rock," and "establish your goings," and give you an interest in Christ, and make you heirs of glory-my brethren, would you not bless the hour when you first listened to the things which pained you? And if you found yourself entering on ages of misery unspeakable, because you had not been warned, would you not curse me at the bar of God? It is well to look sometimes at what, by the Word of God, we are taught will be the end of them who remain ungodly: and I pray that good God, that Being of boundless mercy, who is waiting to be 'gracious to your souls now, that this very night not a few of you, who have been undecided and wavering hitherto, may be guided to know and love that very Saviour through whom you may be blessed! First, then, my dear brethren, if you persist in rejecting Christ, this passage assures us that the wrath of God must abide upon you. You will die under the wrath of God: the Almighty God will then be opposed to your happiness: you will then be exposed to the wrath of One, who is infinitely benevolent; whose anger is never capricious, never severe, never unjust, and by so much the more to be feared. You will be exposed to the wrath of One who has treated you with benevolence and mercy all your life; One whom you continually ill-treated, slighted, and opposed; and under whose vengeance you must now suffer. Will Christ then be your Mediator as he would be now? The day of mercy is passed; you stand before God's bar: will Christ be your Mediator then? Alas, my brethren! he has told us, that "on whomsoever this stone shall fall, it will grind him to powder." Christ has become of no effect: you are exposed to the wrath of the Almighty; to the wrath of the gentle, gracious, infinitely condescending Saviour. You are exposed to His wrath, whose love you trifled with all your life long will he be your Mediator? When the very Saviour who would have plucked you from the abyss of perdition is now your Judge, and you see in Him, who would once have been so willingly your Advocate, nothing but your enemy-what, my brethren, will be wanting then to fill up the cup of your wrath? "Whosoever believeth not the Son, the wrath of God abideth on him." Consider, secondly, when you are thus under the wrath of God, what will be the character of the misery involved in that condition. Under "the wrath of God:" Him from whom came all your blessings. Is not his the sincere benevolence of the universal Father? And if you are under his wrath, think you that you may then expect from him blessings to be misused and derided as they have been by you through life? Do you think he will then give you new instruments of opposition? What has our Lord said? "Take, therefore, the talent from him, and give it to him who hath ten talents: for whosoever hath," (that is, hath gained) "to him shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from whomsoever hath not, shall be taken away even that he hath :" in other words, all the gifts of providence and nature, all the blessings you had on earth, all the opportunities of usefulness which your situation, capacity, and talents gave you; which ought to have been emp oyed to your Maker's glory, but which were employed to your own using, your own private purposes. You lived for yourselves; you lived for earth; you lived for time: and, like the man with the one talent in the parable, you thought your Maker was an austere man; but now you stand before him as the Judge: the sentence is from Him, that, " from him that hath not, 'shall be taken away that which he hath ;" that is, you must reasonably expect that, in that awful day, you will be destitute of all good. Where is your happiness now? What is that which hinders you from turning to God, and prevents you living a holy life? It is the love of gain, the love of pleasure; you wish to have a little more of this world. But all that on which your hopes are now fixed, from which you now derive your happiness, will then be altogether torn from you it is all past: "The world passeth away, and the lusts thereof." And what will you attain in its stead? Go to some solitary dwelling, over the threshold of which no friend ever passes; to some poor creature who was once enjoying all the fashionable gaieties of life; but whom successive misfortunes have brought to poverty, and starvation, and sorrow. She has now no companion and no solace in her sorrow. Look at the poor creature musing over the days of past gaiety and pleasure now gone for ever: and see whether there is not a wreck of happiness but a wreck not to be compared with the utter, dismal destitution to which I feel every one is hurrying fast, when, having abused all the mercies of God here, he must go into that world where he can abuse them no longer. My brethren, consider, if this is the case you have to anticipate, what will be the progress of your state of mind when you come to that eternal world! : But this is not all. Alas! we are led to believe, that you will not only be deprived of God, but the language of Scripture is, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha :" "let him be an accursed thing when the Lord cometh." What, my friends, have you to expect? You do not love the Lord, you will not love the Lord; you see nothing attractive in him now, and when he comes you must be "Anathema"-under the curse of God. Will not that ensure misery unspeakable? Must it not make you wretched when you feel that he hath cursed you? O brethren, do not venture to provoke the curse of an offended God! In the next place, if you persist in rejecting Christ till you die, you must expect at death that the depravity of your nature will be fixed: for the sentence at that time will be, "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still." That is, the moral defilement, the utter want of rectitude, which were growing through life, must then be fixed. All the means that were once employed to renew the soul to holiness, have