Conscience obeyed, or conscience violated, records itself upon the judgment leaf, that one leaf in every human heart.
You have known persons who were near drowning, but they were afterwards resuscitated, and they have told you that in the two or three minutes between the accident and the resuscitation, all their past life flashed before them, all they had ever thought, all they had ever done, all they had ever seen in an instant came before them.
The memory never loses anything. It is only a folded leaf. It is only a closed book. Though you be an octogenarian, though you be a nonagenarian, all the thoughts and acts of your life are recorded by conscience on memory’s page, whether you recall them or not.
That leaf, that judgment leaf in my heart, that judgment leaf in your heart, will decide our condition after this world shall have five thousand million years been swept out the heavens, an extinct planet, and time itself will be so long past that on the ocean of eternity it will seem only as now seems a ripple on the Atlantic.— TALMAGE.
