sowing time allowed to pass can never return; and that they who have
turned, as some of you have turned, dear friends, all your lives, a
deaf ear to the Christ that asks you to love Him and trust Him, may
one day wish that it had been otherwise, and go to look for Him and
not find Him.

There is another kind of seeking that is vain, an intellectual seeking
without the preparation of the heart. There are, no doubt, some people
here to-day that would say, 'We have been seeking the truth about
religion all our lives, and we have not got to it yet.' Well, I do not
want to judge either your motives or your methods, but I know this,
that there is many a man who goes on the quest for religious
certainty, and looks _at_, if not _for_ Jesus Christ, and is not
really capable of discerning Him when he sees Him, because his eye is
not single, or because his heart is full of worldliness or
indifference, or because he begins with a foregone conclusion, and
looks for facts to establish that; or because he will not cast down
and put away evil things that rise up between him and his Master.

My brother! if you go to look for Jesus Christ with a heart full of
the world, if you go to look for Him while you wish to hold on by all
the habitudes and earthlinesses of your past, you will never find Him.
The sensualist seeks for Him, the covetous man seeks for Him, the
passionate, ill-tempered man seeks for Him; the woman plunged in
frivolities, or steeped to the eyebrows in domestic cares,--these may
in some feeble fashion go to look for Him and they will not find Him,
because they have sought for Him with hearts overcharged with other
things and filled with the affairs of this life, its trifles and its
sins.