Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/44

 grotesque side of the case which is damaging to religion in the public feeling by its suggestive aspect of moral and mental instability.

For discussional purposes Reed took some of us one evening lately to a popular revival meeting. The preacher on the occasion, as he himself was fain to boast, was as destitute of human "orders" as he was of human learning. His orders, he said, were direct from Heaven. He told us he had been converted from a life of vice, and with complacent but unsavoury effusion recounted his having broken well-nigh every law, human and divine. But as, withal, he had sought and had found pardon, so no one need be discouraged on account of personal depravity. Heaven, he said, was full of pardoned depravity. The blessed angels rejoiced most over those who had been the most depraved. But some might say, "Live on as you like, only take care at the end to repent and secure pardon and Heaven." Well, it might all come right at the last moment, no doubt; but he must warn all such that they played a risky game, for they might be suddenly cut off unprepared, and thus inherit everlasting fire instead of eternal bliss.

He truly pitied all those people, so worthy in their own eyes, who led what the world called good moral lives; because all their weary and protracted efforts and restraints in that self-righteous way would not bring them, by one jot or one tittle, nearer to Heaven. He then passed to the final and terrible day of judgment, when all these people, in their helpless rags of