84 THE WORLD TO COME. Are there any of you, that are pleasing yourselves here in the days of youth and vanity, and indulge your dreams of plea- sure in the sleep of spiritual death, think of the approaching mo- ment, when the death of nature shall dissolve your sleep, and scatter all the delusive images of sinful joy. The separation from the body of flesh is a fearful shock given to the soul, that makes it awake indeed. Sermons would not do it : The voice of the preacher was not loud enough ; strokes of affliction, and smart- ing providences, would not do it; perhaps the soul might be roused a little, but dropped into profound sleep again : Sudden or surprizing deaths near them, and even the pains of nature in their own flesh, their own sicknesses and diseases, did not awaken them, nor the voice of the Lord in them all : But the parting - stroke, that divides the soul and body, will terribly awaken the soul from the vain delusion, and all its fancied delights for ever vanish. When they are visited by the Lord of hosts with this thun- der and earthquake, as the prophet Isaiah speaks ; Is. xxix. S. when this storm and tempest of death shall shake the sinner out of his airy visions, he shall be as a hungry man that dreameth he was eating, but awakes, and his soul is empty ; or as a thirsty creature dreaming that he drinks, but he awaketh, and behold he is faint, and his soul is pained with raging appetite : The sinner finds, to his own torment, how wretchedly he has deceived him- self, and fed upon vanity : There are no more earthly objects to please his senses, and to gratify his inclinations ; but the soul for ever lies upon a rack of carnal desire, and no proper object to satisfy it. His taste is not suited to the pleasures of a world pf spirits, he can find no God there to comfort him : God, with his offers of grace, are gone for ever, and the world with its joys are for ever vanished, while the wretched and malicious creatures, into whose company he is hurried, and who were the tempters or associates of his crimes, shall stand round him to becotne his tor- mentors. III. " Though death will awaken sinful souls into a sharper and more lively sense of divine and heavenly things, than ever they had in this world, yet they shall never be awakened to spiritual life and holiness:" And I think I may add, that though they should be awakened to a sight of God, and his justice, and his grace, to a sight of heaven and hell, more immediate and perspicuous than what even the saints themselves usually enjoy in this life, yet they would remain still under the bondage of their lusts, still dead in trespasses and sins. They shall for ever con- tinue unbeloved of God, and incapable of all the happiness of the heavenly state, because they are for ever averse to the holi- ness of God, and themselves for ever unholy. It it only in the present state of trial, and under the present proposals of grace,
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