been repelled; now all are removed; and what is there to restore the wretched man to loyalty to God, to obedience to his Maker? You will die: but now you are surrounded by so many of the sunny blessings of life; now, while a gracious Providence has so watched around you, and you have had so many hours of happiness, you feel your hearts so cheerful that you scarcely can be unhappy; the awful buoyancy of your spirits rises above the different ills to which flesh is heir; and you feel surprised at your own happiness. If all this, in a cursed world, does not make you love God, what will you feel when cheerfulness is changed into agony, when mercy has merged into judgment; when, at length, you see nothing around you but the threatening anger of your Creator; when there is no offer of mercy, when there is no possibility of escape, when every moment is a moment of torture, when you see before you destitution to all eternity; will that make you love God? Will it? Did you ever hear of one who was taught to love another by the sufferings which that other, however justly, had inflicted on him? Did you ever hear of one who was thus taught to love God? (), my brethren, be assured of this-that hell is a place of unmixed enmity to the infinitely adorable God. Could suffering bring the soul back to God? Then after these ages of sufferings would not Satan again fix his throne beside that of the archangels in heaven? But witness the ages of fixed and obdurate hatred against God. Witness the unwearied efforts against the cause of Christ which that spirit has been guilty of; and there let the sinner learn what must be his doom if he passes through all the solicitations of divine love unmoved, and confronts the eternal justice of his offended Maker. : Then, my brethren, consider, in the next place, among what beings you must be placed: what will be that dreadful society to which, if you persist in rejecting Christ, you must at last be exposed. The Judge shall say to them at his left hand, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Here Satan's power is checked by various circumstances in the good providence of God-checked by the will and purpose of the Most High but what will there be to check them there? And if you will be lost-if you will meet the anger of God, and place yourselves among that wretched company, without hope, and without virtue-what is the misery that you must expect? Imagine that any of us should be dragged to-morrow from the home we love, and the friendships we value, to be henceforth incarcerated with the very vilest of the human race. Suppose from this hour, we were to have no other fellowship than theirs-those who, destitute of all virtue, and absolutely incapable of generosity, were sunk in their whole nature in worse than brutal ferocity, sensuality, and vice; to be ever shut up hopelessly in their society. What is worse, imagine that any one of us should be placed under their absolute control. And, worst of all, imagine that that control must be exercised when they were exasperated by penury and want, by shame and fear, and by the consciousness of universal scorn and hatred, by the goading of an irresistible and intolerable misery. What would be our prospects if this were all we could look for, for the rest of this short life? This is a poor faint picture of what must be expected by any amongst us who persists in rejecting Christ. And besides, who will be the companions of the lost soul? Others like itself. Now, let me ask you, Did you ever weigh with attention those pictures, so humiliating to consider, in which unprincipled men have been placed in juxtaposition in circumstances of extreme misery? Have you ever watched the sufferings of men wandering across the ocean, short of provisions, when the longings of the cannibal have begun to arise in their spirits, and they have looked one on another, with the expectation that the next meal was to be the flesh of man? Did you ever watch in some disastrous retreat, after some ruinous campaign, what the soldiers have done towards each other when unrestrained by the fear of God or the discipline of man? There you may see, when every other feeling was merged in terrific selfishness, something of what you must anticipate will be the condition of those wretched beings who will persist in rejecting Christ to the end-shut up with the devil and his angels. My brethren, must I say more? Is there more wanting to make you feel that you must flee from the wrath to come? Is there more wanting to make you feel there is no safety for a sinner except in Christ? Then, my brethren, there is more. If you come to this place of penal suffering, I am persuaded it will immensely augment your woe to think, that it was all self-sought; and the remorse which will then penetrate your inmost souls will make despair still more intolerable. Our Lord has spoken of "the worm that never dies," and "the fire that is not quenched?" I am persuaded that that resistless gnawing worm is the intolerable remorse which will ever haunt the miserable mind of the man who might have been among the blessed in heaven, and now feels himself shut up among the damned. "I might have been happy," he says, "but I would not. Accursed folly! that refused to be blessed when my Maker would bless me. Miserable infatuation! utterly unparalleled in this world, that I should barter immortality, and give up my soul!" There is picture. Then, brethren, add another feature to this miserable every reason to suppose that that misery will be eternal. Does not the text say, "He that believeth not the Son, shall not see life?" Then how can we hope that we shall emerge from that penal suffering into life? "Shall not see life:" where, then, is the ground of hope? If it was possible for those who are lost to atone for sin, then that suffering might be limited: or, were it possible for them to recover their lost innocence, then we might hope that that suffering might be limited. But both are utterly beyond our hope. Where shall we learn any hope for the condemned sinner? If there might be an expectation that, after some indefinite number of ages spent in torture, the mind might at length escape purified and unsullied, into the presence of God; there would be some miserable alleviation to the expectation. But does Scripture warrant even that hope? "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." 