"A bruised reed he will not break,
Afflictions all his children feel;

He wounds them for his mercy's sake,
He wounds to heal."

Thus should we, whether in prosperity or adversity, rejoice that the Lord reigneth.

And ye who have rebelled against him, and have hitherto refused his offers of mercy, consider well your case and condition. You can now resist the strivings of his Spirit, refuse all his calls of mercy; but have you an arm of power to contend with God, when he shall come to judge the world in righteousness? "The Lord reigneth; let sinners tremble." Now is the hour of mercy, when from his throne of grace he offers terms of reconciliation. Haste, then, O sinner! now be wise and submit while pardon may be found, and his favor gained. Be assured his kingdom must prevail; before him every knee shall bow. While the sword of justice is suspended, listen, ye that are unreconciled to him, to the calls of a God and the entreaties of a Saviour, that you may join in the general joy at his government. Then may your voices mingle with "the voice of that great multitude which shall be as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth."

SERMON XXIII.

Conscience, as an Instrument of Punishment.

BY REV. FREEBORN G. HIBBARD, A. M.,

OF THE GENESEE CONFERENCE.

"And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed, and say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly."-Prov. v, 11-14.

THESE are the words, and this the condition, of a young man, whose dissolute life had induced disease, and want, and infamy. Standing now upon the further limit of time,

about to descend to a premature grave, he spends the last moments of his inglorious life in retrospections upon his course of conduct. He had spurned the counsels of the wise, and contemned the admonitions of the prudent; he had repudiated the marriage covenant, and broken away from the restraints of virtuous society, till even conscience "-seem'd, nodding o'er her charge, to drop

On headlong appetite the slacken'd rein,
And give him up to license unrecall'd,

Unmark'd."

:

But his career of folly is at length checked by the virulence of disease. He now feels under an arrest by the hand of insulted justice, and his wasted form lingers for a time upon the confines of the boundless future, while conscience awakes, like the meteor's glare, to reveal the horrors of his condition. He stands out upon the dim verge of life, a beacon light to all who live without God. His reputation is blasted; "his honor he had given to another;" his wealth had been foolishly lavished upon "the stranger;" his health ruined by his excesses, and his years cut off by dissipation but that which added poignancy to his distress was the moral aspect of his life. Remorse, like a fierce vulture, had clutched upon his soul, and despair had cast the shadows of a cheerless night around him. It was not that life was so short; that wealth and fame had irrecoverably fled; that dire pains racked his body, and disease drank up his spirits, that he chiefly lamented. These were not of themselves insupportable. But while the wrecks of all that was perishable lay strewn in his path, and the light of hope was now fading for ever from his eye; his soul, "still powerful to reason, full mighty to suffer,” uttered its deep lamentations in the reproachful words, “How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me!" It was from his moral reflections that his keenest anguish arose. It was sin that armed death with its more than mortal sting. Here let us pause, and from this sad history draw forth the admonitions of wisdom.

The theme which will receive our attention in the foling discourse, is, conscience, as an instrument of moral ishment.

I say moral, to distinguish it from civil or corporeal punishment. It is not the province of man to punish immoralities as such. Human laws take cognizance only of the overt act, and their penalties have relation to man in the complex relations of civil life. Impure motives are not cognizable by civil law, and cannot be appropriately punished by the magistrate. It is in the moral nature alone that vice, as such, can meet its just awards. Here must be the seat of that suffering due to moral offense. This is beyond the province of man, or any finite power, to arbitrate. Omniscience alone can adjudge, and conscience execute, a strictly moral punishment.

In discoursing upon this subject, we shall observe,

I. THE NATURAL AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE, AND ITS CONSEQUENT POWER TO INFLICT PUNISHMENT.

II. THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF ITS PUNITIVE

ACTION.

I. The natural authority of conscience, and its consequent power of punishment.

1. If we would appreciate the capacity of the soul to suffer through the morbid action of the moral feelings, we must first understand its internal structure, its several faculties and powers; or, if the phrase suit better, its various states and affections; and the relation of conscience to the whole.

