ing it, when worldly comfort fails you, and one calamity after another presses upon your fate, and you are borne down by such extremity of pain, that even though you had no hope beyond the grave, you would be ready to choose death rather than life, but also for your cherishing it, when no harassing difficulties beset your path, when no direful distresses agonise your bosoms, when no frightful perils impend over your heads, when your way is as smooth, and your sky as unclouded, and your cup as full, and your prospects as gay and smiling, as ever were those of any of the children of men. With all the exemptions from evil, and with all the participation of good, that you either do experience or can hope to experience, still this is but a desert place-it is a polluted land and none of you, from what you know, or see, or conceive of it, can say respecting it, "This is our rest for ever, here will we dwell, for we have desired it." And, O! when you think of the celestial abodes, with all their beauty, and with all their bliss, where the toils and trials and tribulations of mortality shall be neither felt nor feared any more, and amid whose sublime exercises and rapturous enjoyments all that is holiest and best in our present state shall appear in the retrospect as a very little thing, how can you restrain the outgoing of your affections towards that expected period when "he that shall come, will come, and will not tarry," and when his com

ing will be the signal of your admission into those everlasting habitations, on which your eyes are now fixed, and into which you long and expect

to enter.

Here you are subject to disease—to its pain, and its languishing, and its mortal issue. But when your Saviour comes, he will put upon you the crown of life-he will clothe you with the robe of immortality-and you shall neither sicken, nor suffer, nor die any more.

Here your reputation may be wounded from ignorance or from envy, from prejudice or from malevolence. The slander of your foes may deprive you of the attachment of your friends. And the grave itself may scarcely shield you from its malignant assaults. But when your Saviour comes, he will place you conspicuously among those whom God hath justified, and whom no man can condemn-in whose society calumny cannot reach you, and reproach cannot hurt you-and whose unfeigned love, inspired and cherished by Him who has himself pronounced you acquitted and blessed, shall infinitely more than compensate you for all the detractions that may have been poured upon your character in this evil and misjudging world.

Here you may have to struggle with the numerous ills and hardships of poverty-aggravated by the comforts and independence which preceded it, and by the scorn and the desertion of

those whom your bounty had formerly supported and fed. But when your Saviour comes, you shall have no wants which he will not supply with unexhaustible abundance; he will give you the true riches that can never be wasted nor taken from you; he will conduct you into his Father's house, where there is bread enough and to spare he will bestow upon you the "inheritance which is incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.'

Here your chosen and your cherished friends. may betray you when you are most confidingthose with whom you associated and took sweet counsel may be removed far away from you— the husband or the wife, the parent or the child, the brother or the sister, who dwelt with you, and was dear to you as your own soul, may be torn from your embrace by the relentless hand of death, and buried from your sight amid the corruptions and desolations of the grave. But when your Saviour comes, he will wind up this scene of trial, with all its painful separations, and all its inroads on the ties of friendship, and all its agonies and its wailings for departed kindred; he will take you where ingratitude, and treachery, and dissolution, shall be alike unknown; he will unite you with the church of the first born, with those who, being made perfect, cannot be loved too fondly or confided in too freely; and he will unite you with them by bonds of

affection which never can be broken, but which shall grow stronger, and closer, and more endearing, as eternity rolls on.

Here you have the plague of sin to trouble and torment you; wherever you are, and whatever you do, Satan tempts, the world allures, your own hearts deceive and betray you into its indulgencies; and thus dishonouring your nature and offending your God, amidst all your labours to be conformable to the divine will, you feel a bitterness of spirit more galling and intolerable by far, than can be inflicted by all the external misfortunes and calamities of life. But when your Saviour comes, he will place you where you shall be beyond the reach of temptation, and beyond the fear and the capacity of transgressing; where delighting in the vision of God at once immaculate, and reconciled, and full of love, not a single unholy thought shall ever once glance through your imagination; and where, as it shall be the theme of your gratitude that you have been washed from all your sins in the blood of atonement, so it will be the theme of your rejoicing that no moral stain shall ever again pollute your nature or impair your comfort.

Here your eye and your heart are often pained by the sight of abounding iniquity: But when your Saviour comes he will conduct you into a region as pure as it is happy-all whose objects are holy, all whose pursuits are holy, all whose

inhabitants are holy, even as God himself is holy,

Here the very best services you can render— the most conscientious obedience you can yield —the highest attainments you can make in goodness and in virtue, are mixed with much imperfection and weakness, with many shortcomings and violations of duty. But when your Saviour comes, he will so refine and exalt the powers of your moral constitution, and so surround you with all that can give them their highest and their purest exercise, as to elevate you above all the errors which now cleave to your fallen huma, nity to carry you forward with uninterrupted impulse in your career of intellectual and spiritual excellence, and so far as the creature can resemble the Creator, to make you "perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Here all your enjoyments, however exquisite, and however multiplied, and however prolonged, are but mingled at the best, unsatisfactory, uncertain, and soon over. But when your Saviour comes, he will impart to you a happiness suited to all the capacities of your renewed and perfected nature, overflowing in its abundance, unalloyed in every pleasure of which it consists, large as the largest wishes of your heart, and immortal as the souls that are to enjoy it,-as the uncreated source from which it is to flow.