+I. The text is applicable to those who have no solemn recognition of God's all-disposing government and providence+--who have no thought of the course of things but just as going on, going on some way or other, just as it can be; to whom it appears abandoned to a strife and competition of various mortal powers, or surrendered to something they call general laws, and these blended with chance. +II. Is a description of all those who are forming or pursuing their scheme of life and happiness independent of Him.+--They do not consult His counsel or will as to what that scheme should be in its ends or means. His favour, His blessing are not absolutely indispensable. We can be happy leaving Him out of the account. +III. Is a description of those who have but a slight sense of universal accountableness to God as the supreme authority+--who have not a conscience constantly looking and listening to Him and testifying for Him. This insensibility of accountableness exists almost entire--a stupefaction of conscience--in very many minds. In others there is a disturbed yet inefficacious feeling. To be thus with God is in the most emphatical sense to be without Him--without Him as a friend, approver, and patron. Each thought of Him tells the soul who it is that it is without, and who it is that in a very fearful sense it never can be without. +IV. The description belongs to that state of mind in which there is no communion with Him+ maintained or even sought with cordial aspiration. How lamentable to be thus without God! Consider it in one single view only, that of the _loneliness_ of a human soul in this destitution. +V. A description of the state of mind in which there is no habitual anticipation of the great event of going at length into the presence of God;+ in which there is an absence of the thought of being with Him in another world, of being with Him in judgment, and whether to be with Him for ever. +VI. A description of those who, professing to retain God in their thoughts, frame the religion in which they are to acknowledge Him according to their own speculation and fancy.+--Will the Almighty acknowledge your feigned God for Himself, and admit your religion as equivalent to that which He has declared and defined? If He should not, you are without God in the world. Let us implore Him not to permit our spirits to be detached from Him, abandoned, exposed, and lost; not to let them be trying to feed their immortal fires on transitory sustenance, but to attract them, exalt them, and hold them in His communion for ever.--_John Foster._ _MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.--Verses_ 13-18. _Christ the Great Peacemaker._