THE labourer is worthy of his hire, and the solder of his wages; but the hire of iniquity is punishment, the wages of sin is death. When last hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and in, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.' What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed! for the end of these things is death?'

There is the death of the body. No sooner did our first parents commit sin, than they received in themselves the sentence of death, and that sentence has also been executed upon all their sinful offspring, with only two exceptions. The law of mortality is universal and unavoidable, because all have sinned.'

justice. Dissipation and licentiousness not only waste the substance, but ruin the health, clothe a man with rags, and bring him to a piece of bread. Habits of sensual indulgence visibly undermine the bodily constitution; and in the bloated countenance, the emaciated form, or the trembling gait, you at once read the sin in the punishment. To how many fatal accidents does intemperance expose its votaries? How many bodies are found dead or drowned, that are recognized as the bodies of drunkards, who have administered to themselves the slow but sure poison? Nor are these the only methods in which this life, so short at the best, is by the sinner rendered shorter still. Lazy inactivity and luxurious ease enervate the body as well as the mind, and are as prejudicial to health as to happiness. Envy,' says the wise man, is the rottenness of the bones.' Fretful peevishness, corroding worldly cares, and vexing anxieties, the habitual indulgence of anger, malice, revenge,

How frequently has a holy God inflicted instant death on the presumptuous transgressor in a way of judgment! Remember Lot's wife, and Korah and his company, and the sons of Aaron all these tend more or less to shorten life; for and Eli, and Ananias and Sapphira, and many though the results may seem more remote and thers, whose awful fate is recorded in the book are less easily traced, the effect is no less cerof God, and acknowledge, as you read, that verily tain. Not one in a thousand is supposed to die there is a reward for the wicked as well as the a purely natural death; the greater number righteous, that verily there is a God who judgeth either directly or indirectly hasten on their disthe earth! The same truth has been exem-solution. How many have we known who, there plified in the history of communities as well as is every reason to believe, would have lived a of individuals. Look at the world before the longer life had they lived a better! They might food, at the men of Sodom and Gomorrah, at the have enjoyed a good old age, had it not been for Egyptians who perished in the sea, and the Is- their dissolute youth, and their profligate manraelites who perished in the wilderness. They hood. Some, indeed, of a similar character you toiled laboriously in the service of sin, and may see dragging on their miserable existence for ey reaped its stipulated wages. years, but their appearance lamentably testifies that they are filled with the sins of their youth, which shall lie down with them in the grave. In all such cases, therefore, the sinner may justly be regarded as a self-murderer, acting as if he wished to anticipate his final judgment,-forcing for himself a passage into hell, that in its flames he may be tormented before the time.'

And if we could trace the avenging progress of the angel of death now, we should find the destruction of many a sinner effected in the selfsame manner. Liar! swearer! Sabbath-breaker! Button! drunkard!-what security have you that the next time you utter words of falsehood, or take God's name in vain, or profane his sacred day, or abuse his good creatures to the fulfilment of your base lusts-you shall not receive, in the Tery act of sinning, the just recompense of your Leeds?

But even when sin is not immediately followed by death as a judgment from God, it often, in various other ways, does work out death as its Certain consequence. There is a natural tendency in many vices to hurry on the perpetrator to an arly, premature grave. We read in the bible hat bloody and deceitful men do not live out f their days. Sometimes their passions impel them to the commission of crimes, which bring them to an untimely end by the hands of public

For that, after all, is sin's final wages;-not the death of the body only, but the death of the soul, the destruction of both soul and body in hell-fire. That is the ultimate hire of those who toil to life's end in the service of iniquity; as is evident from its being here placed in contrast with the life eternal' given by God through Christ to those who, being made free from sin, become the servants of righteousness.

And what is the second death? We cannot tell. It is one of those tremendous realities, which must be experienced in order to be described; it is one of those facts which our faith admits without being able to explain. We do

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not know-God forbid we ever should-the | limited view, were we to regard this as implying feelings of the impenitent soul, as it passes out of merely the restoration of animal life and immorthe body through the gloomy valley of the sha- tality to the body at the last day. Looking at the dow of death into the broad day-light of eter-word in its fullest and highest acceptation, it must nity, and discovers in the full blaze of that light be held to include the spiritual life of the soul --that it is lost! This only do we know, that here, and the immortal life of soul and body in it will be for ever dying without ever becoming that glorious state of endless happiness which reextinct, that it will be for ever living in misery mains for the people of God; it is 'life eternal.' and for ever seeking annihilation, but shall not Death, we saw, is the wages or hire of sin, but find it; for the punishment will consist not in the it is not said that life is the merited wages, the extinction of being, but of happiness and of hope. deserved reward, of righteousness. No! it is a This death is as certainly due to the sinner as gift, a free gift of the grace of God. True, inare wages to the labourer; it is sin's appointed deed, it is bestowed only on certain characters, but and appropriate recompense. Were not this the the formation of that character is itself the work of due reward of evil deeds, the God of justice the Spirit of God, and to him, therefore, belongs would not have assigned it; and were it not to all the glory. Now, being made free from sin, be actually inflicted, the God of truth would not and become servants to God, ye have your fruit have threatened it. If we knew fully all the unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.' Yet obligations sin has violated, all the excellencies there is no proportion between the obedience of it has insulted, all the dire effects it has produced, the highest saint, and the boundless, endless bliss and will yet produce, throughout the universe, of heaven, which could entitle him to any such we should then have some adequate conceptions reward. It is a reward not of debt, but of grace, of its odious malignity and its deep demerit. and the very holiness which qualifies for its enBut there is one who knows these things full joyment, yea, and even the faith which humbly well, and in his judgment respecting sin's ex- receives it, are not of ourselves-they are the gift ceeding sinfulness, namely, that they who do of God. such things are worthy of death' let us humbly acquiesce, believing that it cannot but be according to truth. In the great day of the revelation of his righteous judgments, His awards shall be made known and vindicated before an assembled world; the convinced and condemned sinner will then be speechless; and the Judge of all the earth will be justified when he speaketh, and clear when he judgeth.

