the old truth. Let us not be ashamed to believe that there is an eternal God — an eternal heaven — and an eternal hell. Let us recollect that sin is an infinite evil. It needed an atonement of infinite value to deliver the believer from its consequences — and it entails an infinite loss on the unbeliever who rejects the remedy provided for it. Above all, let us fall back on plain scriptural statements, like that before us this day. One plain text is worth a thousand abstruse arguments.
Finally, if it be true that there is an " eternal damna- tion," let us give diligence that we ourselves do not fall into it. Let us escape for our lives, and not linger. (Gen. xix. 16, 17.) Let us flee for refuge to the hope set before us in the Gospel, and never rest till we know and feel that we are safe. And never, never let us be ashamed of seeking safety. Of sin, worlclliness, and the love of pleasure, we may well be ashamed. But we never need be ashamed of seeking to be delivered from an eternal hell.*
* There is an expression in the passage now expounded, which appears to demand special notice. It is confessedly one of the hard things of Scripture, and has often troubled the hearts of Bible readers. I refer to the saying of our Lord, " He that blaspheme th against the Holy Grhost hath never forgiveness." It seems that there is such a tiling as an unpardonable sin.
Some interpreters have endeavored to cut the knot of the diffi- culty, by maintaining that the sin here referred to was entirely con- fined to the time when our Lord was on earth. They say that when the Scribes and Pharisees saw the evidence of our Lord's miracles, and yet refused to believe in Him as the Messiah, they committed the unpardonable sin. Their assertion that our Lord worked miracles through Beelzebub, was blasphemy against the Holy Grhost.
There might be something in this view, if the passage under con- sideration stood entirely alone — though even then he would be a bold man who would assert that there were no hardened Scribes and Pharisees among the three thousand converted and forgiven on the
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