If, with these sentiments in our minds, we supplicate the throne of mercy, we have every encouragement to confide in the divine clemency; for we are assured that “_None who come unto Christ will he in any wise cast out_[8].” Consoling promise! Suppose any one under sentence of death were offered a pardon, the errors of his past life to be for ever buried in oblivion, and honours and riches to be liberally bestowed upon him, on condition that he confessed his crime and pledged himself to lead a virtuous life in future; surely such a person must be considered mad, should he obstinately persist in guilt, and allow the sentence of the law to be carried into execution, when the means of preservation and of averting his dreadful fate were in his own hands! Let me ask any of you, whether you would not gladly have undertaken to renounce for ever those errors by which you were first led astray from the pleasing paths of virtue, to prevent your being now separated from your native country? Undoubtedly you would. Yet how trifling, how insignificant are loss of life and separation from the dearest objects of affection, compared with an eternal exile from your heavenly Father, and the destruction of the immortal soul! The thought is overwhelming. There are some, unfortunately, to be found, who tell you their lives have been so bad, they have trespassed so frequently and so enormously, they have gone so far in vice, that it is useless to think of receding, as there can be no chance of their being saved, and that they may, therefore, as well go on to the end. Such is the degrading, humiliating language that sin dictates when it has attained its haughty ascendancy over the human mind, and influences every action. Let us follow these wretched creatures a step further in their senseless career; let us view them on a sick bed, which guilt has converted into a couch of torture; their fancied pleasures have vanished like a shadow, and the terrific prospect of a future state is forcibly and awfully presented to their distempered imagination; no relief is then in hope, because they had rejected it before. It has fallen to my lot more than once, nay more than twenty times, to witness the dying moments of men whose lives had been misspent; but I earnestly hope in the divine mercy, that I may never again be exposed to scenes where my feelings should be so torn as they were on those melancholy occasions. It is difficult to imagine any thing equal to the gloom and horror with which those miserable mortals viewed their approach to the presence of a just God from whom they expected no favour. Ten thousand worlds would they have given for a week, a day, even an hour, to be added to their existence on earth, an existence which sin and conscious guilt had rendered exquisitely wretched, and insupportable. It is really shocking to contemplate the situation of the hopeless sinner “whose ungodly race is nearly run, and he verging fast to the brink of eternity.