when

his life of sin. In your counting-room, or in your schemes of ambition, or in the world of gayety, you have led such a life that you expected and desired not to be troubled with serious impressions about God and the soul. You have neglected to pray when you ought to have prayed; you have refused to read the Bible when you ought to have sought counsel from God; you have been among the gay and the thoughtless, when you ought to have been among the praying and the devout. You have studionsly concealed your feelings when you have been serious; you have hoped that time, and company, and business would make you cheerful again. You have endeavored to embrace some plausible form of doctrine that would be an opiate to the conscience, and allow you undisturbed and unannoyed to enjoy the world; you have sought some device by which you might lead a life of vanity without trouble from the dread of death. You have endeavored so to form your plans of life that you need not be distressed with the constant fear of dying, and so that you need not be chafed and galled by the appeals made to you to serve God. When these solemn truths of religion have been pressed closely on your attention your conscience has been troubled: when you have felt that you were indeed a sinner before God, and that you ought to yield to him and serve him; then to these feelings and convic tions you have offered a decided resistance. You have refused to yield when you knew you ought to yield; you have refused to pray when you knew you ought to pray; you have refused to become a Christian when you knew you ought to be a meek and humble follower of the Saviour. You have argued against the truth; you have cavilled against the truth; you have arged excuses that you might not obey the truth; you have sought plausible reasons for neglecting to do what you knew to be your duty; you have taken refuge under the imperfection of Christians, for not being yourself a Christian; you have embraced false, and absurd, and monstrous opinions, simply because you did not wish to give up the world and become a Christirn. You have done this long. In some cases it has been the work of a life; in all cases it has been a leading object of life thus far. Had you yielded when God first called you, you would long since have been a Christian. But with many of you it has become a settled habit to resist all the calls and appeals of religion, and you expect to be successful in doing it hereafter as you have been heretofore. You go to a funeral with that expectation; you go to church with that expectation; you listen to the closest arguments in favor of religion with that expectation; you sit under the most pungent appeals of the gospel with that expectation. You came here at the present time with no expectation of yielding to God and becoming a Christian: you expect now to leave this house, unmoved and unconverted by all that I can say. You are often convinced by our arguments, but you will not yield to them; you are often urged powerfully by your own conscience to give

yourself to God, but you refuse. While God calls you to a life of religion, you turn contemptuously to a life of vanity; while he calls you to admire his character and to love him, you become lost in admiration of dress; while he calls you to go to the cross as a poor penitent, to confess your sins and be saved, you go to the ball-room to dissipate serious reflections, to forget your Saviour, and to trifle away the precious moments of probation; while he points you to the "narrow way," and the "strait gate," you crowd along regardless, with the multitudes to the " wide gate "-the "broad way" that "leadeth to destruction." If you ask, Who? I answer, You, ye gay, ye worldly, ye prayerless, ye vain, ye "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;" ye who live as if this world were all, and are conscious that you turn a deaf ear to all the calls and invitations of the gospel of Christ. You know who are meant ; for you have not lived thus long without knowing that it is the purpose of your own life not to be a Christian.

III. The effect of neglecting and disregarding these calls. "When your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you." Death will come; he will certainly come. He cannot be evaded; he cannot be put, back; he cannot be made to take his steps any slower. Oh, he will come! All that lives on earth will die every beast, bird, and creeping thing; the eagle, the humming-bird, the insect that flutters in the sun-beam; every tree, and shrub, and flower-the oak, the pine, the acacia, the moss that grows over the wall; every monarch, every peasant-every rich man, every poor man-every slave, every master of a slave-every man, every woman, every child-every old man that prides himself on his honors and his wealth, every young man that prides himself on his talents or his strength, every maiden that prides herself on her beauty. Oh, all will die! I am in & world of death; I am amidst the dying and the dead; I see not a living thing in all my rambles that will not die-no man, no woman, no child--no bird, no beast, no plant, no tree. The eagle that cuts the air cannot fly above it; the monster of the deep cannot dive below it; the tiny insect cannot make itself so insignificant that death will not notice it; leviathan cannot, with his great strength, struggle against it. The Christian will die; the sinner will die-yea, the sinner! Your wealth cannot save you; your accomplishments cannot save you. Death cares for none of these things. They are all trifles, gewgaws-beneath his notice. He no more loves "a shining mark than an ignoble one; he has no more pride in cutting down the rich man than the poor man-the daughter of beau ty and of fashion than the daughter of ugliness and of sin. 'He loves to level the thistle as well as the rosebud, the bramble as the magnolia, the briar as the cedar of Lebanon. He cares as little for the robe of ermine as for the beggar's rags; as little for your richest vestments and gayest apparel as for

the blanket of the savage. You will die, and the fear of death will come upon you. Death comes just as he is--pale, solemn, fixed, stern, determined on his work. He hears no cry for pity; he regards no shriek of terror. He comes steady, certain, unchanged and unchangeable in his purpose, to take you out of your bed of down; to hurry you away from your splendid dwelling; to call you out of the assembly-room-taking you away from the companions that will miss you but for a moment, and then resume their dance-that you may die. Death will come. He has been advancing towards you aince you began to breathe. He has kept on his way, always advancing to meet you, while you have been asleep or awake; and if you have gone north, or south, or east, or west, he has always put himself in your path--how near or how remote you have never known. Death will come. He has always been coming-advancing, never receding, and soon his baleful shadow will fall upon your path, upon your path, and that shadow will deepen and become more chilly, like an avadncing eclipse; and then his dark form will stand right before you, between you and the light of the living world, and you will be in the dark valley. Death will come-fearful enough under any circumstances, even if you are a Christian; awful, un-' speakably awful, if you are not.

