AT THE NATIONAL SCOTCH CHURCH, REGENT SQUARE, JULY 7, 1833, Revelations, xxii. 11.-" He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: he that is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still." Our first remark, on the Scripture we have now read, is how very palpably, and how nearly it connects time with eternity. The character wherewith we sink into the grave at death, is the very character wherewith we shall re-appear on the day of resurrection. The character which habit has fixed and strengthened through life, adheres, it would seem, to the disembodied spirit through the mysterious interval which separates the day of our dissolution from the day of our account, when it will again stand forth, the very image and substance of what it was, to the inspection of the Judge and the awards of the judgment seat. The moral lineaments which be graven on the tablet of the inner man, and which every day of the unconverted life makes deeper and more indelible than before, will retain the very impress they have gotten, unaltered and uneffaced by the transition from our present to our future state of existence. There will be a dissolution, and then a reconstruction of the VOL. VI. body from the sepulchral dust into which it hath mouldered; but there will neither be a dissolution nor a renovation of the spirit, which, indestructible hoth in character and essence, will weather and retain its identity on the midway passage between this world and the next; so that at the time of quitting this earthly tenement, we may say, that if "unjust" now, it will be "unjust" still, if "filthy" now, it will be " filthy" still, if "righteous" now, it will be "righteous" still, and if "holy" now, it will be "holy" still. Our second remark suggested by the Scripture now under consideration is that there be many analogies of nature and experience which even death itself does not interrupt. There is nothing more familiar to our daily observation than the power and inveteracy of habit; insomuch that every propensity is strengthened by every new act of indulgence, and every virtuous principle is more firmly established than before by every new act of resolute obedience F to its dictates. The law which con- its representations of both; of the nects the actings of boyhood or youth with the character of manhood, is the identical and unrepealed law which connects our actings in time with our character in eternity. The way in which the moral discipline of youth prepares for the honors and the enjoyments of a virtuous manhood, is the very way in which the moral and spiritual discipline of the whole life prepares for a virtuous and happy immortality; and on the other hand the succession of cause and of effect, from a profligate youth or a dishonest manhood to a disgraced and worthless old age, is just the succession also of cause and effect between the misdeeds and the depravities of our history on earth, and the inheritance of worthlessness and wretchedness for ever. The law of moral continuity between different states of human life, is also the law of continuity between the two worlds, which even the death that intervenes does not violate. Be he a saint or a sinner, each shall be filled, in the express language of Scripture, with the fruit of his own ways. So that when translated into the respective places, of fixed and everlasting destination, the one shall rejoice through eternity in that pure element of goodness which here he loved and aspired after, the other; the helpless and degraded victim of those passions which lording over him through life, shall be irrevocably damned to that worst of torments, and that worst of tyranny -the torment of his own accursed nature-the inexorable tyranny of evil. Our third remark suggested by this Scripture is that it affords no dubious prospect of the future hell and the future heaven of the new testament. We are aware of the material images employed in Scripture, and by which it embodies forth fire, and the brimstone, and the lake of living agony, and the gnashing of teeth, and the wailing-the ceaseless wailing of distress and despair unutterable, by which the one is set before us in characters of terror and most revolting hideousness; of the splendour, the spaciousness, the music, the floods of melody, the rich and surpassing loveliness by which the other is set before us in characters of bliss and brightness unperishable, with all that can regale the glorified senses of creatures rejoicing for ever in the presence and before the throne of God. We stop not to inquire, far less to dispute, whether these descriptions, in the plain meaning of every letter of them, are to be realized; but we hold that it would purge theology from many of its errors, that it would guide and enlighten the practical Christianity of many honest enquirers, if the moral character both of heaven and hell were more distinctly recognised, and held a more prominent place in the regards and the contemplations of man. If it indeed be true, that the moral, rather than the material, is the main ingredient whether of the coming torment, or the coming extacy, then the hell of the wicked may be said to have already begun, and the heaven of the virtuous may be said to have already begun; the one in the bitterness of an unhinged and dissatisfied spirit, has the foretaste of the wretchedness before him-the other, in the peace and triumph and complacency of an approving conscience, has a foretaste of the happiness