86 THE WORLD TO COME. those, who have been constant and unrepenting rebels against the law and the grace of God. The moment when the body falls asleep in death, the soul is more awake than ever to behold its own guilt and wretched- ness. It has then such a lively and piercing sense of its own iniquities, and the divine wrath that is due to them, as it never saw or felt before. The inward senses of the soul, if I may so express it, which have been darkened, and stupifled, and be- numbed in this body, are all awake at once, when the veil of flesh is thrown off, and the curtains are drawn back, which di- vided them from the world of spirits. Every thought of sin, and the anger of God, wounds the spirit deep in this awakened state, though it scarce felt any thing of it before ; and a wounded spirit who can bear ? Prov. xviii. 14. But sinners must bear it days without end, and ages without hope. . Then the crimes they have committed, and the sinful plea- sures they have indulged, shall glare upon their remembrance, and stare them in the face with dreadful surprize ; and each of them is enough to drive a soul to despair : Nor can they turn their eyes away from the horrid sight, for their criminal practices beset them around; and the naked soul is all sight and all sense ; it is eye and ear all over ; it hears the dreadful curses of the law, and the sentence of the judge, and never forgets it. This is the character, these the circumstances of an obstinate sinner, that awakes not till the moment of death, and lifts up his eyes in hell, as our Saviour expresses it ; Luke xvi. 23. These will be the consequences of our guilt and folly, if we are found in a dead sleep of sin, when our Lord comes to call us from this mortal state. Secondly. Let us spend a few thoughts, also, upon the dan- gerous and unhappy circumstances of those, of whom we may " have some reason to hope they have once begun religion in good earliest, and are made spiritually alive, but have indulged themselves in drowsiness, and worn out the latter end of their days in a careless, secure, and slothful frame of spirit." 1. If they have had the principle of vital religion wrought in their hearts, yet " by these criminal slumbers they darken, or lose their evidences of grace, and by this means they cut them- selves offfrom the sweet reflections and comforts of it on a dying bed, when they have must need of them." They know not whe- ther they are the children of God or no, and are in anxious con- fusion and distressing'fear : They have scarce any plain proofs of their conversion to God, and the evidences of true christianity ready at hand, when all are little enough to support their spirits: They have not used themselves to search for them by self-en- quiry, and to keep them in their sight, and therefore they are missing in this important hour : They have not been wont to live
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