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temporary interests over spiritual and eternal, he hath appointed a day in which he will call an account of the good and the evil, and make a grand and notable decision between those who regarded him and those who regarded him not. For he hath too tender an interest in that which is good, not to sustain it by every means; while for that which is evil he hath too great an abhorrence to keep its direful consequences secret: therefore, it hath pleased him to lift up the veil of death and the grave, and show the spectacle of eternal judgment and the separate issues of obeying and disobeying his revealed law.

Frequent descriptions are given of this judgment in the Scriptures, and allusions to it are ever recurring throughout the preaching of Christ and of the Apostles. It is used to arrest the fears of the wicked, and to rejoice the patience of the righteous. To escape the wrath to come, is the ground upon which all men are commanded to repent and to believe in Christ, who came into the world that men might not perish, but have everlasting life. By this institution of judgment, God hath superinduced, upon the affectionateness of the father and the kindness of the counsellor, the authority of the lawgiver and governor; and his revelations, from being admonitions and exhortations, pass into the severe character of laws which it is perilous to disobey. All that hath been hitherto propounded of their good consequences must therefore be regarded, not as acts of judgment so much, as natural effects flowing from their

obedience.

We come now to the awful exercise

of Almighty judgment, having hitherto treated only of his exquisite wisdom, his long-suffering, mercy, and his most abundant kindness.

Now, though this be a subject of pure revelation, it is one which may be handled with great deference to human reason and to our natural sentiments of justice; and therefore we solicit, as formerly, from our reader, a lively exercise of all his faculties, and a ready proposal of all his doubts; our object being not to overawe him with terrific descriptions of things unseen, in which imagination may at liberty disport, but to convince him, how consonant things revealed are to the best sentiments and interests of mankind. We have seen how exquisitely God hath accorded his law to the honour and advantage of man, and he may therefore be expected to accord the judgment thereof no less exquisitely to our sentiments of justice and equity; for we take it to be a first principle of every communication from a wise and good God, that it should have something in it for the advantage of the creature to whom it is made: and, accordingly, we hope to make it appear that God doth not preserve his dignity at the expense of his justice, or wield his authority at the expense of his mercy, but consulteth for all his noble attributes equally and alike; in every action making their combined lustre to shine forth.

In order, therefore, to carry the reason of men along with us into this solemn subject of Judgment to come, we shall consider the doubts and

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difficulties which the mind hath in meditating the transactions of the great day, and endeavour to render the best resolution of them in our power, before entering upon the very article of the judgment and the principles upon which it proceeds. These preliminary doubts and hesitations are of two classes; one arising from the difficulties of conception, the other arising from our love of justice.

The first class to which we shall give immediate attention, springs from ruminating upon the magnitude of the work to be performed, and the incredible multitude to be judged. When we would grapple with the subject, conception is stunned and calculation confounded, and a most unpleasant incertitude induced upon the mind. Our slow-moving faculties cannot reckon the countless multitude, our subdivisions of time cannot find moments for the execution of the mighty work. The details of each case reaching to the inmost thought, the discrimination of their various merit and demerit, with the proportionate award of justice to each, seem a weary work, for which infinite time as well as Almighty faculties are required. Taking advantage of this confusion of the faculties of conception, many evil suggestions enter into the mind, and destroy the great effect which the revelation of Judgment to come is designed to produce. One thinks he will pass muster in such a crowd, and that he need not take the matter to heart; another, that he will find a sort of countenance in the multitudes that are

worse than he; a third, that if he be condemned it will be in the company of those whose company he preferred on earth, and will continue to prefer so long as he continues to be himself; and thus the whole power of the revelation is laid prostrate.

In like manner have I seen every other revelation of God deflowered of its beauty and defeated of its strength, by similar endeavours to dive into the methods by which it is to be carried into effect. For example, out of all the good which there is in the revelation of creation and providence, it were as easy to escape by similar interrogations into the method of operation.

It is said that God created man of the dust of the earth, and that he formed Eve of a rib from Adam's side. This, as it stands, is a sublime lesson of God's power and our humble origin, and of the common incorporate nature of man and woman; but if you go to task your powers of comprehension, you are punished for your presumption by the arid scepticism and barrenness of heart which comes over you. Make man of dust? we soliloquize, How is that? Of dust we can make the mould or form of man, but what is baked clay to living flesh and conscious spirit? Make it in one day?—these thousand fibres, more delicate than the gossamer's thread-these thousand vessels, more fine than the discernment of the finest instrument of vision-these bones, balanced and knit and compacted so strongly-these muscles, with their thousand combinations of movement-this secret organization of brain, the

seat of thought-the eye, the ear, the every sense, all constructed out of earth, and in one day? This stately form of manhood, which requires generation and slow conception, and the milky juices of the mother, and ten thousand meals of food, and the exercise of infinite thought and actions, long years of days and nights, the one to practise and train, the other to rest and refresh the frame, before it can come to any maturity-this to be created in one day out of primitive dust of the ground? Impossible! unintelligible! And if we go farther into the thing, and meditate that, seeing there was no second act of God, this creation out of dust was not of one man and one woman, but of all men and all women that have been and are to be for ever; that it was virtually the peopling of all nations and kingdoms of the earth in one day out of inanimate dust-who can fathom the work? It is inconceivable, idle, and not worthy a thought. Thus the mind becomes the dupe of its own inquisitiveness, and loseth all the benefit of this revelation.

Not less out of the comforts of Providence have I seen the wisest men beguiled by the nicety and importunateness of their research. They have reasoned of the multitude of God's avocations throughout the peopled universe, in every star imagining the centre of some revolving system, in every system the dwelling-place of various tribes of beings, until they had the Almighty so occupied as neither to have time nor care for our paltry earth. And if you can fix their attention upon the earth,

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