of which must when time is no more at length overtake him-Let the darkening of his foolish heart be as due as it may to the sin of his ancestors, they still left a tribunal there from which went forth upon him the whisper of many an intimation-In the darkest period of this world's abandonment, were there still the vestiges of truth before every eye, and a conscience awake in every bosom,-insomuch that not one trembling culprit will be seen before the judgment-seat, who will not stand self-convicted under the voice of a challenging and inspecting Deity-His own heart will bear witness to the sentence that has gone forth against him; and the echoing voice of his own memory, will be to him the knell of his righteous and everlasting condemnation.

But we should like to bring the principle of our text more distinctly and individually to bear upon you. That process in general history by which the decline of this world's light respecting God, and the decline of its practical allegiance to His authority, have kept pace, the one with the other, is often realized in the personal history of a single individual. There is a connection by the law of our nature, between his wilful disobedience and his spiritual darkness. You have read perhaps in our old theologians, of what they called a judicial blindness. It is a visitation consequent upon sin. It is a withdrawment of the Spirit of God, when grieved and discouraged and provoked by our resistance to His warnings. It is that Spirit ceas

ing to strive with the children of men; and coming to this as the final result of the contest he has so long maintained with their obstinacy-He shall let them alone since they will have it so. It is an extinction of the light which they once had, but refused to be led by; and now perhaps that they have it not, may they do many an evil thing to the evil of which they are profoundly asleep, and against which their conscience, now lulled and stifled into spiritual death, lifts no voice of remonstrance whatever. The guilt of sins committed in this state of dormancy, which is of their own bringing on, is no more done away by their insensibility to the foulness of them, than is the guilt of murder committed in the fury of wilful intoxication. And ye depraved and hackneyed old, at the doors of whose hearts we have so often knocked and knocked in vain, we bid you remember a season of alarm and tenderness which has now passed away-we ask of you to look back on the prayers and the precautions of boyhood, when, the conscience awake and at her post, you at one time trembled to think of that which you can now do without remorse and without fearfulness. Ye men who have become stout-hearted sinners, and just because the moral light which shone upon you once has been extinguished by yourselves, and by yourselves your foolish hearts have been darkened-the scruples and the sensibilities of your earlier days may all have taken their departure, and such may be the lethargy of your souls that neither the thunders

of the law nor the entreaties of the gospel can move them. You may now be able to stand your ground against all the spiritual artillery of the pulpit-and, even though death has stalked at large over the entire field of your former companionship and left you a solitary and surviving memorial of friends and of families that have all been swept away, still may you persist in the spirit of an unbroken worldliness, and act the secure and the stout-hearted sinner, who rivets all his desires and all his hopes on a slippery foundation. It is true. indeed, that, with a conscience obliterated, and an inner man deaf to every awakening call, and a system of moral feelings like a piece of worn and rusty mechanism that cannot be set agoing, and an overhanging torpor upon all the spiritual faculties, so that every denunciation of an angry God and a coming vengeance is only heard like a sound that whistles by-it is indeed true that he whose soul is in a condition such as this, sits in the region and in the shadow of grossest darkness. But it is not like the transmitted darkness of Paganism, which he can offer to plead in mitigation-or which will make his last sentence more tolerable for him even as it shall be more tolerable for Sodom or Gomorrah. It is a darkness which he loved, and into which he voluntarily entered. He made his escape to it from the light which he hated; and by his own act did he so outrun his pursuing conscience, as now to be at a distance from her warnings. If the call of 'repent or perish' do not bring him back

-it is because he is sealed unto the day of condemnation; it is because God hath given him over to a reprobate mind; it is because he is judicially in a state of blindness; it is because his soul is compassed with a thick and heavy atmosphere of his own gathering. The Heathen sinner will be tried by the light which he had. The Christian sinner will be tried by the light which he fled from. This is his condemnation, that light has come into his part of the world-and he would not come to meet and be enlightened by it. He is on a footing altogether different from that of the idolater-though the darkness in which he is enveloped be irrecoverable. Enough that a light was offered which he refused-or enough that a light was once possessed, and he did not like to retain it.

We have already remarked, that, in the gradual darkening and deterioration of our world from one age to another, each age became successively more ignorant of God than the preceding; and yet with each we believe, even in the veriest wilds of savage and unwrought humanity, is there enough of light and enough of conscience, and enough of God's law in dim but remaining vestiges, to make every individual of our species a fit subject for moral examination, and for a righteous sentence consequent upon a fair and impartial trial. Now we have not practically to do with the destinies of the unconverted Heathen-nor shall we just now enter upon this region of speculation at all. But we have immediately

to do with a question which respects the immortality of our own countrymen. What is their light, and what is the degree of their condemnation if they resist it? What is the precise addition which our possession of the Bible has conferred upon our responsibility? What is the knowledge of God to which a conscientious and diligent perusal of this book might conduct us-unless we like not to receive that knowledge which we might obtain ? What is the knowledge of God which we throw away from us by throwing this book away from us -and that because we like not to retain the knowledge which we might possess? Only grant, that we are as morally and as rightfully to blame for not acquiring the light which we might receive if we had so willed it, as for not preserving the light which we might attain if we had so willed it; and the question before us is brought within a manageable compass. Is there at the very outset enough of likelihood that God might be the author of this book, as should resolve us upon a serious examination -then if God actually be the author, we have not acquired the knowledge of Him we might have done; and we shall be condemned accordingly, if we withhold the examination which ought to have been given. Is there enough of the character of the Divinity stamped upon its pages, that, had we only read with earnestness and pondered with earnestness, we would have beheld the traces of Him distinctly there and have been satisfied-then if, instead of so reading, we have wantonly and ignorantly re