vain. The very conformation of man, his moral structure and capacities, bespeak him responsible at all times. But further:

2d. The Divine perfections confirm this view. That there is a distinction between right and wrong is undeniable, and that adherence to right is conducive to the peace of society, and to the personal happiness of each individual, is certain. Nearly all the pains we feel and the unhappiness we experience are the result of wrong doing somewhere, either in ourselves or in others. To repress evil is to contribute to human happiness, and to do so much toward the banishment of unhappiness. To repress evil and to promote the right, therefore, benevolence itself would prompt. Now, inasmuch as justice is nothing other than an enlarged benevolence,-in other words, justice is benevolence guided by wisdom,-justice must demand that evil be repressed and the right fostered. If, then, the punishment of evil doers, and that in exact proportion to the malignancy of the evil and the guilt of the evil doer, be the best, or if it be even an appropriate means of repressing evil, then justice and benevolence both demand that man be held strictly responsible for his doings, and punished according to his demerit. But God, our Maker, is a being of absolute perfection, wise, benevolent, and just. In making man such as he is-capable of discerning between good and evil, instinctively impelled to do what seems to him right, and to avoid the contrary, and certain also to find his happiness and his entire well-being affected by his own conduct directly, and by the conduct of others almost as directly-God has, by the very perfections of his own nature, guaranteed the responsibility of man, and the punishment, in strictest justice, of all ill doing.

In this world such award is not always made. Sometimes it is, and strikingly so; as, e. g., "when evil hunts the violent man to overthrow him." But very often such award is not here rendered; for the wicked do, not seldom, live through a long and prosperous career, and die surrounded with honors. But the immortality of man assures us that hereafter there may be ample opportunities to clear up all difficulties, and vindicate the justice of a righteous God!

For, 34. The Bible emphatically asserts this doctrine, telling us of retribution awaiting all!

"God hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him from the deal." "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every man may receive the things done in the body, according to that he hath done whether it be goodor wheth er it be evil." Again, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Again, "For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment!" and

the text, "There is nothing hid that shall not be manifested." From these and sundry other passages of Scripture, it is plain that, if words can convey the idea, then the Bible does teach that retribution actually awaits every man, and that, for ALL his doings, he shall be called to a strict account. "The secrets of all hearts shall be made plain."

Further, 4th. There is and there always has been, an instinctive expectation of such retribution awaiting him, universally felt by man everywhere.

Of all this, the pangs of a guilty conscience, which no prosperity can quell, no honors can dissipate, no earthly distinctions can thoroughly allay, furnish clear indication. Agitated by remorse for his misdeeds, even when no apprehension of punishment from the hand of man could be felt, the guilty perpetrator of evil, high though he might be in command among his fellow-men, has found his prosperity unavailing, his joys embittered, and his very life a burden! Conscious guilt has driven men to voluntary confession of their crimes, and has impelled them to solicit punishment at the hand of human justice, as though with the hope of propitiating offended Heaven, and making some expiation, by present suffering, and so averting, or at least mitigating the Divine vengeance. Moreover,

The religious system of every nation under heaven recognizes, in some shape, the doctrine of human responsibility and a future judgment. You see it in the ancient tenets of China; in the Budhist doctrines of Hindostan; in the classical myths of Pluto and his infernal domains, of Charon the ferryman of the Styx, of Minos, the inflexible judge of the dead, with the fabled joys of the shadowy Elysium, and the varied horrors of Tartarus. You see it in the trial of the dead among the ancient Egyptians, in their doctrine of the judgment of souls before the god Osiris, with the scribe of judgment, the god Thoth, and the forty-two judges in the region of Amenti.* It is stamped upon every line of their long ritual of the dead, in every pictured chamber of their countless tombs, and on every sarcophagus, on every mummy, and on every papyrus roll drawn from their innumerable cemeteries. Similar tenets have been found prevalent among the aboriginal hordes of this western continent, north and south; yea, even among the barbarous tribes roaming in the heart of Africa, recognizing a future life, a judgment after death, and punishments varied and appropriate to the delinquencies that had marked the life on earth of those arraigned in judgment; all, all evincing the presence in man's breast, find him when and where you may, of a deep-seated belief, that each act of man's life will, sooner or later, meet with its proper reward. But it is well to observe also,

* See Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, 2d series, vol II, pp. 2, 3, 74, 75.

5th. That many facts of every day occurrence seem to foreshadow such retribution on the evil doer.

If this life be probationary merely, then the full administration of justice can hardly be looked for at all times; and we know that many offenders do, in fact, long enjoy impunity. And yet, if God be just and all-wise, we may reasonably expect that he will so govern the world, and so shape the course of events, as that guilt shall be evidently frowned on, and uprightness and virtue favored as a general thing. And so, in fact, we find it to be. Virtue usually insures happiness and respectability. Vice is generally productive of misery; and although, now and then, daring offenders seem to escape with entire impunity, yet most generally evil doing does, sooner or later, yield a bitter return of shame, infamy, remorse and wretchedness: No caution can elude the Omniscient Eye; no skill can control the steady movements of Providence, which work to the detection and punishment of the deeply criminal. No daring can outface justice, or prevent its sure, though it may be tardy, vengeance. The guilty perpetrator of wrong may burrow in darkness, and work his secret way by cunning stealth. It avails him only for a time. Justice may seem to slumber long and profoundly; the guilty perpetrator of secret crime may be congratulating himself on his security; years may elapse after the commission of the evil deed; the guilty one may migrate to far-distant lands, and settle in a strange place, under a strange climate, and in a society where he himself is a stranger; and yet the seeds of vengeance sown by his own hand in the very act of his evil doing, years and years agone, shall all this time be germinating, and ready to shoot up to sudden and fruitful maturity, in disease that shall waste his frame and shorten his life, or in evidence of his guilt, that, like the fast multiplying threads of a spider's web, shall be accumulating around him, and closing in upon him, and bringing on exposure, infamy, ruin, and wretchedness, complete and incurable. The wicked shall not be unpunished." God has said it, and facts occurring every day prove it true! Hide where he may, flee withersoever he may, justice sure, though tardy, dogs his footsteps, and with the certainty of fate, falls upon him in vengeance at a time and in a mode oft least expected. The grand lesson stamped upon every page of man's history is, God is just, and retribution is certain. For,

