balls, burst upon the scene of ruin and confederacy against him-seize the dice, to try anew, as if yet uncertain of the issue, the throw that ruined him; loud and desperate at first, but shrinking away in pathetic silence. But according to the revelation of Scripture, all such are nothing to the remorse of sinners who know themselves for ever excluded from Heaven, the gnawing thought that it might have been otherwise; whose agony ever arrests them to calculate the contingencies of the past, but drives them from the satisfaction of a finished process; who multiply their eternity of pain by exhausting, every intense moment, the suffering of ages. Ambition is there, and, in virtue of his disputatious distinctions, lashed with a bigger and redder billow. And there is Envy, less wasted beneath the sounding rains of fire that come ever on, than pressed and withered into a farther immortality of her hateful aspect. And Avarice cries through Hell for all his gold, to buy off the sharking Worm that will not die nor let him alone. And a million figures of moral agony are there and physical torment, writhing under the sense of an endless task; living pictures of fierce endurance, set in frames of deeply compact and stern, or faster and careering fires. What meaneth the joy of worldly men under such a prospect? It is unnatural as "wild laughter in the throat of death." Life to them is a lie; and that page which records their happiest annals, swelled by notices of mirth and marriage, and enlivened by sons and daughters born, and every circumstance of prosperity, should yet be edged with a margin of black, the sad notification of death. And that man is a madman a thousand times denounced, who, well assured that, a thousand years hence, he shall have heard, for at least nine hundred years, either the glorious anthems which good men sing, and seraphim that, in the extacy of the song, raise high their streaming wings, when sweet evening shadows the Hill of God; or the strange converse of that Other Place, and soliloquies that fearfully mouth the far off Heavens ;-yet cries not now unceasingly for the baptism of the Spirit-be it with flames of severest afflic tion that he may be purified for that Hill; that at death he may not be found an unclean spirit, to be taken down naked to Hell's awful laver of fierce but unregenerating fire. CHAPTER VI. THE ATTAINMENT OF CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES. Is virtue, then, unless of Christian growth, Cowper. If the important question be now put, how to conquer worldly-mindedness, and other obstructions to the Christian life, and by what means to attain its beginning;-in the very first instance, to know its primary principle gives a simple view of religion, and proposes the end of our being high above the distinctions of expediency, and unincumbered with any comparisons; and this is no small encouragement to the beginnings of action, too often disheartened or altogether repressed by the confused and contradictory statements of the first principles of Christianity. The difficulty of this noble motive is in some degree counter balanced by its simplicity that tempts an impulse in the reflection, that in this one point gained, is gained the essential qualification towards Heaven. Thus distinct our first duty, and its disinterested character an appeal to our self-respect, that hope is awakened, the best spur of action, which, as if the conflict were reduced to a single difficulty, will not easily be gainsaid in thinking it may be over come. If argued, that a man cannot love God merely by knowing what love is, by being aware of its necessity as a principle, or by endeavouring to love; yet may he have a wish so to be animated, from a regard to God; and this wish implies a careful respect to God's commandment; his moral nature is engaged in duty; and the watchfulness with which he attends to his affections, to know whether they are right, and to report his desired progress, shews that his respect to God is growing more tender; purity of life induces farther purity of heart; and such a man is assuredly in every respect more likely to attain the perfect affec |