Nothing can be more evident from the word of the GOD of truth. It there plainly appears to be a determined case, which leaves no room for a more favourable conjecture or hope. “The wicked shall be turned into hell, even all the nations that forget GOD,” _Psalm_ ix. 17. “They shall go away into everlasting punishment,” _Matthew_ xxv. 46. into a state where they shall in vain seek death, and death shall flee from them. Oh! brethren, it is a certain, but an awful truth, that your souls will be thinking and immortal beings, even in spite of themselves. They may indeed torment, but they cannot destroy themselves. They can no more suspend their power of thought and perception, than a mirror its property of reflecting rays that fall on its surface. Do you suspect the contrary? Make the trial immediately. Command your minds to cease from thinking but for one quarter of an hour, or for half that time, and exclude every idea and every reflection. Can you succeed in that attempt? Or rather, does not thought press in with a more sensible violence on that resistance; as an anxious desire to sleep, makes us so much the more wakeful. Thus will thought follow you beyond the grave, thus will it, as an unwelcome guest, force itself upon you, when it can serve only to perplex and distress the mind. It will for ever upbraid you, that notwithstanding all the kind expostulations of GOD and man, notwithstanding all the keen remonstrances of conscience, and the pleadings of the blood of CHRIST, you have gone on in your folly, till heaven is lost, and damnation incurred; and all, for what? for a shadow and a dream.
Oh think not, sinners, that the remembrance of your past pleasures, and of your success in your other cares, whilst that of the one thing needful was forgotten, think not that this will ease your minds. It will rather torment them the more. “Son, remember that thou in thy life-time receivedst thy good things.” Bitter remembrance! Well might the heathen poets represent the unhappy spirits in the shades below, as eagerly catching at the water of forgetfulness, yet unable to reach it. Your present comforts will only serve to give you a livelier sense of your misery, as having tasted such degrees of enjoyment; and to inflame the reckoning, as you have misimproved those talents lodged in your hands for better purposes. Surely, if these things were believed, and seriously considered, the sinner would have no more heart to rejoice in his present prosperity, than a man would have to amuse himself with the curiosities of a fine garden, through which he was led to be broken upon the rack.
But I will enlarge no farther on these things. Would to GOD that the unaccountable stupidity of mens minds, and their fatal attachment to the pleasures and cares of the present life, did not make it necessary to insist on them so frequently and so copiously!
I now proceed to the reflections which naturally arise from hence, and shall only mention two.
1. How much reason have we to lament the folly of mankind in neglecting the one thing needful.