ch we should avoid; not the fear of punishment, which is
not at all degrading, but the being insensible to the love of Christ and
of goodness; and so being capable of receiving no other motive than the
fear of punishment alone. With such natures, to withhold punishment,
would be indeed to make Christ the minister of sin; to make mercy, that
is, lead to evil, and not to good. For them, the law never is dead, and
never will be. Here, of course, in this first life, as I have called it,
punishment indeed goes but a little way: it is very easy for a hardened
nature to defy all that could be laid upon it here in the way of actual
compulsion. Our only course is to cut short the time of trial, when we
find a nature in whom that trial cannot end in good. Still there may be
those in whom this life here, like their greater life which shall last
for ever, will have far more to do with punishment than with kindness;
they will be living all their time under the law. Continue this to our
second life, and the law then will be no less alive, and they will never
be dead to it, nor will it be ever dead to them. And however a hardened
nature may well despise the punishments of its first life,--punishments,
whose whole object is correction, and not retribution,--yet, where is
the nature so hard as to endure, in its relations with God, to feel more
of his punishment than of his mercy; to know him for ever as a God of
judgment, and not as a Father of love?

LECTURE XI.

* * * * *

ST. LUKE xxi. 36.

_Watch ye, therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy
to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before
the Son of Man_.

This might be a text for a history of the Christian Church, from its
foundation to this hour, or to the latest hour of the world's existence.
We might observe how it Lad fulfilled its Lord's command; with what
steadiness it had gone forward on its course, with the constant hope of
meeting Him once again in glory. We might see how it had escaped all
these things that were to come to pass: tracing its course amidst the
manifold revolutions of the world, inward and outward. In the few words,
"all these things that shall come to pass," are contained all the events
of the last eighteen hundred years: indistinct and unknown to us, as
long as they are thus folded up together; but capable of being unrolled
before our eyes in a long order, in which should