and a patriot, of a murderer and a martyr! Both may be tried by the same forms, bound with the same chain, locked up in the same cell, tortured by the same instruments, led to the same scaffold; both may be doomed to the same kind of death, to be hung up, beheaded, drawn and quartered, impaled, or burnt alive. This has been the lot of the best of men, as well as the worst of malefactors. But the former met death without fear, often with exultation, and have been heard singing praises in their prisons and on their scaffolds; while the latter were overwhelmed with shame, confusion, and horror. Why this difference? The former were conscious that they had done nothing worthy of death; the consciences of the latter told them that "they received the due reward of their deeds." And thus it is with sinners who are guilty before God, and have incurred the sentence of death.

We have been speaking of criminals, who fall into the hands of men who shall die themselves, and who can only kill the body; but sin is a capital crime against the living God, who, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell. Death, as threatened in the code of Heaven's criminal jurisprudence, means something very different from its legal acceptation among men. In the last sense it is no death compared with the former, and no object of fear. "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul." * If the curse of the law of God were exhausted by natural dissolution, and sin exposed to nothing more than the extinction of animal life and the separation of the soul from the body, there would be no such great reason for apprehension. But conscience, when it is not stupified or its voice smothered, conspires with Scripture in testifying aloud that this is not the case-that there is a hereafter that the soul does not cease to live when the body ceases to breathe—that the spirit appears before the bar of a just and holy God, and has sentence passed upon it according to the deeds done in the flesh. The Heathen had a deep conviction of this. They had their Tartarus, or hell, and their Rhadamanthus, or judge before whom departed spirits appeared;

*Mat. x. 28.

Р

and although superstition mixed up its dreams, yet conscience was to be heard speaking through these dreams; and the workings and the expression of their terrors were like the startings and the monologue of a murderer in his sleep-proclaiming the apprehensions, which haunted him during his waking hours, of falling into the hands of justice, and demonstrating his guilt, though more incoherently, yet no less convincingly, than the judicial evidence that may be afterwards led against him on his trial. Revelation, while it more clearly reveals our duty, has also lifted up the veil which covers the invisible world, and disclosed to sinners the punishment which awaits them there. It declares that "the soul that sinneth"the soul is the sinner-" it shall die." It denounces "indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil." And the prospect it presents to all that know not God and obey not the gospel is "a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries "—that the dead, small and great, shall be raised and appear before the judgment seat-that the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment, and shall have their portion with the devil and his angels, in that place where "their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched."

Let these things, which are the true and faithful sayings of God, be believed, and "the sinners in Zion will be afraid, and fearfulness will surprise the hypocrite, like a woman in travail." Let them realize these things, and they will feel what it is to be "in bondage" through the fear of death. When a man is in a passion, we say he is not master of himself -he is a slave for the time to his anger. All the passions have the effect of enslaving those who yield to them; but none of them have such a power over the mind as fear when it rises to a height. Hence the common expression applied, justly and almost exclusively, to this emotion, slavish fear—a fear which makes slaves of us. We do not speak of slavish love, or anger; to these passions we pay a voluntary homage, by wilfully indulging them. But "of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought into bondage." Fear unmans the person. It locks up all the senses-it paralyses both body

and soul; so that the person cannot flee from danger, cannot move an arm in his own defence; can neither speak, nor hear, nor see. No prison, no guards, no bars, no bolts, no chains which a tyrant can invent or employ, are so efficient as fear. This is the adamantine chain with which God has bound the devils, and in which he reserves them unto the judgment of the great day. O how easy for Him to put this hook into the nose, and this bridle into the jaws, of his proudest and fiercest enemies! He has only to lift himself up-to show himself— to look through the cloud of darkness which is on their minds; * he need not speak to them with the voice of thunder, he has only to whisper into the ear of conscience, "I am the Lord; it is I!" and instantly their hearts quail, their countenances are changed, their thoughts trouble them, the joints of their loins are loosed, and their knees smite one against another. † A Felix, a Herod, a Belshazzar, a Pharaoh, a Cain, are examples of this. Nay, whole hosts have in this manner been discomfited; "the stout-hearted have been spoiled, and none of the men of might have found their hands;" so that "one has chased a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight;"‡ yea, "the sound of a shaken leaf has chased them, and they have fled, as fleeing from a sword, and fallen when none pursued." §

