a voluntary being exercising a vigorous control over
his own movements? When racked with pain, and
borne down by the pressure of a sore and over-
whelming calamity? Surely the greater the work of
repentance is, the more ease, the more time, the more
freedom from suffering, is necessary for carrying it on;
and, therefore, addressing you as voluntary beings,
as beings who will and who do, we call upon you to
seek God early that you may find him—to haste,
and make no delay in keeping his commandments.
The other view is, that repentance is not a self-
originating work in man, but the work of the Holy
Spirit in him as the subject of its influences. This
view is not opposite to the former. It is true that
man wills and does at every step in the business of
his salvation; and it is as true that God works in
him so to will and to do. Take this last view of
it then. Look on repentance as the work of God's
Spirit in the soul of man, and we are furnished with
a more impressive argument than ever, and set on
higher vantage for urging you to stir yourselves, and
set about it immediately. What is it that you pro-
pose? To keep by your present habits, and your pre-
sent indulgences—and build yourselves up all the
while in the confidence that the Spirit will interpose
with his mighty power of conversion upon you, at the
very point of time that you have fixed upon as conve-
nient and agreeable? And how do you conciliate the
Spirit's answer to your call then? Why, by doing all
you can to grieve, and to quench, and to provoke him
to abandon you now. Do you
feel a motion towards
repentance at this moment? If you keep it alive,
and act upon it, good and well. But if you smother

and suppress this motion, you resist the Spirit-you stifle his movements within you: it is what the impenitent do day after day, and year after year-and is this the way for securing the influences of the Spirit, at the time that you would like them best? When you are done with the world, and are looking forward to eternity because you cannot help it? God says,

"My Spirit will not always strive with the children. of men.' A good and a free Spirit he undoubtedly is, and, as a proof of it, he is now saying, "Let whosoever will, come and drink of the water of life freely." He says so now, but we do not promise that he will say so with effect upon your death-beds, if refuse him now. you You look forward then for a powerful work of conversion being done upon you, and yet you employ yourselves all your life long in raising and multiplying obstacles against it. You count upon a miracle of grace before you die, and the way you take to make yourselves sure of it, is to grieve and offend him while you live, who alone can perform the miracle. O what cruel deceits will sin land us in! and how artfully it pleads for a "little more sleep, and a little more slumber; a little more folding of the hands to sleep." We should hold out no longer, nor make not such an abuse of the forbearance of God: we will treasure up wrath against the day of wrath if we do so. The genuine effect of his goodness is to lead to repentance; let not its effect upon us be to harden and encourage ourselves in the ways of sin. We should cry now for the clean heart and the right spirit; and such is the exceeding freeness of the Spirit of God, that we will be listened to. If we put off the cry till then, the same God

may laugh at our calamity, and mock when our fear cometh.

We

3. Our next argument for immediate repentance is, that we cannot bring forward, at any future period of your history, any considerations of a more prevailing or more powerfully moving influence than those we may bring forward at this moment. can tell you now of the terrors of the Lord. We can tell you now of the solemn mandates which have issued from his throne-and the authority of which is upon one and all of you. We can tell you now, that though, in this dead and darkened world, sin appears but a very trivial affair-for every body sins, and it is shielded from execration by the universal countenance of an entire species lying in wickedness -yet it holds true of God, what is so emphatically said of him, that he cannot be mocked, nor will he endure it that you should riot in the impunity of your wilful resistance to him and to his warnings. We can tell you now, that he is a God of vengeance; and though, for a season, he is keeping back all the thunders of it from a world that he would like to reclaim unto himself, yet, if you put all his expostulations away from you, and will not be reclaimed, these thunders will be let loose upon you, and they will fall on your guilty heads, armed with tenfold energy, because you have not only defied threats, but turned your back on his offers of reconciliation. These are the arguments by which we would try to open our way to your consciences, and to waken up your fears, and to put the inspiring activity of hope into your bosoms, by laying before you those invitations which are addressed to the

his

sinner, through the peace-speaking blood of Jesus, and, in the name of a beseeching God, to win your acceptance of them. At no future period can we address arguments more powerful and more affecting than these. If these arguments do not prevail upon you, we know of none others by which a victory over the stubborn and uncomplying will can be accomplished, or by which we can ever hope to beat in that sullen front of resistance wherewith you now so impregnably withstand us. We feel that, if any stout-hearted sinner shall rise from the perusal of these Treatises with an unawakened conscience, and give himself to an act of wilful disobedience, we feel as if, in reference to him, we had made our last discharge, and it fell powerless as water spilt on the ground, that cannot be gathered up again. We would not cease to ply him with our arguments, and tell him, to the hour of death, of the Lord God, merciful and gracious, who is not willing that any should perish, but that all should turn to him, and live. And if in future life we should meet him at the eleventh hour of his dark and deceitful day-a hoary sinner, sinking under the decrepitude of age, and bending on the side of the grave that is open to receive him-even then we would testify the exceeding freeness of the grace of God, and implore his acceptance of it. But how could it be away from our minds that he is not one of the evening labourers of the parable? We had met with him at former periods of his existence, and the offer we make him now we made him then, and he did what the labourers of the third, and sixth, and ninth hours of the parable did not do-he rejected our

call to hire him into the vineyard; and this heartless recollection, if it did not take all our energy away from us, would leave us little else than the energy of despair. And therefore it is, that we speak to you now as if this was our last hold of you. We feel as if on your present purpose hung all the preparations of your future life, and all the rewards or all the horrors of your coming eternity. We will not let you off with any other repentance than repentance now; and if this be refused now, we cannot, with our eyes open to the consideration we have now urged, that the instrument we make to bear upon you afterwards is not more powerful than we are wielding now, coupled with another consideration which we shall insist upon, that the subject on which the instrument worketh, even the heart of man, gathers, by every act of resistance, a more uncomplying obstinacy than before; we cannot, with these two thoughts in our mind, look forward to your future history, without seeing spread over the whole path of it the iron of a harder impenitency -the sullen gloom of a deeper and more determined alienation.

4. Another argument, therefore, for immediate repentance is, that the mind which resists a present call or a present reproof, undergoes a progressive hardening towards all those considerations which arm the call of repentance with all its energy. It is not enough to say, that the instrument by which repentance is brought about, is not more powerful to-morrow than it is to-day; it lends a most tremendous weight to the argument, to say further, that the subject on which this instrument