earliest dawn of your understanding, you have been offered the hire of the morning labourer and have refused it, then the parable does not say that you are the person who at the third, or sixth, or ninth, or eleventh hour, will get the offer repeated to you. It is true, that the offer is unto all and upon all who are within reach of the hearing of it. But there is all the difference in the world between the impression of a new offer, and of an ofler that has already been often heard and as often rejected-an offer which comes upon you with all the fiuniliarity of a wellknown sound that you have already learned how to dispose of, and how to shut your evm-y feeling against the power of its gracious invitations-an offer which, if discarded from your hearts at the present moment, may come back upon you, but which will have to maintain a more unequal contest than before, with an impenitency ever strength · ening, and ever gathering new hardness from each successive act of resistance. And thus it is that the point for which we are contending is not to carry you at some future period of your lives, but to carry you at this moment. It is to work in you the instantaneous purpose of a firm and a vigorously sustained repentance; it is to put into you all the freshness of an immecliate resolution, and to stir you up to all the readiness of an immediate accomplishment-it is to give direction to the very first footstep you are now to take, and lead you to take it as the commencement ofthat holy career, in which all old things are done away, and all things become new-it is to press it upon you, that the state of the alternative, at this moment, is " now or never"--:it is to prove how fearful the odds are against you, if now you suffer the call of repentance to light upon your consciences, and still keep by your determined posture of careless, and thoughtless, and thankless unconcern about God. You have resisted to-day, and by that resistance you have acquired a firmer metal of resistance against the power of every future warning that may be
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