ye shall surely die. Do not, then, my dear young friends, take "the children's bread and cast it to the dogs," as a thing of no reputation. "Know how to refuse the evil and choose the good;" otherwise there will be a mighty famine in the land; you will be in want, and perish with hunger. Behold, then, the rich, ample provision for your spiritual sustenance in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ! Hungry and thirsty, your souls fainting within you, here you may be fed

to satiety. Oh! reject not our invitations, lest it be found that with suicidal impiety you have destroyed yourselves, and die of a spiritual atrophy in the midst of gospel superabundance.

Here then we stop; but our picture of prodigality is not yet completed; there is one feature more to be exhibited, which may have escaped your observation; but if you will favour us with your attendance again at our next lecture, we will attempt to delineate it; and then to show the first

dawning of the prodigal's amendment. Retire to your respective houses; seriously meditate on what has been said, and may God give you a right understanding in all things, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

87

LECTURE IV.

LUKE XV. 17.

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

PAINFUL as it has been to contemplate the unhappy picture of prodigality as exhibited in the passage before us, we would, however, hope that it has kindled in your minds a horror of sin. It cannot but excite our compassion to behold the time, the talents, the energies, of one who might have been an ornament to his country, prostituted to the vilest of purposes, and converting him into its bane and curse. Yet repulsive as the object unquestionably is, the portrait of misery,

and degradation, is incomplete. One very important feature remains to be inserted, in order that the resemblance to the original may be accurately traced. We behold something more than the ef fects of folly or of youthful levity; we see in the character before us actually the workings of a madman, and we are fully justified in this assertion by the expression in the text, "when he came to himself," which evidently implies that hitherto he had been beside himself; bereft of his reason, acting under the impulse of a feverish and frenzied brain. This is the last point we would notice in the consummation of the prodigal's wretchedness; the climax of misery-his delirium and his madness. The man of pleasure, the libertine, in his own estimation, is alone entitled to the designation of a wise man; but the pen of inspiration hath declared him to be a fool; a man void of understanding a madman. Almost every action of his life denotes an aberration of

intellect; a state of mental degradation, which does not even rise so high as the instinct of the beasts that perish. "The ox knows his owner, and the horse his master's crib;" but this fool knows nothing of his owner, the God who has a property in him, and who still, notwithstanding his waywardness, continues to feed him; or if he knows him, he does not consider him. He seeks not his daily sustenance at the hand of his Master, but in the haughty spirit of impiety attempts to live independently of all, even of his God.

Which of the brutes of the earth seeks to encompass the destruction of his own life, and pursues a course which must be detrimental to his existence? Is not the preservation and elongation of life the first law of our nature; the primary object of attainment by the whole animal creation? Yet this fool, with all his fancied superiority of wisdom, is sporting with suicidal weapons, and is digging for himself a grave with his own hands,