the dreadful
necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy.

There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible. Be we as heroic
as we like, that is the end which awaits the world. Let us reflect on this
and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that there is no good in this
life but in the hope of another; that we are happy only in proportion as we
draw near it; and that, as there are no more woes for those who have
complete assurance of eternity, so there is no more happiness for those who
have no insight into it.

Surely then it is a great evil thus to be in doubt, but it is at least an
indispensable duty to seek when we are in such doubt; and thus the doubter
who does not seek is altogether completely unhappy and completely wrong. And
if besides this he is easy and content, professes to be so, and indeed
boasts of it; if it is this state itself which is the subject of his joy and
vanity, I have no words to describe so silly a creature.

How can people hold these opinions? What joy can we find in the expectation
of nothing but hopeless misery? What reason for boasting that we are in
impenetrable darkness? And how can it happen that the following argument
occurs to a reasonable man?

have wrought more kindly, and they have been
successfully carried on in the way to life. And thus Satan seemed to be
restrained, till towards the latter end of this wonderful time, when
God's Holy Spirit was about to withdraw.

Many times persons under great awakenings were concerned, because they
thought they were not awakened, but miserable, hard-hearted, senseless,
sottish creatures still, and sleeping upon the brink of hell. The sense
of the need they have to be awakened, and of their comparative hardness,
grows upon them with their awakenings; so that they seem to themselves
to be very senseless, when indeed most sensible. There have been some
instances of persons who have had as great a sense of their danger and
misery as their natures could well subsist under, so that a little more
would probably have destroyed them; and yet they have expressed
themselves much amazed at their own insensibility and sottishness at
such an extraordinary time.