Man is endowed with various powers of reason, of sensibility, and of action. Of the principles of action, some are mechanical, as instinct and habit; some are animal, as the appetites and some of the desires and affections; and others rational, arising from a knowledge of his relations to other beings, and from a foresight of the proper consequences of his acts. He thus combines in his nature those laws which govern the brute creation, with those which declare him to be made in the "image of God," and suit him to a state of moral discipline. With this complex nature he is endowed with the power of self-government, which implies the due exercise of all the properties of his being, under the direction and control of one supreme authority. This authority is conscience, which God has enthroned in the human breast with all the attributes of sovereignty. By this faculty, as an intellectual principle, man judges of the relation his conduct bears to the rule

of duty, and of its tendencies in the moral system; as a motive principle, it enforces right conduct upon grounds the most rational, by feelings the most sacred and urgent.

The brute animal rushes on to the gratification of its desires without a thought beyond the immediate object of pursuit, and with no higher law to govern it than the present impulse of appetite. Not so with man. He brings under his eye the just relations of universal being-lifts the curtain of futurity, and traces the operation of causes to their ultimate effects-and what, upon the wide scale of existence, and in the flow of infinite duration, is promotive of the chief good, he chooses and pursues. This is the graduating scale of the moral law; this the governing law of man's nature; he is capable of this, was made to act thus, and cannot be said to act naturally, or agreeably to the full powers of his being, if he act otherwise. His highest nature can be developed in no other way. He has appetites and desires like the brute, which seek their appropriate objects, and furnish a strong inducement to live for present gratification; but he has also a nobler endowment a higher ground, and a safer rule of action-and a more sublime and enduring susceptibility of enjoyment. In the present gratification of desire he may, indeed, fulfill an inferior law of his nature-he may be consistent with himself, considered merely as possessing an animal constitution; but the case may be such as to impinge a higher law-the sovereign law of conscience. He may be a consistent animal, but a perverse man.

2. But consider what a monitor conscience is. It teaches us to perform in good faith, as being right, that which we do; but it does not of itself supply an independent rule of right. If the particular rule of action should be defective, it is not the office of conscience, in its direct operations, to correct it. It avails itself of the best aids of the understanding, and enjoins upon its possessor to act upon a conviction of right, according to the best information within his reach. The apostle informs us that the heathen orld are governed by conscience; and though their rule duty, by which conscience operates, is not written in habetical characters, it is, nevertheless, graven "on the art;" it is in part the law of the constitution of all so

cial beings, and in part supplied by tradition and the simpler deductions of reason.

3. The government of conscience is not like that of the animal appetites. Instance our desire for animal food. It is at first a gentle monition; but neglected, it rises by degrees till its painful effects are felt throughout the system, the mind is drawn off from the pursuits of business and pleasure, and we are compelled to seek its gratification. Not so with conscience. Its voice is gentle and persua sive, often drowned in the clamor of passion, or unheeded in the eager pursuit of forbidden pleasure. But, however inadequate may be its practical power to govern in a given case, its rightful sovereignty is undisputed and eternal.

4. But if conscience is supreme, according to the original constitution of our nature, then, whatever may be the occasional, temporary abuse it may receive from the usurpation of the animal propensities, it must, upon the whole, and taking all the range of our existence into the account, possess an ascendent power over man.

However impotent the moral feelings may seem in the generality of men in the present state of existence, no argument can be drawn from this fact to disparage the real efficiency of conscience as the directive and executive principle of the soul. The present is a state of probation, and this single fact involves the possibility of an abuse of those powers, in the right cultivation of which consists the highest perfection of our nature. But man is under moral government, by the remedial and executive operations of which he will ultimately be placed in circumstances wherein all the constitutional powers of the mind will have their legitimate scope of action.

It cannot be that those principles of our nature which constitute the crowning glory of man, and which, by the very charter of our being, are constituted supreme, should always be subjected to the inferior powers. In the progress of our being, and the development of the wise purposes of Heaven, they must, sooner or later, be called forth, if not to answer the end for which they were at first bestowed, still, to furnish the abuses they have received. And this power to furnish will be great in proportion to their relative importance in the social economy. The very notion of supreme authority, in a well-organized govern