There is, however, a second point of consideration, and that a very important one, which ought not to be lost sight of, _the consequences of Revelation being true_,—the unutterable anguish of hopeless, endless despair and torment. Infidels often speak with much levity, and sometimes with profaneness, of the awful punishments of a future world, denounced in Scripture against impenitent guilt; but, if they searched deeply into their own hearts, they would find not only that they were less happy than they were before they shook off their belief in Revelation; but some might discover, almost, the commencement of the gnawing of the undying worm. In health, this may be scarcely perceived, but when the hour approaches, which generally tears away the mask which has concealed internal feelings long kept secret, the hideousness of infidelity is fully seen. Some appear to have acted their part to the last; thus Hume was said to have spent some of his latter hours in reading “the Dialogues of the Dead,” of the Apostate Lucian; but what an employment for one who professed to be a philosopher! At a time, when the eyes are about to close for ever on all that the heart has held dear in life, “drollery, in such circumstances, is neither more nor less than Moody madness, laughing wild Amidst severest woe.” {227} But such cases are, generally, of rare, occurrence: as the sombre shades of the evening of life gathered around Gibbon, this melancholy confession escaped him,—the past is gone, the present is but for a moment, and the prospect of the future is dark and doubtful. Paine, who had vauntingly proclaimed, that, during an illness, expected by himself and those around him to be fatal, he had rejoiced that he had published his Age of Reason, when the hour of death really arrived, endured all the agonies of remorse, evincing a horrible combination of awakened terror and blasphemous despair. And that renowned champion of infidelity, Voltaire, who was smitten, in his hour of pride and triumph, suffered in his last hours such intolerable anguish and such overwhelming terror, that the alarmed physician declared, that the furies of Orestes could not equal the horrors of such a death-bed. Should the consideration of the possibility and consequences of the truth of Revelation, and of the certainty of the present wretchedness of infidelity, awaken in some readers feelings of apprehension,—lest, whilst in imagination they have been releasing themselves from the trammels of superstition, they have in reality been fastening round their own necks the heavy yoke of that hard task-master, the great enemy of the human race; let them be entreated to institute now a strict enquiry as to the unanswerableness of the objections against Revelation, on the strength of which they have withheld their belief; and as to the certainty of those conclusions of unassisted reason, on which they have been content to build their opinions as to an hereafter, unmindful that,