Jesus Christ for acceptance in that eventful meeting; then may you adopt the language of the poet :

"Bold shall I stand in that great day;

For who aught to my charge shall lay?
Fully, through thee, absolved I am

From sin and fear, from guilt and shame."

HELL.

THE people of God have frequently experienced that bodily pain and outward troubles are comparatively easy to be borne while they enjoy a sense of his supporting presence; they have even been known to sing in the furnace of affliction. His omnipotent aid, together with a consciousness of integrity, have sustained believers under the most acute bodily sufferings; "the spirit of a man will sustain his infirmities, but a wounded spirit who can bear?" Or in other words, conscious guilt will break a man's spirit, and render his life a burden to himself; and in such an one we see a contrast to the Christian.

Picture to yourself a gamester, who by his sinful courses has squandered his estate, beggared his wife and children, and set all but his life upon the hazard of the die; such an one, deeply tinctured with the false notions of sentimental honour; proud in spirit; indebted to his accomplices, and unable to meet their claims; alive to the internal sense of the guilt of his actions; exposed to the savage scorn and contempt of those whose dupe he has been; the reproaches of his awakening conscience now gaining the ascendancy over every force that had hitherto quelled its upbraidings; while the hope of retrieving his circumstances is

for ever banished from his breast; and truly may it be said that such an one suffers a hell upon earth. But let us proceed with this picture: remorse of conscience, however acutely it may agonize the mind, however it may urge the sufferer to the borders of despair, may be, and often is, accompanied by torturing pains of body. When sickness and disease are known to have been induced by riotous living, and are felt as the penalty of illicit pleasures, they add greatly to the anguish they otherwise occasion. This state of wretched suffering, without the alleviations of friendship's soothing influence, and destitute of the consolations of the gospel, being cut off from all hope in futurity, and obnoxious to the reproaches of the world, this state of hopeless misery constitutes indeed a hell upon earth.

I confess it is difficult rightly to conceive of the extent of agony of which such an one must be the subject; it is difficult, if not impossible, to throw the mind and feelings into these various forms of woe: how much less then are we able to do justice to the fearful subject which is placed before our contemplations in the heading of this essay? If we cannot enter into right conceptions of the miseries of such a state as may fairly be designated a hell upon earth, how shall we be able to form suitable notions of that place of woe which the eternal Jehovah has declared shall be the abode, the everlasting portion, of all unbelievers: "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God."

Various places have been assigned for the locality of hell; but whether it be in the centre of the earth, in the sun, or in the comets of our system, is a matter of little importance. In modern times, the celebrated Whiston has advanced the hypothesis, that the comets are so many hells, appointed to carry the damned in

their orbits alternately into the confines of the sun, to be burned with its excessive heat, and then to convey them beyond the orb of the remotest planet, there to starve with extreme and bitter cold. The word of God says nothing respecting torment from cold, but "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." More modern discoverers state that the comets are not solid bodies, but only meteors, and if so, they cannot be the prisons alluded to.

Our Saviour's description of hell is, "the fire that never shall be quenched, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." In this quotation we have set forth the two principal sources of torment, the one applicable to the soul, the other to the body; "The worm that dieth not," intends a guilty conscience; “the fire that never shall be quenched,” intends eternal burnings, in which the body will be tormented.

I conceive the principal feature in the punishment of hell to be anguish of spirit, arising from various causes. We may suppose that, as soon as the soul of a wicked person is disembodied by death, the first fearful impression experienced is, that it is damned; oh, awful feeling! who can fathom it? What language can describe it? What thought conceive it? What tongue can utter the horrors that will press upon the cursed spirit? Seized by infernal and misshapen demons, it will be hurried hence, and plunged beneath the liquid fires of ever burning sulphur; and there, bound in chains of darkness to the bottomless pit, time or duration enough will be realized to bewail its folly and madness, in sinning away all the opportunities and means of grace which, in the present state, are thought lightly of: then what inconceivable wailings of despair will be uttered, that the day of grace is past, heaven and happiness for ever

lost, hell and misery for ever gained; as an eternal fool will the soul then regard itself, having enjoyed the pleasures of sin for a season, and for those transitory pleasures to be for ever paying the penalty.

In hell, the soul will be a sufferer in all its faculties; the body in all its members. There, the unrepenting sinner will take a retrospective view of all his past actions; busy memory will be active in furnishing incidents of folly and of sin, while all the past must come in awful review, in never terminating succession, and prove a source of never ending upbraidings : means of grace slighted, offers of mercy rejected, a crucified Saviour trampled on, his ministers and people despised,-the consideration of these things, together with the innumerable acts of guilt committed, will go to justify the equity of God in the punishment, and aggravate the gnawings of the worm that never dies! However accumulated the woes that will be heaped upon the head of the victim of God's wrath, from a retrospective view of his life, think you he will find much alleviation of suffering from an anticipation of the future? The faculties of the soul were active enough in sinning, and so they will prove, even against his will, in suffering; and what are the prospects of a damned soul in hell? I will tell you.

"And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever;" this is his prospect; this will be the prospect of every impenitent sinner, and this the general, the universal prospect of all the damned; "for ever and ever," like a pendulum will vibrate horror and despair to every agonized soul, for ever damned! after the lapse of thousands and millions of ages, for ever damned, will be the burden of the soul's wretchedness. "And the devil that deceived them shall be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone,"