eve of judgment, what avails your many cares and your unresting occupations. Will your snug dwellings, your gay clothing and your downy beds, give freshness to the stiffened joints, or remove the disease which hath got a lodgment in your marrow and your bones? Will your full table and cool wines give edge to a jaded appetite, or remove the rancour of a rotted tooth, or supply the vigour of a worndown frame? Will a crowded board, and the full flow of jovial mirth, and beauty's wreathed smile, and beauty's dulcet voice, charm back to a crazy dwelling the ardours and graces of youth? Will yellow gold bribe the tongue of memory, and wipe away from the tablets of the mind the remembrance of former doings? Will worldly goods reach upwards to heaven, and bribe the pen of the recording angel, that he should cancel from God's books all vestige of our crimes? Or will they bribe Providence, that no cold blast should come sweeping over our garden, and lay it desolate? Or will they abrogate that eternal law, by which sin and sorrow, righteousness and peace, are bound together? Will they lift up their voice, and say wickedness shall no more beget woe, nor vice engender pain, nor indulgence end in weariness, nor the brood of sin fatten upon the bowels of human happiness, and leave, wherever their snakish teeth do touch, the venom and sting of remorse? They cannotyou know they cannot. And when that last most awful hour shall come, when we shall stand upon the brink of two worlds, and feel the earth sliding from beneath our feet, and nothing to hold on by that we should not fall into the unfathomed abyss; and when a film shall come over our eyes, shutting out from the soul, for ever, friends and favourites, and visible things; what are we, what have we, if we have not a treasure in heaven, and an establishment there? And when the deliquium of death is passed, and we find ourselves in the other world, under the eye of him that is holy and pure, where shall we hide ourselves, if we have no protection and righteousness of Christ?

Once more, ye sons of men! hear me for your honour and your interest's sake; and give ear as you value the love of Christ and the majesty of God. It is sure as death and destiny, that if you awake not from this infatuation of custom and pleasure, at the calls of God your Saviour, the habitations of dismal cruelty, endless days and nights of sorrow, shall be your doom. Oh! could I lift the curtain which shrouds eternity from the eye of time, and disclose that lazarhouse of eternal death, what sleeper of you would not start at the chaos of commingled grief! Dives, surrounded

with his eastern pomp and luxury, little dreamt that he was to awaken in torment, and crave a drop of water to cool his tongue. What business has any forgetter of God with any better fare? No,-there is no purgatory to purge away the spiritual dross your spirits are encrusted with, and make you clean for heaven. It is not true, that after a season of endurance, the prince of the bottomless pit will hand you at length into heaven. Without holiness no man can see God: without Christ no man can attain to holiness. Yet, conscious that you are unholy; deriving no mediation from Christ; deceiving yourselves with no respite nor alleviation of punishment; here you are, listless, lethargic, and immoveable!

Men and brethren! Is this always to continue, or is it to have an end? If you are resolved to brave it out, then there is before you a proof to make nature shudder and quake to her inmost recesses. Can ye stand and brave Omnipotence to do his utmost! Why, in this world, where power is muffled with mercy, there are a thousand inflictions which ye could not brave. Could ye stand all that was laid upon patient Job? Possessions, sons, daughters, health, reaved away-then could you stand hope benighted, and the light of heaven removed, and fellowship of friends, and almighty displays of power and wraths? Why the hardy band of Roman soldiers, (and who so stout-hearted as Romans?) swooned, every man of them, at the sight of one of God's visions. What could ye, were God's judgment-seat displayed, his justice no longer restrained, and his retribution no longer delayed; every fleet minister of execution ready harnessed at his post, and hell opening wide its mouth, insatiable as the grave, and grimmer than the visage of death. Arraigned, self-condemned, singled out of every crime, solitary, unbefriended, one among thousands; life's pleasures at an end, the world's vision faded, God's anger revealed, sentence passed, judgment proceeding, and the pit opening its mouth on you, as the earth on Korah's company, to receive you quick. Can you stand this can you think to brave it? Then, verily, ye are mad, or callous as the nether

millstone.

