remember that it will not continue for ever. In heaven, there will be nothing to draw us off from our God. The glorified and ethereal body will have nothing at variance with the glorified spirit. The things will then be present which are now distant and future, and “ seen,' "which are now "unseen." Our companions will love God supremely, and with the eloquence of heaven, will "provoke" us unto holier love. Our associations will all be similar in character, and tend to bind us more and more firmly to our God. No cloud shall come between us and "the brightness of his glory." We shall " see him as he is"-see him eye to eye, and face to face;" and to see, will be to adore and love. Our hearts will be single, for our knowledge shall be perfect, and our joy shall be full. 66 134 CHAPTER VIII. THE HARDENED HEART-THE "But when Pharaoh saw that there was respite he hardened his heart." "And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also." "He that hardeneth his heart shall fall into mischief." "Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone." Being past feeling." 44 In our admirable liturgy we pray to be delivered from "hardness of heart;" and perhaps in reference to none of the evils there enumerated and deprecated, has the believer greater cause to respond, in the sincerity and fervency of his spirit, "Good Lord deliver us!" It would seem, then, that the Church evidently contemplated this "hardness of heart," as a possible and probable evil-as one of those sins or sinful conditions of the soul, so easily besetting us, as to be worthy of constant and special remembrance before God in public prayer. Whether hardness is one of the invariable attributes of the natural heart, I am not prepared to decide. The negative of the question would 66 perhaps be best supported by facts. In the plastic season of childhood, there certainly is much tenderness of feeling, a lively sensibility to impression, and much pliancy of disposition; and to these the Saviour doubtless had reference when he said, Except ye be converted and become as little children," &c. The infant or childish heart, rarely, most rarely, steels itself against human kindness; nor is there visible any decided repugnance to the admission of the more solemn and sacred claims of religion. Without admitting the vain and fanciful idea of natural or intuitive religiousness, we must still perceive that facile, deep, and permanent impressions belong to childhood and youth, of which the later periods of life are utterly incapable. This susceptibility constitutes the charm and the attractiveness, the importance and the value of these introductory periods of human existence. Every Christian parent makes this childish tenderness of feeling and conscience the basis of early moral culture; and Christendom, as a whole, has at length put forth a parent's efforts and a parent's tenderness for the young of her bosom, the children which God hath given her." 66 But whatever comparative softness of heart and of character favourable to religious influence may be supposed to exist in the young, it is certain that it rapidly disappears and evanesces with succeeding years. Except where the direct and meliorating influence of religion is brought in, the heart, left to itself and to the world, rapidly hardens. It would seem as though a change, "growing with its growth, and strengthening with its strength," passed over it, analogous to that which the body experiences. As in the almost cartilaginous bones of infancy become ossified, and the muscles acquire firmness, even so in the spiritual part, that which was flexible becomes firm and unyielding, and toughness and rigidity come over all that was tender. Evey year, and month, and day of unrepentant existence hardens the heart more and more. When the bodily organ becomes the seat of a special disease, physicians inform us that its orifices and ventricles become ossified, and by that ossification utterly incapable of continuing the action and re-action essential to the continuance of animal life. No spiritual physician who has made the spiritual diseases of the heart his careful study, can be ignorant that something analogous to this ossification is far more common in "the inner man," than in the natural and animal part. Whether there be hardness originally or not, in all the impenitent it gradually supervenes. Much of it comes through intercourse and collision with the world-much of it through the gradual influence of time upon the mental and spiritual faculties—and much of it is to be traced to self-the carelessness or the wilfulness of men. And as the two former causes can only operate through the last, I am disposed to view the stony or adamantine heart, that almost invariable concomitant of adult and aged impenitency, as the result of personal induration. Men harden their own hearts. The illustration of this truth; The mode in which this self-hardening is effected; The several steps which are taken, or degrees which are passed in the course, with the distinctive marks of each; The preventive and remedial discipline in the case. These points properly considered will perhaps place this important subject fully before the reader in its practical bearings. I. The induration of the heart is a personal work. Men harden their own hearts. I hold this to be almost a religious axiom; scarcely seriously disputable under any circumstances, and rather to be admitted by the spontaneous and immediate acknowledgment of conscience, than to be established by process of reasoning; and yet such is the lamentable selfdeception of the human heart, that very many, I am persuaded, of those persons who do the most certainly harden their own hearts, " yea, make them as an adamant stone," will profess to others, and endeavour to persuade themselves, that they |