yawns beneath you? Do you never look upward to that glorious heaven, the gate of which, on golden hinges turning, is wide open to receive the repenting sinner, who seeks admission through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? If you have never done it before, do it now. You are yet on mercy's shore; you still have the Bible to read, and you hear the gospel trumpet sound. O look to Christ and be not faithless but believing; fix your eye on Calvary's rugged hill; behold yon bloody tree! Whom do you there see? Behold Christ the anointed of God, to be the Saviour of sinners, as your atoning priest, himself the sacrifice. Hear him pray, "Father forgive them; for they know not what they do." Behold him bow his head and give up the ghost. And do you never hope your sins were there? that he bore them in his body on the tree? Hard is that heart, that can think of this without emotion; dead, buried in sin, is that soul which can muse thereon and have no feeling. And does your heart never relent, O sinner! Does it never melt within you, that you have pierced the Lord Jesus so deep, and continued to do it so long? O sinners, sinners! let me plead with you. This is your friend he is your best friend. For you he left the courts above, O live to him your every breath. Yes, let me plead with you; by your capacity for happiness; by your need of salvation; by the forbearance of God; by the love of Jesus; by the horrors of damnation; by the glories of heaven, promised through Christ to repenting sinners. Let me plead with. Give yourself, O sinner! to Jesus; he is worthy, he is willing, O give yourself to him; you must do it or perish; you must do it heartily; you must do it unreservedly. You cannot serve God and mammon, Jesus and the world. I conjure you to repent. I have, as God has enabled me, set before you life and death; salvation and damnation! I conjure you to choose which you will take, and whom you will serve; I conjure you that you turn to God and live; that you repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved. But if you do not repent of your sins, and with your heart believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you shall perish. They are his words that I give you; if you believe not on him you shall be damned. And it is no slight thing to be damned of God and his Christ. no slight thing to be cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is But, perhaps, some of you, my readers, are thinking, I do not believe all this; I'll risk it; I am not ready to be religious yet; a little more time for the world; I do not think that I shall die VOL. II.-Presb. Mag. 2 Y soon, and any time before I die; I'll risk it. Risk it if you dare. It is a risk indeed. In the snare of the devil you are carried captive by him at his will. And when your day of grace is past, and you are shut up in the prison of hell, remember this address--remember the writer now warns you not to presume on life and continue in sin. You will risk it, will you? Think again. Whom are you setting at defiance? Have you an arm to contend with the Almighty? Have you a voice, that you can thunder like him? Pensioner on his bounty-tenant at his will, did he but let thee go, life's thread would break, and destruction, eternal destruction, be the portion of thy soul. Therefore, to-day, after so long a time, even to-day hear his voice and harden not your heart. But turn ye, turn ye; why will you die? ISAAC REED. ESSAY ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT. "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment."-MATT. xxv. 46.. Truth is in order to holiness; and holiness the path to glory and to God. In a revelation, therefore, designed to save mankind from their sins, we may expect to find a just and true exhibition of the character of God, and the principles of his government. We may expect also a plain discovery of his will, and the nature of the obedience he requires, as well as of the way of escape from sin and ruin. Our Lord Jesus Christ has made these discoveries. This chapter contains a clear and most solemn account of the eternal consequences of the course of action pursued in the present life. The closing verse declares the sentence of the last day to be a fixed and irreversible doom. This is one doctrine which the great Prophet of the church employed his strongest eloquence to enforce. It is the object which he placed in the front ground of revelation, that it might strike every heart and awaken every conscience. The words at the head of these remarks are the more interesting, as they are the words of our Judge, as they contain an account of the fate that awaits a large proportion of the human race, and because we are compelled by all the rules of just interpretation to understand them literally: "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." Punishment, in general, signifies pain or suffering, or some natural evil inflicted on one who has sinned. All just punishments imply that the suffering party has broken a righteous law, and therefore deserves to suffer. The measure or degree of suffering must be in exact proportion to the evil committed: as, for example, life for life. The malicious destruction of a fellow creature's life forfeits that of the murderer. There are three principal ends designed in the infliction of punishment: The first, where the offender may be reclaimed by means of correction, and prevented from repeating the offence. Of this kind were many of the calamities brought upon the nation of Israel. The sufferings of the saints on earth are sent for the same end, that they may work the peaceable fruits of righteousIn such corrections, God assumes the gracious part of a father, who afflicteth not willingly but for our profit, "that we may be partakers of his holiness." "Though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion, according to the multitude of his mercies.". ness. A second design of punishing, is to deter others from sin, by showing the evil of the crime in its painful consequences. God in his providence has shown many dreadful examples of the evil of sin. Sin is never indulged without being attended with some pain, or the forfeiture of some blessing, even in the present world. To continue only in a state of sin, without the grosser crimes of the wicked, will debar the sinner of that noblest happiness of the soul, communion with God through the Mediator. But the more open and atrocious vices are attended in a thousand instances with striking tokens of the divine anger: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men," more especially of those "who hold the truth in unrighteousness." No man is ignorant of the curse which the