Make all their hearts, so Lucifer summed up, as he dismissed his obsequious devils, make all their several hearts each a warehouse, a shop, a farm, a pulpit, a library, a nursery, a supper-table, a chamber of wantonness—­let it be to each man just after his own heart.  Only, keep—­as you shall answer for it,—­keep faith and hope and charity and innocence and patience and especially prayerfulness out of their hearts.  And when this my counsel is fulfilled, and when the pit closes over thy charge, I shall pay thee thy wages, and promote thee to honour.  And before he was well done they were all at their posts.

CHAPTER XIV—­THE DEVIL’S LAST CARD

   ’Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light’—­Paul.

Wodrow has an anecdote in his delightful Analecta which shall introduce us into our subject to-night.  Mr. John Menzies was a very pious and devoted pastor; he was a learned man also, and well seen in the Popish and in the Arminian controversies.  And to the end of his life he was much esteemed of the people of Aberdeen as a foremost preacher of the gospel.  And yet, ‘Oh to have one more Sabbath in my pulpit!’ he cried out on his death-bed.  ‘What would you then do?’ asked some one who sat at his bedside.  ’I would preach to my people on the tremendous difficulty of salvation!’ exclaimed the dying man.

1.  Now, the first difficulty that stands in the way of our salvation is the stupendous mass of guilt that has accumulated upon all of us.  Our guilt is so great that we dare not think of it.  It is too horrible to believe that we shall ever be called to account for one in a thousand of it.  It crushes our minds with a perfect stupor of horror, when for a moment we try to imagine a day of judgment when we shall be judged for all the deeds that we have done in the body.  Heart-beat after heart-beat, breath after breath, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and all full of sin; all nothing but sin from our mother’s womb to our grave.  Sometimes one outstanding act of sin has quite overwhelmed us.  But before long that awful sin fell out of sight and out of mind.  Other sins of the same kind succeeded it.  Our sense of sin, our sense of guilt was soon extinguished by a life of sin, till, at the present moment the accumulated and tremendous load of our sin and guilt is no more felt by us than we feel the tremendous load of the atmosphere.  But, all the time, does not our great guilt lie sealed down upon us?  Because we are too seared and too stupefied to feel it, is it therefore not there?  Because we never think of it, does that prove that both God and man have forgiven and forgotten it?  Shall the Judge of all the earth do right in the matter of all men’s guilt but ours?  Does the apostle’s warning not hold in our case?—­his awful warning that we shall all stand before the judgment-seat?  And is it only a strong figure of speech that the