If this doctrine, equally corroborated by scripture and facts, be not admitted, the divine justice would stand impeachable for taking off infants, whose death is often the instant successor of their birth, and is accompanied with a train of diseases, and agonizing pains. And, though in the case of them, as of adult believers, death proves a blessing, through the redemption that is by Christ Jesus; yet to those who continue in the practice of sin, and die under the guilt of it, their dissolution is the commencement of eternal woe. For, the wages of sin is death, eternal as well as temporal. The eternal duration of the penalty is, in that respect, proportioned to the infinite demerit of the offence, as being committed against the sacred law of an infinite God, and rising in aggravation according to the dignity and majesty of the Being offended. The perverse reasoning of men of corrupt minds may controvert this awful truth, too, as unjust. But their quarrel is with scripture. For that declares, that the wicked shall “go into _everlasting_ punishment,” Mat., xxv. 46, and shall “suffer the vengeance of eternal fire,” never to be extinguished through ages more numerous than the drops of the ocean, or the countless sands upon the sea-shore. Here imagination might paint a scene sufficient to harrow up the soul, and make the blood of every mortal run cold; were we to dwell upon the sufferings of those who are lost for ever; and to consummate and perpetuate which, the wrath of God unites with the worm that never dies, and the fire that is never quenched. I might lead you, in order to behold an exemplification of the truth in our text, not only to beds of sickness, where the pallid countenance, the cold sweat, and throbbing breast, indicate death’s near approach—to the haunts of the debauched, or the chambers of the luxurious, where sin reigns, and death triumphs with a long train of diseases both of body and mind, the sad recompense of a life spent in sin and vanity—to the dungeon’s doleful cells, where criminals drag the galling chain, and expect, with horror and remorse, the hour that is to fix them to the gibbet, and make an ignominious death the wages of their iniquity—to the church-yard, that repository of the promiscuous dead, where the crumbled bodies of the rich and great are not distinguishable from the dust of the earth; or to the charnel-house, crowded with the dry and ghastly relics of thousands, who were once flushed with health, and bloomed with beauty, like their present gay survivors, who hardly ever spend a serious thought on death, and live as if they had made a covenant with the grave—to the historic pages of the annalist and the poet, recounting the horrors of the tented field, and telling over the tens of thousands that have been cut off in the midst of their sanguinary and ambitious schemes—I say, I might not only lead you to these several scenes, as declarative of the truth before us; but I