cessity, enforces this care upon you. One thing is needful, absolutely needful, and needful above all other things. This, one would think, is such an argument as cannot but prevail. What exploits has necessity performed in the world! What arts has it discovered as the mother of invention! what labors, what fatigues, what sufferings has it undergone! What dangers has it encountered! What difficulties has it overcome! Necessity is a plea which you think will warrant you to do anything and excuse anything. Reasoning against necessity is but reasoning against a hurricane; it bears all before it. To obtain the necessaries of life, as they are called, how much will men do and suffer! Nay, with what hardships and perils will they not conflict for things that they imagine necessary, not to their life but to their ease, their honor, or pleasure! But what is this necessity when compared to that which I am now urging upon you? In comparison of this, the most necessary of those things are but superfluities; for if your ease, or honor, or pleasure, or even your life in this world be not absolutely necessary, as they cannot be to the heirs of immortality, then certainly those things which you imagine necessary to your ease, your honor, your pleasure, or mortal life, are still less necessary. But O! to escape everlasting misery, and to secure everlasting salvation, this is the grand necessity! This will appear necessary in every point of your immortal duration; necessary when you have done with this world for ever, and must leave all its cares, enjoyments, and pursuits behind you. And shall not this grand necessity prevail upon you to work out your salvation, and make that your great business, when a far less necessity, a necessity that will last but a few years at most, set you and the world around you upon such hard labors and eager pursuits for perishing vanities? All the necessity in the world is nothing in comparison of that which lies upon you to work out your salvation; and shall this have no weight? If you do not labor or contrive for the bread that perisheth, you must beg or starve; but if you will not labor for the bread that endureth unto everlasting life, you must burn in hell for ever. You must lie in prison if your debts with men be not paid; but, O! what is it to the prison of hell, where you must be confined for ever if your debts to the

justice of God be not remitted, and you do not obtain an interest in the righteousness of Christ, which alone can make satisfaction for them! You must suffer hunger and nakedness unless you take care to provide food and raiment; but you must suffer eteternal banishment from God and all the joys of his presence, if you do not labor to secure the one thing needful. Without the riches of this world you may be rich in faith, and heirs of the heavenly inheritance. Without earthly pleasures you may have joy unspeakable and full of glory in the love of God, and the expectation of the kingdom reserved in heaven for you. Without health of body you may have happiness of spirit; and even without this mortal life you may enjoy eternal life. Without the things of the world you may live in want for a little while, but then you will soon be upon an equality with the greatest princes. But without this one thing needful you are undone, absolutely undone. Though you were as rich as Cræsus, you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." Your very being becomes a curse to you. It is your curse that you are a man, a reasonable creature. It had been infinitely better for you if you had been a toad or a snake, and so incapable of sin and of immortality, and consequently of punishment. O then let this grand necessity prevail with you!

I know you have other wants, which you should moderately labor to provide for, but O how small and of how short continuance! If life and all should be lost, you may more than find all in heaven. But if you miss at this one thing, all the world cannot make up the loss

Therefore to conclude with the awakening and resistless words of the author I before quoted, "Awake, you sluggish, careless souls! your house over your head is in a flame the hand of God is lifted up! If you love yourselves, prevent the stroke. Vengeance is at your backs, the wrath of God pursues your sin, and wo to you if he finds it upon you when he overtaketh you. Away with it speedily! up and begone; return to God; make Christ and mercy your friends in time, if you love your lives! the Judge is coming! for all that you have heard of it so long, yet still you believe it not. You shall shortly see the majesty of his appearance and the dreadful glory of his face; and yet do you not begin to look

