ii4 134 THE Wotan to Cost& and most dismal eaves are their most ardent wishes, that they might never see the countenance of their divine avenger, nor feel the weight of his hand. Sinners, who heretofore, thought themselves, and their deeds of darkness, secure enough from the eye of God, and from the strokes of his justice, while they revelled in their coin - mon habitations; those who, even under the open sky, could defy the Almighty, could laugh at his threatenings, and mock the prophecies of his vengeance, now they can find no caverns deep or dark enough to hide them from his sight ; his lightnings penetrate the hardest rocks and shine into the deepest solitudes: There is no screen or shelter thick and strong enough to stand between God and them, and to cover and shield them from his thunder. They call now to the mountains and the rocks to be an eternal screen ; but the rocks and the mountains are deaf to their cry ; then shall they remember, with unknown regret and anguish those days of grace when Christ Jesus, who is now their Judge, offered himself to become a screen to them, and a defence from the anger of God, their Creator : But they rejected this offered grace. He would have been the rock of their safety, where they should have found refuge from the fiery threatenings of the broken law, and the majesty of an offended God. The Father ,himself path appointed him for this kind office to repenting sin- ners ; and perhaps he gave Moses a type or emblem of it, when he commanded himself to hide in the clefts of the rock, to secure him from destruction, while the burning blaze of his glory passed by ; Ex. xxxiii. 22. And Isaiah the prophet had foretold, that this Jesus should be as the shadow of a great rock ; Is. xxxii. 2. to shelter them from the beams of the wrath of God; but they refused this blessing, they renounced this refuge ; and now they . find there is no other rock sufficient to become a shelter from the stroke of his almighty arm, or a sufficient shadow from the burn- ing vengeance. Sinners, who mice over -rated their flesh and blood, and loved it with infinite fondness, who treated their fleshly appetites with excessive nicety and elegance, and affected a humorous de- licacy in every thing round about them, they would now gladly creep into the mouldy caverns of the rocks, they would be glad to hide, and defile themselves in the dark and noisome grottos of the earth, and squeeze their bodies into the rough and narrow clefts, to shield themselves from the indignation of him that sits upon the throne, and of the Lamb. Those who once were so tender of this mortal life and limbs, and could not think of bearing the least hardship for the sake of virtue and piety, are now wishing to have those delicate limbs of theirs crushed by the fall of rocks and mountains : They wish earnestly to have their lives and their souls destroyed for
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