moral feelings, but also the understanding. The vigor, the elasticity, and the comprehension of the intellect; in fine, all its powers have become paralized, so that knowledge, as well as bread, can be acquired only by the "sweat of the face." The affections, the heart has also fallen under the influence of this fearful lapse. How high, how transcendently glorious, was the object of man's earliest and holiest affections! But, when he had fallen, how fitly is he described as "changing the truth of God into a lie, and worshiping and serving the creature more than the Creator!" Affections withdrawn from God, now centred in himself; and envy, and malice, and all-absorbing selfishness, sprung up as the legitimate offspring of perverted affections. The heart, just now so pure, so holy, so elevated in its aims, how has it fallen! "How has the gold become dim, and the most fine gold changed!"

suffered in this uni

Conscience and reason have also versal wreck of our spiritual nature. And as if sin would leave no sentiment, no principle, no power of our nature, uncontaminated, it has invaded the sanctuary of its freedom and enslaved the will, so that every power and susceptibility of our nature has become the servant and minister of sin. "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint." "Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." "The carnal mind is enmity against God;" it has abjured reason, conscience, and religion, and become the slave of passion and base desire. How often is it seen, in the dark catalogue of man's follies, that he wills-sternly and daringly wills-against all that is just, and pure, and virtuous, and good; and in favor of all that is base, and dark, and ruinous as perdition itself! How often is it that the will-the inexorable willstands firm as the granite bulwark against all the pleading remonstrances of conscience; against all the sublime and touching sympathies that pour themselves forth from the garden of Gethsemane, the hall of Pilate, and the cross of Calvary; against all the terrors that are thundered from the lofty peaks of Sinai, from the majesty of eternal justice, and from the sinner's final doom! Why, against all this, does the heart remain unmoved, and the will unsubdued, but that this spiritual death has spread through all our nature, chilling every emotion, and corrupting every faculty?

5

4. This spiritual death extends to, and reigns over, all men, until they are renewed by the grace of life.

The whole history of man, in every age, in every nation, so far as we have any knowledge, is but a standing and everlasting demonstration that both Jews and Gentiles are all included under sin; that, naturally, "there is none righteous, no, not one,"-" there is none that understandeth, none that seeketh after God." "They are all gone out of the way,"-" there is no fear of God before their eyes; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace have they not known." Amid the overspreading influence of this spiritual death, wickedness has acquired rank and fearful growth, and earth itself has grown old in crime. From this deep fountain of wicked-. ness in man's spiritual nature, what floods of iniquity have been poured out to blacken the fair face of creation, and cover the entire history of a sinning race with shades of moral turpitude appalling to the virtuous contemplation!

And even the church of the living God, purchased and renewed by the blood of atonement, how has her light been dimmed, and her energies paralized, by the lethargic influence of this spiritual malady. And never can she stand forth in all her comeliness and beauty-"the light of the world"-till, through faith, she has obtained triumphant victory over sin, and inscribed, HOLINESS TO THE LORD, upon all her banners. How have the great enterprises of Christianity flagged beneath the waning zeal and activity of the church! O, would she but rend asunder the graveclothes of her worldly-mindedness, and put on her garments of Heaven's own weaving; how soon would the life's blood of the soul begin to course her veins with unwonted freedom! how soon would she come up from the wilderness leaning on her Beloved! The breezes of heaven would fill her temples; and the dry bones, now scattered abroad, bleaching on all her plains, would rise to spiritual life; and an accumulated flood of glory would roll onward till our desert world should bud and blossom as the rose.

III. But let us approach the third and last topic of our discourse, and contemplate the wages of sin in their final and eternal results.

I approach this subject, my brethren, with the profoundest solemnity and awe. It is no subject on which to trifle,

or use vain words; for if there be one subject on which we should deal with our fellow-beings with more scrupu lous sincerity than another, it is that which affects their eternal hopes and condition. God forbid, that I, as a minister of his word, should withhold aught of his truth, or fail to declare the whole counsel of God; and while I am thus called to deal out the terrors of the Lord, I would do it with all plainness and godly sincerity.

