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you glorified God in all your actions? Have you made your calling and election sure, by a lively faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, by repentance from dead works, and by universal purity of heart and life? Have you enriched your mind with the treasures of wisdom? Have you adorned your life with the beauties of holiness? Have you laid many deeds of piety and charity as a good foundation against the time to come? Unless you have done these things, you have done nothing. You have been blanks in the universe. You are as if you had never been. You have been fast asleep; nor has your sleep been the less sound, that you have dreamed you were awake.

I now call upon you to arise, or be for ever fallen. It is now high time to awake. Almighty God now calls upon you to finish the work which he hath given you to do. Glory, and honour, and immortality are set before you. Up then and be doing, and the Lord shall be with thee. With such views of your duty, and upon these principles of action, you will never join in the apology which some make for themselves, that the general tenor of their life is innocent, and that they have at least the negative merit to do no harm. Perhaps this account may be true; but let me ask such persons, have you ever considered the parable

of the master who called his servants to account? He delivered talents to each of them, according as he saw fit, with this charge," Occupy till I come." The servant who received the one talent, was negligent and slothful. He wrapt up his talent in a napkin, and hid it in the earth. He thought he did well, if he secured the capital till his Lord's return. But the master received the talent with indignation. He cast the unprofitable servant into utter darkness, and condemned him to weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. The poor wretch was neither a thief nor a murderer. He had not wasted his Lord's goods. He had' your plea, he had done no harm. But he was found guilty of idleness and sloth; he received his sentence, and was condemned to punishment. That

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which is the ground of your security, could not save him from condemnation.

But, in good earnest, do you no harm? Is it no harm to wander from the cradle to the grave, in a labyrinth of amusements, either vain or childish? Is it no harm to waste in dissipation and expensive pleasure, that wealth which might have saved an honest family from beggary and want? Is it no harm. to squander in one continued round of vanity and folly, those precious hours on which your future happiness depends? If there be harm in human actions, this is harm. It is a criminal negligence which will turn the scale of your eternal doom.

To you, my younger friends, this duty recommends itself under the most interesting claims. You are now in that period, when time can be improved to the best advantage. With you, every hour of life is precious. The misimprovement of youthful days is more than the loss of time. It were of little consequence to throw away a few days from your life; but along with these, you cut off the substantial improvements, the real joys of maturer age. Figure to yourselves the loss which the year would sustain, if the spring were taken away ;-such a loss you sustain. No tears, nor lamentations, nor bitter upbraidings, will ever recal that golden period. The star sets, to rise no more; the flood rolls away, never to return.

Your own experience, my aged brethren, will, urge the instant necessity of redeeming the time. Consider the fate that awaits you soon. A few steps will bring you to the threshold of that house which is appointed for all living. Man that is born of a woman, is of few days. He cometh forth as a flower, and is cut down; he flieth as a shadow, and continueth not. By the unalterable law of nature, all things here hasten to an end. An irresistable rapidity hurries every thing to the abyss of eternity; to that awful abyss, to which all things go, and from which nothing returns. The great drama of life is perpetually going on. Age succeeds to age, and generation to

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generation. Not long ago, our fathers trod the path which their fathers had trodden before them; we have come into their room, and now supply their places, In a little time we must resign to another race, who in their turn also shall pass away, and give place to a new generation. The race of men, saith a Jewish writer, is like the leaves of the trees. They come forth in the spring, and clothe the wood with robes of green. In autumn they wither; they fall; the winter wind scatters them on the earth. Another race comes in the season, and clothes the forest again.

Consider the world, my friends, as you saw it at first, and as you see it now. You have marked vicissitude and alteration in all human affairs. You have seen changes in almost every department of life. You have seen new ministers at the court, new judges on the bench, and new priests at the altar of the Lord, You have seen different kings upon the throne. You have seen peace and war, and war and peace again. How many of your equals in age have you survived? How many younger than you have you carried to the grave? Year after year hath made a blank in the number of your friends. Your own country hath insensibly become a strange land, and a new world hath risen around you, before you perceived that the old had passed away. The same fate that hath taken away your friends, awaits you. Even now the decree is gone forth. The king of terrors hath received his commission, and is now on his way. If you have misemployed your time, that talent which God hath put into your hand; if your life is marked with guilt or folly, how will you answer to your own heart at that awful hour? For, previous to the general doom, Almighty God hath appointed a day of judgment in the breast of every man. The last hour is ordained. to pass sentence on all the rest. The actions of your former life, will there meet you again. How will you then answer at the bar of your own heart, when the collected crimes of a lengthened life, at one view, shall flash upon the mind; when the ghosts of your depart

ed hours, of those hours which you have murdered, shall rise up in terrible array, and look you in the face? What would you then give for that time which you now throw away? What would the wretch who lies on a bed of agony, extended and groaning, who feels in his heart the poisoned arrow of death; who, looking back on his past life, turns aside from the view; who, looking forward to futurity, discerns no beam of hope to break that utter darkness which overwhelms him; what would he then give for those hours which you now despise, to make his peace with Heaven, and fit him for his passage into the world unknown? Remember, my friends, that this is no imaginary case; it is a case which may soon be your own. Be wise, therefore, while wisdom can avail, and save yourselves from the agony of repenting in bitterness of soul, when all repentance may be in vain.

To sum up all; my friends, the time is short. We are as guests in a strange land, who tarry but one night. We wander up and down in a place of graves. We read the epitaphs upon the tombs of the deceased. We shed a few tears over the ashes of the dead; and, in a little time, we need from our surviving friends the tears we paid to the memory of our friends departed.

Time is precious. The time is now passing that fixes our fate for ever. The hours are, at this instant, on the wing, which carry along with them your eterhal happiness or eternal misery.

Time is irrecoverable. The clock is wound up once for all; the hand is advancing, and, in a little time, it strikes your last hour.

SERMON V.

WH

PSALM iv. 4.

Stand in awe.

YHEN the Patriarch Jacob departed from his father's house, and entered on that state of pilgrimage, which only terminated with his life, he lighted on a certain place, where he tarried all the night. Agreeably to the simplicity of the ancient world, he laid himself down to rest upon the open plain; without any pillow but a stone of the field; and without any covering but the curtains of heaven. A stranger he was to the elegance and luxury of after times, but he enjoyed pleasures of a higher kind, The God of his fathers was with him. In the patriarchal ages, before a public revelation was given to the world, the Deity frequently appeared to holy men in dreams, and visions of the night. Accordingly, Jacob, in his dream, beheld a ladder set upon the earth, the top of it reaching unto the heavens, and up-t on it the angels of God ascending and descending: and behold! the Lord stood above, and said, "I am "the Lord God of Abraham, thy father, and the "God of Isaac; the land whereon thou liest, to thee "will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall "be as the dust of the earth; thou shalt spread abroad "to the east, and to the west; to the south, and to the "north; and in thee, and in thy seed, shall all the "families of the earth be blessed."

Did the Patriarch awake in a rapture of joy, when he had been thus so highly favoured of the Lord? You shall hear: "And Jacob awakened out of his

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