Now, hear his description and character and the rule of his award: "The Lord our God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God."--"He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity."--"The soul that sinneth, it shall die."--"The wages of sin is death." These positive declarations are enforced by the accounts which, for our warning, we read in sacred history, of the terrible vengeance of the Almighty: His punishment "the angels who kept not their first estate, and whom he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day:" The fate of Sodom and Gomorrah; the sentence issued against the idolatrous nations of Canaan, and of which the execution was assigned to the Israelites, by the express command of God, at their own peril in case of disobedience: The ruin of Babylon, and of Tyre, and of Nineveh, and of Jerusalem, prophetically denounced as the punishment of their crimes, and taking place in an exact and terrible accordance with the divine predictions. These are indeed matter of awful perusal, sufficient surely to confound the fallacious confidence of any who, on the ground that our Creator must be aware of our natural weakness, and must be of course disposed to allow for it, should alledge that, though unable indeed to justify ourselves in the sight of God, we need not give way to such gloomy apprehensions, but might throw ourselves, with assured hope, on the infinite benevolence of the Supreme Being. It is indeed true, that with the threatenings of the word of God, there are mixed many gracious declarations of pardon, on repentance, and thorough amendment. But, alas! which of us is there, whose conscience must not reproach him with having trifled with the long-suffering of God, and with having but ill kept the resolutions of amendment, which he had some time or other formed in the seasons of recollection and remorse?--And how is the disquietude naturally excited by such a retrospect, confirmed and heightened by passages like these? "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh: when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you: then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me: for that they hated knowledge, and did not chuse the fear of the Lord[11]." The apprehensions, which must be excited by thus reading the recorded judgments and awful language of Scripture, are confirmed to the inquisitive and attentive mind, by a close observation of the moral constitution of the world. Such a one will find occasion to remark, that all, which has been suggested of the final consequences of vice, is in strict analogy to what we may observe in the ordinary course of human