guide nor star to cheer--on the eternal voyage! Beware, then, beloved, lest that come upon you which our blessed Lord foretold of those who rejected his mission: "Ye shall die in your sins, and where I am ye cannot come." With only two exceptions, Christ's recorded miracles are all works of mercy, wrought for the relief of suffering and the consolation of sorrow; and even these exceptions, which may be called miracles of judgment--performed, the one upon irrational animals, and the other on an insensible tree--show the aversion of his tender heart to severity and vengeance. He is long-suffering, unwilling that any should perish, desiring that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. He smites only where he cannot cure. As long as there is any hope of reformation, he spares the unthankful and the evil; and never, till all possibility of salvation is past, does he visit the incorrigible with punishment. Justice must have its claim as well as mercy; and, mercy rejected, justice must avenge. The terribleness of the retribution makes nothing against its righteousness; and though it send a tremor through all the worlds of God, the obstinate transgressor shall not go unpunished. Very terrible indeed it is, and imagination staggers beneath the apprehension of the wrath of the Lamb; but terrible also was the deluge, and the fate of Sodom, and the slaughter of the Egyptian first-born, and the overthrow of Pharaoh and his host, and the end of Korah and his mutinous company, and the destruction of seventy thousand Israelites at a stroke, and the death of a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians in a single night, and the sudden catastrophe of Nineveh and Babylon with all their pomp and their power, and the wrath which fell in its manifold final infliction upon the chosen people when the day of their merciful visitation was over and ended; but the terribleness of the vengeance did not stay the avenging hand of Justice, when Mercy, with broken heart, retired and left the guilty to their fate. And the dawn of the last day will be terrible, and the coming of the Son of man will be terrible, and the destruction of the Antichrist will be terrible, and the conflagration of the universe will be terrible, and terrible beyond all precedent the punishment of reprobate impenitence when the Lord Jesus with his holy angels shall be revealed from heaven in flaming fire! The tree may long lift its green boughs to the sun and toss its gay blossoms to the breeze; but when the Master comes for fruit and finds nothing but a deceitful promise, smitten with his curse it shall quickly wither away.