about you, and make ready for such a day? Yea, before that day, your separated souls shall begin to reap as you have sowed here. Though now the partition that stands between you and the world to come do keep unbelievers strangers to the things that most concern them, yet death will quickly find a portal to let you in: and then, sinners, you will find such doings there as you little thought of, or did not sensibly regard upon earth. Before your friends will have time enough to wrap up your pale corpse in your winding-sheet, you will see and feel that which will tell you to the quick, that one thing was necessary. If you die without this one thing necessary, before your friends can have finished your funerals, your souls will have taken up their places among devils in endless torments and despair, and all the wealth, and honor, and pleasure that the world afforded you will not ease you. This is sad, but it is true, Sirs; for God hath spoken it. Up therefore and bestir you for the life of your souls. Necessity will awake even the sluggard. Necessity, we say, will break through stone walls. The proudest will stoop to necessity: the most slothful will bestir themselves in necessity: the most careless will be industrious in necessity: necessity will make men do any thing that is possible to be done. And is not necessity, the highest necessity, your own necessity, able to make you cast away your sins, and take up a holy and heavenly life? O poor souls! is there a greater necessity for your sin than of your salvation, and of pleasing your flesh for a little time than of pleasing the Lord and escaping everlasting misery? O that you would consider what I say! and the Lord give you understanding in all things. Amen.

SERMON XXII.

SAINTS SAVED WITH DIFFICULTY AND THE CERTAIN PERDITION OF SINNERS.

1 PET. IV. 18.-And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?

THIS text may sound in your ears like a message from the dead; for it is at the request of our deceased friend* that I now insist upon it. He knew so much from the trials he made in life, that if he should be saved at all, it would be with great difficulty, and if he should escape destruction at all, it would be a very narrow escape; and he also knew so much of this stupid, careless world, that they stood in need of a solemn warning on this head; and therefore desired that his death should give occasion to a sermon on this alarming subject. But now the unknown wonders of the invisible world lie open to his eyes; and now also he can take a full review of his passage through this mortal life; now he sees the many unsuspected dangers he narrowly escaped, and the many fiery darts of the devil which the shield of faith repelled; now, like a ship arrived in port, he reviews the rocks and shoals he passed through, many of which lay under water and out of sight; and therefore now he is more fully acquainted with the difficulty of salvation than ever. And should he now rise and make his appearance in this assembly in the solemn and dread attire of an inhabitant of the world of spirits, and again direct me to a more proper subject, methinks he would still stand to his choice, and propose it to your serious thoughts, that "if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?"

The apostle's principal design in the context seems to be to prepare the Christians for those sufferings which he saw coming upon them, on account of their religion. "Beloved," says he, "think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you," verse 12, "but

The person was Mr. James Hooper; and the sermon is dated August 21, 1756.

rejoice inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings" it is no strange thing that you should suffer on account of your religion in such a wicked world as this, for Christ the founder of your religion met with the same treatment; and it is enough that the servant be as his master, ver. 13, only he advises them, that if they must suffer, that they did not suffer as malefactors, but only for the name of Christ, ver. 14, 15. "But," says he, "if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed," ver. 16, "for the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God." He seems to have a particular view to the cruel persecution that a little after this was raised against the Christians by the tyrant Nero, and more directly to that which was raised against them everywhere by the seditious Jews, who were the most inveterate enemies of Christianity. The dreadful destruction of Jerusalem, which was plainly foretold by Christ in the hearing of St. Peter, was now at hand. And from the sufferings which Christians, the favorites of Heaven, endured, he infers how much more dreadful the vengeance would be which should fall upon their enemies, the infidel Jews. If judgment begin at the house of God, his church, what shall be the doom of the camp of rebels? If it begin at us Christians who obey the gospel, what shall be the end of them that obey it not? Alas! what shall become of them? Them that obey not the gospel of God, is a description of the unbelieving Jews, to whom it was peculiarly applicable; and the apostle may have a primary reference to the dreadful destruction of their city and nation which was much more severe than all the sufferings the persecuted Christians had then endured. But I see no reason for confining the apostle's view entirely to this temporal destruction of the Jews: he seems to refer farther to that still more terrible destruction that awaits all that obey not the gospel in the eternal world: that is to say, if the children are so severely chastised in this world, what shall become of rebels in the world to come, the proper state of retribu tion? How much more tremendous must be their fate!

In the text he carries on the same reflection. If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? The righteous is the common character of all good men or true Christians; and the ungodly and