before him. Each is ripening for his own everlasting destiny; and, whether it be in the depravities that deepen and accumulate on the character of the one, or in the graces that brighten and multiply on the other, we see materials enough for the worm that dieth not, or for the pleasures that are for evermore. The perpetual violence. The man of cunning and concealment, however dexterous, however triumphant in his wretched policy, is not at ease. stoop, the downcast regard, the dark and sinister expression of him who cannot lift up his head among his fellow men, or look his companions in the face, is a sensible proof that he who knows himself to be dishonest, feels himself to be degraded; and the inward sense of dishonour that haunts and humbles him here, is but the commencement of that shame and everlasting contempt to which he shall awake hereafter. This, you will observe, is purely a moral chas But, again, it may be asked, will spiritual elements alone-will moral and spiritual elements alone, suffice to make up either the intense and unutterable wretchedness of the hell, or the intense beatitudes of the heaven? For the answer to this question, let us first draw your attention to the former of these receptacles; and we ask you, to think of the state of that heart in respect of sensation, which is the seat of a concentrated and all absorbing selfishness, which feels for no other interest than its own, and holds no fellowship of truth, or honesty, or confidence with ❘tisement, and, apart from the inflic the fellow beings around it. The owner of such a heart may live in society; but cut off as he is, by his own sordid nature, from the reciprocities of honorable feelings and good faith, he may be said to live an exile in the midst of it; he is a stranger to the daylight of the moral world, and instead of walking abroad on the open platform of free and fearless communion with his fellows, he spends a cold and heartless existence in a hiding place of his own. You mistake it, if you think of this creeping and ignoble creature, that he knows ought of the real truth or substance of enjoyment; or however successful he may have been, in the wiles of his solitary selfishness, that a sincere and a solid satisfaction has ever been the result of it. On the contrary, if you enter his heart, you will find a distaste and disquietude in the lurking sense of its own worthlessness; and though it is dissevered from the respect of society without, he finds no refuge within, when he is abandoned by the respect of his own conscience. It does not consist with our moral nature that there should be internal happiness or internal harmony when the moral sense is made to suffer tion of violence or pain in the sensible economy, is enough to overwhelm the spirit which is exercised thereby. Let him, therefore, who is unjust now, be unjust still; and in stepping from time to eternity, he bears in his own distempered bosom, the materials of the coming vengeance along with him. Character itself will be the executioner of its own condemnation; and, instead of each suffering apart, the unrighteous are congregated together, as in the parable of the tares, where instead of each plant being severally destroyed, the order is given to bind them up in bundles and burn them. We may be well assured, that when the turbulence and disorder of an unrighteous society are superadded to those sufferings which prey in secrecy and solitude within the heart of each individual member, a ten fold fiercer and more intolerable agony will ensue from it. The anarchy of a state, when the authority of its government is for a time pended, forms but a feeble representation of that everlasting anarchy, when the unrighteous of all ages are let loose to act and re-act with the utmost violence on each other. sus In this conflict of assembled myriads- | perfect character can suffer without this fierce and fell collision between all the other virtues suffering along the outrages and the anxieties on the with it. We believe that the conone side, and the outcries of resent- nexion between the habit of an unment on the other-though no pain lawful pleasure, and the maintenance were inflicted in this war of passions, of a strict resolute exalted equity in yet the purpose of passion and the truth, is very seldom, we could alpurpose of violence in one creature most say, is never realized. calls forth the purpose of passion and the purpose of keenest vengeance back again --though no moral and sentient agony were felt in the war of disembodied spirits, yet in the wild tempest of the emotions alone, the hatred, the fury, the burning recollection of injured rights, and the brooding thoughts of yet unfulfilled retaliation in these, and these alone, do we behold materials enough of a dire and dreadful pandemonium; and apart from corporeal sufferings altogether, may we behold in the full and final developement of character alone, enough for imparting all its corrosion to the worm that dieth not"-enough for sustaining in all its fierceness "the fire that is not quenched." But there is another moral ingredient in the after-sufferings of the wicked, besides the one of which we have now spoken, suggested to us by the second clause of our text, and from which we learn, that not only will the 'unjust' man carry his falsehood and his fraud along with him to the place of condemnation; but that also the voluptuary will carry his unsanctified habits and unhallowed passions thitherward; in