Conscience urges you to your duty and interest with many sharp goads, and will you still kick against them? O! do you not find this hard? I am sure it would be very hard, it would be impossible to a creature under the right conduct of reason and self-love. And before you can be capable of performing this dire exploit with ease, you must have acquired a prodigious, gigantic strength in sinning. This is what the mightiest saint upon earth could not dare to do. No; he owns conscience is his master: long did he resist, but now he must submit: and he would not incur the displeasure of his conscience for all the world. O! that we were all weak in this respect! My time will allow me only to add,

4. Is it not a hard piece of self-denial for you to deprive yourselves of the exalted pleasures of religion?

You love yourselves, and you love happiness, and therefore one would reasonably expect you would choose that which will afford you the most solid, refined and lasting happiness, and abandon whatever is inconsistent with it. Now religion is a source of happiness. Yes; that dull, melancholy thing, religion, which you think, perhaps, would put an end to all your pleasures, and which, for that reason, you have kept at a distance from ; religion, which its enemies will tell you has made some intolerably precise, and dead to all the joys of life, and turned others mad and melancholy; religion, I say, will afford you a happiness more pure, more noble, and more durable than all the world can give. Religion not only proposes future happiness beyond the comprehension of thought, but will afford you present happiness beyond whatever you have known while strangers to it. The pleasures of a peaceful, approving conscience, of communion with God, the supreme good, of the most noble dispositions and most delightful contemplations; these are the pleasures of religion. And ask those who have enjoyed them, those whom experience has qualified to be judges, and they will tell you with one voice, "There are no pleasures comparable to these." Besides, religion has infinitely the advantage of other things as to futurity. Those pleasures which are inconsistent with it end in shocking prospects, as well as pale reviews. But religion opens the brightest prospects; prospects of ever

lasting salvation and happiness; prospects that brighten the gloomy shades of death, and the awful world beyond, and run out infinitely beyond our ken through a vast eternal duration. My heart is so full of my subject, that I must borrow the more expressive words of another, to give it vent."

"Let the proud Witling argue all he can,

It is religion still that makes the man;

'Tis this, my friends, that streaks our morning bright;
'Tis this that gilds the horrors of our night.

When wealth forsakes us, and when friends are few;
When friends are faithless, or when foes pursue;
'Tis this that wards the blow, or stills the smart ;
Disarms affliction, or repels its dart;

Within the breast bids purest pleasures rise;
Bids smiling conscience spread her cloudless skies.
When the storm thickens, and the thunder rolls;
When the earth trembles to th' affrighted poles;
The pious mind nor doubts nor fears assail,
For storms are zephyrs, or a gentler gale.
And when disease obstructs the laboring breath,
When the heart sickens, and each pulse is death,
Even then Religion shall sustain the just,

Grace their last moments, nor desert their dust."

Such, my brethren, is religion; the highest, the most substantial, and most lasting happiness of man. And is it not a painful piece of self-denial to you, to give up all this happiness, when nothing is required to purchase it but only your choice of it! Is not this doing violence to the innate principle of self-love and desire of happiness? Can you be so stupid, as to imagine that the world, or sin, or any thing that can come in competition with religion, can be of equal or comparable advantage to you? Sure your own reason must give in its verdict in favor of religion. And is it not a hard thing for you to act against your own reason, against your own interest, your highest, your immortal interest, and against your own innate desire of happiness? Do you never find it any difficulty to live for years in the world, without once tasting the sweets of the love of God, or the pleasures of an applauding conscience? Is it not hard, that while others around you, in the use of the very means which you enjoy, are made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light, and are animated to endure the calamities

See a Letter to Mr. Hervey by a physician, prefixed to his Medita. tions, Vol. 1.

of life, and encounter the terrors of death, by the pros pect of everlasting glory, while they are now often lost in ecstatic wonder, while surveying the things that God hath laid up for them that love him: I say, is it not hard, that you should be destitute of all these transporting prospects, and have nothing but a fearful expectation of wrath and fiery indignation, or at best a vain self-flattering hope, which will issue in the more confounding disappointment? Is not this really hard? Must it not be a difficulty to you to live at this rate?

