not care to remember Him now? Indeed, if you care to think less of Him than to think of business now, or pleasure now, or money now, or the great things, or the high things of the world now, what is He, or what is any mere human witness to think of your feeling towards Him? You give Him the last,

least share of your heart. Alas! your faith and your profession are only a heartless mockery, and you surely can hope nothing from Him hereafter. Put sin, or rather gross wickedness, out of the question, the fact is as clear as the daylight, you have neither part nor lot in this matter; and for the plainest reason in the world, because you care nothing about it. Nor can you deem that sacred word unreasonable, which tells you that as you now confessedly seek nothing, you must not be disappointed if you find nothing. Nay, you must not, will not, dare to blame any one but yourself, if you should find yourself at last separated for ever from Him, in whose presence is the fulness of joy, and at whose right hand there are pleasures for evermore. Oh! think on these things with serious and manly attention. Weigh it seriously in your mind, that the judgments of God upon sin are not to be revealed and pronounced for the first time at the end of a man's course of sin or forgetfulness of God. They are plainly set before

us now.

No words can be plainer than those of

the gracious Being who came to seek and to save our ruined race,- "He that believeth not is condemned already."

Careless observers of the ways of God to man, and those who never think with seriousness and attention, are apt to form judgments at once unwise and untrue. They know that the curse of God is upon sin, and they often judge harshly of the Lord, as if He had delight in the condemnation of the sinner. True it is, that the soul that sinneth it shall die; but the curse which is upon all sin is not so much a judicial curse, or a curse that comes down in judgment upon the sinner, having no connection with his sin: it is a curse which is the natural consequence of the sin; it is as it were born and bred of the sin itself, and it springs out of it, as the stem of the plant springs up from the seed, as the leaves and the blossom and the fruit grow out from the stem. Thus, St. James sets before us the means and the end, the cause and the effect, "Lust when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin; and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death." It was thus, indeed, in the case of the first death that ever happened on earth. It might have been reasonaby expected, that as death had been so awfully pronounced as the penalty of sin, the Lord God Himself would have inflicted the

awful doom. It was just the contrary. The early history of man is a series of restrainings and warnings, on the side of the Lord God, against sin, and its attendant curse and condemnation; and a series of provocations, on the side of man, in which he blindly rushes upon his own destruction. Thus we have first the seed of hatred in the heart of Cain, and then gradually the growth of hatred into murder, till the cause has produced its natural consequence and effect; and at last, by man's own hand, the first dreadful, mortal blow is inflicted. But, even then, the wrath of God does not seem to have been dreaded by the cowardly murderer. He does not shrink under the overhanging judgment of the Lord his God: to God he turns, with God he expostulates, as evidently dreading not a judgment-blow from heaven to crush and destroy him, but death from the hand of man, as the punishment of his sin. And it is indeed remarkable, that instead of condemning this first murderer to death, the judgment of the Lord is pronounced in sevenfold severity upon the man that slayeth Cain.

This truth, therefore, I would have you consider. Leave any sin to itself in a man's heart, let it receive no check in the child from the correction of a parent, in the grown-up man from the usages of society or from the law of the land,

above all, from the word and Spirit of God, and it will in time deaden the power of conscience and work out the ruin of the man. There need scarcely have been a curse pronounced on sin. It is its own dreadful curse, or rather, it bears within it, as the seed contains within its little shell the whole future tree, the crime and the misery that shall at last come to a gigantic growth. Is this, then, a severe doom upon the ungodly, that "the wicked shall be turned into hell and all the people that forget God?" Is it not rather the declaration of the fact, from the word of the all-wise God, that ungodliness of heart and life is but the preparation and the growing fitness of the man for eternal misery. By every step he takes in the course of a world which is at enmity with God, he is gradually withdrawing himself from heaven, and rendering himself unfit for God's presence, and as certainly rendering himself fit for that cursed place, to which God has given the name of hell. It is not the fact, in the case of hell and the sinner, that the place is prepared for the person. Fitted for him it certainly is, but it was not prepared for him. The person is rather prepared for the place, and he is prepared, by himself, as the agent of his own misery. The judgment is, "Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared”—not for men, but-" for the devil and his angels." You have

known His will, and you have not done it, the heavier must be your condemnation.

See here, then, the doom of the wicked, "The wicked shall be turned into hell." But let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return unto the Lord, and seek forgiveness and repentance through the great atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ; and when the wicked man thus turneth away from the wickedness that he has committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive; and "being justified by faith, he shall have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ."

See, also, the doom of all those who forget God. You must do more, however, than hear a sermon on the subject, before you attempt to disregard, and, in fact, practically set aside this scripture, I beseech you to give this subject your deepest consideration. You will find when you have done so, if the word of God be truth, if the testimony of past ages are to be received, if the accounts we hear of the practices of many heathen nations at the present day are worthy of our attention, you will find it to be an established fact, that there is no degradation of wickedness, no depth of vile and horrible iniquity, no crime of brutish depravity, no vice of fiendlike malignity, to which men who like not to