TO THE UNGODLY. 283 in eternal misery. When the insidious but smiling seducer would tempt you astray, think with yourself, "Can I bear my Creator's anger? Can I endure my Judge's frown? Can I dwell with everlasting burnings? Shall I neglect eternal life, and choose eternal death, for things that perish in the using ?" - May God forbid. Amen. CHAPTER XVIII. THE TERRORS, AND FEARFUL CONSEQUENCES OF DEATH AND JUDGMENT, TO THE UNCONVERTED, A REASON FOR EARLY PIETY. § 1. HAS what I have already urged on your. attention produced, under God, the desired effect? or has all been urged in vain? if it have, let me, before I leave you for ever, entreat you to consider those awful scenes, to which you are hastening so fast. Should you love the world ever so well, should you enjoy it ever so much, and even live in it through the longest term allowed to man, yet short is the longest, and when past, a nothing. You must die. How thoughtless soever you may be of death and eternity, they are nearer to you every hour, and you, even you must die. If you continue to live without God, you must die without him. Imagine yourself leaving the world in that awful state. You must leave it thus, unless you repent and remember your Creator. Imagine your last day arrived. This scene of vanity is ending.. The world you loved is leaving you for ever. Behind you is a wasted and sin-spent life. Before you is the grave, judg 284 DEATH OF THE UNGODLY, ment, and eternity. Your day of grace is finished. Your soul, loaded with innumerable sins, is going to meet that God, to whom all your secret guilt has been revealed. Where can you look for refuge? Man cannot help you, and you have every reason to believe that God will not. Now sins forgotten come to mind again. Now guilty pleasures stare you in the face; but all their charms are gone. Now fears and terrors crowd upon your soul; and devils seem to beckon you away. All is darkness and misery before; all guilt and folly behind. O fearful state! O fearful end of an ungodly life! You must plunge into eternity; and justly dread the awful change. No friend can go with you; you must die alone, and go alone to meet your God. All else is forsaking you; and he who would never have forsaken you, he who would have been your friend for ever, even he will refuse to receive you. How you would dread to be carried to sea alone on a single plank; or to be tossed alone upon some unknown shore, where you knew none, and none knew you! But what is this to passing into another world, where all is strange and new; a world so different from this poor transient state, that all is awful, and all eternal there! Yet thither you must go. The hour, the dreadful hour arrives. Your last moment comes, you die; and ah! the agonies of death are succeeded by the fiercer torments of damnation and despair. No kind angels welcome your departing spirit. No gentle messengers appear to convey it to eternal rest. O doleful state! if this were the worst; but far worse than this remains untold. Your sweet season of mercy is gone; and in vain you wish for mercy and for time AND DREADFUL ENTRANCE ON ETERNITY. 285 again. Weeping friends commit your body to the grave; friends who little imagine where the wretched soul is fixed. There must the body lie, till it rise to the resurrection of damnation. Your soul is conveyed to the infernal prison; there to await its final and still more dreadful doom, at that day when the soul and body, that "were partners in sin, shall be partners in misery. § 2. Oh, how dreadful a change is this! Oh, when they, who trifle with salvation, have breathed their last, how may they shrink back from the scene which opens before them! how may their terrified souls wish to creep into their dead bodies again! but wish in vain. Oh, what terrible dismay must seize upon them, when that eternal world which they neglected, all at once appears before them! When the majesty and glory of that God, whose threatenings and invitations they equally disregarded, burst upon them! and no place to hide their affrighted souls; no way to escape the terrifying sight. Now indeed they find it a fearful thing, to fall into the hands of the living God, whose mercy is changed to vengeance. Oh, miserable immortals! how terrible are their feelings, while they stand trembling and despairing, before the great and dreadful God, and see him who is love itself to his children, arrayed in vengeance and terror against them! O, could they shrink back for one year more to life! What worlds, if they had them, would they give to gain this boon. O, could they have but one month's mercy more, or could they die a second time and never live again. Oh, how distressing, beyond the impassable gulf, to see the blessed heaven but themselves shut out. (Luke, xvi. 26.) To see those glorious and hap 286 THE YOUNG SINNER REMINDED py saints and angels, that might have been their companions for ever, but now not one friend aniong them. To see what they might have enjoyed, and what their sin and neglect of Christ have lost. And Oh, though heaven is shut against them, hell is open to receive them; that is the region, which they must take instead of heaven; that seat of horrors; that mournful gloom; that outer darkness; that wretched abode of everlasting fire, and ever-tormenting fiends. Oh, dreadful hour, when they enter that flaming prison, yet there they must await eternal judgment. § 3. Ah my young friend, remember that the hour, the now forgotten, but, if you live in your sins, the terrible hour of eternal judgment will arrive. You may forget it now, but will be unable to forget it then. You possibly laugh at the expectation of it, but will then find it dreadfully serious, to see and feel its terrors. You, even you, must hear the archangel's trumpet. You must behold the descending Judge, and the burning world. Willing or unwilling, ready or unready, there you must appear. There will be no shrinking from trial; no escaping the notice of the Judge; no lingering longer in the grave. Appear you must, for, "the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power. God will render unto every man according to his deeds. Unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, in 2 Thess. i. 7-9. OF ETERNAL JUDGMENT. 287 dignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish. upon every soul of man that doeth evil. Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart, and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." Do you believe that such a day will come, and can you forget it? forget that day, that joyful, or that dreadful day, which will come as surely as the sun shines in the heavens; forget that awful day, when you, without any fear or hope of change, must become like the angels of heaven, or the fiends of hell. O, will you forget it? If you were going on trial for your life, before an earthly judge, how anxious would you be to procure an acquittal; and when you have to go before an infinitely higher Judge, whose decision will be life or death eternal, will you be so distracted as to remain unconcerned? § 4. There you must account for the deeds done in the body. Then your actions must be tried; your words examined; then the black aggravations of your crimes will fully appear.. 0 sinner, then it will be known, how you broke through the checks of conscience; and the restraints of religion; how you were warned of your danger, and exhorted to repent, but still, obstinately impenitent, went forward to destruction. Or if your heart has, at times, been seriously impressed, and yet in vain, it will then be seen, as one of the aggravations of your sins, Rom. ii. 6. 8. 9. Eccles. xi. 9. Rev. xx. 15. Rom. xiv. 12. |