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your Christian privileges, when you value them not yourself? How can you tell of a sign to them, when all, but your own heart, see and grieve, God and holy Angels above, and penitent fellow sinners on earth, that as yet you regard no sign from heaven, and to every sign, significantly speak its instant dismissal from your thoughts?

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If, my brethren, in your hardened indifference to these your bondmen in soul as in body, your understanding has been convinced by the evidences of Christianity, and so you are compelled to believe it true, I will speak to you a day, a great and terrible day, in Christianity made known to us all, wherein these matters will be finally adjusted. My argument demands the supposition, which God of his redeeming make utterly void! that you die, as you live, regardless of the interests of your own soul, and therefore indifferent to the souls at this moment tabernacled in bodies over which, by human law, you have sovereign controul. The distinctions, under which you lived and died in this life, on that day will not be recognised. You must stand on equal terms with your earthly bondmen, and each be judged according to his works. Should he also be condemned

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for the sins which he committed against the light of conscience, your condemnation must be heavier far than his. Over eternally lost Sodom and Gomorrah the Saviour himself declared, that a less bitter portion awaited them at the Judgment, than those people and languages among which the light of his Gospel offered itself to shine. This will be the illustration of your own judgment from himself. Your bondman on earth knew not the Lord; that Lord you never taught him: he perished in his ignorance; that ignorance you never heartily sought to remove. He sinned from the corruption that was within him his vices were unchecked by you; nay, more than this, you, or those who personally represented you, promoted their direful increase. An example was before him, and taught him the practical and contagious lesson, that a sensual life is the end of man; and that "Let us eat and "drink, for to-morrow we die," was not more adopted in the creed of the depraved heathen, than made manifest in the life of him who professed Christianity. He felt all this in its pernicious influence over him here. Sin gained that empire over his soul, which you exercised over his body; and sin for ever destroyed both you

and him his slavery and

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dominion were

each accompanied by sin on earth, and each must then be for ever slaves to Satan, under "the wages of sin," which "is death."

If this anticipated description of an event declared in the eternal verity of that Word, which you say you believe to be the Word of God, awaken in you one single thought upon your own soul's slavery to the law of sin, it will soon progressively advance to better things for the enslaved in body as in soul, who are under you. You cannot learn to think for your own soul's redemption in Christ, without a heartfelt desire, and an immediate endeavour to promote theirs. This is the Scripture test: and none other can be safe. Humbled before the cross of the same ever blessed Redeemer, you will then, but then only, join in heart and voice, with your poor dependents in other climes, in magnifying the name whereby alone you may each be saved. And then will you abound, both of you, as in knowledge, so in a most glorious hope; as in Christian relationship, so in recognition of a Christian and a reciprocal duty: he shall learn what shall teach of the same all-gracious God, and Saviour, and Holy Sanctifier; and both thus profit by this

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"sign of the times:" a dispensation soon to end in the certain arrival of that time and kingdom, in which we are all equally interested, "where there is neither Greek nor Jew, cir"cumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond or free: but Christ is all, "and in all." (Col. iii. 11.)

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SERMON IV.

"THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES."

2 PETER i. 19, 20.

We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts: `knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation.

PROPHECY is the pledge given by Almighty God of his superintending providence in regard to all that is future; and human experience is the demonstrative proof of the same providence in all that is past. The holy Word of God greatly abounds in the language of prophecy; so much abounds that it will be found, at the termination of all things, to have been a regular chain of history in the great outline of God's government over the world. We are justified, therefore, by the

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