It is in vain to urge, as the ancient teachers of morality were in their ignorance content to do, that the guilty pleasures of this life are so short and so poor as to be unworthy of a wise man's desire, unless we are, in the first place, talking to those who profess the name of wisdom, or unless we can first prove to each individual that, by refusing such pleasures, he will get something more than the barren praise of being wise. It is of little avail to press on his notice that, by these indulgences or pursuits, he renounces the far greater enjoyment of a pure and speculative philosophy, when the sensualist or the ambitious man, (and nine tenths of the world are naturally either ambitious or sensual) may reply that, of worldly gratifications, he takes those which please him best. Nor is it sufficient to point out to his notice the lassitude and disease, the remorse and the danger to which an unbridled indulgence of his criminal desires must, even in this life, expose him. His answer is easy; that he knows how to stop in time; that others who have gone as far in vice as he designs to go, have nevertheless escaped the worst of those penal consequences with which we menace him; or that he is aware he is shortening his days, and means, therefore, to make the most of the days which yet remain to him.

I do not forget, and still less am I inclined for the sake of temporary argument, to suppress my conviction that, even in this life, the cup of the sinner is usually full of bitterness; and that of this

world, separately considered, the virtuous and the wise have the best and fairest portion. But I am convinced that, where the advantages and disadvantages held out on both sides are alike only for a time, the present short-lived enjoyment will generally preponderate over the future short-lived pain; and that we must first persuade the sinner that the things which are not seen, both are, and are eternal, before he is likely to forego those temporal and unholy, but powerfully seductive pleasures, which, at every step, ensnare his eyes and confuse his understanding.

But as a want of faith is thus fatal to all goodness; so is it a deficiency far more frequent among men than a careless observer would imagine. I do not mean that many are to be found so fearfully abandoned to themselves and to Satan as to maintain, either with their mouths or in their hearts, that there is no God. I do not mean that in a Christian land, and among those who, from their childhood, have been surrounded with the evidences of the truth, and with the association and example of all which is good, or great, or holy, the number is considerable of those who expressly deny the Lord who bought them. But this I do mean, and this is unhappily proved true both by reason and experience, that there is a great difference between not disbelieving what is related in Scripture concerning God and His Son, and actually and habitually believing it; and that many a man has no genuine faith who never in his life either denied or

doubted the Gospel. Believing, it should be recollected, is an act of the mind consequent to attention. We cannot believe that which is not present to our thoughts; we cannot have a habitual faith in God, without habitually retaining His image in our minds as the object of our love and reverence. And when we consider how many men there are who, to all outward appearance, never think of God or His Son at all; and how many more who endeavour to get rid of religious thoughts whenever they arise as unnecessary, untimely, and troublesome; we must allow, I think, that a want of faith is at the bottom of the wicked lives of many professing Christians; that some who, when the Gospel is named to them, are very far from doubting its truth, are yet, during the greatest part of their lives, to all practical purposes, unbelievers; while others who, from time to time, may perhaps believe and tremble, are anxious to make still less the little faith which yet lingers in their bosoms. To these men a voice of most aweful warning is necessary. They should be reminded that the Christian religion must, inevitably, be either false or true; that its falsehood or truth is a question of infinite concernment to them; that the things which are not seen, if such things there really are, are eternal, and that either the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a fraud, and the best and wisest men of all ages since His death have been the dupes of a wild imposture; or else, if it be true, that their lives cannot be right, that their feet are treading the downward way, and their end will

be ruin irretrievable. They should be warned, that not only are sinners of a more enormous guilt and a deeper defilement to "be turned into hell," but that "the people who forget God'," are to find a proportionate share in those menaced sufferings; and they should be urged, for the sake of their present comfort here, if not for the sake of their everlasting happiness hereafter, to study the Gospel of Christ and the evidences of His religion, and to ask of God to guide their enquiries aright, and to preserve in their minds evermore the conviction to which those enquiries will lead them. It is thus, and thus only, by a diligent examination of the Scriptures, and by a diligent use of the appointed means of improvement and of grace, that the avowed and the practical unbeliever may be alike enabled to overlook "the things which are seen and are temporal," and to fix a due share of his attention on "the things which are not seen and are eternal."

Another and perhaps a still more common cause of this indifference to eternal things, and this perverseness of intellect which prefers to them the fleeting advantages of this world, is the notion that, for the cares of the other world, whatever may be at some future time their necessity, there is no present occasion or, at least, no immediate and urgent hurry. "The temporal concerns of this life," they reason, may be inferior in importance to the joys

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1 Psalm ix. 17.

or sorrows of the life which is to come, but such as they are, they are present, and they must be presently attended to; whereas the prospects which religion holds out are certainly future, may perhaps be distant, and may, therefore, safely be deferred till to-morrow, or next month, or next year, or ten years hence, when there will yet be quite sufficient time to arrange our accounts for Heaven, and repent at our leisure of whatever forbidden sweets we have stolen a taste of during our passage through things temporal."

To these men it might be easily and truly answered, that there is no such inevitable and universal opposition as they suppose between an adherence to the duties of Christianity, and the needful cares of the present world; that our religion itself not only permits but enjoins us to unite a diligence in business to a fervour in spirit'; and that, if they will make the just deduction from the claims of ambition, of avarice, and of idle amusement, they will find their temporal duties and their real temporal interests consist, for the most part, extremely well with their care for eternal happiness. But to men so infatuated as these, on their own shewing, appear to be; to men who commit their eternity to the chance of a life which any one of ten thousand accidents may, the next moment, bring to an end; who lie down securely on beds which they may change that night for couches of fire, and act as if

1 Romans xii. 11.