must have sometimes spoken, and that they must have sometimes been enabled to obey it; it is impossible but that they must have had some notions of sin, and some desires to struggle against it; and so far as they ever felt that desire, it was the work of God’s Holy Spirit.  Man cannot dare to say how great the amount of their guilt may be; but guilt there certainly is; they have grieved the Holy Spirit; and, though we dare not say that they have utterly blasphemed him, yet they have a long hardness to overcome, and every hour of delayed turning to God increases it:  it may be possible still to overcome it, but meanwhile it is not overcome; they are not receiving the Holy Spirit; they are not being renewed into the likeness of Christ, without which no man can see God.

Here, then, are the four cases, one of which must belong to every one of us here assembled.  Either we have been always and still are receiving the Holy Ghost; or we can remember when we were not, but yet are receiving him now; or we can remember when we were, but yet now are not; or we cannot remember to have received him ever, nor are we yet receiving him.  I cannot say which of the last two states is the most dreadful, nor scarcely which of the first two states is the most blessed.  But yet as even those happy states admit not of over-confidence, so neither do the last two most unhappy states oblige us to despair.  Not to despair; but they do urge us to every degree of fear less than despair.  There is far more danger of our not fearing enough than of our being driven to despair.  There is far more danger of your looking on the season of youth, of our looking on to old age; you trusting to the second freshness and tenderness of the first,—­we to the calmness and necessary reflection of the last.  There is far more danger of our thus hardening ourselves beyond recall; there is not only the danger, but there is the sin, the greatest sin, I suppose, of which the human mind is capable, that of deliberately choosing evil for the present rather than good, calculating that, by and by, we shall choose good rather than evil.  I believe, that it is impossible to conceive of any state of mind more sinful than one which should so feel and so choose; and this is the state which we incur, and which we persist in whenever we put off the thought of repentance.  Now, then, it only remains, that we apply this each to ourselves; I say all of us apply it, the young and the old alike; for there is not one here so young as not to have cause to apply it; there is not one of us who would not, I am sure, be a different person from what he now is, if he were to ask himself steadily every day, Have I been and am I receiving the Holy Ghost since I believed?

LECTURE XXVII.

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TRINITY SUNDAY.

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JOHN iii. 9.

How can these things be?