O what tongue can express, or what heart can conceive, the immense load, and everlasting train of mischiefs and miseries, that lie heavy on poor mankind, and have pursued human nature, in all the infinite members and branches of it, through all ages and nations, for almost six thousand years? All these were introduced by man’s first disobedience. We are a sinful race of creatures, born in the likeness of the original sinner; We come into the world _estranged from God, and go astray from the womb_; for we were _shapen_ in iniquity, and conceived in sin; Ps. lviii. 3. and li. 5. It is the temper and spirit of mankind, by nature, to desire an absence from God, and to wish their own misery; Job xxi. 14. “What is the Almighty that we should serve him?—Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.” By nature we love him not, nor do we seek after his love. This is your state, and this mine by nature: These are our hateful and deplorable circumstances, and yet we go on to aggravate our own guilt, to run further from God hourly, and to make haste to everlasting wretchedness, if divine grace prevent us not. III. Reflection. Is nearness to God the foundation of the creature’s felicity, then how vain are all pretences to happiness, while man is a stranger to God? Let him be surrounded with all imaginable delights of sense, or let him be furnished with all advantages of reason or natural knowledge, to entertain the mind; yet if he be afar off from God, he must be afar off from blessedness. _Without God, and without hope_, is the character of the sinful world. Do the profane and sensual wretches boast of their pleasures, while God is not in all their thoughts? Empty shews of pleasure, and vain shadows! And even these shadows, these vain flatteries, are ever flying from their embraces; they delude their pursuit in this world, and shall vanish all at once at the moment of death, and leave them in everlasting sorrow.