Pause awhile, and reflect! Some of you, perhaps, by this time, instead of making a wise resolve, have begun to wonder that so heavy a judgment should be denounced merely against forgetfulness. But look at the affairs of common life, and be taught by them. Do not neglect, and want of attention, and not looking about us to see what we have to do--do not any of these bring upon us consequences as ruinous to our worldly business as any ACTIVE misbehaviour? It is an event of every day, that a man, by mere laziness and inattention to his business, does as certainly bring himself and family to poverty, and end his days in a gaol, as if he were, in wanton mischief, to set fire to his own house. So it is also with the affairs of the soul: neglect of that--forgetfulness of God, who only can save it--will work his ruin, as surely as a long and daring course of profligate wickedness. When any one has been recollecting the proper proofs of a future state of rewards and punishments, nothing, methinks, can give him so sensible an apprehension of punishment or such a representation of it to the mind, as observing that, after the many disregarded checks, admonitions, and warnings which people meet with in the ways of vice, folly, and extravagance warnings from their very nature, from the examples of others, from the lesser inconveniences which they bring upon themselves, from the instructions of wise and good men--after these have been long despised, scorned, ridiculed--after the chief bad consequences (temporal consequences) of their follies have been delayed for a great while, at length they break in irresistibly like an armed force: repentance is too late to relieve, and can serve only to aggravate their distress: the case is become desperate; and poverty and sickness, remorse and anguish, infamy and death, the effects of their own doings, overwhelm them beyond possibility of remedy or escape. This is an account of what is, in fact, the general constitution of Nature.