thy father, of thy mother, is at this moment regarding thee with tender solicitude; is watching wheth er all the advices they have given to thee, all the prayers they have offered for thee, all the sighs and tears which thou hast forced from them, shall be of no avail; whether thou wilt not by turning unto the Lord, bestow on them a new sensation of joy, even in the midst of paradise; give them lib. erty to entertain the hope again to join you, when you enter into the kingdom of God, and to exclaim with transport-" Return, my child; return to my parental embraces."

V. Finally, (for although I fear I have already ex. hausted your patience, yet I cannot resolve to leave you without urging one more motive :) Finally, on your conduct in youth, your salvation or perdition, almost infallibly depend. I can conceive no consideration more impressive than this: listen, if you please, to its proof and illustration.

If you do not in your youth seek the God of your fathers, a prolongation of your life will be indispensably necessary to repair this neglect. Are you certain that your life will be thus prolonged? Have you not seen thousands whose health was as firm, whose prospects as fair as yours, cut off in their bloom, and summoned to meet their Judge in the midst of their schemes of future amendment? You act as though you were assured that this would not

be your lot; but whence have you derived this assurance? Have you ascended into the heavens, and there penetrated into the counsels of that God, "who holdeth in his hands the keys of life and of death ;" who hath appointed the number of your days beyond which you cannot pass? Or have you fettered the hands of the Almighty, so that he cannot snatch you hence before your repentance? Have you, if I may borrow the strong language of Isaiah; have you "made a covenant with death," that he shall not yet smite you; "an agreement with hell," (Isaiah xxviii. 15.) that it shall not yet swallow you up? No, no; you like the rest of men are ignorant of the duration of your life: You know not whether this sun that enlightens you, shall not before it sets behold you a corpse; you are not sure but that the angel of death has already received his commission, and is already winging his flight to tear your unwilling soul from its body, and bear it to the tribunal of God, to sustain there all the holiness, the purity, the strictness of his judgment. And yet in so perilous a state, you are cool and tranquil;-and yet in so dreadful an uncertainty you can be sportive and gay. When your body is attacked by a disorder, you think not of deferring till to-morrow the remedies which may immediately be applied; when your house is enwrapped in flames, you endeavour without delay to extinguish them; but when your soul is stricken by the mortal malady of sin, when you are burning with unholy desires and preparing to be consumed

in the flames of the abyss; you cry, that at some more convenient season you will attend to these matters, but that there is no need of instant anxiety and attention. God of our lives! thou only knowest whether they will not be in the eternal world, before this anticipated period arrives.

Let us however suppose for a moment that some friendly hand had lifted for you the veil of futurity, and removed all its uncertainty; let us suppose that God had revealed to you that you should yet live fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years, if you please: still it is by no means probable that at the expiration of this term you would be willing to seek the Lord and renounce your sin. Sin will then have become deeply habitual; its chains will have not only the strength but also the brilliant lustre of the adamant. Your criminal inclinations will be fortified by frequent exercise and by guilty example; will mingle in the whole course of your life, and become incorporated into your very essence; your understanding will be obscured by your guilt, and those false reasonings which you shall have so often used to quiet your fears, will appear to you irrefragable arguments; your conscience, whose monitions you shall so often have rejected, will be almost silent, and will reserve its testimony to be given in at the bar of your Judge ; your heart corrupted by sin, will be devoid of all taste for pure and holy pleasures; your imagination whose endless illusions you shall have experienced,

will occupy itself in mustering up the images of past pleasures, to furnish new aliment to the flame that devours you, and to re-animate dying passions. Is it conceivable that in such a situation you will be willing and disposed to forsake your sins and seek the Lord; to do what you are unwilling to do now while sin is less habitual and less endeared? Is it not probable that, a slave in the fetters which your own hands shall have forged, you will not even make one struggle to deliver yourself from them? If unconvinced by this reflection, go and consult experience. How few do you find among real christians; how few pious persons in this assembly who do not date the period of their conversion from their youth : How few are there in the number of those who hear my voice, who after neglecting to seek God in their youth have since become his true disciples : How many aged sinners who see all the consequences of their iniquities, who know the perdition which awaits them, yet still love their crimes, cling to them, refuse to separate from them. Will not this probably be your lot also my young friends, if you longer neglect to seek the God of your fathers?

Will you say "All this is true; of ourselves we shall not be able to turn to God; nevertheless his grace will be sufficient to dispose and enable us to do it; there is no resistance which it cannot overcome." God forbid that a minister of Christ should deny the omnipotence of grace, or bound the power

of the Most High. We know that if he pleases "he can of the stones raise up children to Abraham." (Mat. iii. 9.) We know that he can convert the most hardened sinners if he undertake to do it, if he interpose in their behalf; but will he thus undertake, will he thus interpose, if you now in your youth neglect to seck after him? This is the question which concerns you; let us examine what answer we must make to it.

Grace then is necessary for our conversion. Nevertheless scripture and reason concur in teaching us that God, in righteous judgement, withholds the internal influences of this grace from certain persons, who have previously abused and neglected it. Grace then being necessary for conversion, and this grace being withheld from these sinners, it is indubitable that they must be sealed up in judicial hardness, and remain forever unconverted. My brethren, I view this as the most awful truth of our religion; I stop not to prove it; it has more than once been established from this sacred desk; let us apply it to our subject. The just and sovereign Jehovah then will not forever bestow the secret inspirations of his grace to be despised, contemned, and rejected; those who now impiously refuse it, and contemptuously neglect it, may hereafter seek for it in vain. And say, young men, have you not cause to fear that this will be your destiny, if, notwithstanding the warnings that are given you, not