6 dN nomme arrestrr, &c. you not known their painful solicitude of soul for your happi- ness and your eternal interests ? What have you 'done with all these lessons- of piety, these assistances to virtue and goodness ? Have you cast them all behind your back, and are you grown as negligent of God and Christ, and religion and sacred things, as thosewho havebeen brought- up as the savages of the wilder- ness, and hate been suffered to run at large in a, wicked world, thoughtless of God and of all that is holy ? Have you taken no more rare to practise the rules of sobriety and temperance than those who have been nursed up in a wild and licentious indul- gence of appetite and passion ? Have you no more strictness in your morals than those who were born in families which made no pretences to virtue,, and. took nocare to instil the principles of religion and goodness into the souls of their offspring ? It is time, my friends, it is high time to bethink yourselves and put such enquiries as these to your own consciences ; these early blessingswill become a terrible aggravationof your guilt in the great day óf account, if the Judge shall then find that you have abused and lost them. H. You who have sat under a serious, a fervent and evan- gelical ministry, who have heard betimes of the evil of sin, who have been taught the danger of your state by nature, that you are afaroffrom God and heaven, you who have been instructed early in the gospel of Christ, and the methods of his salvation by the preaching of the word, what have you done more than others? You have knownJesus betimes, and learned his offices as a Mediator tobring sinners near to God ; as a prophet to reveal the mind and will of God to you ; as a high priest to make atonement for sin on earth, and to intercede for you in the court of heaven ; as a king to give you laws, and to govern you ; as a heavenly example of all that is pious toward God, and beneficent toward man : Have you ever endeavoured to im- press on your own hearts a deep and humbling sense of your sinful and dangerous state without renewing grace and an in.. terest in the Mediator's love ? Have you ever yielded yourselves up to this blessed Mediator, and received his salvation ? Have you prayed earnestly for the divine influences of the Holy Spirit, which you have been often told are promised in the gospel, to make you new creatures, and assist you in every duty ? Have you had a constant awful sense of death and judgment, of hea- ven and hell, which have been so frequently set before you in the ministry of the word, and impressed upon your ears and your consciences with life and fervency ? Have your fruits of holiness been answerable to this favourable cultivation which heaven has bestowed upon you ? Do you remember that awful representa- tion of your case bythe apostle in Iieb. vi. 7. The earth which drinketh in the rain that comes oft upon it, andstill bears nothing
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