So that nothing remains in concluding this dis course but to ask you, what are your intentions? What designs have ye formed? What projects do ye resolve to pursue? What are your aims? Have ye any thing more precious than your souls? Can ye conceive a nobler hope than that of being saved? Can ye propose a more advantageous end than your own salvation? Can ye persuade yourselves that there is a greater felicity than the fruition of God? Will ye destroy yourselves? Do ye renounce those delightful hopes that are set before you in the gospel? And shall all the fruit of our ministry be to accuse and confound you before God? Young man, thou mayest live fifty or sixty years: but at the expiration of those fifty or sixty years, time finishes and eternity begins. People of mature age, your race is partly run; ten, fifteen, or twenty years more, through the dissipations and employments inseparable from your lives, will vanish with an inconceivable rapidity; and then, time finishes and eternity begins with you. And ye old people, a few years, a few months, a few days more, and behold your race is at an end; behold your time finishes and your eternity begins. And can we resist this idea! Alas! what hearts! what Christians! what a Church! Grant Almighty God that our prayers may supply the defect of our exhortations; may we derive from thy bosom of infinite mercies what we despair of obtaining from the insensibility of our hearers! O thou Author of religion, thou divine Spirit, from whom alone could proceed this beautiful system which thou hast condescended to reveal to us, impress it in all its parts on our minds. Pluck up every plant which thy good hand hath not planted. Triumph over all the obstacles that our sins oppose to thine empire. Shut the gulfs of hell. Open the gates of heaven. selves. Amen. Save us, even in spite of our To the Father, to the Son, to the Holy Ghost, be honour and glory, dominion and power for ever. Amen. & SERMON II. The Eternity of God. Preached in the French Church at Rotterdam on the first Lord's Day of the Year 1724. 2 PETER iii. 8. Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. We could not meditate on the words which you have heard, my brethren, without recollecting that miraculous cloud which conducted the Israelites through the desert. It was all luminous on one side, and all opake on the other.* The Jews say that it was the throne, or the triumphal chariot of that Angel who marched at the head of the camp of Israel; of that Angel whom they call the Prince of the world, the Shekinah, the presence of the divino Majesty, the Deity itself. It is not needful to examine this opinion. I do not know whether the pillar of a cloud were a throne of God, but it was a beautiful symbol of the Deity. What is the Deity in regard to us? If it be the most radiant of all light, it is at the same time the most covered with *See Rabbi Menachem in Parasch. Beschalec. Exod. xiv. 19. fol. 63. edit. de Venise 5283. S. darkness. Let the greatest philosophers, let the most extraordinary geniusses elevate their meditatations, and take the loftiest flights of which they are capable, in order to penetrate into the nature of the divine essence, the stronger efforts they make to understand this fearful subject, the more will they be absorbed in it: the nigher they approach the rays of this sun, the more will they be dazzled with its lustre. But yet, let the feeblest and most confined genius seek instructions, in meditating on the divine grandeurs, to direct his faith, to regulate his conduct, and to sweeten the miseries that inbitter this valley of tears; he shall happily experience what the prophet did: does he look to him? he shall be lightened, Ps. xxxiv. 5. God presents himself to your eyes to-day, as he once presented himself to the Israelites in that marvellous phenomenon. Light on one side, darkness on the other. "A thousand years are with the Lord as one day, and one day as a thousand years." Let the greatest philosophers, let those extraordinary beings in whose formation God seems to have united an angelic intelligence to a human body, let them preach in our stead, let them fully explain the words of my text. From what abysses of existence does the perfect Being derive that duration, which alike overspreads the present, the future, and the past? how conceive a continuation of existence without conceiving a succession of time? how conceive a succession of time, without conceiving that he who is subject to it acquires what he had not be fore? how affirm that he who acquires what he had |