consternation of interminable despair, must be indeed the Child of the Devil, instigated by him, but too willingly the Actor in the fiendish work. By so foul an offence all the charities of our Nature are uprooted, and the tie of Man to Man sacrilegiously broken. The brute creation, ungifted with reason and left to the instinctive impulse of their own passions, presents not so horrible a spectacle as the cold-blooded destruction of its own species; the law of Man as well as That of GOD, cries out against it, and the haunting execrations of an injured Conscience overwhelm the reflecting Soul with horror at the deed. And though in an act of murder, perpetrated without forethought or premeditated malice, there may be hope of Forgiveness in HEAVEN, yet let it never be forgotten that this can only be expected where there is real penitence, and the sorrow of the heart is vitally productive of its fruits-an actual or an earnest desire of reparation and amendment. And who can tell whether a season for repentance will be allowed, or whether the death of the Murderer may not so soon follow as to leave him without a season for penitential communing with GOD. A heart capable of such a crime must have been disciplined in the ways of iniquity by yielding to the guidance of its own evil passions habitually. GOD cannot have been otherwise than driven from the thoughts of that Man, however Conscience, in the early career of his viciousness, may have presented him as A GOD of Justice and as Loving Righteousness. By an accumulating indifference to the whispers of Conscience and the Warning Voice of The CREATOR in it, and to the Ordinances of His Revelation, Man casts from him the only Antidote to his own evil propensities, which gradually and oftentimes scarce perceptibly gain such an ascendancy over him as eventually to lead him to the commission of guilt, which in earlier life he would not only have shrunk from, but then thought himself incapable of engaging in. Since, when the floodgates of vice are once opened, None can tell where the mischief created by the torrent may end, it behoves us to instil into the Human Soul in its earliest dawn of reason, the

N

necessity of controuling its passions, in deference to its present and future happiness, lest from one inconsiderate act it gradually gets involved in sins of deep and yet deeper die; proceeding from inconsiderateness to habitual neglect of the duties injoined upon our Nature, and finally sinking into the very vortex of iniquity, and possibly ending in such an awful consummation of crime as self-murder, if not the destruction of another Fellow-Creature. For one offence, to which the absence of the fear of GOD leads, and which is in defiance of the spirit of This Commandment, is that of self-destruction. Where this arises from bodily or mental infirmity, it is the subject of commiseration, not of condemnation, both in HEAVEN and Earth; but where it proceeds from a cowardly apprehension of the frowns of a taunting World, and is the offspring of pride and of habits of wickedness and uncontrouled passion and self-will, no extenuation offers for its committal; and, moreover, in the moment when the Culprit vainly hopes that all his sorrows will be ended by rushing into extermination or insensibility, he finds himself consciously under the Eye of An Offended GOD and before A JUDGE, Whom in this instance he has deprived of the Exercise of His Attribute of Mercy, and entering into the experience of The ALMIGHTY's Judgment, untempered with Mercy, feels the deep and dreadful horrors of despair in the prospect of eternal misery, as the just return of his setting at nought The DIVINE Commands. O what would he give, that he had to give, to have then restored to him the life of probation, which he daringly terminated on Earth before its time; and how would he rejoice in the extreme of Human sufferings and count them even as a source of thankfulness, and all the contumely and scorn of his Fellow-Creatures as Blessings from A Benevolent CREATOR, if he could but be allowed by penitence and prayer and faith in The SON of GOD, as The Atoning Sacrifice for sin, and The MEDIATOR of Reconciliation with The FATHER, that he might escape from the Judgment to Come. For miserably weak and brutally insensible and despicably foolish must that mind be that can suppose the end of an ill-spent

