intelligence should be acquainted with your sins, than that they should be known to your conscience; better they should be emblazoned on every other record, yea, written in flowing capitals, and exhibited to the whole universe, than that they should be remembered by yourself.

DELAY.

"I am waiting," says the sinner. For whom does he wait? For God? God is ready for him. Waiting! What folly to wait for one's self to act!

Every sinner being dependant on the aid of the Holy Spirit for a disposition to embrace the Gospel offer; it cannot be safe for him to delay his surrender to Christ, except on this condition, that God agrees to it. If he agrees to a postponement, let it be so. But where has he given his consent? Has he not, on the contrary, threatened most severely all who hesitate?

He is in a sad way, whose income never met his expenses, and whose expenses are daily becoming greater, while his income is daily becoming less. It is just so with every sinner who defers repentance. He is like a man unskilled to swim, who is by every step he takes, going further from the shore, and into water of greater depth, besides becoming every moment more and more exhausted,-the man plunges on, while ten

thousand voices on the shore, call and conjure him to stop and turn; and that which calls loudest, and conjures most earnestly, is the voice of God: "Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die. As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth; but that he turn from his wicked way and live."

What can exist hereafter, that does not now exist, to give sinners the disposition to repent? What inducement will there be that is not now? Circumstances may indeed change. Adversity may overtake a man. He may be sick-he may be afflicted, and he may feel himself to be drawing near to death, and under these circumstances, he may have some inclination to religion, which he has not now. But it is not every kind of inclination to the subject, that will answer the purpose. A man may have a disposition to be saved, yet no disposition to trust in Christ. Now the former without the latter is of no avail. The awakened sinner has some disposition towards religion, yet how long he remains, notwithstanding this, without the willingness to be a Christian; and sometimes dies without it. So sometimes the sinner on his death bed, is exceedingly solicitous about his salvation, and it seems as if there was nothing he would not do to secure it, and yet after all, he is not willing to give his heart to God. Perhaps if any sinner were sure of dying in a day, he would have some disposition towards religion. And yet with this certainty of death before him, he might be as far from the right disposition towards religion as he is now. Every sinner is dependant on God for the disposition that availeth. He never will

have it until God give it to him. Make his circumstances ever so favorable, and still it does not exist. The heart did never originate, and will never originate this disposition. It must come from God; and “He has mercy on whom he will have mercy."

He knows not what he does, who puts off repentance from the certain present, to the uncertain future; or if he knows, he does a deed of daring, which would signalize the most nefarious spirit in the dark dominions of eternal death.

To-morrow exists not but in anticipation. It is but the reflection of time-the shadow of a day, that recedes continually as we advance, till it is lost in eternity. To-day is all of time that we have.

Should any ask, how long a time it will require to make up the mind rationally, deliberately, and fully, to embrace Jesus Christ as the Saviour? I answer, just as long as it takes a drowning man to make up his mind to let go the little twig which he has in his hand, and lay hold on the spar that is thrown out to save him.

Delay is refusal; and refusal is base ingratitude; and ingratitude is full of danger. When men say, we will repent and be reconciled to God by and by, they say we will not repent and be reconciled. All honest purposes of repentance relate to the present time.

PRIDE.

The will of God appoints the measure of understanding, wealth, power, beauty, pleasure, and influence, which each shall have. Here is an abiding and unanswerable reason why none should glory and none should envy.

There is another consideration which evinces the unreasonableness of both pride and discontent. It is that men are not proprietors, but stewards, holding whatever they have in trust, to be accounted for to God. Therefore, the man who boasts of his superior endowments, does in effect, boast of the heavier account he will have to render, and is virtually proud of the more aggravated condemnation to which unfaithfulness will subject him. And the discontented does as really lament that he has no more onerous burden laid upon him, no more goods to give account of, and that unfaithfulness in employing his talents, will only expose him to a comparatively light condemnation. It would be quite as reasonable for men of great endowments to murmur against the Almighty Dispenser, and to be envious and discontented, because they are placed over so much, as for men more moderately endowed, to do the same, because they are placed over so little; inasmuch as it is certainly more easy to be faithful in few than in many things, and the precious reward of faithfulness in every case, however small the trust, is everlasting life, and an entrance into the joy of the Lord.

PRIDE AND HUMILITY.

Never do human pride, self-conceit, contempt of others, arrogant pretensions, high thoughts, and haughty demeanor, appear so hateful and hell deserving, as when we place them in contrast with the humility of the Son of God.

Who art thou, O proud man? "A worm and no man,” not even worthy of the name of man, since you have become a sinner- -a worm taken out of the dust, and crawling through it, to return into it—a poor, exposed, dependant, feeble, timid, mortal creature-aching, tossing, weeping, mourning, decaying, dying-to-day thou art this, and to-morrow thou must be dead, and for thy death mayest be indebted to the meanest insect that flies the air-thy noise all stilled, thy dignity brought down to the dust, thy beauty marred, and thou a mass of matter unsightly and offensive. With all thy courage, thou durst not say this shall not be thy end to-morrow. In intellect too, how weak and erringhow little thou knowest, and even that little, how easily it may be lost; and the mind that is now so proud of its powers and acquisitions, sink into hopeless idiocy. And thy heart, the worst part of thee, deceitful above all things and desperately wicked-thy inward part, very wickedness, whose excesses it takes Omnipotence to restrain, and so defiled, that God alone can purify it-unsusceptible of improvement, it must be