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small pains to avoid it! Where was my understanding when I neglected that<br />
gracious offer; when I called ‘the Lord a hard master,' and thought his<br />
pleasant service a bondage, and the service of the devil and the flesh the only<br />
freedom? Was I not a thousand times worse than mad, when I censured the<br />
holy way of God as needless preciseness; when I thought the laws of Christ<br />
too strict, and all too much that I did for the life to come? What would all<br />
sufferings for Christ and welldoing have been, compared with these<br />
sufferings that I must undergo for ever? Would not the heaven, which I have<br />
lost, have recompensed all my losses? And would not all my sufferings have<br />
been there forgotten? What if Christ had bid me to do some great matter;<br />
whether to live in continual fears and sorrows, or to suffer death a hundred<br />
times over: should I not have done it? How much more, when he only said,<br />
‘Believe and be saved. Seek my face, and thy soul shall live. Take up thy<br />
cross and follow me, and I will give thee everlasting life.' O gracious offer!<br />
O easy terms! O cursed wretch, that would not be persuaded to accept them!"<br />
This also will be a most tormenting consideration, to remember for what<br />
they sold their eternal welfare. When they compare the value of the pleasures<br />
of sin with the value of "the recompense of reward," how will the vast<br />
disproportion astonish them! To think of the low delights of the flesh, or the<br />
applauding breath of mortals, or the possessing heaps of gold,--and then to<br />
think of everlasting glory. "This is all I had for my soul, my God, my hopes<br />
of blessedness!" It cannot possibly be expressed how these thoughts will tear<br />
his very heart. <strong>The</strong>n will he exclaim against his folly: "O miserable wretch!<br />
Did I set my soul to sale for so base a price? Did I part with my God for a<br />
little dirt and dross; and sell my Savior, as Judas, for a little silver? I had but<br />
a dream of delight for my hopes of heaven; and, now I am awakened, it is all<br />
vanished. My morsels are now turned to gall, and my cups to wormwood.<br />
When they were past my taste, the pleasure perished. And is this all that I<br />
have had for the inestimable treasure? What a mad exchange did I make!<br />
What if I had gained all the world, and lost my soul! But, alas! how small a<br />
profit of the world was it for which I gave up heaven!" O that sinners would<br />
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