the righteous and the wicked, exist in a conscious state-the one comforted with the hope and prospect of their future glory, the other mortified with the expectation of torment. The promise to the saints, that they shall never taste of death, is without limitation of time;-in the text, a time being set, until which the persons intended shall not taste of death, it is implied that then they shall taste it. The departure of the wicked into everlasting torment is, in Scripture, called the second death. This is the death from which Christ came to save penitent sinners; and to this the impenitent remain obnoxious. The pangs and horrors of it will be such, that the evil of natural death, in comparison, may well be overlooked; and it may be said of the wicked, that they shall have no real taste of death till they taste it in the burning lake, from whence the smoke of their torment shall ascend for ever and ever. This is what our Lord insinuates in the alarming menace of the text ;-this, at least, is the most literal exposition that the words will bear; and it connects them more than any other with the scope and occasion of the whole discourse. 'Whosoever,' says our Lord, will lose his life, shall find it;'-shall find, instead of the life he loses here, a better in the world to come: and whosoever will save his life, shall lose it;'-shall lose that life which alone is worth his care: for what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul; or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?' For there will come a day of judgment and retribution ;—the Son of manhe who now converses with you in a human form -shall 'come in the glory of the Father, with his angels; and then he shall reward every man ac

cording to his works. On them who, by patient continuance in well-doing, have sought for life and immortality-on them he shall bestow glory and happiness, honour and praise; but shame and rebuke, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil. The purport of the discourse was to enforce a just contempt both of the enjoyments and of the sufferings of the present life, from the consideration of the better enjoyments and of the heavier sufferings of the life to come; and because the discourse was occasioned by a fear which the disciples had betrayed of the sufferings of this world, for which another fear might seem the best antagonist, for this reason, the point chiefly insisted on, is the magnitude of the loss to them who should lose their souls. To give this consideration its full effect, the hearers are told that there were those among themselves who stood in this dangerous predicament. There be some standing here, who shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom;' and then will they be doomed to endless sufferings, in comparison with which the previous pangs of natural death are nothing. 'Flatter not yourselves that these threatenings will never be executed,-that none will be so incorrigibly bad as to incur the extremity of these punishments: verily, I say unto you, there are present, in this very assembly, there are persons standing here, who will be criminal in that degree, that they will inevitably feel the severity of vindictive justice,-persons who now perhaps hear these warnings with incredulity and contempt: but the time will come, when they will see the Son of man, whom they despised, whom they rejected, whom they persecuted, coming to execute ven

geance on them who have not known God, nor obeyed the gospel; and then will they be doomed to endless sufferings, in comparison with which the previous pangs of natural death are nothing.'

It will be proper, however, to consider, whether, among the hearers of this discourse, there might be any at whom it may be probable that our Lord should point so express a denunciation of final destruction.

"There are are some standing here.' The original words, according to the reading which our English translators seem to have followed, might be more exactly rendered, 'There are certain persons standing here;' where the expression certain persons' hath just the same definite sense as 'a certain person,' the force of the plural number being only that it is a more reserved, and, for that reason, a more alarming way of pointing at an individual. Now, in the assembly to which our Lord was speaking, a certain person,' it may well be supposed, was present, whom charity herself may hardly scruple to include among the miserable objects of God's final vengeance. The son of perdition, Judas the traitor, was standing there. Our Saviour's first prediction of his passion was that which gave occasion to this whole discourse. It may reasonably be supposed, that the tragical conclusion of his life on earth was present to his mind, with all its horrid circumstances; and, among these, none was likely to make a more painful impression than the treason of his base disciple. His mind possessed with these objects, when the scene of the general judgment comes in view,-the traitor standing in his sight,-his crime foreseen,— the sordid motives of it understood, the fore

thought of the fallen apostle's punishment could 'not but present itself; and this drew from our divine instructor that alarming menace, which must have struck a chill of horror to the heart of every one that heard it, and the more because the particular application of it was not at the time understood. This was the effect intended. Our Lord meant to impress his audience with a just and affecting sense of the magnitude of those evils, the sharpness of those pains, which none but the ungodly shall ever feel, and from which none of the ungodly shall ever escape.

Nor in this passage only, but in every page of holy writ, are these terrors displayed, in expressions studiously adapted to lay hold of the imagination of mankind, and awaken the most thoughtless to such an habitual sense of danger as might be sufficient to overcome the most powerful allurements of vice. The wicked are to go into outer darkness; there is to be weeping and gnashing of teeth; they are to depart into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched; there they shall drink of the wrath of God, poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation.' Whatever there may be of figure in some of these expressions, as much as this they certainly import, -that the future state of the wicked will be a state of exquisite torment, both of body and mind,-of torments, not only intense in degree, but incapable of intermission, cure, or end,—a condition of unmixed and perfect evil, not less deprived of future hope than of present enjoyment.

It is amazing, that a danger so strongly set forth should be disregarded; and this is the more amaz

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ing, when we take a view of the particular casts and complexions of character among which this disregard is chiefly found. They may be reduced to three different classes, according to the three different passions by which they are severally overcome,-ambition, avarice, and sensuality. Personal consequence is the object of the first class; wealth, of the second; pleasure, of the third. Personal consequence is not to be acquired but by great undertakings, bold in the first conception, difficult in execution, extensive in consequence. Such undertakings demand great abilities. cordingly, we commonly find in the ambitious man a superiority of parts, in some measure proportioned to the magnitude of his designs: it is his particular talent to weigh distant consequences, to provide against them, and to turn every thing, by a deep policy and forecast, to his own advantage. It might be expected, that this sagacity of understanding would restrain him from the desperate folly of sacrificing an unfading crown for that glory that must shortly pass away. Again, your avaricious money-getting man is generally a character of wonderful discretion. It might be expected that he would be exact to count his gains, and would be the last to barter possessions which he might hold for ever, for a wealth that shall be taken from him, and shall not profit him in the day of wrath. Then, for those servants of sin, the effeminate sons of sensual pleasure, these are a feeble, timid race. It might be expected that these, of all men, would want firmness to brave the danger. Yet so it is,—the ambitious pursues a conduct which must end in shame; the miser, to be rich now, makes himself poor for ever; and the tender, delicate