If we consider the works themselves, they should teach us the great evil of sin; if we reflect on the great author of them, they should impress us with a reverential awe of his tremendous majesty, and a dread of his wrath; or, if we have any just idea of our own character as sinners and mortals, they should preach to our hearts the necessity of seeking the great means of conciliating the divine favor, that we may be prepared for those contingencies, which render our existence upon earth so very precarious, and proclaim the folly of those who seek terrestrial good to the fatal injury of their everlasting interests. If we are Christians, we should contemplate the works of Jehovah, with confidence and joy; and, standing at a distance equally from presumption and unbelief, should rejoice with trembling that the great Ruler of the Universe is our Father and our God; while we feel ourselves encompassed with the most forcible motives to love his name and obey his will. But if, instead of living as Christians, any of us should be sunk in ignorance, dissipated by pleasure, supine in carelessness, and immersed in sin; we should awake from the fatal lethargy, and fly from the wrath to come, ere death overtake us, and judgment fix our miserable and eternal doom. 1. The desolating works of God are intended to display the heinous nature of _sin_. All the evils which overspread the natural and moral world spring from this source. Sin is the great parent-evil, to which, as to a bitter and common fountain, may be traced every corruption that has depraved the heart, every malady that has invaded the human frame, and every judgment that has rent the earth. All the disorder of jarring elements, all the commotions in contending nations, all the convulsions that shake the globe, and all the dispensations that sweep away its inhabitants, imply its existence, and publish its malignity. The sin of man “is written as with a pen of iron, and the point of a diamond, on the tables of the heart,” and stands engraven, in capital characters, upon his words and actions; while all the dispensations of God, directed to the great end of obliterating the writing, shew how enormous that evil must be, which requires the exertions of omnipotence either to punish or reform. Come, ye, who think or speak lightly of sin, and see what desolations it hath occasioned in the earth. Look at the ruins of mighty cities, the depopulation of flourishing states, and the fall of great empires, and then say, whether it be a small thing to sin against God. View the first rebellious pair expelled their earthly Paradise; their sinful progeny swept away with a flood; the earth cursed for the sin of man; and all the generations that are past buried in the promiscuous ruin of the grave; and entertain, if you can, low thoughts of the evil, that has produced these dire effects. Or, if this complex scene of misery and desolation does not sufficiently display sin’s enormity; examine death’s