And now, sinners, will you with infernal bravery break through all these obstacles, and force a passage into the flames below? Or will you not give over the prepos. terous struggle to ruin yourselves, and suffer yourselves to be saved? O! let me arrest you in your dangerous career, as the voice which pronounced my text did St. Paul; and let me prevail upon you for the future to choose the highway of life, and take the course to which God, conscience, duty, and interest urge you. In that indeed you will meet with difficulties; it is a narrow and rugged road; and it will require hard striving to make a progress in it. But then the difficulties you have here to surmount are in the road to happiness, with which therefore it is worth your while to struggle; but those in the other are in the road to destruction; and your striving to surmount them, is but striving to destroy yourselves for ever. It may be worth your while to labor and conflict hard to be saved; but is it worth while to take so much pains, and strive so hard to be damned? Besides, the difficulties in the heavenly road result from the weak, disordered, and wicked state of human nature, as the difficulty of animal action and enjoyment proceeds from sickness of body; and consequently every endeavor to surmount these difficulties tends to heal, to rectify, to strengthen, and ennoble our nature, and advance it to perfection. But the difficulties in the way to hell proceed from the contrariety of that course to the best principles of human nature, and to the most strong and rational obligations; and consequently, the more we struggle with these difficulties, the more we labor to suppress and root out the remains of all good principles, and break the most inviolable obligations to God and ourselves. The easier it is for us to sin, the

more base and corrupt we are just as the more rotten a limb is, the easier for it to drop off; the more disordered and stupefied the body is, the more easy to die. To meet with no obstacle in the way to hell, but to run on without restraint, is terrible indeed; it shows a man abandoned of God, and ripe for destruction. Such an ease in sinning is the quality of a devil.

Upon the whole, you see, that though there be difficulties on both sides, yet the way to heaven has infinitely the advantage; and therefore, let me again urge you to choose it. You have walked long enough at variance with God, with your own conscience, with your own interest and duty: come now, be reconciled: make these your antagonists no longer. While you persist in this opposition, you do but kick against the pricks; that is, you make a resistance injurious to yourselves. For the future, declare war against sin, Satan, and all their confederates, and ere long ye shall be made more than conquerors; and for your encouragement remember. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things: and I will be his God, and he shall be my Son, saith the Lord God Almighty."

SERMON LII.

THE CHARACTERS OF THE WHOLE AND SICK, IN A SPIRITUAL SENSE, CONSIDERED AND CONTRASTED.

MATT. ix. 12. But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

THERE is no article of faith more certain than that Jesus Christ is an all-sufficient and most willing Savior, "able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God through him, and that those that come unto him, he will in nowise cast out." They that intrust their souls in his hands he keeps, and none of them is lost. It is also certain that all the guilty sons of Adam stand in the

most absolute need of him in vain do they look for salvation in any other. Without him, they are undone for ever and without him, their very existence becomes a curse, and their immortality but the duration of their misery. The disease of sin has so deeply infected their souls, that none but this divine Physician can heal them.

Since this is the case, who would not expect that Jesus would be universally the darling of mankind? Who would not expect that as many as are wounded, and just perishing of their wounds, would all earnestly apply to this Physician, and seek relief from him upon any terms? Who would suspect there should be so much as one heart cold and disaffected towards him? Must not all love and desire him, since all need him so extremely, and since he is so completely qualified to be their deliverer?

But, alas! notwithstanding such favorable presumptions from the nature of the thing, it is a most notorious fact that this divine Physician is but little regarded in our dying world. This all-sufficient and willing Savior is generally neglected by perishing sinners. There are thousands among us that have no affectionate thoughts of him, no eager longings after him, they exert no vigorous endeavors to obtain an interest in him, nor are they tenderly solicitous about it. They indeed profess his religion, and call themselves Christians after his name: they pay him the compliment of a bended knee, and now and then perform the external duties of religion, and thus have high hopes they shall be saved through him: but as to their hearts and affections, he has no share there: these are reserved for the world, which, in practical estimation, they prefer to him, whatever they profess.

Now whence is this strange and shocking phenomenon in the rational world? Whence is it that the dying are careless about a Physician? That a Deliverer is neglected by those that are perishing? The true reason we may find in my text, "They that be whole, need not a physician, but they that are sick;" that is, "they who imagine themselves well, however disordered they are in reality, do not feel their need of a physician, and therefore will not apply to him; but they who feel