and are at length, like Manasseh, driven among the thorns, repine not that the emissaries of wrath have overtaken you, and that your doom is privation and punishment. Oh! be content to wear the fetters of sorrow for a season, and to be made the "prisoners of hope." The God of mercy, who designed the heavy blow, intends it for ultimate good. Weep not then, O sinner, without some mixture of consolation, when thou art carried away into the strange land of adversity. Far better is it to be arrested by the messengers of heaven, than to become the prey of the armies of hell. The looks of the first may be stern and vengeful, but there is mercy shining in the rear. The others but deepen into darker shades of wrath, and exult with fiercer malignity, as they witness the augmenting pangs of their unhappy victims. Oh! terrible state of utter desolation and abandonment! The soul is then carried a living captive to the house of everlasting bondage. The body is left a ruined tenement, the loathsome seat of vileness and corruption, the unrelinquished prey of the subterranean spoiler. Never shall it be built up again, as were the battered walls of Jerusalem on the retirement of the besiegers, until the hour when the Son of Man shall appear in the clouds of heaven,-to call it from the damps of earth, to the fiery lake -from the worm that fed sweetly upon its perishing fragments, to the worm that shall gnaw for ever its undecaying structure. The case of Manasseh affords us here no parallel. Earthly sufferings dwindle into a point, when compared with the torments of the imprisoned damned. Earthly captivity may have an end, when the tear of repentance falls to appease the wrath of Heaven. Manasseh in chains is not the sinner in hell for his case was yet within the pale of mercy. And you, brethren, are still spared, whether smarting under the rod of correction, or yet untouched by the blight of sorrow. You have already glided on from the opening day of the year through two of its monthly stages. You have been permitted to enter upon another of those sacred intervals which our church has consecrated to the solemand repentance. What have Has the work of Has the work of grace been nity of reflection you been doing? going on in the soul? Has the religion of Jesus Christ become the actuating principle of the life? Some, perhaps, have in reality begun to turn and repent, snatched like firebrands out of the fire. Others may be still pursuing the crooked path of the froward in heart, reckless of the scriptural denouncement," Be sure your sin will find you out." Oh! let such remember that time is rapidly wearing away, and that the longsuffering of God will at length be exhausted. To every impenitent transgressor death is the signal for unsheathing the sword of vengeance. The hand of Omnipotence draws it from the scabbard, and the legions of Satan receive it. From them, alas! there is no escape, and you know not how soon they may burst upon you. Turn, then, oh! turn unto the Lord, while he is still waiting to be gracious. Listen to his own expostulation with his people :-"O house of Israel, are not my ways equal? Are not your ways unequal? Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions, so iniquity shall not be your ruin. Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit for why will ye die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God; wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye." 54 SERMON IV. MANASSEH HUMBLED AND RESTORED. 2 Chron. xxxiii. 12, 13. And when he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly : before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him and he was intreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem, into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord he was God. HUMAN life is a scene of great and diversified movement. Like the shiftings of dramatic representation, there is a continual change of the characters, as well as of the spectacle. And there is one great presiding Being who holds in his hands the entire regulation of the machinery by which the whole system of sublunary events |