gence and long-suffering. But come at length it will, when Revenge shall array herself to go forth, and Anguish shall attend her, and from the wheels of their chariot' ruin and dismay shall shoot far and wide among the enemies of the king, whose desolation shall not tarry, and whose destruction, as the wing of the whirlwind shall be swift-hopeless as the conclusion of eternity and the reversion of doom. Then around the fiery concave of the wasteful pit the clang of grief shall ring, and the flinty heart which repelled tender mercy shall strike its fangs into its proper bosom; and the soft and gentle spirit which dissolved in voluptuous pleasures shall dissolve in weeping sorrows and outbursting lamentations; and the gay glory of time shall depart; and sportful liberty shall be bound for ever in the chain of obdurate necessity. The green earth with all her blooming beauty and bowers of peace shall depart. The morning and evening salutations of kinsmen shall depart, and the ever welcome voice of friendship and the tender whispering of full-hearted affection shall depart, for the sad discord of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And the tender names of children, and father and mother, and wife and husband, with the communion of domestic love, and mutual affection and the inward touches of natural instinct, which family compact, when uninvaded by discord, wraps the live-long day into one swell of tender emotion, making earth's lowly scenes worthy of heaven itself-All, all shall pass away; and instead shall come the level lake that burneth, and the solitary dungeon, and the desolate bosom, and the throes and tossings of horror and hopelessness, and the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.

'Tis written, 'tis written, 'tis sealed of heaven, and a few years shall reveal it all. Be assured it is even so to happen to the despisers of holy writ. With this in arrear, what boots liberty, pleasure, enjoyment-all within the hourglass of time, or the round earth's continent, all the sensibilities of life, all the powers of man, all the attractions of woman!

Terror hath sitten enthroned on the brows of tyrants, and made the heart of a nation quake; but upon this peaceful volume there sits a terror to make the mute world stand aghast. Yet not the terror of tyranny neither, but the terror of justice, which abides the scorners of the most High God, and the revilers of his most gracious Son. And is it not just, though terrible, that he who brooked not in heaven one moment's disaffection, but launched the rebel host to hell and bound them evermore in chains of darkness, should also do

his sovereign will upon the disaffected of this earth, whom he hath long endured and pleaded with in vain? We are fallen, 'tis true-we found the world fallen into ungodly customs, 'tis true-here are we full grown and mature in disaffection, most true. And what can we do to repair a ruined world, and regain a lost purity? Nothing-nothing can we do to such a task. But God hath provided for this pass of perplexity; he hath opened a door of reconciliation, and laid forth a store of help, and asks at our hand no impossibilities, only what our condition is equal to in concert with his freely offered grace.

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These topics of terror, it is very much the fashion of the time to turn the ear from, as if it were unmanly to fear pain. Call it manly or unmanly, it is Nature's strongest instinctstrongest instinct of all animated nature: and to avoid it is the chief impulse of all our actions. Punishment is that which law founds upon, and parental authority in the first instance, and every human institution from which it is painful to be dismembered. Not only is pain not to be inRicted without high cause, or endured without trouble, but not to be looked on without a pang: as ye may judge, when ye see the cold knife of the surgeon enter the patient's flesh, or the heavy wain grind onward to the neck of a fallen child. Despise pain, I wot not what it means. Bodily pain you may despise in a good cause, but let there be no motive, let it be God's simple visitation, spasms of the body for example, then how many give it licence, how many send for the physician to stay it? Truly, there is not a man in being whom bodily pain, however slight, if incessant, will not turn to fury or to insensibility-embittering peace, eating out kindliness, contracting sympathy, and altogether deforming the inner man. Fits of acute suffering which are soon to be over, any disease with death in the distance may be borne, but take away hope, and let there be no visible escape, and he is more than mortal that can endure. A drop of water incessantly falling upon the head, is found to be the most excruciating of all torture, which proveth experimentally the truth of what is said.

Hell, therefore, is not to be despised, like a sick bed, if any of you be so hardy as to despise a sick bed. There are no comforting kindred, no physician's aid, no hope of recovery, no melancholy relief of death, no sustenance of grace. It is no work of earthly torture or execution, with a good cause to suffer in, and a beholding world or posterity to look on, a good conscience to approve, perhaps scornful words to revenge cruel actions, and the constant play of resolution or

study of revenge. It is no struggle of mind against its material envelopments and worldly ills, like stoicism, which was the sentiment of virtue nobly downbearing the sense of pain. I cannot render it to fancy, but I can render it to fear. Why may it not be the agony of all diseases the body is suscepti ble of, with the anguish of all deranged conceptions and disordered feelings, stinging recollections, present remorses, bursting indignations, with nothing but ourselves to burst on, dismal prospects, fearful certainties, fury, folly and despair.

