debaucheries, in order to banish care and snatch a fleeting joy. O my
brother, if you so act, from my soul I feel for you and pity you! For
the sick-bed is coming, and you may be compelled to think there; and
if so, you are treasuring up tenfold agony for yourself, by your
present off-putting apathy and wilful thoughtlessness. And should
you manage, even in the time of sickness, and up to the very hour
of death, to shut out the future from your mind; should long and
inveterate habit enable you to succeed in the terrible, suicidal
experiment, so that you shall die as you have lived--fearing nothing,
because believing nothing,--can you avoid entering the other world?
Can you prevent a meeting between yourself and your God; or silence an
accusing conscience for ever; or hinder Christ from coming to judge
the world; or fly from the judgment-seat, and by any possibility delay
or prevent a minute examination of your life; or stay the sentence
which the omniscient and holy Judge shall pronounce upon you? And if
you cannot do this,--and if, rather, every power, faculty, and emotion
of your heart and soul must one day be roused to the intensest pitch
of earnestness about your eternal destiny,--do you not think it wise,
my brother, to think about all this now?--_now_, when there is a
remedy, rather than _then_, when there is none?

This suggests another reason why possibly you hate to think about the
future. Not only are you conscious of want of any preparedness for it,
but you do not see how it can be much better with you. You have, in a
word, lost confidence in God--have no faith in His good-will to _you_.
You think of Him--if you think of Him at all--as one who watches you
with a jealous or angry eye; who has no wish that you should be better
or happier than you are; or who, if He can save you, will not; or who,
if He will, offers to do so only on such hard and impossible terms
as to make it practically the same as if there was no salvation