66 racter of PERFECT hell, if one part of its misery were not despair. The worm never dieth;" "the banishment from the presence of God is everlasting," "the chaff is burnt with unquenchable fire; the smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever:-these shall go away into everlasting punishment." If these things be so,-if, indeed, it be a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, how deeply essential must it be to our well-being, that we arise and flee from the wrath to come! O! what would many, who have now finished their course, and are reserved in chains and darkness for the great day of account, willingly give in exchange for permission to return but for a little to the precincts of light, that they might enjoy and improve, though it were only a day of the * Alovioo—is the same term applied to the duration of the happiness and the misery :—if its meaning then be contracted to a round of ages in the latter case, it must be so in the former also.-Matt. xxv. 46. Son of man-one only of those days, which many of us who possess them, too unthinkingly lavish; and on which all of us place too little store! Since the night cometh upon us, when no man can work, -let us up and be doing, while it is happily called day. Although the minister is sometimes compelled to have recourse to the terrors of the Lord, it is infinitely more pleasing to him to draw forward his fellow servants, with the gentler cords of love, and bands of a man, into the faith of Christ, and obedience to his gospel. Revelation hath disclosed the mysterious way, by which penitence, -penitence, concerning the value, of which natural religion could affirm nothing with certainty, may be made available towards the blotting out of past offences. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." Transgressor!-strike quickly into this secure path, that thine iniquities may be blotted out from the book of judgment, and that thou mayest find rest to thine endangered soul. LECTURE VI. PSALM, XVI. 11. Thou wilt show me the path of life; in thy presence is fulness of joy, and at thy right hand there are pleasures for ever To a being like man, warned by the experience of all past generations, that he has but a short time to sojourn upon earth;—daily reminded by the frailty of his own frame, and the various accidents to which his brethren around him are exposed, that life, which at the longest is no more than a span, may be suddenly and abruptly cut off;-and discovering, from the surmises of reason, and the clear intelligence of revelation, that another scene of existence is to succeed the present;-to a being so situated, the wish . |