I know it is not only the fashion of the world, but of Christians, to despise the preaching of future wo; but the methods of modern schools which are content with one idea for their gospel, and one motive for their activity, we willingly renounce for the broad methods of the Scripture, which bring out ever and anon the recesses of the future to upbear duty and downbear wickedness, and assail men by their hopes and fears as often as by their affections, by the authority of God as often as by the constraining love of Christ, by arguments of reason and of interest no less. Therefore sustained by the frequent example of our Saviour, the most tender-hearted of all beings, and who to man hath shown the most excessive love; we return, and give men to wit, that the despisers of God's law and of Christ's gospel, shall by no means escape the most rigorous fate. Pain, pain inexorable, tribulation and anguish shall be their everlasting doom! The smoke of their torments ascendeth for ever and ever. One frail thread snapped and they are down to the bottomless pit. Think of him who had a sword suspended by a hair over his naked neck while he lay and feasted,-think of yourselves suspended over the pit of perdition by the flimsy thread of life-a thread near worn, weak in a thousand places, ever threatened by the fatal shears which soon shall clip it. You believe the Scriptures, then this you believe, which is true as that Christ died to save you from the same.

If you call for a truce to such terrific pictures, then call for mercy against the more terrific realities; but if you be too callous or too careless to call for mercy and ensue repentance, your pastors may give you truce to the pictures, but God will give no abeyance to the realities into which they are dropping evermore, and you shall likewise presently drop, if you repent not.

Now, if you be aroused to think, let us argue together and bring things to an issue. What hinders you from giving your souls to the divine institutions? Early habits hinder, the world's customary fashions hinder, and Nature's lean

ings the other way hinder, and passion hinders, and a whole insurrectionary host of feelings muster against the change. Well, be it granted that a troop of joys must be put to flight, and a whole host of pleasant feelings be subdued. Then, what is lost? Is honour lost? Is fortune lost? Is God's providence scared away? Hath the world slipt from beneath your feet, and does the air of heaven no longer blow fresh around you? Has life deceased, or are your faculties of happiness foregone? Change, the dread of change, that is all. The change of society and habits, with the loss of some few perishable gaieties.

Now let us reason together. Is not that as great a change. when your physician chambers you up, and restricts your company to nurses and your diet to simples? Is not that as great a change when you leave the dissipated city, outworn with its excitements, and live with solitude and inconvenience in your summer quarters? And is not that a greater change which stern law makes, when it mures up our person and gives us outcasts to company with? And where is the festive life of those who sail the wide ocean; and where the gaieties of the campaigning soldier; and how does the wandering beggar brook his scanty life? If for the sake of a pained limb you will undergo the change, will you not for the removal of eternal pains of spirit and flesh? If for a summer of refreshment amongst the green of earth, and the freshness of ocean, ye will undergo the change, will ye not for the rich contents of heaven? And if at the command of law ye will, and if for gain the sailor will, and for honour the soldier will, and for necessity the strolling beggar will; men and brethren, will ye not, to avoid hell, to reach heaven, to please the voice of God, to, gain the inheritance of wealth and honour, and to feed your spirit's starved necessitiesOh men, will ye not muster resolution to enterprize the change?

Bring manly fortitude to this question, I entreat you, andlook it in the face; compare these two alternatives-the world's principles and customs-Christ's principles and customs. When we entered into life we were equally strangers to both, predisposed to have our own will in every thing, and reluctant to resign it either to the institutions of our ancestors, or to the institutions of Christ. By a greater aptitude of nature, and the neighbourhood of more examples, and the presence of more immediate rewards and punishments, and a youth of continual training, we have grown into the school of the world where we are enchanted and spell

bound. I know not with what, but sure we are bewitched, or with thraldom worn down and unmanned. 'Tis not better fortune that holds us, that I deny ; nor more accomplishments of mind, nor larger bounds of feeling, nor sublimer thoughts, nor more generous actions, nor more peaceful moments; which I affirm to be all on the other side. What then is the mighty gain? Next to nothing. A few gay smiles of companionship, a few momentary gratifications dear bought at the price of after-thoughts and after depressions; a few heady excesses of spirit, and extravagances of language, and irregularities of conduct; that is nearly the sum total of the benefit. Are you free? Not a jot. You are the slaves of the customs, and dare not on your peril depart from one of them. You call religion a bondage; yes, it is the bondage of angels strong and seraphs blessed; Na-" ture's well-pleased bondage to her Maker, the creature's reverence for his Creator; but yours, yours is a bondage to idle floating customs, narrow rules of men like yourselves, whose statutes enslave you. You have no privileges worth naming. You have heaven forfeited. You have hell forestalled: Pitiful drugery. And this is what you are in love with and cannot leave. So were the swinish herd enamoured of Circe's cup, forgetful of their former noble selves.

I wish I could disenchant you, that you might perceive the blessed truth, and love it-which I see not, but I may, seeing God grants his blessing to the weakest instrument. Let me speak a moment of the nature of this change; and if ever, now God send us persuasive words.

Ye take up the thing amiss when you think, as is too often represented, that it is a change to be succeeded in upon the spur of resolution. A beginning it must have, and that most noticeable when from leaving God's face and favour, we turn timorously to seek them again. But for its completion the age of Methuselah were insufficient; men are never converted, but always converting; saints never built up, but always building up. Now herein you do greatly err. Unless you change and master nature at once, you give it for hopeless, and fall down into the quietus of man's total inability and forlornness. This is the grossness of stupidest error. Knowledge of God's will is not derived at once, cases of conscience are not settled at once, nor is the ability to overcome conferred at once. The conversion is the new birth, but to be born is not to be the man complete in feature and in mind, which groweth out of knowledge, experience, discipline of youth, observation of life, and the thousand ap

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