But (it may be said) are such fears generally felt by sinners? Do not we see multitudes living at their ease, putting the evil day afar off, enjoying themselves as if they were never to die, or as if there were nought to dread after death? Are there not many persons, giving no evidence of religion, who are fearless of death, and expose themselves to jeopardy every hour? Is it not said of the wicked that "they have no bands in their death," and do they not often depart without any apparent horror or apprehension on their spirits?

There is truth in all this, and I am not unaware of the difficulty which it involves. It must be allowed to be a fact, to a confounding degree, that multitudes speak peace to themselves, though they walk after the imagination of their own

Exod. xiv. 24. + Dan. v. 6.

Deut. xxxii, 30,

S Lev. xxvi. 36.

hearts. And if the understanding be darkened and perverted, if conscience be "seared as with a hot iron," what can be expected to succeed but a fearless apathy? It may be remarked, however, in the first place, that the hardihood which some display, may be traced to fear. They wish to brave out the matter, and affect to despise both death and hell, when in reality they are all their lifetime in bondage through fear of them. It is not always true courage that prompts persons to expose their lives in scenes of peril; in many instances it can be traced to necessity, avarice, a false sense of honour, or, in other words, the dread of the world's laugh, which is in truth the strongest symptom of cowardice. It is the same with the fool-hardy sinner. And with respect to the apparent fortitude which some wicked men exhibit on a death-bed, it may be remarked, that fear may sometimes rise so high as to overcome itself, and to produce a species of fearlessness. The timid hind will turn upon her pursuers, and make an obstinate resistance, when she perceives that she can no longer escape. How many instances are there of condemned criminals anticipating the day of their execution! The jailer of Philippi, under the apprehension of the punishment which awaited him for allowing the prisoners to escape, was on the eve of killing himself. Despair, like a parricide, will sometimes destroy the fear which produced it.

In the second place, many plunge into dissipation and profaneness, that they may drown the fears of death, and banish all thoughts of a hereafter. Those who are most courageous over their cups, are often the most dastardly when sober. We have heard of generals who have distributed intoxicating liquors to their troops on the eve of a battle; and certain it is that some of Satan's most determined men are in a state of almost continual intoxication. The loud laugh, the noisy revel, the horrid imprecation, the profane and coarse jest at heaven and hell-what are they but the Devil's martial music, by which he contrives to put spirit into his faint-hearted troops, and without the aid of which the stoutest of his champions would sometimes lose courage, and drop their weapons in their war against the Almighty? We may trace the secret influence of

the same principle in the eager pursuit of the world, exemplified in the conduct of those who haste to be rich, or who greedily surfeit themselves with sensual delights. Like cattle who have broken into a forbidden pasture, from which they know they will be speedily driven, aware that their time is short, afraid that death will overtake them, and having hope only in this life—“behold! joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die." *

Finally, the apathy and composure of those sinners who do not run to this excess of riot, is still irrational; it is a species of sober madness. Whether it spring from pure thoughtlessness and inconsideration, or assume the air of superior wisdom, the possessors of this supposed fortitude are really chargeable with brutish folly. They become fearless, only in proportion as they approach to the rank of the brutes, who fear not death because they are incapable of foreseeing it, and have nothing to look to beyond it. They are driven to death with stupid unconcern, "as an ox goeth to the slaughter," or plunge into it with blindfold impetuosity, "as the horse rusheth into the battle." And as for those would-be wise, who boast that they have risen above the prejudices and fears of the vulgar, what is the amount of their great discovery? Why, one which we should think sufficiently humiliating, and which shows that the wisdom of this world soars only to sink the lower that all men, and they among the rest, "perish like beasts, and are laid in the grave like sheep; " or, as the wise king expressed it for them long ago: "As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me: and why was I then more wise? How dieth the wise man? As a fool. For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath: so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast." There lies the pride of modern philosophy!" How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the