present estimate of these privileges, you will fully appreciate them when they are for ever gone. If you shall live and die as you are, impenitent, you will begin to consider then what you have lost. You will recount the days now passing over you, bright with the promises of mercy. A Saviour "wounded for your transgressions, bruised for your iniquities," will stand before you, and you will remember how you pierced him by your sins. You will remember all the means of grace which you resisted-the gracious Spirit who strove with you till you grieved him finally away-the ministry of the word, proclaiming the offers of life in your ear, which earnest entreaties to repent you disregarded. These Sabbaths will return to you-not as available realities to be again enjoyed—but the ghosts of their murdered hours will throng up the avenues of memory to lay their accusations at your feet. You will remember this house of prayer, where you so often turned your back upon your Maker, and the memorials of your Saviour's love. You will remember this blessed Bible, given to make men wise unto salvation, the dust of whose unopened lids will testify against you. You will remember its holy truths, once your rule of action and your guide, but now the matter of your accusation and the sentence of eternal condemnation. You will remember how those influences followed you up, step after step, from Sabbath to Sabbath, year after year-from the earliest dawn of reason to the close of life-and how you steadily, perseveringly, and stubbornly resisted them all--fighting your way through a thick array of warnings, entreaties, prayers, tears, nay, through the blood of atonement, and the strivings of the Spirit, down to eternal death.

3. There is another class of means by which God is striving to win sinners to his service and love; I mean his Paternal chastiesments. Many are subdued and saved by the hand of affliction upon whom all other means have been tried in vain.

My hearers! why is it that God has so often stepped between you and the object of your earthly desire? Why has He so often disappointed your plans, and blasted your hopes, and stripped you of worldly good? Why has He constrained you so often to see and to feel the utter emptiness and vanity of all things earthly, and to sigh in your soul over the blight and misery of this sinful state of being? It is that he might withdraw your affections from earth and cen tre them on heaven-reclaim you from the ways of sin, and establish you in obedience. This is the design and the na tural tendency of all God's chastisements; and this would be their invariable effect, through the blessing of his grace, if they were not resisted and perverted. You may not see this now: sin may shut this truth out of sight; but the day will come when the darkness will vanish, and you will re

member all the scenes of your earthly suffering and disappointment with a perfect recollection. Memory, from the remotest future, will wander back to this probationary world, and recount not only every mercy of God, but every dealing of his paternal faithfulness with his wayward child, and your insensibility and incorrigibleness under the discipline Call up to-day some of the reminiscences of the past. Let recollection bring back the time when, arrested by the hand of God, you found yourself prostrate and helpless on a bed of sicknesss. Then an opening grave, a proffered heaven, a threatened hell, a despised yet infinately-needed Saviour, seized upon your thoughts and constrained reflection and prayer, and you resolved, under the pressure of these then felt truths, to devote your remaining days to the service of God, should He in mercy spare and raise you up. But you forgot it all, your sickness and your vows, as soon as you recovered; but those broken vows, made to God in that solemn hour, though hidden, are not effaced from the tablets of your soul. Like characters written with invisible ink, and which are brought out by exposure to heat, so will they be revealed by the fires of the final day; and they will be remembered while eternity endures.

Think again. God has taken from you cherished friends, from whose dying lips, from whose opening graves, you have heard the warning, "Prepare to meet thy God!" For a time the impression of that solemn death-scene lingered in your mind and restrained your conduct, but at length you effaced it all, and now think, perhaps, that the unpleasant reflections which it once suggested, will never more revisit your heart. But be not deceived. That scene, with its attendant circumstances, is engraved on your spiritual being in characters of immortality; and memory will one day revive it, and confront you with the unwelcome record; and no hand will ever be able to efface it-no voice command it away. Transfixed in mute astonishment and despair, the soul will look upon, and read and ponder the pages of a past and almost forgotten experience, as memory reproduces them, one after another, and holds them up before the mind.

Sinners will remember in eternity the evil influence which they exerted while on earth, and all the fatal consequences of it. The wretched man alluded to in the text, when he found there was no relief to be had for himself, entreated that his "five brethren," whom he had left behind, might be warned, lest they also should come to the same place of torment. Was this request the dictate of benevolence towards his brethren?" Not at all; there is no benevolence in hell. There can be no natural affection. Every being is perfectly selfish and perfectly hateful. There is no pity felt there for sinners on earth; no desires cherished in the bosom of the lost for their salvation and happiness. The devil

would make every creature as wicked and as miserable as himself; and this doubtless is the spirit of that entire world of total and unrestrained depravity. But there is remorse in hell, and this will account for this seemingly strange re quest. This despairing and tormented man remembered the influence he had exerted over those five brethren; his conscience already accused him in their name. He dreaded the thought of being confronted with them face to face in that world of torment. He knew well that their presence would torture him eternally with the reflection that he had been an accomplice in their guilt and ruin, perhaps their corrupter and destroyer; and, if possible, he would escape this additional pang; he could not endure their bitter reproaches. And no doubt the remembrance of the ruin which they have brought upon others, causes the keenest and most excruciat ing pang felt in the world of torment. Few go there alone. Few can look around them there and not see some doomed spirit reproaching them with its ruin.

