Univerfally, therefore, to every person, in every condition of life, in every stage of his spiritual progress, frequent SELF-COMMUNION is an indifpenfable duty. If we are accountable beings, and that we are, not only the Sacred Writings declare, but our faculties, our feelings, our confciences, irrefiftibly prove to us; if we cannot, without the utmost hazard, go on at random, as appetite prompts or accident leads us; if every step we take in our moral conduct must bring us nearer to heaven or to hell; furely it behoves us to call our ways ferioufly and frequently to remembrance; to confider them with the utmost care and circumfpection, and obferve where they terminate, and to what point they will carry us. Should we find ourselves in the right way, we shall have the fatisfaction of going on in the consciousness of being right, and of acting well upon principle. Should we have departed widely from the path of our duty, it will be high time for us to return to it, left we go too far to retreat, and rush thoughtlessly forward into irretrievable deftruction. If we have deviated but flightly, we fhall prevent this deviation from growing infenfibly wider, and regain the ground we have loft with little trouble or pain. In many things we offend all, even the very best of us; and it is far more wife and prudent to find out these offences by reflexion, and to correct them by suitable resolutions, than to let them accumulate by neglect, till fome fatal mischief awake us to a fenfe of our duty, or the ftroke of death render it no longer practicable. This fingle confideration, the poffibility of being called, even the healthiest and the youngest of us, fuddenly and unexpectedly called, to give an account of ourselves to God, before we have properly settled that account, is of itself enough to make us reflect on our condition, and to do it alfo without delay. We fee almost every day of our lives the moft striking and affecting inftances of our precarious condition. We fee our friends and neighbours fuddenly fnatched away from us, at a time when we (perhaps they too) leaft expected it. We see multitudes of others drop around us, one by one, till we are left almost alone in a wide world, deferted by all those whom we most intimately knew and esteemed. Yet all this feems to make little or no impreffion upon us, We follow our acquaintances to the grave; we drop, drop, perhaps, a few parting unavailing tears over them, and then return again to the cares, the pleasures, the follies and the vices, of the world, with as much eagerness and alacrity, as if nothing at all had happened that in the leaft concerned ourselves; as if there was not the least chance or poffibility, that the danger, which we fee fo near us, fhould at last come home to us. But, furely, thefe convincing, these alarming proofs of our mortality, ought to have a little more effect on our hearts. When we fee thousands fall befide us, and ten thousands at our right hand, we ought to reflect, that our turn may, perhaps, be next; that, at the very beft, we have no time to lofe, and that it highly behoves us to call our ways immediately to remembrance; to make hafte, (for death will not wait for us) to make hafte, and prolong not the time, to keep God's commandments. When, in fhort, we confider the extreme uncertainty of life, and the absolute certainty of appearing before our Judge in the very fame state in which that life is taken away from us, with all our fins and all our infirmities to answer for, we can never confent to truft our all on fo precarious a bottom, nor to let our most important concerns lie at the mercy mercy of every accident that may befal us. The loss of a year, the lofs of a day, may be the lofs of heaven: "thou fool, this night "shall thy foul be required of thee." This was faid for our admonition: and if, under this apprehenfion, we can calmly lay ourselves down to fleep, without reviewing our conduct, or preparing ourselves to wake, as we may do, in another world, it is in vain to use any further exhortations. If an argument fo plain, fo fimple, fo forcible, has no influence upon our minds, Reason and Religion can do nothing more for us; our obftinacy is incurable, our danger inexpreffible. From that danger, may God of his infinite mercy preserve us all, through Jefus Chrift our Lord. VOL. II. H SERMON |