Do you disbelieve it then, do you think God will not be so bad as his word? When did he fail? Did he fail at Eden, when the world fell? Did he fail at the deluge, where the world was cleansed of all animation, save a handful? Did he fail upon the cities of the plain, though remonstrated with by his friend, the father of the faithful? Failed he in the ten plagues of Egypt, or against the seven nations of

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Canaan; or, when he armed against his proper people, did ever his threatened judgments fail? Did he draw off when his own Son was suffering, and remove the cup from his innocent lips? And think ye he will fail, brethren, of that future destiny, from which to retrieve us he hath undertaken all his wondrous works unto the children of men! Why, if it were but an idle threat, would he not have spared his only begotten Son, and not delivered him up to death? That sacred blood, as it is the security of heaven to those who trust in it, is the very seal of hell to those who despise it.

Disbelieve you cannot; brave it out you dare not; then must you hope, at some more convenient season, to reform. So hoped the five virgins who slumbered and slept without oil in their lamps; and you know how they fared. Neither have you forgotten how the merchant, and the farmer, and the sons of pleasure, who refused the invitation to the marriage feast of the king's son, were consumed with fire from heaven. What is your life, that you should trust in it; is it not even a vapour that speedily passeth away? What security have you that heaven will warn you beforehand; or that heaven will help you to repentance whenever you please? Will the resolution of your mind gather strength as your other faculties of body and mind decay? Will sin grow weaker by being a while longer indulged; or God grow more friendly by being a while longer spurned; or the gospel more persuasive by being a while longer set at naught? I rede you, brethren, to beware of the thief of time, Procrastination. This day is as convenient as tomorrow, this day is yours, to-morrow is not; this day is a day of mercy, to-morrow may be a day of doom.

But the work is not the work of a moment, that it should be put off like the making of a will or the writing of a farewell epistle. It is the work of a lifetime, and too great a work for a lifetime. And if St. Paul, after such ceaseless labours and unwearied contentions with his nature, had still his anxieties, and speaks of the righteous as being hardly or with difficulty saved, how do you dare to defer it from time to time, as a thing that can at any season, and in any space, be performed?

And, oh heavens! is God thus to be entreated by his creatures are they to insist, for their own convenience, and put off the honour of his friendship from time to time, preferring this indulgence, that engagement, and trifling downright with his preferred invitations? And being thus put off, will the King of the Universe endure it patiently? Yes, he endures it patiently-that is, he leaves you to yourselves, and

does not cut you off with prompt and speedy vengeance. But he leaves you to yourselves, and every refusal hardens you a little more, and every resistance closes up another avenue of grace, and every postponement places farther off the power of acceptance; and though God changeth not his mercy, we change our capacity of mercy-cooling more and more, hardening more and more, till old age, with its lethargy and fixed habits, steals on apace, and feeble-mindedness, and sickness, which brings with it the routine of sickbed attendance, but little or no repentance, no opportunity for new obedience, no space for trying the spirit we are of, -and death to such a penitent becomes a leap in the darkbut as such penitents are rare or never, death to such procrastinators rivets up the closing avenues of grace, and presents him to the judgment-seat, fixed, finished, and incurable!

But it is time to close a Work, which we now commend to the providence and grace of God.

Do Thou, great source of all intelligence, forgive the errors and imperfections which thine omniscient eye beholdeth in this discourse, remembering the limited faculties of every creature, and the clouds which sin hath induced upon the mind of man. If aught hath been uttered injurious to thy Majesty, whereof thou art very jealous, do thou forgive that greatest of transgressions. If aught hath been said opposed to thy revealed word, hinder it from its evil influence upon the minds of men, and if Thou, who knowest the end from the beginning, dost know that this book is to harm the interests of thy Son's gospel, then never may it find favour in the eyes of men, but die as soon as it is born. But if, as it is intended and devoted to thy glory and to the eternal welfare of men, so it be fitted to procure the same, do Thou give it large prosperity and a lengthened life. Obscure its weak and erroneous parts, and sharpen its points of truth, and prepare the soul of every reader for its reception-that men may awaken from deep sleep, and prepare to meet thy righteous face. For Thou, who knowest all things, dost know how the souls of thousands perish from earthly enjoyment and eternal blessedness, through that veil of prejudice and ignorance which Satan, the prince of this world, hath cast over them. Arise, O Lord! arise, for the sake of the earth, and make thy name to be glorious from the rising to the setting sun. This grant, for the sake of Jesus Christ thine only Son our Saviour, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, now and forever-AMEN.