through your journey on earth; take it as your lamp in life, as your hope in death, as your pathway to Jesus, to immortality,

and the skies.

Maintain communion and fellowship with God; walk with and live near God. Miss not the house of prayer; forsake not the assembling of yourselves together. Do not let it be said that while a bright day fills the church, a wet day empties it; that a little headache, which would not detain you from the exchange, keeps you from the sanctuary. Do not make the Sabbath a day for recruiting your body: rather take a day from Cæsar for that end. Make the Sabbath a day of communion and fellowship with God. Do not show that you are punctual in the things of Cæsar, but careless in the things of God. Be thankful for your Sabbaths, for you know not how long they will last. Be thankful for the Bible, for you know not how long it will be open before you. Be thankful for your privileges, for you know not how long they will be continued to you. Work ye while it is yet day, for the night cometh in which no man can work. And, further, look upon all that surrounds you in this perishing world as transient, ephemeral, evanescent; all its glory is approaching to an eclipse; all its grandeur is soon to pass away, like as a fleet ship glides swiftly past us at sea. All that men call high, will soon be of low estate; all that men pronounce to be little, will be seen to be great and glorious. Look around you, and you see the long-established institutions of the nations tottering, and crashing, and falling to pieces. Even in our own country, men's hearts are failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth. We are now quiet, at peacecomparative peace; like a beautiful gem, placed in the bosom of the mighty waters, our throne, and our country, and our people are secure; but it is, I solemnly believe, because upon that the name of Jesus is legibly inscribed, and that here among us his truth is more or less reverenced and prized. But, however long these privileges of ours may last, we know that our country must be moved; the shocks which shake the world cannot leave Great Britain unmoved. The day is fast hastening, I am persuaded, when all human institutions will be more or less

gem

loosened; let us, therefore, look up, and learn to place our hearts upon that throne which cannot be shaken; and we shall hereafter have to bless God for dethroning kings, scattering dynasties, shattering thrones, and convulsing the world; for the shaking of things here will thus have led us to look to the things which never can be shaken or removed.

Let me give as the
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And, dear friends, let us walk with God. last prescription, "Love to walk with God." more to see God. We always carry so much atheism with us when we travel into different countries, or go forth into the fields, or stroll by the seaside. Try not only to see nature, but to "rise from nature up to nature's God." Try to realize God in the less perspicuous book of nature, as well as in the more perfect page of revelation. Let the stars that shine in the firmament be to you as the eyes of the omniscient, omnipresent Deity. Let the tints of flowers, and their fragrance too, be to you but as visible creations of the smiles and breath of God. Let all nature's sounds proclaim to you his love; all scenes reflect to you his glory and greatness. And, whether the thunder-cloud overshadow you with its lowering darkness, or heaven's golden sunshine beam upon you in all its effulgence, you will have no awful forebodings of the future, no paralyzing reminiscences of the past. Every hill shall be to you a Tabor, every day a Sabbath, every house a sanctuary, every table a Lord's table; the bright orbs and worlds above and around you, as God's shining footprints in the immensity of space. You will taste of the grapes of Eschol in the wilderness, and see a door of hope in the valley of Achor. You shall hear the voice of God in all sounds, and realize the presence of a heavenly sunshine in the tents of Mesech, and the tabernacles of Kedar.

And, above all, pray for that Holy Spirit who is needed to create that confidence, arrest this departure, and give us a new impulse to carry us to God. And may that Spirit descend on us all, and make us earnest, loving, consistent, devoted Christians!

I have thus tried to analyze the mother sin, of which the sins enumerated in verse eighth are but the progeny. It may

be that these sins are here enumerated as the special characteristics of the antichristian and Roman apostasy. They are, unquestionably, the historical characteristics, and, I believe, necessary fruits of that system. But whether there or here, unbelief is the parent. Faith is the cure: it worketh by lovepurifieth the heart-overcometh the world; it is the gift of God, and the privilege and possession of them that pray.

117

LECTURE VIII.

ENDLESS SUFFERERS.

"Which is the second death."—Revelation xxi. 8.

I HAVE already addressed you on previous Sunday evenings from the subject of "the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband;" and also on its peculiar accompaniment, "The tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them ;" and we have rejoiced together at the promise of the final extinction of all tears and sorrows in the hearts of God's people, for God shall wipe away, and wipe out the fountains of all tears from their eyes. I noticed the creative intimation, "Behold I make all things new," and the free invitation addressed to all: "I will give unto him that is athirst of the water of life freely;" lastly, I stated that all these promised good things are to be the inheritance of "him that overcometh," an expression which involves conflict, weapons, a leader, and victory.

My object this evening is to show that the notion held by some in the present day, that the sufferings of the lost will not be eternal but temporal, is erroneous, and without any scriptural or reasonable foundation. Before entering upon my subject, I will read a short quotation from Archdeacon Paley. He says, "It is very difficult to handle this dreadful subject properly; and one cause of the difficulty is, that it is not for one poor sinner to denounce such awful terrors and appalling consequences upon others." In stating that the pains of the lost are not temporal but eternal, I am aware that I take the unpopular and, to many, the unpalatable view; but the truth of a doctrine does not depend on its agreeableness, or upon the many or the few that hold it: "To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

As far as I can conceive of the state of the lost, I think the expression in the text, "the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone," is figurative. I do not think it is here implied that there will be a material fire, or a literal gnawing worm, to torment the lost; these are the expressive, and it may be inadequately expressive, vehicles and symbols of their intense and untold agony. Besides these there are elements of wo enough in hell. Let a virtuous and delicate mind, to allude only to one, conceive what it would feel, were it condemned for a time to the company of persons selected from the bridewells or the penitentiaries of the earth. Would not the scene be a painful one? Would not their blasphemous oaths strike terror into the heart, and their impure words create disgust and abhorrence in the pure and delicate soul? And yet, to be placed in such a hell on earth is but a faint shadow of the realities of that literal hell: here, amid all the varied forms of depravity, redeeming traits are thrown up, mitigating and relieving elements of aboriginal beauty shine forth; but among the lost there is no softening element at all, nothing but unmixed sin, unmitigated and unmingled evil in its various degrees.

In the state of the lost, too, those evil passions which so often rankle latent in bosoms here, and develop their powers with years and opportunities, we have reason to believe will there be released of every restriction, and left unshackled to revel in full and exasperated expansion for ever. "He that is holy, let him be holy still; he that is unholy; let him be unholy still." Heaven is the full and unfettered expansion of those noble principles of holiness, and buds of happiness, that God has implanted in the renewed heart; and hell is the eternal growth and expansion of the poisonous passions and rankling elements of misery formed in the natural heart. Thus a sinner sinks to hell as a natural consequence of his past conduct; it is not God who has doomed a soul to hell, it is not his fiat that sends him there, but sin, which has ripened the soul for it, weighs it down and buries it there. I gather from the Scriptures, that whatever of beauty and splendour, and ennobling motive, and inspiring hope, survive here, are emanations of the Almighty. But there will be with the lost God's curse concentrated; no trace of beauty with