applauded as characters of superior excellence, have no true humiliation before God, no earnest desires after a Saviour, no real delight in holy exercises, no fixedness of mind to glorify their God. What shall I say of them all ? Have they any just views of sin ? Have they any suitable apprehensions of the state to which they have been brought by means of sin ? Do not their whole spirit and temper shew, that they think light of it ? and, if it were set before them in all its malignity and ill desert, would they not say, that the representation was exaggerated, and that the person who gave them the repre- sentation was deceived ? They need not utter any words, to betray the thoughts of their hearts: these are sufficiently evi- dent by the absence of all those feelings which a just estimate of sin would create : and exactly as those who imagine that God will never punish sin, are said to " contemn God^," so may those, who think that sin will not involve us in misery, be justly said to contemn sin, and, in heart at least, if not in act, to " make a mock at it."]
2. By those who discountenance piety in others —
[Though a form of godliness will gain us applause, no man begins to experience the power of it without exposing himself to the censure of an ungodly world. Let a person be really broken-hearted and contrite, as every sinner ought to be; let him be seeking the Lord Jesus Christ with his whole heart ; let him turn his back upon the vanities of the world, and sepa- rate himself from the society of those who would ensnare his soul; let him give himself to reading the holy Scriptures, to devout meditation, to fervent prayer, to a diligent use of all the ap- pointed ordinances of religion ; let him join himself to the Lord's people, and choose the excellent of the earth for his compa- nions ; let him, in a word, be in earnest in fleeing from the wrath to come, and in laying hold on eternal life ; let him do this, and his nearest friends will instantly dissuade him from such a course : they will represent to him the inexpediency of such extravagant measures ; they will complain of him as en- thusiastic and righteous over-much. They will impute the change that has taken place in him to weakness, or vanity, or perhaps to hypocrisy and a desire of human estimation. Now then I ask, whence would such a disapprobation of his ways arise? Are they not such ways as are marked out by God? Are they not the very footsteps of the flock who have gone before him ? Is not this course precisely such as common sense would dictate, and such as all mankind would approve, if the bodily life were in danger ? Who would complain of earnest- ness in a shipwrecked mariner ? Who would deride the cries and fears and efforts of a person endeavouring to escape from
e Ps. X. 13.