1. Need I apologize, my brethren, for dwelling upon this solemn, momentous theme? And yet, I am perfectly aware that the proclamation of the fearful denunciations of God does not suit the fastidious tastes of even many professing Christians. Say they, "Tell us of salvation, bring to us the messages of mercy, speak to us of the love of God-of the compassionate, bleeding Lamb, tell us of heaven, of its blessedness and glory; but tell ús not of the wrath of God, speak to us not of his anger, bring not before us the horrors of an endless hell." My brethren, how inconsistent is this fastidiousness! What is the proclama

tion of heaven to the pure in heart, but the proclamation of hell to the impure, and to all workers of iniquity? But, has God declared a truth, and shall man presume to hide it from his perishing fellow-men, lest he should wound the false delicacy of the formalist, or shock the sensibility of the impenitent and godless? Nay, sinner, the very love we bear to your souls, as well as our duty to our divine Master, requires us to declare the whole counsel of God. Even affection, love for the sinner, would constrain the minister of God to deal plainly with his soul. If a man is in the first stages of a lingering and fatal disease, what would you say of the wisdom, or prudence, or justice, even, of the physician who should withhold from him a knowledge of his situation, if that knowledge were essential to his cure? Would a man in his senses ask for such medical treatment? Rather, would he not claim it as his right, to be made acquainted with the real nature and danger of his case? And would not the physician be faithless in his duty, who should withhold knowledge of such imminent importance from him? If, then, we would not be trifled with in the disease that can only destroy the body, how can we ask to be trifled with in that spiritual malady which will destroy both soul and body in hell!

2. The death of which we have here spoken, is unquestionably the special and peculiar fruit or wages of sin to which the apostle referred in our text. For the death spoken of is placed in contrast with "eternal life;" and what, I beseech you, but eternal death can be the opposite of eternal life? I am aware that some tell us that such a death has no existence, except in the brain of the theologian. But you must know, as well as myself, that the future state of the wicked is often represented as being different from that of the righteous-nay, the one is often placed in contrast with the other, and the same terms used to express the duration of each. If, then, the use of these terms, in the one case, affords any ground of hope that the joys of heaven will be of eternal duration; in the other, they afford deep and awful reason to fear that the woes of hell will be alike interminable and unceasing. You may as well tell me there is no heaven, as that there is no hell; or that the angels and God himself are but the creatures of poetic fancy, as that Satan and fiends of darkness have no essential existDoes the Bible speak of the one, so it does of the other. Does it portray the unspeakable bliss of the saints in glory, it also speaks of the unutterable woes of the damned in hell-the horrors of the "second death."

ence.

3. But what is this second death? what language can describe it? What lofty conception can comprehend it in all its fullness? The mariner, with his plummet, can fathom the depth of the sea-the navigator can measure its expanse-but what line or plummet can fathom the bottomless ocean of eternal perdition? what navigator can take the aggregate of its wo? Inspiration only can give utterance to the fullness of this eternal death. It is an eternal banishment of both soul and body from the presence of God, and from the glory of his power-an eternal separation from the favor and enjoyment of God. And, if God be withdrawn from the soul, what is left to it but the "blackness of darkness for ever?" It is not an extinction of being, but of happiness and hope the destruction of both body and soul in hell. It is being cast into hell, where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched. It is being cast, with all his members, into hell; it is going into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. To the wicked the day of judgment is a day of wrath; for then

shall the Lord Jesus be revealed from heaven with the mighty angels; in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them. which know not God, and that obey not the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power. And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever; and they have no rest day nor night.

Such are the fearful and final wages of sin. Sad as is the picture of wo it exhibits, it is what the finally impenitent shall really suffer. Say not that the picture is colored and fancy-wrought; for the pencil that drew, and the fancy that wrought it, were those of inspiration. And if these are only the plain, solemn, and truthful announcements of the righteous retributions of offended Heaven, how ought the impenitent to take alarm, and escape from impending death!

4. Is it not the fear and apprehension of this death that clothes the hour of dissolution with such dread-that arms the "king of terrors" with such a fearful "sting?" How universal is the fear and dread of death! By how many mortals would a life of poverty, and toil, and bodily suffering, be gladly chosen, rather than to endure what is dreaded and feared in death!

"The weariest and most loathed worldly life,

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment, can lay on man,
Is paradise to what we fear of death."

But repulsive as may be the wasting pain, the gasping agony, the utter dissolution and rottenness of the grave; hard as it may seem to be cut off from the society of those we love—to open our eyes upon the light of heaven no more -to be incarcerated in that gloomy cell, which is penetrated by the beams of no sun, and cheered by the murmurs of no sound; sorrowful as may be the unavailing grief of bereaved friends, the heart-rending wail of those bound to us by ties that death only could sever-it is not the anguish of friends, the gloom of the grave, nor the agony of dying, that makes us dread death, and shudder at its approach. Whence, then, this shrinking from its cold embrace? Why this fear and alarm at its approach?→→