Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
If life be brief and fading, we have all the more need to improve it diligently, and to realize its awful bearing on eternity. Knowing that we are every day advancing nearer to the grave, oh! how important to be daily looking beyond it, and turning our time to a spiritual account. Consider, then, for what ends life was given you, how these ends have already been prosecuted, and to what extent they have yet been attained. Without all controversy, the most urgent business of time is to secure the salvation of the soul — to acquire the knowledge and the favour of God — to learn his truth, and to live to his glory. How much, then, of the time past of your lives has been devoted to spiritual exercises, to prayer, to searching the Holy Scriptures, to the study of your own hearts?
Just let the last year of your existence be the subject of review, and say what were your spiritual views and experience at the time it commenced, and what are they now? Surely some change, either to the better or the worse, must have taken place upon your moral condition, for character is no more stationary than time — and in not improving, it must be degenerating. And it becomes you to ascertain whether you have advanced in knowledge and in grace, or whether you have been losing ground, and pursuing a careless and a backsliding path. ...
For more, see Robert Bryden on the urgency of salvation.
Just let the last year of your existence be the subject of review, and say what were your spiritual views and experience at the time it commenced, and what are they now? Surely some change, either to the better or the worse, must have taken place upon your moral condition, for character is no more stationary than time — and in not improving, it must be degenerating. And it becomes you to ascertain whether you have advanced in knowledge and in grace, or whether you have been losing ground, and pursuing a careless and a backsliding path. ...
For more, see Robert Bryden on the urgency of salvation.
