Baxter - HP BV4920 B38 1829

XV untainted. Who, with the rigour of self-command, combined the softening lustre which a pure and amiable modesty she~s over the moral complexion of him who abhors that which is evil, and cleaves to that which is good, with, all the energy of a holy.determination. Can that be a true interpretatiOn, which levels this youth of promise and of accomplishment, with his equal in years, who is now prosecuting every guilty indulgence, and crowns file audacity of his rebellion by the mad presumption, that ere he dies, he shall be able to propitiate that God, · on the authority of all whose calls, and all whose remonstrances he is now trampling? Or follow each of them to the evening of their earthly pilgrimagewill you say that the penitent of the eleventh hour, is at all to be likened to,him who bas given the whole of his existence to the work and the labour of Christianity? to him who, after a morning of life adorned with all the gracefulness we have attempted to describe, sustains through the whole of his subsequent history such a high and ever brightening example, that his path is like the shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day; and every year he lives, the graces of an advancing sanctification form into a richer assemblage of all that is pure, and lovely, and honourable, and of good report; and when old age comes, it brings none of the turbulence or alarm of an unfinished preparation along with it-but he meets rleath with the quiet assurance of a man who is in readiness, and hails his message as a friendly intimation; and as he lived in the splendour of ever-increasing acquirements, so he dies in all th~ r~diance of anticipated glory. ·~ This mterpretation of the parable cannot be sustained; and we think, that, out of its own mouth, a condemnation may be stamped upon it. Mark this peculiarity. 'The labourers of the eleventh hour are not men who got the offer before, but men who for the first time received a call to work in the vineyard; and they _may therefore well repres~nt the - ,_

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