xxvii brought to bear upon you. You have stood your ground against the urgency of the most earnest admonitions, and against the dreadfulness of the most terrifying menaces. On that ground you have fixed yourself more immovably than before; and though on . some future day the same spiritual thunder be made to play around you, it will not shake you out ofthe obstinacy of your determined rebellion. It is the universal law of habit, that the feelings nre always getting more faintly and feebly impressed by every repetition of the cause which excited them, and that the mind is always getting stronger in its active resistance to the impulse of these feelings, by every new deed of resistance which it performs; and thus it is, that if you refuse us now, we have no other prospect before us than that your cause is every day getting more desperate and more irrecoverable, your souls are getting more hardened, the Spirit is getting more provoked to abandon those who have so long persisted in their opposition to his movements. God, ·who says that his Spirit will not always strive v.-rith the children of men, is getting more offended. The tyranny of habit is getting every day a firmer ascendency over you; Satan is getting you more helplessly involved among his wiles and his entanglements; the world, with all the inveteracy of those desires which are opposite to the will of the Father, is more and more lording it over your every affection. And what, we would ask, what is the scene in which you are now purposing to contest it, with all this mighty force of opposition you are now so busy in raising up against you? What is the field of combat to which you are now looking forward, as the place where you are to accomplish a victory over all those formidable enemies whom you are at present arming with such a weight of hostility, as, we say, within a single hairbreadth of certainty, you will find to be irresistible? 0 the bigness of such a misleading infatuation ! The proposed scene in which this battle for eternity is to be fought, and this victory for the crown ofglory is to
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