you.  You have health for God now.  You have strength of mind and body.  You have powers which may fit you for real usefulness.  You have appetites for enjoyment which can be consecrated to God.  You acknowledge the law of honour.  Well then, by every feeling of manliness and generosity remember this:  now, and not later, is your time to learn what religion means.

There is another motive, and a very solemn one, to be urged upon those who are delaying.  Every moment of delay adds bitterness to after struggles.  The moment of a feeling of hired servitude must come.  If a man will not obey God with a warm heart, he may hereafter have to do it with a cold one.  To be holy is the work of a long life.  The experience of ten thousand lessons teaches only a little of it; and all this, the work of becoming like God, the man who delays is crowding into the space of a few years, or a few months.  When we have lived long a life of sin, do we think that repentance and forgiveness will obliterate all the traces of sin upon the character?  Be sure that every sin pays its price:  “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Oh! there are recollections of past sin which come crowding up to the brain, with temptation in them.  There are old habits which refuse to be mastered by a few enthusiastic sensations.  There is so much of the old man clinging to the penitent who has waited long—­he is so much as a religious man, like what he was when he was a worldly man—­that it is doubtful whether he ever reaches in this world the full stature of Christian manhood.  Much warm earnestness, but strange inconsistencies, that is the character of one who is an old man and a young Christian.  Brethren, do we wish to risk all this?  Do we want to learn holiness with terrible struggles, and sore affliction, and the plague of much remaining evil?  Then wait before you turn to God.

 XXI.

 Preached May 15, 1853.

 JOHN’S REBUKE OF HEROD.

“But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, added yet this above all, that he shut up John in prison,”—­Luke iii. 19, 20.

The life of John the Baptist divides itself into three distinct periods.  Of the first we are told almost nothing, but we may conjecture much.  We are told that he was in the deserts till his showing unto Israel.  It was a period probably, in which, saddened by the hollowness of all life in Israel, and perplexed with the controversies of Jerusalem, the controversies of Sadducee with Pharisee, of formalist with mystic, of the disciples of one infallible Rabbi with the disciples of another infallible Rabbi, he fled for refuge to the wilderness, to see whether God could not be found there by the heart that sought Him, without the aid of churches, rituals, creeds, and forms.  This period lasted thirty years.