stone of God's perfect law, have been no better than splendid sins ; or, rather, they have been one con- tinued accumulation of guilt and misery against the day of wrath. If we try ourselves only by the letter of the law, we shall see nothing of this : but if we enter into the spirit of it, and examine ourselves by that, there will be no terms too humiliating for us whereby to express our sinfulness and our desert of God's wrath and indignation.
Permit me, then, to call you to this self-abasing state. Permit me to wrest out of your hands that delusive plea, that you have done no harm. I pray you to take judgment as your line, and righteousness as your plummet, and to judge of yourselves as God judgeth. It is by his judgment, and not by your own, that you must stand or fall : and his judgment will be according to truth.
Were the condemnation that awaits men to affect only this present life, we might be contented to leave them under their delusions. But we must shortly appear before the heart-searching God, to receive our final doom. Then the book of his remembrance, wherein all our actions, words, and thoughts, were written, will be opened; then will our own con- sciences also attest the truth of every accusation that shall be brought against us ; and then, above all, shall we see the equity, both of the test whereby we shall be tried, and of the sentence that shall be pronounced against us. And then there will be no respect of persons with God. The learned and the dignified will stand on the same footing with the most illiterate peasant ; or rather, will have a severer judgment, in proportion to the advantages which they have neg- lected to improve. The Lord grant that these con- siderations may be duly laid to heart ; and that all of us, while yet the opportunity is afforded, may abase ourselves before God, with all humility of mind, and with that brokenness of heart which God will not despise !
I must not close this subject without observing, in the second place, What a folly it is ever to think of