is there!  Take it away!  They can not take it away.

You say:  “How dark it is getting in the room!” Why, the burners are all lighted.  Your family come up one by one, and tenderly kiss you good-bye.  Your feet are cold, and the hands are cold, and the lips are cold, and they take a small mirror and they put it over your mouth to see if there is any breathing, and that mirror is taken away without a single blur upon it; and they whisper through the room:  “She is gone.”  And then the door of the body opens and the soul flashes out.  Make room for the destroyed spirit.

Push back that door!  Lost!  Let it come into its eternal residence.  Woe! woe!  No cup of merriment now, but cup of the wrath of Almighty God.  The last chance for heaven gone.  The door of mercy shut.  The doom sealed.  The blackness of darkness forever!

Voltaire is there.  Herod is there.  Robespierre is there.  The debauchees are there.  The murderers are there.  All the rejectors of Jesus Christ are there.  And you will be there unless you repent.  You can not say, my dear brother, that you were not warned.  This sermon would be a witness against you.  You can not say that God’s Holy Spirit never strove with your heart.  He is striving now.  You can not say that you had no chance for heaven, for the Omnipotent Son of God offers you His rescue.  You can not say:  “I had no warning about that world; I didn’t know there was any such place,” for the Bible distinctly rings in your ears to-day, saying:  “At the end of the world the angels shall separate the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire.”  And again that book says:  “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.”  And again it says:  “The smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever.”

You can not say that you did not hear about heaven, the other alternative, for you hear of it now:  “The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”  No sorrow, no suffering, no death.  Oh, will you be careless any longer, when I tell you that Christ, the Conqueror of earth and hell, offers you now escape from all peril, and offers to introduce you this very hour into the peace and pardon of the Gospel, preparing you for that good land?  The sides of Calvary run blood for you.  Jesus, who had not where to lay His head, offers you His heart as a pillow of rest.  Christ offers with His own body to bridge over the chasm of death, saying:  “Walk over Me; I am the way.”