ESSAY ON BAPTISM 579

who have not, like Obadiah, feared the Lord from their youth¹-a literal and mathematically definable moment. For it is certain there was one time when, if they had died, their souls would have perished; and another time actual contact the limits of these conditions, for there is no neutral ground. A man is either Christ’s friend or enemy; there cannot therefore be so much as an instant in which he is neither the one nor the other. Therefore the change from being the one to being the other must be instantaneous.

Now it is also true that a man must be either alive or dead, and that the change from a state of Life to a state of death is instantaneous. Yet we have no difficulty in understanding what is meant when it is said that a man is “Dying.” He may be dying for some hours, for some days, or for some years, but he is certainly to be considered dying from the time he is first struck by mortal disease, or at least all the time such disease is making progress.

May not this be true also of Conversion? Is not a man converting, as we say he is dying? May not his Spiritual frame die to sin just as slowly, and with as long a struggle, as his physical frame sickens, wastes, and expires? Does not his Christian soul give up the world grievously and agonisingly, till it comes to the last gasp of sin, and is dead to it?

Some persons are doubtless converted as a man is killed by Lightning; but are not others converted they know not when, as men die in their sleep; do not some struggle with their conversion, and thrust it off by strength of heart, as men do their deaths; and do not some pass through a lingering conversion of many wearing years?

§ 13. Now I ask the Evangelical Christian, whether, in the natural body, he would say that God’s hand was more stretched out against a man at the instant of his death, than in the disease which brought about the death? When Ahaziah fell through the lattice,* or at least when Elijah received God’s message for him, was God’s wrath less definitely gone forth against him than at the moment of his death? Was God’s power less exerted upon Herod, when the worms first began to gnaw him, than at the instant of his giving up the Ghost?†

Now put the parallel question.

Is the Grace of God acting less definitely upon a man when the worm first begins to gnaw his conscience, than at the instant when he dies to the world? When first the fear and the foreboding seize him, which are to bring him to Christ, is God dealing with him less affectionately than at the moment in which he comes to Christ? Consider this analogy carefully, and see whether this Moment of Conversion, upon which you lay so much stress, be anything more than the time of the last, and perhaps the lightest blow which God strikes at a man’s heart to cut it from the world. You watch a woodman hewing a tree, and you are thrilled as the tree nods, and appalled as it falls. But in God’s eyes the first blow of the axe is

* 2 Kings i. 2, 4.

† Acts xii. 13.

¹ [1 kings xviii. 12.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]