The men of whom our Lord spoke refused the truth, knowing that it was true; not carried away by passion, but by cold self-love, and envy, avarice, and ambition. Not merely doing wrong knowingly, but setting their whole natures knowingly against the light. Of this nature must the sin against the Holy Ghost surely be. “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Was not their condition unpardonable? How, through all this mass of falsehood, could the pardon of God reach the essential humanity within them? Forgiveness while they were such was impossible. Out of this they must come, else there was no word of God for them. But the very word that told them of the unpardonable state in which they were, was just the one form the voice of mercy could take in calling on them to repent.

If the Spirit of God is shut out from a man’s heart, how is he to become better? God who has made us can never be far from any man who draws the breath of life. May not then one day some terrible convulsion from the center of his being shake such a man so that through all the deafness of his death, the voice of the Spirit may be faintly heard, the still small voice that comes after the tempest and the earthquake? May there not be a fire that even such can feel? Who shall set bounds to the consuming of the fire of our God, and the purifying that dwells therein?

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