66 They that have done good," says the prophet Daniel, “shall rise to everlasting life; some to shame and everlasting contempt." They shall be punished," says St. Paul, "with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and the glory of his power." "The smoke of their torment," says St. John, of one class of transgressors, and, by implication of them all—“The smoke of their torment ascends up for ever and ever." Remember, brethren, the argument that would limit them, would limit eternal happiness also: the language affords no stronger terms to express eternity: the very same conclusion that would relieve the lost of their despair, would crush the blessed in their felicity, with the unutterable feeling that they may lose it all. But if the language of Scripture does not warrant the hope, may it not derive from reason some ground of limitation? No: reason apart from Scripture, will bring us to the same conclusion. Who could have meditated with any thing like seriousness, on the attributes of God, even though revelation were wholly set aside, and not see that it is utterly inconceivable that, in the relation in which we stand to our Maker, hemmed in by mercy, besieged by divine light, entreated to return, there shall be any suffering of any duration that can present to God the semblance of an atonement for guilt like ours. If it were possible, let me recur to that awful consideration, that the condition of the lost is such, as will more strongly rivet all the chains of sin, will mature their wickedness: the punishment will leave no virtue which destroys hope: with hope farewell fear, and with fear farewell all limitation to depravity. So that if the sins of earth require the punishment of a just and incensed God, the sins of hell must still more require it; and every miserable moment of its duration, will only be still demanding fresh indignation by accumulated wickedness. My brethren, it were a miserable chance for a man to rest his soul upon that, deeming it barely possible that that suffering shall not be eternal, in the face of such plain declarations of God's Word. 66 There is only one more thought which I will present, to describe the condition of those who shall persist in rejecting Christ. Our Lord gives us reason to expect that it will be misery altogether overwhelming. It is termed by St. Paul everlasting destruction." And our Lord has said, "Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder." Remember, he is speaking of the immortal soul. What did he mean by the expression, "It will grind him to powder?" That it would blast, crush the wretched spirit. Could he endure this? Fortitude may wrestle on with adversity; the spirit would not be crushed: could he hope to escape from it, he would not be crushed. But this is unutterably hopeless: it is the wrath of Almighty God do you conceive a soul can bear that? Our Maker has given us a nature that can wrestle with all the ills of the present state; and the person, however he suffers, escapes from them by dissolution: there is a limit, therefore, to the malice of the persecutor, and the sufferings of the oppressed. The fortitude of man can endure all sufferings; his spirit is stronger than adversity: and even to the last, just as the wolf dies in silence, it is said, and as the camel labours on under the heaviest load, man can bear the severest trials. And yet the arrows of the Almighty even here can make him shrink; and that when he may be no coward perhaps on other occasions. The wretched Judas, harassed by the goadings of conscience till he could bear them no longer, may be a picture of what the Almighty can do when, in the language of Job, he "maketh the heart soft" -not with contrition, but with terror; when he pursues it “as a leaf driven to and fro of the whirlwind ;" and when he had so much knowledge of God's judgments as to entreat the Almighty to "let loose his hand and destroy him." How then, brethren, can you endure this, if you will persist in rejecting Christ, when you know that the Almighty God is your eternal enemy, and that you stand without hope, without any shelter, without the possibility of dissolution, when you stand exposed to the avenging justice of God? The venomous reptile that should be crushed beneath some granite cliff that has fallen from the mountain, would not be so utterly crushed as the lost spirit: the poor reptile would escape with its sufferings, but the crushed soul lives on. My brethren, it is a hopeless case. Could the tortured spirit merge from its sufferings, at last, glorious and pure in the presence of its God, there were some light in the darkness. But the atmosphere of hell is despair: every word, every countenance there is despair look where the ruined man will, he will find nothing but despair. Does the imagination shock you? What will be the reality? Can you not bear to hear it now imagined? O, will your hand be strong, and will your heart endure, that day when you enter the reality? Perhaps there are some among you who may have, at this moment, towards him who addresses you in nothing but good-will, something of the feeling of that king of Israel towards the prophet, when he said, "I hate him, for he prophesies no good concerning me, but evil." But if you cannot bear to hear it stated now, with what mind will you reflect upon your Maker himself, if only you should prove all this to be true! I confess I shrink from the task of bringing it before you, because I |