If we pursue this subject, it will conduct us far beyond the sight of mere temporal punishment. Sin not only incurs present misery, but has opened the gates of despair, and kindled inextinguishable flames. That wrath which must have inevitably consumed the whole of Adam's posterity, but for the Redeemer's interposition, will rage forever against the impenitent and the apostate. "Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies; thy right hand shall find out those that hate thee. Thou shall make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger; the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them." "Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest; this shall be the portion of their cup." It is surely wonderful to holy angels, that by persevering acts of impiety and rebellion, men should voluntarily reduce themselves to a state in which it "had been good for them if they had never been born." Can there be a more important gift than life, or a more valuable quality attached to it than immortality? Yet apostates, by their degeneracy, convert this greatest of blessings into a curse--this noblest good into an infinite evil. "As righteousness tendeth to life, so he that pursueth evil, pursueth it to his own death." Who can paint the horror of that moment, when the final, the irrevocable sentence will be passed upon a guilty race--when INFINITE LOVE will denounce INFINITE WO--when every word proceeding from the mouth of eternal justice will prove a poisoned arrow, struck into the destiny of transgressors--when that face which has always illuminated the regions of glory with smiles of ineffable grace, will gather blackness and look despair! O what a crush!--what a ruin!--what a wreck!--How many human temples, defiled by intolerable abominations, will in a moment fall into the gulf of perdition to supply its everlasting fires!--What lightnings will accompany the "thunder of his power!"--What fervid heat will melt these elements--what terror shake the lowest abyss of hell! O, could we descend to the regions of despair, whence "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever;" or, transported on a seraph's wing, rise to listen only for a single moment, to those rapturous sounds which warble from immortal harps, and bespeak infinite felicity--with what feelings should we return to this probationary state! How should we be alarmed and allured--terrified and enraptured--deterred by "sights of wo," excited by scenes of glory! but, "if we hear not Moses and the prophets," Christ and the apostles: if "God who at sundry times, and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son," to no purpose: "neither should we be persuaded though one rose from the dead."