The fear of the judgment-day will come upon you, for that cannot always be avoided. It is to come to all human beings, and that is to be a solemn day when we shall give up our account for the deeds done in the body, and hear the sentence which is to determine our everlasting doom. You have endeavored, and to a melancholy extent have succeeded in your endeavors, to make your mind insensible to this subject; and perhaps for months, possibly even for years, it has never seriously occurred to you that you are to appear before your Maker on so solemn a business. Yet, in the cares of life, in the engrossment of business, in the whirl of pleasure, you have merely concealed this fact from your view-you have not affected its reality; you have only put a little further from you what must, sooner or later, be contemplated in all the solemnity of its import. Somewhere, either when in health, and before we are driven to it by the mere fear of death; or on the bed of lingering sickness, where we may calmly contemplate the future world; or in the terror and alarm of sudden death, we must look at the judgment bar; we must think of giving up our account; we must reflect on the solemnity of that moment when we shall stand before our final Judge. The fear of this will come upon the sinner. You cannot always be insensible to it; you cannot always be immersed in the cares of this world; You cannot always be husy with briefs, or with merchandise; you cannot always move in the circles of festivity, amidst songs and dances; for you must die, and must go before your Judge. It is a solemn thing for a man to be arraigned before a human tribunal on a high charge of crime

and when the question whether he is to live or die is to depend on the opening of the lips of the foreman of the jury, and the utterance of one little word, and neither by indifference nor by jesting can he make anything else of it and so it will be a much more solemn thing to stand before your final judge, when the question of your everlasting joy or sorrow-of life or death eternal-shall depend on the opening of His lips. The apprehension of this shall come upon you; and all that there is that is fearful in the apprehension will be experienced, and will be heightened by all the pains that you have taken to forget it, and by all your folly in refusing to hearken to the voice of wisdom.

Desolation and destruction will come upon the impenitent and ungodly, and upon you if you are found among the impenitent and the ungodly-upon all who have continued to refuse while God has called, who have not regarded when he has stretched out his hands. God says: "He that, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy." He has solemly said also, that "the wicked shall be turned into hell." He has sollemnly declared also, that "the wicked is drawn away in his wickedness." He has, as if borne down himself with a sense of the folly, the wickedness, and the danger of man, with all the tender solicitude of a Father and a Friend, asked of the wicked, "Why will ye die-why will ye die?" He has plead; he has warned; he has invited; he still pleads, warns, invites, that this fearful doom may not come upon you. Yet come it will if you be found among those that refuse to hear him, and that turn away when he calls. And you are doing nothing to prevent it; you can do but one thing that will prevent it. Indifference to

danger does not turn danger away; argument does not; cavil does not; ridicule does not; scorn does not; pride of rank or station, wealth, flattery, accomplishment does not-You may call it "cant" in me to preach about death-but death comes; you may call it gloom that I speak of the coffin and the grave -but there they are; you may ridicule the apprehension of the judgment-but there it is; you may curl the lip, and turn away with scorn at the mention of hell-but there its fires for ever burn. Ridicule, cavil, scorn, have never saved one human being from the grave, and never will; scorn, cavil, ridicule, will never save one sinner from destruction. Death is not turned away by contempt; nor are the fires of hell put out by a jibe. Man standing on the borders of the grave, and about to launch forth to worlds unknown, as in solemn circum mstances, and he changes nothing; he diminishes no dangers; he puts off no evil, he extinguishes no fires that kindle along his future path, because he can toss his head and laugh at these things, or because he can meet his Maker's communications with scoffs and scorn. "Woe unto yout hat laugh now, for ye shall mourn and weep," "for the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be as

stubble and the day cometh that shall burn them up, sarth the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch."

IV. When these things come it will be too late to cry for mercy. "Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer them they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me."

:

There must be a limit to the calls of religion and mercy, for life is very brief, and they all lie this side the grave; and soon the inviting voice of wisdom will cease to call you, for you will lie in the tomb. Then you will no more bear the voice of wisdom and mercy that you have here so often disregarded in this sanctuary, or when addressed to you by the friend, or by the Providence and Spirit of God. That voice will indeed continue to be addressed to the living : but you will not then be among the living. And there must be a limit to these calls from the nature of the case. Can vou suppose that God will for ever call hardened and incorrigible sinners? Can you suppose that he will always appeal to the skeptic and the caviller, and bear with his skepticism and cavils through a vast eternity? Can you suppose that anywhere, and everywhere, in all the boundlessness of his future being, the sinner, as he chooses, may pause and claim the mercy of God? This cannot be; and, somewhere, there MUST be a limit to the offers of mercy to men-the termination of the day of grace to the guilty.

That may occur before you shall reach the death-bed near as that is to you, and short as the journey thither. Who has said that it may not? And why should it not? May not the mind become so worldly, and the heart so vain, and the conscience so "seared," and the life so wicked, and the will so obdurate, and the whole soul so utterly shattered and ruined by sin, that conversion shall be hopeless and ruin certain? You may be a sinner so hardened, so bold, so daring, so malignant ; you may have been so often called, and yet have refused; to you God may have so long stretched out the hand, and you may have so disregarded it; the offers of the Gospel may have been so often made to you, and you may have so often rejected them, and in such forms; you may have been so often near the kingdom, and so often grieved the Spirit of God, that the great matter of your eternal destiny may be practically settled before you die, and all that was designed in your probation may be closed for ever.

It may occur on a death-bed. Are there no dying sinners. that seem to cry for mercy in vain; to whom no response is given; who have no peace in their last moments, to show that their cry is heard? Are there none who then bitterly bewail the follies of a past life, and who look back with anguish on their violated Sabbaths and their abused mercies, and on the sins and follies of youth, and who have no peace, as they look forward to a vast eternity? Do all sinners die peacefully,