My unconverted hearer, have not some of your companions gone before you into eternity, and gone unprepared? They, doubtless, remember their ungodly example in this life, and their evil influence over you, and, if they could, would prevent your following them to their dismal abode. Perhaps they are even now begging that some messenger may be sent to warn you of your approaching doom, and to entreat you not to come to that place of torment. But soon, if you repent not, you will be with them, and like them; and, like the rich man, you will remember what you have done for the ruin of others; that you lent your example and influence to the enemy of your souls.

Are you a parent? God has committed to your care the souls of those whom you love as your own life, and bidden you to train them to virtue, to piety, and heaven. But by your example, the most powerful of all influences upon their minds, you are training them up for sin, and impenitence, and perdition. And if they shall follow you in your footsteps down to death, as they are likely to do, you will remember your agency in their ruin. You will remember, that, had you taught them, and lived before them, as you ought, they might have been with you, adoring spirits before the throne, instead of hopeless outcasts and exiles. Oh! what a fact for a parent to remember through eternity. What remorse and anguish will it forever awaken!

But you sustain other relations in which you are exerting the same kind of influence over other minds. This influence, unseen, it may be, now, will be revealed in the light of eter nity, and as its fruit, many of those whom you loved in life may be sharers of your eternal prison. A husband or wife, a brother or sister, a friend or associate, may there reproach you as the instrument of their eternal undoing, pointing you

to the very temptation by which you ensnared them, to the laugh or sneer by which you banished their serious thoughts, and led them to grieve the Spirit of God, to the whole life of sin and impenitence which you lived before them. Ah! you will remember it all; and bitter indeed will be the reflection -bitter enough, with no other agents of misery, to overwhelm the soul with remorse and anguish. What, then, with all its other bitter ingredients, must be the sinner's cup of final woe!

But we will pursue these thoughts no farther. I have endeavored, in what I have said, not to rely upon conjecture, but to keep within the range of Scripture teaching, and legitimate inference from it. These views, we know, are not pleasing and grateful to unrenewed hearts, but if they are in accordance with the facts of the case, they are of immense importance, aud every unconverted soul should strive to realize now, what, unless he speedily repent, he must realize when it is too late to find relief.

Imagine, then, the change already past, which may pass upon you at any hour;-imagine yourself engaged in the reflections I have been describing. The affairs of earth are all over, and you are reviewing them from your abode in eternity. A voice from the bright world above, which you can see, but cannot enter, says to you, "Son remember," and all the scenes of probation start up before you, as witnesses to the justice of your doom, and in the words of inspiration, thou mourn at last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed, and say, "How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof!" There is the golden opportunities I wasted, and the countless gifts of my Father's goodness which I abused. There is the long, dark, terrible catalogue of my sins, which must witness against me forever. There is the heaven I might have gained. There is the glorious Saviour, in whose presence I might have spent my eternity. There is the vacant seat I might have occupied-the untuned harp I might have strung. But here I am in hell! the place of which I so often heard, but to which I never for a moment meant to come. Yet here I am at last, a hopeless, accursed,. despairing exile from all good: the enemy of my God, the victim of my own impenitence, the murderer of my own soul, -lost forever lost! Oh! that the humblest saint in heaven might bring me but one drop of water, to cool my burning tongue!

My unconverted hearer, are these pictures real or not? They are as certainly real and true as that the Word of God is real and true; and being so, your soul is in jeopardy every hour. Nothing but the slender thread of life holds you one moment from the world of torment. Let that thread be cut, and all this will become a terrible reality to you in a single hour.

I forewarn you of it now, while you can escape, and I implore you to heed the warning, and take refuge in Christ. Go to him in penitence and contrition-go as a perishing sinner,-go at once, and you are safe.

SERMON DIII.

BY REV. E. C. PRITCHETT,
ROME, NEW YORK.

THE CHRISTIAN AS A REFORMER.

"Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them." EPHESIANS, 5: 11.

ALL men ought to labor and pray for the extinction of evil and the prevalence of good. What all men ought to do the Christian endeavors to effect. When sins are on every hand thrusting up their horrid fronts, unabashed and bare, or are marking their deformity under the seemly guise of some pretended good, the child of God will not fail to cry, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" And such an inquiry has peculiar significance at a time like this, when Christians have been led to see that their relations extend far beyond their parish or vicinity: and it is not easy to evade the sense of responsibility by asking, "Who is my neighbor ?" To such a prayer for wisdom, the Spirit, through the Apostle, answers in the words of our text, "Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them." The term "darkness," as used here, means depravity, which is clear from its evident purport in the 8th verse: Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are light in the Lord." The phrase, "works of darkness," consequently signifies sins, the results of moral depravity in general, and no particular class of them rather than another. Well may they be called unfruitful, for all that shall be finally achieved by those who persist in committing them will be but the negation of good and all hope of good, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power, the undying worm, and the unquenchable fire of Gehenna. These are the fruits of the works of darkness. With regard to them, the Christian's duty is twofold in its aspect,-negative and positive; and in this order let us consider it.

1. Negative.-"Have no fellowship."

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There are several kinds of connection with evil and with evil-doers, which may be mistaken for the forbidden fellowship. Consequently the indolent, the man-fearing, and the