SERMON II. CHRISTIAN CONTEMPLATION OF DIVINE JUSTICE. LORD, thou art righteous, and all thy judgments are just! Before thee, O most holy, and before thine all-searching look, the veil of dissimulation and hypocrisy, which human prudence so often throws over profligacy and crime, immediately drops; but oppressed and suffering virtue also, which, misunderstood and despised, is yet never weary of doing good, is encouraged in thy sight to the hope of a better world. Therefore the thought of thee, thou eternal and supreme Judge of the world of spirits, seizes at last the heedless and secure sinner, and fills him with horror and trembling, because of the futurity which awaits him; but, therefore also, the conviction of thy perfect justice rewards thy children with contentment and peace of mind, when they suffer wrong and persecution at the hands of men. Father of all! let the importance of this consideration be ever present to us, that we also may be just towards our brethren; that we may learn wil lingly to endure wrong and suffering, because thou directest them to our benefit; that we may all, as thy children, look forward with joy in the hour of death to thy sentence, thou, who art the Judge of all the world! It is a peculiar feature of the unperverted nature of man, my beloved, that it seeks to preserve the most exact and perfect balance between guilt and punishment, between merit and reward. We detest the judge with all our heart, who sells his judgment for gifts, who gives sentence for the vicious man, but is deaf to the voice of innocence defending itself in vain. On the contrary, we cannot deny our respect and high esteem to the man, who with upright and candid mind reprobates vice in the palace and in the cottage with equal impartiality, who entertains an equal regard for the moral worth of the rich and the poor. So unbounded, my friends, is our respect for a virtue, the conscientious practice of which must form the most exalted dignity and the fairest distinction of humanity. But, alas! the limitation of our powers, ignorance, covetousness, and insensibility, are the dangerous rocks, on which it is so often wrecked on this earth. We all, therefore, expect our sentence and the determination of our fate with silent submission from a superior Judge, whose all-scrutinizing view none of our most hidden virtues, none of our most secret |