licitude, it will vibrate on his ear more dreadfully than the sound of the archangel's trump which called him from the grave. When the impenitent are represented as calling on the mountains and rocks to fall on them, what is that which they seek to avoid? they ask to be hidden from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb-the wrath of the Lamb. Had it been the fury of the lion; had it been the wrath of a being who had only created them, given them a law, and left them to obey it or perish: who had only been known to them as a being of rigorous and unbending justice; then, however conscious of guilt, they might have attempted to lift up their hardened front in his presence. But it is the wrath of the Lamb; of a Being who has always acted towards them with infinite tenderness and patience; who became the Lamb of God, the great sacrificial victim, suffering and dying to take away their guilt: this is the circumstance which will render his wrath so unendurable, that they will ask no higher favor than to be sheltered from the sight of his face, and would take the weight of the incumbent earth as a blessed exchange.

3. Our Lord very frequently spoke of the pomp and circumstances of the final scene. In painting that coming event, there is, no doubt, a propensity to overcharge the picture with physical terrors; to make it depend for interest, too exclusively on material splendors; there is a danger of sinking the moral, and of leaving the mind unduly occupied with images of material grandeur. And it is, no doubt, true, that in that awful day, our spiritual condition will be the great engrossing theme; that a flaming world will have little interest for one who is about to pass into a lake which ever burneth; that the stupendous magnificence of the surrounding scene will have slight attractions for one whose ear has just drank in the sentence of divine approval, and whose eye is fast filling with the visions of

eternal life. But, till then, we have the sanction of our Lord's example, for introducing, and enlarging on, the physical machinery of that day. He who knew all the avenues to the human heart, knew that the way to engage our attention to the day of doom itself, is to invest it with sublime scenical imagery, to accumulate around it all those circumstances of awful pomp which are known to have terrible attraction for the human heart. 'The Son of man shall come in the clouds of heaven, in his own glory, and in the glory of his Father, and of all his holy angels, with a great sound of trumpets.'

And who can question that the truth of the scene requires this dramatic description? Had Sinai its apparatus of quailing terrors; its sublime blackness of darkness; its thunders, and tempests, and earthquakes; its sound of a trumpet waxing louder and louder; and its hosts of ministering angels: did all this appalling machinery attend the publication of the law, a mere national event, a comparatively private scene? and shall that day, when the law is to assert its high majesty, and man to have his final audit; that day of universal summoning, and eternal dispensations; be wanting in circumstantial effect? Had even Bethlehem its signs and wonders, its guiding star, and exulting cherubim; when He came as in labored obscurity, could creation even then be hardly restrained from collecting her glories to grace the scene? and shall she be remiss in her attendance when he will come on purpose to be glorified, when leave will be given her to pour all her splendors in his train? has Calvary also its tale of prodigious things; did nature come and weep at his cross, and sympathize with his sorrows? and shall she not come to wait on his throne and give effect to his triumph? Yes, we believe that the promise which he made, especially to his disciples, is destined to have universal application; that every element and every nature which sympathized in his

tribulation, will then be promoted to swel! his train, or enthroned to share his glory. Whether, indeed, every predicted prodigy, every image of terrible sublimity which the scriptures assign to that awful day, will be literally realized or not, it is immaterial to determine. The fact that our Lord's descriptions of it fill the imagination, that in order to aggrandize its interest he has selected and combined every element of greatness, beauty, and terror, warrants us to infer that the machinery will be every way worthy the unparalleled occasion; that if one of those predicted circumstances is wanting, it will only be to make way for another of surpassing power.

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He shall come in his own glory,' clad in the robe of essential light he had worn from eternity; and in the glory of his Father, absorbing in his own person all power and office, invested by the paternal hand with all the insignia of supreme majesty, and girt with the sword of ultimate justice never till now unsheathed; and crowned with the most convincing signs, and glorious demonstrations of paternal love; and in the glory of his holy angels,' all the bright inhabitants of heaven, forsaking their sublime occupations, and descending from their lofty seats, ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands ,shall encircle his throne, and attend his coming. In the presence of that splendor, the sun itself shall wane, and all light be swallowed up. The vast procession, sailing on the bosom of the troubled air,, filling the concave of the sky, and flanked with prepared thunderclouds of wrath, shall open its front on the astonished world. No interpreter will be necessary; it will flash its meaning on every mind; find a key in every breast; explaining a thousand presentiments, and realizing ten thousand apprehensions. The sound of the trumpet is heard; it is the voice of the Judge calling for the sleeping dead; calling with a voice which is instantly heard, understood and obeyed; they that are in their graves come forth. Again

it sounds; and unnumbered angels, true to the signal, disperse over the four winds of heaven, and collect the whole human family into the area of the great tribunal. Then shail ensue the conflagration of the globe; forsaken of its inhabitants, all its stores of fire shall be unmasked, every mountain shall be a Sinai, and the flame universal: yet who shall heed the sight? for the great assize will have begun. 'Oh, may the Lord grant that we may find mercy of the Lord in that day.'

4. The rectitude which will distinguish the proceedings of the last day, is a sentiment familiar to the Old Testament. On this account, I should content myself with barely repeating it, had not our Lord directed our attention to certain particulars, by which that rectitude will make itself impressively seen. 'Before him shall be gathered all nations; in other words the judgment will be universal. If it were not—if only one of all the generations of mankind were absent, the whole universe would have a right to complain of injustice. But the judgment will be righteous, so that all will be present: and therefore you will be present. However loath to leave the darkness of the grave, you must come forth. However eager to remain in the domains of death, death must deliver you up. However loud your entreaties to the rocks to fall on you, and to the hills to cover you, they will refuse to afford you a refuge, Though now you may often compel nature to serve you in your sins, and to conceal your character; then it will be avenged; darkness itself will reject you; the night will become light about you, every department and element of creation, true to its original design, will render service to its Lord in conspiring to facilitate the ends of justice. And so essential to those ends will be the presence of every human being, that if you alone were absent, the solemn proceedings would wait, the judgment would stop for your appearance,

But impartiality requires not only that every individual should be present; it also demands that congnizance be taken of every act. Let a single deed, let a single thought, the most inconsequent and unproductive that ever passed through the mind, be omitted; and if that thought possessed a moral quality, the universe would be justified in protesting against the omission. But nothing shall be overlooked, nothing made light of; the slightest voluntary exercise of the soul, the very dust of the balances shall be taken into the account. The two mites, the cup of cold water, the prison visit, the pious wish, on the one hand: the omitted kindness, the idle word, the unchaste look, the thought of evil, the deed of darkness, on the other; shall all be brought into the open court. It is in the moral world as it is in the natural, where every substance weighs something; though we speak of imponderable bodies, yet nature knows nothing of positive levity. And were we possessed of the necessary scales, the exquisite instrument, we should find that the same holds true in the moral world. Nothing is insignificant on which sin has breathed the breath of hell: every thing is important on which holiness has impressed itself in the faintest characters. And, accordingly, there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid that shall not be known.' However unimportant now in the estimation of man, yet, when placed in the light of the divine countenance, like the atom in the sun's rays, it shall be found deserving attention; and as the minutest molecule of matter contains all the primordial elements of a world, so the least action of the mind shall be found to include in it the essential element of heaven, or of hell.

And in order to make good its character for righteousness, it must also be a judgment of proportion and comparison; in which the guilt of each is ascertained according to all its peculiar modifications. In the courts of human