Note 3 — ISAIAH.

Is there anything more terrible than a false confidence? It is an awful thing to wake up and find that what we have been trusting in is rotten. To embark gaily in a ship that on mid-ocean proves to be worm-eaten, and leaky; for a man who believed himself to be wealthy to receive tidings that the failure of a bank has made him a beggar; for a sick man rejoicing in the cessation of his pain to be told by his physician that that is due only to the setting in of mortification that precedes death;—what horrible disappointments are these! But what poor and faint image they furnish of the horror of that man who lives in a state of delusion as to his spiritual condition, who dies in peace, imagining falsely that he is Christ’s, and who, when he has traversed the valley of the shadow of death—when he has reached that point from which there is no return, finds that the doors of heaven are shut against him, discovers that he is shrouded by thick darkness, and begins to feel the fires of hell kindling upon him! Can you picture to yourself his astonishment, his terror, his despair? Do not tell me that such a case is not conceivable—Christ declares that such cases are frequent (Matt. vii. 21–25).