SECTION VIIL 79 III. Unless you improve the blessings you enjoy for thepur- poses of godliness, you will forfeit all these blessings, these pe- culiar advantages for religion, and provoke a righteous God to remove them. This was the case with Jerusalem, the city that Was beloved and favoured of God with his own presence, above all the cities of the earth, and whither he sent his own Son font heaven with a special commission of grace and peace to the numerous inhabitants of it: but they had abused all their mer- cies, they had misimproved, all their privileges, and forfeited all the favours of a condescending God; and therefore the Sonnf God himself pronounced their destruction, though at the same time he wept over the rebellious city, and shed tears of pity at the thoughts of their ruin : Mat. xxiii. 37, 38. 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou who killest the ,prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children to,et /ser, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not? Behold Our house is left Unto you desolate. Luke xix. 42. If thou hadst known in this thy day, (i. e. in this last message which God has sent thee by me his Sou) if thou haddt known the things that belong to thy peace! But now they are hidfrom thine eyes, &c. The same sort of threatening is pronounced against the chief priests and elders of the people, Mat. xxi. 43. The gos- pel of the Son of God was preached to them, and rejected by them, Therefore say I unto you, the kingdom of God shall be takenfrom you, and given to a nation bringing forth thefruits thereof. Some of the primitive Christian churches who enjoyed. glorious advantages had such a sentence of forfeiture threatened and executed. upon then ; Rev. ii. 5. Br-member from whence thou úrt fallen, O church of Ephesus, and repent asid do the first works ; or else 1 will come unto thee quickly, and will re- move thy candlestick out of his place, i. e. will dissolve thy church, and deprive thee of all holy ordinances, which was done effectually in the course of punishing providence. And in our day, we Christians in Great-Britain, by negleet- ieig to improve our advantages, may provoke God to take away his gospel from amongst us, by permitting a spirit of apostasy and infidelity to over -run the whole nation. We protestants may endanger the loss of our reformation by such impious neg- ligence, sect expose ourselves in the providence of God to some dreadful and bloody desolation, whereby we may be given up to idolatry, superstition and tyranny. We dissenters by the mis- improvemeut of our present privileges and peace, may forfeit these mercies into the hands of a righteous God : and though no authority of man can justly deprive us of our liberty to wor- ship God according to the dictates of our own consciences, so long as ive pay proper duties to the state, yet in the course of
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