C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Impenitence
It is not sin that kills the soul, but impenitence.
He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever—black-pinioned, winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.
We pray for those who have ceased to pray. We pray for those that need prayer more than ever, that have fewer and fewer seasons even of thought, that grow hard with years, that are less and less troubled by sin, and that are more and more irreverent of religion. We pray for the children of Christian parents who sometimes weep at the memory of father and mother, but who never have thought of God.
Ah, sinner, may the Lord quicken thee! But it is a work that makes the Saviour weep. I think when He comes to call some of you from your death in sin, He comes weeping and sighing for you. There is a stone that is to be rolled away—your bad and evil habits—and when that stone is taken away, a still small voice will not do for you; it must be the loud crashing voice, like the voice of the Lord which breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.