tribunal, and fans up in his
bosom the burning flames of hell! He may lie down on his pillow, but
spectres haunt his brain; and awake, asleep, at home, abroad, he finds
that he has rendered his own existence a curse. He lives in misery,
and in darkness expires.

Let us next notice the thief, who plunders our property. His crime is
of less magnitude than the above, but his guilt is in proportion. No
one by such means has ever enriched himself. He, who obtains property
by dishonorable means, is ignorant of its value, and will dishonorably
spend it. He has forgotten that God governs the world. Our
state-prisons and penitentiaries not only (so far as human laws are
concerned) reveal his fate, but speak his woes. But suppose he escape
detection, and is only exposed to the naked and fearful grandeur of
that law which God has written in the heart. He hears its thunders,
and he feels its fires. He his taken from some fellow being his hard
earnings; and sees him and perhaps his children mourning their
misfortune and suffering the miseries of adversity. Guilt takes
possession of his soul, and misery, which the hand of time cannot
extinguish, rolls its dark waves of damnation upon him, and drowns his
dearest joys, while poverty marks him for her own.

God has so constituted his plans in the government of the world that
the plunderer cannot prosper. Inward horrors and fears of detection
abstract his mind from the proper duties of life, so that misfortune
and defeat find their way into his plans, which might otherwise by
calm deliberation have succeeded, and disappointment and misery,
satiety and disgust, and all the evils that are the offspring of his
iniquity, commingling in a thousand ways, render his existence
wretched. Relying upon dishonesty for support, he becomes but a
midnight beggar. His slumbers are haunted by frightful dreams; and
fear of detection, prisons and dungeons are torturing his imagination
and incessantly sporting with his broken peace. He is a stranger to
those solid joys arising from the practice of virtue, is doomed to
encounter all the miseries that attend his ill-chosen career, and to
drink every drug of wormwood and gall that heaven has mingled in the
cup of dishonor. He lives a nuisance and pest to society, and dies
covered with infamy.

In all this we shall see the truth of our text exemplified, that God
rules in the kingdom of men, and brings punishment, not only upon a
haughty monarch seated on t