You unjust, you oppressors, you extortioners, you who, as well as your ancestors, have lived on the substance of the wretched, and who are about to transmit an accursed patrimony to your posterity, God will abundantly pardon you: yea, though you have made a sale of justice, negotiated the blood of the miserable, betrayed the state, and sold your country, yet you ought not to despair of the mercy of God, for his thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are his ways your ways. ways your ways. All these sins he will forgive, if you endeavor seriously to amend them; if you lay aside those equipages, and retrench those sumptuous festivals, which are the fruits of your own, and of your parents, oppressions and extortions.. e You sick, you dying people, who cannot think of your momentary life without thinking of those sins, which you have been perpetually committing, and in the multitude and magnitude of which your thoughts are lost, God will abundantly pardon you. Though no other time remains to conciliate your souls to God than the last days of a dying illness, the slight remains of a departing life, yet you ought not to despair of the mercy of God, for his thoughts. are not as your thoughts, neither are his ways as your ways. He will forgive all your sins, if you sincerely forsake, and seriously reform them; if you be animated not only with the fear of death and hell, but with a sincere desire of returning unto the Lord; if you do not make your pastor an accomplice in your sins; if you do not forbid him the mentioning of some of your sins; if you do not prevent the removal of that vail, which yet hides a great part of your turpitude from you; in a word, if you willingly fall in with all the ways of repentance and reparation, that may be opened to you. I conclude with the clause, that I have so often repeated and which I again repeat, (and woe be to him who forgets it! woe be to him who, by his perseverance in sin, rendereth his compliance impossible!) if you sincerely forsake, and seriously endeavor to reform and repair them. I give you a subject to meditate for the conclusion of this discourse, (a very terrible and alarming conclusion for those who have the madness to turn the grace of God into lasciviousness,) Jude 4. this subject, which I leave with you to meditate, is, What degree of punishment in hell will be inflicted upon such men as despise the mercy that we have been describing?" God grant you may never be able to answer this by your own experience! Amen. SERMON IX. The Severity of God. Hebrews xii. 29. For our God is a consuming fire, is a very deplorable thing, that your preachers can never expatiate on the goodness of God, without having just grounds to fear that you infer dangerous consequences from their doctrine. That goodness, of which God hath made such tender declarations; that goodness, of which he hath given us such astonishing proofs; that goodness, which seems so proper to make us love him above all things; that goodness, through our abuse of it, contributes the most, to rivet our infidelity, and to increase our misery. We freely acknowledge, therefore, that with fear and trembling we endeavored last Lord's day, to display its greatness, and, though all our protraits were infinitely beneath the original, though we esteemed it then our happiness, and our glory, not to be able to reach our subject, yet we have been afraid of having said too much. When, to prevent the fatal effects of despair, we assured you, that though you had trafficed with the blood of the oppressed, or betrayed the state, or sold your country, yet you might derive from the ocean of divine mercy, a pardon for all these crimes, provided you were enabled sincerely to repent, and thoroughly to reform them; when we said these things, we revolved in our minds these discouraging thoughts: perhaps, some of our hearers may poison our doctrine: perhaps some monster, of which nature produceth an example in every age, actually saith to himself; I may then, without despairing of my salvation, traffic with the blood of the oppressed, betray the state, sell my country, and, having spent my life in these wicked practices, turn to God on my death-bed. You will allow, we hope, that the bare probability of our having occasioned so dangerous a wound, ought to engage us to attempt to heal it, by contrasting to-day the goodness of God with his severity. The text we have chosen is the language of St. Paul, Our God is a consuming fire; and, it is worthy of observation, we have scrupulously imitated the apostle's example in making this subject immediately succeed that which we explained last Lord's day. The gospel of last Lord's day was a passage in Isaiah, God will abundantly pardon, for his thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are our ways his ways; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than our ways, and his thoughts than our thoughts, ch. lv. 7. The gospel of this day is, Our God is a consuming fire. St. Paul hath made a similar arrangement, and him we have imitated. In the verses which precede our text he hath described, in a very magnificent manner, the goodness of God in the dispensation of the gospel. He hath exalted the condition of a christian, not only above that of the heathens, who knew the mercy of God only by natural reason, but even above that of the Jews, who knew it by revelation, but from whom it was partly hidden under veils of severity and rigor. Ye are not come, said he, unto the mount that be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words, which voice they that heard, intreated that the word should not be spo : |