6th. Man's intellectual structure prepares him for it! As a preparation to fill responsibility there is needed, not only reason to qualify for the investigation of truth,-judgment aided by the moral sense to decide what is wrong and what right in the several emergencies of life as they arise,-together with conscience, that faculty which includes a sense of obligation to do right and to shun evil,-and also self condemnation or remorse

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for evil consciously perpetrated; but there is needed also the faculty of memory, to retain the knowledge that may have been acquired. Without memory, remorse would be unfelt, and punishment must be a nullity; for the suffering included in punishment would lose its penal character if the memory of the guilt that called for it were lost. Each pang endured would be forgotton as soon as felt; the consciousness, and indeed the entire being of the sufferer, would all be concentrated in the passing instant. The future is unseen; the past, were memory extinct, must be a blank. But memory lives in every bosom, and memory cannot die. It lives beyond the death-pang and beyond the grave. 'Son, remember!" cried the father of the faithful to the spirit of the rich man tormented in hell. "Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood!" sing the ransomed around the throne of the Lamb in heaven; plainly showing that in heaven and in hell memory still lives, and will live for ever, growing probably in clearness, in strength, and in vivacity, as rolling ages move on. The existence and the perennial vigor of memory warn us of a-coming retribution, and fit also for a full appreciation of its power. It needs, then, but the presence of some adequate prompter to memory, to awaken it to life and action,-to spread before it some imperishable record of the past; and this will produce a complete recognition of every item, prepare the man to meet the full force of retribution, and thus render that retribution certain! But,

7th. This imperishable record of the past, the material universe is, by the very laws of nature, so arranged as that it shall certainly furnish; and in so doing it yields convincing evidence to establish the certainty of retribution, full and complete, beyond the possi bility of a doubt.

For, what the police is in a vigilant human government, that the very elements around us are in the government of God. The laws of nature will, on man's last trial, furnish witness to convict him.

A rigid mathematical demonstration might be adduced to establish this fact. When you move, each foot-fall shakes the earth. When you act, you stamp the image of your emotion on your own spirit, and upon the face of the physical universe itself. When you speak, you breathe forth your own soul upon the elements, and you send it abroad bearing the impress of the passion that agitates it, subtle as thought, and indestructible as space. Our inner spirit is a self-registering instrument. The passing moments are time's leaves, each catching and retaining a history, daguerreotyped, fixed for ever,-borne on and on to the grand archives of eternity, there laid up safe in the repository of the Almighty, and constituting "the books" out of which men shall be judged!

Look now at the facts, and ponder them well!

Take your stand by the side of a tranquil lake. Throw into it a pebble, and mark the result. From the point where that pebble strikes the water, you see the circling ripple spread, and enlarge and widen, ripple beyond ripple, wave beyond wave until the agitated water breaks in tiny waves upon the distant banks. A little reflection will satisfy you, that as that stone sinks to the bottom of the lake, every single atom included in the entire mass of water in that lake is forced out of its place, and the whole is agitated, until each particle settles in a new position, different, both positively and relatively, from that which it held before. In like manner, when a ship founders at sea, nay, when a corpse is cast overboard into the deep, not only is the water immediately around that foundering ship, or that sinking body, agitated and displaced, but the motion extends and spreads far as ocean reaches; and it affects the waters of the ocean on its remotest shores, in its deepest estuaries, and in all the streams that empty into it, though to our imperfect percep tions that motion is lost long ere it reaches the nearest shore. Now, the effect of that agitation and displacement of the particles of ocean's waters must tell on the position and mutual relation of each particle of all those waters, and that through all coming duration. After such agitation each particle occupies a new position, different from what it previously held on the next agitation its starting-point is different from what it would have been otherwise; its point of after subsidence and rest is therefore different; and so of the next succeeding agitation, and the next, and the next,-and so on indefinitely through all coming ages. This, then, must be one of the almost innumerable elements that enter into the problem which must be solved, if you would demonstrate the condition of things, the final result of all the influences brought to bear upon the ocean, from its first production up to the ultimate examination.

So also the air of our atmosphere is a fluid, subjected to laws analogous to those affecting all other fluids.

Sound is the effect on our organs of hearing, produced by the circling waves of air in motion. The crashing thunder, the booming of artillery, the sharp crack of the rifle, are familiar illustrations. At sea the discharge of a cannon can be heard for many miles. It agitates the air, the waters, nay, the solid earth itself. The comparatively feeble sound of yon organ's pedal bass can be not only heard at the distance of several furlongs, but to a person walking at a distance of some hundreds of yards, when those notes are sounded, the effect on the solid earth itself is felt in the trembling of the ground beneath his feet as he treads. Does this effect stop where man ceases to perceive it?