pillow. What has the transgressor to fear from annihilation? What is there serious in the rejection of Christ, if death ends and expunges man's existence ? Where are "the terrors of the Lord," which the Apostle employed to persuade men, if "probation is a name, and no more, and men are to be tried in another state of existence?" A heathen can ask, "If the day of man's death annihilate him, what can be more desirable than, in the midst of the ills of life, to lie down and shut his eyes in everlasting sleep?" It will be wretchedly awful for some professedly Christian teachers to meet the members of their congregations at the Bar of God. How many in these days are proving false to their Ordination Vows. It is a very fashion to cavil at old truths, while error and speculation receive the homage due only to established verities. You have intimated how rarely this doctrine is enforced. No trifler, it is true, can preach it, no indolent and jocose minister of religion will have much to say on this subject. Such a one is a stranger to the Psalmist's experience; "Horror hath taken hold upon me, because of the wicked that forsake Thy law." We cannot in our teaching, as Holy Scripture shews, dispense with warnings, any more than with promises. That inborn and strong dread of a coming judgment should be appealed to, and in these times of spiritual indifferentism, the ministers of Christ are loudly summoned to a serious proclamation of "the whole council of God." The severity of this doctrine is assuaged when you remember, that everlasting woe is not inevitable; for "God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ." That is the gracious appointment under which we live, "and this is His commandment that we should believe on the Name of His Son Jesus Christ." We may escape to mansions of eternal felicity. R It is right, I should add here, that throughout our conversations, I have been referring to the fre of those to whom the Gospel has been addressed, and for whom every conceivable couragement and overture of love has been used to effect their salvation. If the man who, for only a few years, has lived a wicked life goes away into everlasting punishment, the man who has lived a godly life for only a few years, goes away into life eternal. If we take the argument of time in the one case, we must also take it in the other. But it is childish to talk of men being sent to hell, because they have misspent a few years upon earth. No, no, it is not a question of time but of taste, disposition, character. The man who argues against this doctrine of endless woe in a Christian land like ours, knows that by dutifulness, and self-denial, and prayer, he may find his way to heaven. But in his case all remedial provisions have been rejected, and having been often told that, "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," he knows he must reap corruption; and he knows as a reader of his Bible, that that is equivalent to everlasting punishment. In his heart and conscience he knows this. With respect to the heathens, and such as die without knowledge of the Gospel, we have only again to repeat, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" If heathens are condemned, it is not because they have rejected our privileges, but because they have knowingly sinned and persisted in evil. They will be judged by the law of natural conscience, and according to the light they possessed. Perhaps more than we sometimes imagine will be saved, but on reaching heaven if we find them not, as some one has well said, we shall find a good reason why they are not there. Upon whom was the awful sentence of the text pronounced? The neighbouring "He shall divide the one A verses give the answer. from the other, as the shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats." The goats are placed on His left hand, but the sheep on His right. man is wicked and opposed to the righteous by his wilful neglect of the offers of salvation, and by his omission of duty. The careless, the worldly, the sensual, the "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God," the indolent and unbelieving, are the parties here banished. They refused homage to the Omnipotent Ruler, and outlawed themselves from the order and happiness of the universe. Thus they are dismissed for ever from holy companionships, they are driven from Him who died to save them, and hurried from the hope of everlasting rest and blessedness. Yet the loss of supreme happiness is not all, since they "go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal." THE END. PRINTED BY UPSTONE & DOE, 15, QUEEN Street, Oxford. |