other argument before the people of Athens, and their learned Bench of Judges in the Areopagus: for having found an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God, he reproaches their blindness, and shews the divinity cannot be confined to temples built with hands, because he is not distant from any of us all. And how does he prove that? Because in him we live, we move, and have our being. Yes, my brethren, the eye of your Maker is in every place open and fixed upon you; his hand is stretched out to cut you down in the midst of your sins; and when the tree is felled, we know the consequence, it lives no more. But that is not all: In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be, saith the preacher. In what place soever you meet this fatal blow, your eternity depends upon it; it is the hand of God that strikes, death is the axe, yourselves are the tree; and what is the end? Cast the fruitless

tree into unquenchable flames. And tell me, you that cannot bear the slightest mortification, the approach of an affliction, the want of a repast, or a superfluity, no nor of an excess: "Who among you can dwell with the devouring fire? Who among you can dwell with everlasting burnings?" But what could raise the indignatiod of our God to such a height against his creatures? against his own likeness, the likeness of God, "Who cannot forget to be gracious, nor in his anger shut up his tender mercies;"+ but because he is in the midst of us, and we know him not? Ah, Christians, let us enquire no farther, our guilt is too evident.

That we know not God, that we are not actuated by a sense of his divine presence, is the specific crime of man; an apostacy that discri

* Isaiah xxxiii. 14.

† Psalm lxxvi. 9.

minates him from all other creatures, which by an inborn tendency to fulfil the will of their Creator, execute those orders which they do not understand. "The ox knows his owner, and the ass the crib of his master; but Israel knows not me.' You that excel all other creatures, because you have the power of knowing, know not God that gave you that power: the faculty that makes you little less than the angels, sinks you below the condition of beasts. But that which raises your crime to an unpardonable enormity, is, that you are his people, his inheritance, which he has separated from the rest of the world, chosen out of all nations, sealed with the blood of the testament, enriched with his Spirit; and, as he once told his servant David, "If all these things are too little, I am ready to add far greater."+ If, then, my brethren, a want of the sense of the presence of God be so criminal, what an impression should this thought make on reasonable souls!" God is in the midst of us;" God seeth us. "When thou wast under the fig-tree," said Jesus to Nathaniel," I saw thee." We do not know what Jesus Christ saw under the fig-tree, nor is it necessary now to inquire; but it was certainly something which Nathaniel was fully persuaded no mortal eye had seen. As soon, therefore, as Jesus Christ had uttered these words, he believed, and said, "Rabbi, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."

My brethren, God uses the same language to each of you this day; when you were under the fig-tree, I saw thee. His eyes are every where open-his tribunal every where erected. He

* Isa. i. 3.

+ 2d Book of Kings, xii. 8. † John i. 48.

waits not the general summons to meet us in the vale of Josaphat; nor the particular, to answer before him at the hour of our death: no, not so much as the place where you have committed the theft, that injustice, that extortion; but because" he is in the midst of you"-because he dwells in your heart, and sees your wickedness in the spring-head, before it breaks out into practice: there he passes the first sentence. Unless you repent, not only of the sins you have committed in the eyes of men, but also of every irreligious and indecent thought, of every unlawful desire, of every unchristian design, you shall inevitably perish.* This sentence is pronounced against you, hypocrite! who, wrapped up in the veil of religion, embellished with exterior piety, conceal an impious heart, and endeavour to impose on God and man. Against you, worldling! who, with a prudence truly infernal, have the art of giving a beautiful tint to the most odious objects; who appear not to hate your neighbour, because you do not openly attack him; not to falsify your promise, because you have the art of eluding it; not to oppress your dependents, because you know how to impose silence on them. The Almighty saw you, when you gave those secret stabs, when you received those bribes, when you accumulated those wages of iniquity, which cry for vengeance against you. O slave to sensuality! who ashamed of your excesses before the face of the sun, the Lord saw you, and pronounced this sentence against you; when with bars and bolts, with obscurity and darkness, with complicated precautions, you hid yourself from the eyes of men, to defile the temple of

* Luke xiii.

God, and, to use the expression of St. Paul, did make the members of Christ the members of a harlot.*

O miserable man! ought you not to say to yourself, forgetting that God was present, I have committed not only those sins, which ordinarily belong to the frailty and depravity of mankind, but those also which are a shame to human nature, and which suppose, that he who is guilty of them, has carried his corruption to the highest pitch! O miserable man! I have committed, forgetting that God was present: not only one of those sins, which the scripture declares deprive those who commit them of inheriting the "of kingdom of God," but I have lived many years in the practice of such sins; in impurity, in adultery, in the possession of unjust gain, in the gloomy revolutions of implacable hatred! Miserable man! I have not only abused the ordinary means of conversion, but also those extraordinary means, which God grants only to a few, and which he seems to have displayed on purpose to shew how far a God of love can carry his mercy! Miserable man! I was engaged as a professor of Christianity to give an example of piety, but I was also engaged to do it as a parent, as a master; yet, in spite of all my unworthiness, God has borne with me, and has preserved me in this world, not only while prosperity was universal, but, while calamities were almost general; while the sword was glutting itself with blood, while the destroying angel was exterminating on every side, as if he intended to make the whole world one vast grave! All this time God has been show† 1 Cor. vi. 10.

* 1 Cor. vi. 15.

ering his blessings upon me the chief of sinners, me his declared enemy!

O God, although thou art in the midst of us, we know thee not. "The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.”* It is by thee we live, we think, and enjoy all pleasures, and yet we know thee not, by whom we do all these things: we see nothing but by thy universal light, Ö, illuminator of souls, which shineth far brighter than the sun of this world, yet seeing nothing but by thee, we see thee not: it is thou that givest all things; to stars their light, to fountains their water and their course, to earth its plenty, to fruits their relish, to flowers their beauty and their scent, to all nature its riches and its charms; to men health, reason, and virtue thou givest all, doest all, regulatest all, and yet the world knows thee not. But alas! he who does not know thee has passed his life in the illusions of a dream; he is as if he were not; nay, more unhappy, for it were better for him that he had never been born. But who is it, my God, that can know thee? He only who can know nothing but thee, who no longer knows himself, and to whom all that is not thee shall be as if it was not.

The world may be surprized at such language, because the world is full of itself, of vanity and lies, and void of God; but I trust there will always be found in it souls that thirst after God, and who can taste the joys of his presence. 0, my God, not to know thee then, is to regard thee as out of us, as an Almignty Being that gives laws to all nature, and has made all things visible; this is to know but one part of that which thou art, and to be ignorant of that which is most wonderful, and most concerns thy reasonable

* John i. 5.