other words, "let him that is filthy be filthy still." I would here take the opportunity of exposing what I fear to be a frequent delusion in society, which gives respect to the man of honour and integrity; and he does not forfeit that respect though known at the same time to be a man of dissipation. Not that we think any one of the virtues which enter into the composition of a The man of forbidden indulgence, in the prosecution of his objects, has a thousand degrading fears to encounter, and many concealments to practise, perhaps, low and unworthy artifices to which he must descend; and how can either his honour or his honesty be said to survive, if, at length, in his heedless and impetuous career, he shall trample on the dearest rights and the most sacred interests of families? We think it has all the authority of a moral aphorism, that the sobrieties of human virtue can never be invaded, without the equities of human virtue also being invaded. The moralities of life are too closely linked and interwoven with each other, as though one should be touched the others may be uninjured and entire; and so no man can cast his purity away from him without a violence being done to the general moral consistency and structure of his whole character. But besides this we have the authority of the text, and the oft repeated affirmations of the New Testament, for saying to the voluptuary, that if the countenance of the world be not withdrawn from him, the gate of heaven is at least shut against him; that nothing unclean or unholy can enter there; and the carrying his unsanctified affections into the place of condemnation, he will find them to be ministers of wrath and executioners of a still fiercer vengeance. The loathing, the remorse, the felt and conscious degradation, the dreariness of heart that follow in the train of guilty indulgence; here these form but the beginning of his sorrows, and are but the presages and precursors of that deeper wretchedness, which, by the unrepealed laws of moral nature, descend on its possessor in another state of existence. They are but the penalties of vice in embryo; and that may give, at least, a conception of what those penalties are in full. It will add inconceivably to the darkness and the disorder of that moral chaos in which the unpenitent shall spend their eternity, when the uproar of the bacchanalian and licentious passions are thus superadded to the selfish and malignant passions of our nature; and when the frenzy of unsated desire, followed up by the languor and compulsion of its worthless indulgence, shall make up the sad history of many an unhappy spirit. We need not to dwell on the picture, though it brings out into bolder relief the all important truth that there is an inherent bitterness in sin; that by the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse, and its own worst punishment; that the wicked, on the other side of death, but reap what they sowed on this; and that whether we look to the tortures of a distempered spirit, or to the countless ills of a distempered society, we may be very sure that to the character of its inmates a character which they have fostered upon earth, and which now remains fixed on them in eternity-that to this character the main wretchedness of hell is owing. Before quitting this part of the subject we have but one remark more to offer. It may be felt as if we had over-stated the power of mere character to beget a wretchedness at all approaching to the wretchedness of hell, seeing that the character is often realized in this world without bringing along with it a distress or a discomfort which is at all intolerable. Neither the 'unjust' man of my text, nor the licentious man of my text, is seen to be so unhappy here, in virtue of the moral characteristics which respectively belong to them, as to justify the imagination that these characteristics will have the power to effect such anguish and disorder of spirit as that which we have now been representing. But it is forgotten, first, that we shall have no such world on the other side of death-that the world presents, in its business, and amusements, and various gratifications, a refuge from the reflection and remorse of the mental agonies of the world; and, secondly, that the governments of the world offer a restraint against those outbreaks of violence which would keep up a perpetual anarchy in the species. Let us simply conceive of these two securities, against our having even now a hell upon earth, that they are both taken down; that there was no longer such a world as ours, affording to each individual spirit innumerable diversions from the burden of its own thoughts; and no longer such a human government as ours, affording to general society a powerful defence against the countless variety of ills which would otherwise rage and tumultuate within its bounds; and then as sure as a solitary prison (and a remarkable fact it is and illustrative of the real tendency of our moral nature in a marked degree) is felt by every criminal to be the most dreadful of all punishments; and as sure, on the authority of law being suspended, the reign of terror would commence and the unhinged passions of humanity would go forth over the face of the land to ravage and destroy, so surely, out of moral elements and moral influences alone, might an eternity of utter wretchedness and despair be entailed on the rebellious. And only let all the unjust and all the licentious of my text be formed |