be well with the righteous," it must and should " go ill with the wicked d?"]
4. How little men are influenced by the things they profess most to believe —
[They profess to believe that there is a God : yet they do not love him, or fear him, or trust in him, or regard him, any more than if there were no such Being. They profess to believe that they have an immortal soul ; yet they pay no more attention to its interests, than if it were not to survive the body. They profess to believe that there will be a day of judgment, wherein they shall give account of themselves to God : yet they are not at all solicitous to know how their account stands ; they bestow no pains in preparing for that day; they presume that others are happy, and that they shall fare as well as those who have gone before them ; and thus they hazard their eternal welfare on a mere groundless surmise. They profess to believe that death will put a period to their day of grace, and that it may snatch them away suddenly, and unawares : yet they live as securely, as if they could call days and years their own : " Soul, take thine ease," is the constant language of their hearts. Now, whence is all this ? Will any one say, that these men are thoroughly persuaded even of the things which they profess most to believe? they certainly are not : they give a general assent to them, because they have been educated in these particular sentiments, and because their reason cannot but acquiesce in them as true : but as for the faith which realizes invisible things, which is " the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen," they have no portion of it ; they are shut up altogether in unbelief.]
The prevalence of unbelief being thus unquestion- ably proved, we proceed to point out,
II. The folly of it—
A just view of this subject will soon convince us, that the very men who glory in their unbelief, and say, " Wisdom shall die with usc," are indeed influ- enced by the most foolish and fatal of all principles : for, with respect to unbelief,
1. It cannot avert the evils which it affects to despise —
[Unbelief can never make void the truth of God. It did not in the days of old. When Satan said to our first parents, " Ye shall not surely die," and they credited his testimony in
d Isai. iii. 10, 11. e j0b xii. 2.