away from the hearts of those who should pray for it.

There is an observable harmony here between that process which takes place in the hearts of believers, and that process which takes place in the counsels and acts of the upper sanctuary. You know that according to the usual methods of the divine administration, the Spirit is given in larger measure and larger manifestations to those who have duteously responded to His earlier intimations or made right and faithful use of His first and feebler influences upon their hearts-whereas He is more and more withdrawn from those who quarrel or who resist these first impressions of His upon the conscience—so that at length He may take a final and irrecoverable departure away from their souls, and abandon to their own infatuation the unhappy men, who, growing every year in moral hardihood, live in the recklessness of all that is sacred, and die at the last in fatal impenitency. With this view of it you will be at no loss to understand the saying-that to him who hath, more shall be given; and from him who hath not, there shall be taken away even that which he hath. Paul himself, who served God with good conscience from his youth, though then in ignorance and in unbelief, had at length a full revelation given to him-whereas those of his countrymen who even against conscience maligned and resisted the Saviour, and so put away from them the things which belonged to their peace, were delivered up to that state of judicial blindness in which

VOL. IV.

C

they were for ever hid from their eyes. The life of a Christian is made up of perpetual accessions of grace from one degree of it to another, till he arrives at perfection, and is ripe for glory. The life of an impenitent is made up of perpetual and successive extinctions of one good feeling, of one lingering sensibility after another, till he pass away into utter darkness, and is ripe for the awful the irremediable distruction which follows it. There

is a point somewhere in this dismal this descending pathway, where the irrecoverable step is taken, and he has sinned unto death. You will here be reminded of the apostle John, who bids us pray for those who have not sinned unto death; but who adds that there is a "sin unto death and I do not say that he should pray for it." Now, as the last symptoms of any remaining good die away from the character of these reprobates, so the last sparks of a hope for their recovery die away from the hearts of by-standers who are looking on, and who at length cease to persuade and even cease to pray for them. Paul had not just sunk so pondency with regard to the Jews. He was not yet discouraged out of all faith and all prayer about them. He still observed one good point or property in the character of that nation-a zeal of God, even that very zeal which actuated himself when he breathed forth threatenings and slaughter against Christians-And so he still could hope, and still could pray for them.

low in des

From the materials of such an argument as this

there may be constructed a powerful appeal, by which, if possible, to arrest the headlong way of that moral desperado, who, hastening on from one enormity to another, is fast losing all the delicacies of conscience, the truth and the tenderness of other days-in whose breast that light of the inner man which has been termed the candle of the Lord is fading away to its ultimate extinction; and whom the Spirit, tired and provoked by the stubborn resistance of all His warning, is on the eve perhaps of abandoning and that for ever, to his own heart's wickedness since he will have it so. Every year finds him a more confirmed alien from God, and stouter in all the purposes of rebellion than before. The disease of his soul grows and gathers in inveteracy-till, encrusted all over with that judicial hardness to which he has been delivered, all the touching demonstrations of Providence and all the loud artillery of menacing sermons play upon him in vain. Even when age and disease overtake him, even the alarum bell of his coming mortality might bring no terror to his ear; and with all his sensibilities lying prostrate under the power of that corruption which has withered them, he may be alike unappalled by the demonstrations of his guilt, and the fell denunciations of the vengeance which is due to it. The truth is that he is sunken, he is profoundly sunken in spiritual lethargy; and now beyond the possibility of recall, he affords the dire and the dreadful spectacle of a helpless a hopeless creature whom the Spirit of God hath irrecoverably

forsaken. Know then all ye regardless hearers who have entered and are now walking on a path of wilful iniquity, that this is the state to which you are descending. Your friends behold the progress of this impenitency. They sigh and they even supplicate Heaven on your account; but the time may speedily arrive, when the characteristics of your impiety shall look so indelible and so desperate, that to supplicate in faith is beyond them. And O is it not time to retrace your footsteps on this way of destruction, unknowing as you are how near or how soon you shall be on the verge of that condition when the Spirit of God shall cease to strive; and the very parents who gave you birth may weep, but cannot pray for you!

The Jewish character was not yet so utterly desolated of all worth and goodness, as to drive the apostle from hope's last refuge-even prayer. They wanted knowledge, but they had zeal; and this so far propped his spirit in that exercise, to the success of which a certain faith and a certain hopefulness are so indispensable. That must have been a valuable property, in virtue of which they could still be prayed for. But that on the other hand must have been a most important and essential property, from the want of which they eventually perished. Had they added knowledge to their zeal, they would still have remained the favourites of Heaven; and from the actual history of the Jewish people, we may learn what a serious want the want of knowledge is. That day of their tremendous

visitation, in the prospect of which our Saviour shed tears over their devoted city, came upon them, to use His own language, just because they knew not the things which belonged to their peace. Their ruin as a nation was the effect of their ignorance; and in that fearful that overwhelming doom which our Savionr wept over, but would not recall, we have experimental proof of that alliance which obtains, by the ordinations of the gospel, between the knowledge of man and his salvation, on the one hand, and between the want of that knowledge, and his utter and irreversible wretchedness, upon the other. The judgment which went forth against them because of their ignorance, had in it as much of the spirit and character of a vengeance, as if it had been inflicted on the worst moral perversities whereof humanity is capable. It is true that the awful extermination came upon them, because they had killed the Prince of life. But it was in the spirit Peter and John testify, Their con

of a blind zeal, and as
through ignorance that they did it.

demnation still resolves itself into the want of knowledge-for had they known, Paul says, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Let us not then underrate the importance of knowledge in religion; nor under the imagination that ignorance is not a responsible or not a punishable offence, hold that men might be in safety however defective in point of information, however wrong in point of mere understanding.

But in addition to the historical proofs, for what