No, this Life is but the

life, which has brought on itself suffering and sorrow upon Earth, will, if self-terminated, know no more sorrow or sighing, no anguish or remorse. passage to one that shall thence be eternal, Death being, as it were, but the Gate opening upon a Life that shall never end, whether of Blessedness or of Woe; and in the same instant, in effect at least, if not in fact, that Life ceases here, it begins interminably there; for though the body is not immediately revived, but during the period of its separation from the Soul it is altogether insensible, and unconscious in all the interval till its resurrection; yet the Soul, being in its nature immortal, does not, like the body, even for an instant probably, lose its animation and sensitiveness. Amidst, therefore, accumulated offences in an utter defiance of the Laws of GOD, a rejection of His Blessings and a disregard of His Forbearance, the experiment of shrinking from His Appointed Chastisements here, (Inflicted as they are in Mercy, to prevent, by Inducing to repentance and reformation, the Sentence of Eternal Punishment when the Day of Universal Judgment and Decree of Retributive Justice shall arise,) is to place the Soul out of the possible reach of Mercy, and to become not only the Perpetrator of Self-destruction here, but of a never-ending state of misery and remorse in utter despair of One Ray of DIVINE Compassion. These preconsidered offences come within the spirit of the foregoing Commandment; there are others, also, which obviously are so included; for though we lift not the dagger, nor present the poisoned chalice, yet if we undermine our own constitution by lust and sensuality and intemperance, or if we superinduce those evils and their inseparable effect by example and seduction in others; if by cruelty, by oppression, by pride and ambition, we ruin the peace, and by embittering the Lives of Others we shorten their duration, can we in our Conscience say that we have faithfully and fully kept This Commandment? Might not those Lives have been prolonged, and perhaps for much useful purpose, if we had not destroyed their happiness? and might not our own constitutions have been much longer preserved, had we not

yielded to such Soul-destroying as well as bodily-afflicting habits? These consequences of not putting the guard of vital religion on the heart-of not living as under the Eye and in the fear of THE ALMIGHTY-of not looking to the end, for which this Life was Given, and the inestimable Treasures, which await the pious and proper employment of it, opening step by step into the progress and perseverance in a fatally evil course, are not sufficiently considered, or surely a check would wisely and Self-preservingly be put on the first or earliest advances in it; whilst to withdraw from it may not be difficult, the Soul, under the influence of The DIVINE Warning through the Conscience, being then susceptible of the weight and influence of Truth. No evil passion amidst the dreadful variety that actuate the Soul of Man, if unrestrained by the power of faith in The DIVINE Word and watchful obedience to The DIVINE Will, in a reliance on the Allsufficient Grace of The HOLY SPIRIT, but has terminated in the destruction of both Body and Soul in Hell; and what Murder can be so dreadful? Jealousy prompted Cain first to stain the Earth with Human blood, and to heighten the horrors of the deed by the destruction of a Brother; covetousness influenced Judas, a Witness of The MESSIAH's Love, to betray His Innocent Blood, and to seek to have It shed as that of a Blasphemer; and his faithlessness in the Mercy of GOD, (Who might have Found Mercy even for the Soul that gave Him up to destruction, had It been sought in contrition and repentance, not to be repented of,) afterwards stimulated him, when stung to the quick by the remorse of Conscience, to be guilty of Self-murder. Ambition, Pride, Revenge, Lust, and Sensuality have disfigured every page of History with bloody annals, and Intemperance fills the grave with more than half of its premature Victims. In these cases, generally, the heart has not all at once become desperately wicked, but by degrees has, by perseverance in evil thoughts and actions, been more hardened in sin and callous to right feeling, and eventually has sunk to the lowest pitch of depravity. How necessary and vitally important is it to seize every evil weed

and crush it in its birth, that the heart may not be overrun by it. This watchfulness over the incitements to conduct is necessary to guard from offences in the Eye of HEAVEN: for though hid from the observation and knowledge of Man, yet the wish and desire for the ruin and injury of Others, either in their temporal or Spiritual interests, to which perhaps the want of opportunity alone prevents from being yielded to in action, prove a heart as much alienated from GOD, and as much surrendered to Satan and his devices, as if outwardly and publicly displayed to Man in positive commission of the meditated evil: and as our most secret sins are set in the Light of The LORD's Countenance, so we reasonably expect He will Judge us by the very thoughts of our hearts and the motives to our conduct, whether they be for good or for evil; and then even our own hearts will condemn us. Let us, therefore, whilst we have time, that even this great sin in its immediate or remote effects may not be Justly laid to our charge, turn to The LORD with all our heart, that He may Have Mercy upon us, and to our GOD, that He may Abundantly Pardon us through the Atoning Sacrifice by the BloodShedding of Christ, and by The Purifying Grace of The HOLY SPIRIT, that our sins, whether of thought or of deed, though they be red as scarlet, may be whiter than snow; and let us, henceforth, with the most unremitting vigilance, avail ourselves of the Great Mercy of GOD in not Cutting us off in the midst of our iniquities; and, on the contrary, in Affording us not only a season for repentance and amendment, but also in Giving us both faith and repentance, that we might find Peace to our Souls, and have the hope of Redemption and of Glory through the Incarnation and Interposition of The SON of His Love!The Priest then delivers the Seventh Commandment

Thou shalt not commit adultery!

And the People add

LORD, Have Mercy upon us; and Incline our hearts to keep This Law!