Almighty has attached to intemperance and other sensuality. Poverty, disease, disgrace, and death, are the temporal penalties which the votaries of vice are daily suffering for "the pleasures of sin." But if we could witness the secret racks and horrors of conscience, the regrets, the fears and tormenting conflicts of appetite and passion, that most sinners endure in a course of wickedness, we should see enough to establish it as a general maxim, that "the way of transgressors is hard." A third end proposed, in the infliction of punishment, is to satisfy the claims of law and justice. Men that are not blinded by error, or hardened in sin, universally allow that the punishment of a transgressor is a claim due to the majesty of the laws; and that nothing but suffering will answer that claim. And it is a leading maxim in the government of God. By his law it was as great an iniquity in Israel to let the wicked escape the sword of justice, as to oppress and injure the innocent. It is one of the most sacred attributes of his that he government, "will by no means clear the guilty." This was terribly manifested in the destruction of the house of Saul. While his de scendants were suffered to live, famine raged in the land; nor was the wrath of God appeased, or the judgment removed, till David had executed upon that bloody race the vengeance writ ten. From the scriptures it abundantly appears that God extends the operation of this principle to the eternal state. In that world, as well as on earth, sin bears the brand of Jehovah's frown, and justice exacts the debt of suffering due to the violated majesty of the law. The words before us are taken from the plainest revelation the scriptures contain, respecting the final trials and destinies of mankind. Our Lord carries our views across the remaining ages of time to the end of all things, and places man before the bar of his God. The scene opens with the descent of the Son of Man to the place of judgment. The hosts of the Lord are despatched to gather all nations before the throne. The Judge classes the human race, not by tribes and kindreds, not by empires or generations, but according as every man's work shall have been. Then, upon the fullest evidence, the final judgment is pronounced. Respecting the nature of the punishment endured by the enemies of God in that world, our principal informations are drawn from his word. On a subject so pregnant with all that is awful and interesting to man, it were madness to reason without that guide. Future miseries are painted by the Spirit of God in every form of horror that the mind of man can conceive or grasp. Ponder such descriptions as these: "The wicked shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord." They are described as "cast into a bottomless pit," whence "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever." They are described as dwelling in "outer darkness," "the mists of darkness," and "blackness of darkness"-"there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." Their habitation is a "lake of fire and brimstone," "a furnace of fire," "where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched." How far these dismal images accord substantially with the real objects of the eternal world, is not a question for human reason to decide, or even to discuss. But our Lord has collected into one sentence enough to strike curiosity dumb, and to sink every passion in breathless amazement. To them on his left hand the King shall say, " Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." In that sentence there are three ingredients, which, when mingled together, form a misery far beyond our utmost stretch of thought. "Depart from me." On earth "the captive exile hasteneth to be loosed," that he may terminate his banishment and regain the lost blessings of his native land: but the soul banished from heaven begins a term of exile that runs parallel with the ages of eternity. It is a banishment from God, the centre of hope, the source of life, the fountain of felicity; it is a captivity cheered by no ray of blessed expectation glimmering through the gloom of futurity. The sinner leaves all that can render his being supportable, and takes with him nothing but sin, and the curse, and a capacity to suffer. He is done forever with hope and joy, with saints and angels, with the city, the temple, and the ark of God. Again, he departs to "fire." The most terrible torments of which the body is capable, are those produced by fire. The soul of man when reunited to the body, after the resurrection, will possess a capacity for suffering proportioned to her knowledge, and proportioned to her guilt; otherwise the justice of God would be robbed of its claims. This capacity will be all filled with the fire of his wrath. It has been made a question whether material fire, like that which glows in the sun and animates nature, will burn in hell. But shall a creature posting to eternal retribution amuse himself with such inquiries? Let him inquire rather how he shall "escape the damnation of hell.” Our Judge will be the Lord God omnipotent. His resources are equal to his power. The place of torment is the same prepared of old for the devil and his angels. The condemned of Adam's race are consigned to the same region, and the same punishment as the great destroyer. Their companions, therefore, will be fellow sinners and fellow sufferers. If any wo can aggravate the terror of the "wrath of God, poured without mixture into the cup of his indignation," it will be this: All the refuse of the fallen creation will be gathered into one community, the society of hell, the community of the damned. As the cup of divine wrath goes round, blasphemy and mutual reproach, with all the endless workings of hatred and despair, will swell the tide of wo forever and ever! For It will be "everlasting punishment." Eternity will add desperation to the loss of happiness. It is the poison that inflames every stroke froin the arrows of the Almighty; it will clothe hell with its heaviest gloom; it will render the society of fellow criminals seven-fold more insupportable. Time is nothing, but as it relates to temporal beings; it is nothing to man but as it stands connected with the affairs of time, and their consequences in eternity. So eternity would be nothing to man, were it not for "everlasting punishment," or "life eternal." But when we view eternity as the duration of the deathless spirit of man; when we contemplate endless ages as the measure which the living God assigns to the heaven of the saint and the sinner's hell; reason is engulfed, and imagination shrinks back in terror from the awful idea! Yet, overwhelming as it is, we |