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I. HOW THIS HARDNESS OF HEART IS EVIDENCED.

1. One of these signs is dulness of conscience. A sensitive conscience is only the possession of those whose hearts have not been hardened, or have been softened. But where there is religious insensibility the hearing of the conscience is confused, its sight perplexed, its voice low and weak. This is the state of the moral nature of which Paul speaks when he describes a "conscience seared with a hot iron" — an allusion, evidently, to the custom, that was very prevalent among ancient Eastern doctors, of cauterising any affected flesh. Sin is indeed a terrible caustic to the conscience. At first it burns the living moral tissue very painfully, but at last it leaves it insensitive, almost destroyed.

2. Another sign of a hardened heart is poverty of love. No tale of human want or woe stirs their pity or prompts their help; no statement of God's great bounty or wondrous love awakens their praise.

3. Another sign — comprising those we have mentioned, and suggesting several more — is inability to be moved by the gospel truth.

II. HOW THIS HARDNESS OF HEART IS ATTAINED.

1. By familiarity with the mere theory of religion. It is well enough to have true ideas, to accept a correct creed; but if those ideas linger only in the intellect, are merely themes for memory, imagination, logic, and do not send down into the affections an influence that will permeate the entire being; if that correct creed is a mere mental property, held and defended jealously by the mind, but not colouring and controlling the plans and loves and whole scope of the daily life, then those ideas, that creed, however true, produce hardness of heart. They lose their freshness, and thus much of their force. The soul becomes accustomed to them, as the forester to the rustling of the foliage, or the mariner to the murmur of the waves. And that familiarity intercepts every effort to arouse, and startle, and awaken.

2. By a neglect of religious claims. Some by procrastination, others by stolid indifference, refuse to come face to face with such questions as "What must I do to be saved?" The capacity for religion diminishes, and almost dies out through disuse. Is it not thus with every power we possess?

3. By conscious indulgence of any sin. The man who continues, perhaps, in a very studied secrecy, to carry on some business scheme that he knows to be fraudulent, to cherish some desire that he knows to be impure, to maintain a habit that he knows is stamped with meanness, or uncharitableness, is doing the very best he can to become insensible to sincerity, holiness, nobility, and love.

III. HOW THIS HARDNESS OF HEART IS TO BE PREVENTED.

1. Be earnest. Triflers petrify with terrible rapidity.

2. Be real. They who simultaneously live two lives — the outward, upright, pious, irreproachable; the inward, false, godless, corrupt are, by all the restraint and repression that their hypocrisy involves, hardening their hearts, becoming in heart " as hard as a piece of nether millstone."

3. Be watchful. Not only to avoid trifling and to keep wide of all hypocrisy, but because of the insidious influence of familiarity with holy things, there is need in every one for watchfulness. Often introspect yourself to see if you are getting less tender-hearted; and if you are, use every means that can soften and quicken you again.

IV. How THIS HARDNESS OF HEART IS TO BE REPROVED.

1. How can the hard heart be broken? God has provided the means.

(1) The dispensations of His providence, such as the loneliness of Jacob, the manifold sorrows of Job, the sickness of Hezekiah, are designed to quicken our spiritual nature.

(2) God's Word is a hammer that has crushed the pride, shivered the self-righteousness, broken the " stony heart" of many a sinner.

(3) The Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, and all that cross signifies of a life of love, of sacrificial suffering, and of atoning death, is the great power for melting and subduing human hearts.

(4) The Spirit of God, sometimes using these means, sometimes acting directly upon the human spirit, is the power that takes away "the stony heart, and gives a heart of flesh."

2. What are the signs that the heart is rightly broken?

(1) There is consciousness of sin. As in broken stones we find fossils of the reptile or the fern, telling of the time when it was a soft, clay like substance, easily impressible; so in the process of breaking the hard heart, there is revealed the reptile of actual sin, as well as the fern of fair promise. "God be merciful to me a sinner!" "Father, I have sinned."(2) There is the sense of God's gracious presence. When the heart is rightly broken, He who was " sent to heal the broken-hearted" is there. "The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and sayeth such as be of a contrite spirit."

(U. R. Thomas.)

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KJV: Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his voice,

WEB: Therefore, even as the Holy Spirit says, "Today if you will hear his voice,