The perfect freeness of this gift is farther apparent from the medium through which it is conveyed, viz., through Jesus Christ our Lord. As by man came death, by man also comes life.' 'This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son,' as a treasure sealed up and secured-life hid with Christ in God. And, therefore, as he who has the field has the treasure, as he who has the fountain has the 'The wages of sin is death.' Nothing our water, as he who has the garden has the fruit, fancy can picture, or our fears apprehend, can so 'he that hath the Son hath life.' Yes! it is a exceed the amount of misery which is represented sublime and solemn truth, that the eternal Son by the being bound hand and foot and cast into of God is possessed in the highest and most imouter darkness, where there is weeping, and portant sense, not by the worlds that are upheld wailing, and gnashing of teeth-where their worm by his power, not by the heavens that display his never dies, and their fire is never quenched-glory, not by the angels that worship before his where they have no rest day nor night-and face, but by the lowly heart that bows to his where the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever. May the God of mercy have mercy upon every reader, that he die not the second death!

grace, and rejoices in his salvation. To such he is the Resurrection and the Life-the resurrection of the body, and the life of the soul; for transforming the spirit by the energy of his grace, he shall, in due time, change the vile body also, and fashion it like unto his own glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.' Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift!

How important for every reader to ascertain to the darkness, that men were not ashamed to fall which of the two he belongs! down before the works of their own hands, and Here is the kingdom of darkness, the domain converted that earth which the Creator God had of satan, who is pre-eminently the power of formed to show forth his praise, into one vast darkness,' that is, the prince or sovereign who temple of idols. Great is the power of darkness possesses the power. When Jesus was betrayed in encouraging and concealing vice. "He that by a false friend, and seized by the hands of vio-doeth evil cometh not to the light.' Need we lence at the dead of night, he said to those who wonder then that the heathen of ancient times, like sought his life, 'This is your hour, and the power the heathen of our own day, not retaining God in of darkness—a deed of darkness, befitting the their knowledge, should have given themselves season you have chosen for its perpetration, and over to the vilest abominations, which are fitly emanating from him who is the ruler of darkness. represented as 'deeds of darkness'—'the unfruitWhat was the object of Paul's commission to the ful works of darkness? So thoroughly was the Gentiles? It was 'to open their eyes, and to turn pagan world pervaded by this character, that them from darkness to light, and from the power they are spoken of as the darkness itself; 'Ye of satan unto God.' Before we can be made meet were sometimes darkness.' for the inheritance of the saints in light, we must be delivered from the power of darkness. Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that they may show forth the praises of him who hath called them out of 'darkness' into his marvellous light. The apostle, in describing the conflict they have to maintain in standing against the wiles of the devil, says, 'We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness, (or wicked spirits) in high places.'

Now under this dominion of darkness all men are by nature. Ever since the apostacy in Eden, satan, the prince of this world, has swayed his iron sceptre over blinded, deluded man. As light is the emblem of knowledge and joy, so darkness is the emblem of ignorance and wretchedness. As darkness wraps up visible objects from our bodily eyes, so ignorance hides the true nature of things from the eyes of the mind. Light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun; but there is nothing more unpleasant in itself, or more commonly associated with the idea of terror, than the gloom of night, and so the term darkness came likewise to be used to denote the feeling of horror and misery. In this sense, therefore, the power of darkness is nothing else than the tyranny which the devil exercises over his wretched and captive slaves, filling their understandings with error, and their consciences at one time with insensibility, and at another time with affright. The depth of his abyss vomits forth, as it were, a black and dense vapour, which conceals from them heaven and its blessed brightness. It was thus that he turned all the heathen nations from the service of their Maker; first obscuring, and then extinguishing those sparks of divine knowledge they yet retained-until so gross was

Yet why limit the description to pagans? Though Paul had been a well-instructed Israelite of the straitest sect, and touching the outward righteousness of the law was blameless, he yet here includes himself among those who had been under the power of darkness.' And not to speak of the many heathens at home-adulterers, profane swearers, drunkards, sabbath-breakers, persons given to covetousness, which is idolatry—are there not thousands and tens of thousands who, though nominally Christian, are as much under the power of darkness as was Paul before his conversion? for they have not the knowledge of God, and the love of God is not in them.

Professing Christian! if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! and how great too its power in misleading you into error, and exposing you to danger! Yes, and unless removed by divine illumination, it will surely end in the horror of great darkness hereafter-the blackness of darkness for ever—the outer darkness, so called because it consists in perpetual banishment from Him who is the light and life of men.

But from this power of darkness true Christians are delivered-the original word denoting that exertion of power which is put forth in snatching a person from imminent peril. God, by the illumination of his truth, and the energy of his grace, rescues them from the darkness and chains of the spiritual Egypt, and gently leading them by the hand, introduces them into the kingdom of his well-beloved Son.

What a contrast between these two kingdoms! The one of darkness, the other of light; the one of pollution, the other of purity; the one of discord, the other of peace; the one of death, the other of life. Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart.'

Here then is another distinguished privilege in