DISC. XIILi THE PUNISHMENTS IN HELL. 64; make haste to rescue their souls from this everlasting vengeance ? With what warm and solicitous zeal should they lay hold of those poor thoughtless wretches who are Madly indulging their lusts and follies, and thereby pre- paring themselves to become fit fuel for this eternal fire ? They are forming themselve's by their iniquities to become vessels of this everlasting indignation : let us seize them by some kind and constraining wordsof love, Some outcries of compassion and fear, lest they rush into those flames which will never be quenched: perhaps when they are summoned away from us by the stroke of death, they may leave us in the most uncomfortable' sor- rows for our neglect, while they are suffering the long endless punishment due to their own iniquities. Reflec. VI. " How unreasonable a thing is it for us ministers, who are charged and intrusted with the whole counsel of God for the salvation of men, to avoid the mention of these his eternal terrors inour sermons, and in our addresses to mortal creatures ;" creatures who are daily preparing themselves for them by their sins, and are ready to plunge into the midst of them ? Has not our blessed Saviour made frequent mention of them in his gospel, and set them in their dreadful array before his hearers ? Has he not expressed them in their strongest terms, and spread them in their most frightful colours, and set them in their full and everlasting extent, before the sinners which attended his ministry ! And did he ever give any hint that they should be understood in a milder sense ? Have not the apostles followed their Lord in the same dreadful display of thé sharp andever-during punishments of hell ? And have they taught us to qua- lify these terrors? by gentler interpretations of them? And have not such kind of discourses been abundantly blessed in the providence of God, both in ancient and later ages, to awaken and save multitudes of the souls of men ? How many holy and happy spirits are now rejoicing before God, and before the throne of his love, and en- /compassed with all the joys of immortality, who ewe the beginnings of their repentance, and the first turn of their souls towards faith and salvation to such Words of terror -as these? How many of the saints on high have been first awakened from their deadly sleep 'in sin by the Ministrations of this eternal vengeance of God? Ilow
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