ration? Indeed, Christ's complaint hath place here, whereunto
shall our generation be likened? For he hath lamented to us and we have
not mourned; he hath piped to us, and we have not danced. We will neither
be made glad nor sad by these things. How long hath the word of the Lord
been preached unto you, and whose heart trembled at it? Shall the lion
roar, and the beasts of the field not be afraid? The lion hath roared
often to us. God hath spoken often, who will not fear? And yet who doth
fear? Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, in congregations every day,
that terrible trumpet of Mount Sinai that proclaims war between God and
men, and yet will not the people be afraid? Amos iii. 6, 8. Have not every
one of you heard your transgressions told you? Are ye not guilty of all
the breaches of God's holy law? Hath not the curse been pronounced against
you for these, and yet who believes the report? Ye will not do so much as
to sit down and examine your own guiltiness, till your mouth be stopped
and till ye put it in the dust before God's justice. And when we speak of
hell unto you, and of the curses of God passed upon all men, you bless
yourselves in your own eyes, saying, peace, peace, even though ye walk in
the imagination of your own hearts, add sin to sin, and "drunkenness to
thirst," Deut. xxix. 20. Now, when all this is told you, that many shall
be condemned and few saved, and that God is righteous to execute judgment
and render vengeance on you, ye say within yourselves, For God's sake, is
all this true? But where is the mourning at his lamentations, when there
is no feeling or believing them to be true? Your minds are not convinced
of the law of God, and how shall your hearts be moved? Christ Jesus
laments unto you, as he wept over Jerusalem, "How often would I have
gathered thee, and thou wouldst not!" What means he? Certainly, he would
have you to sympathize with your own condition. When he that is in himself
blessed, and needs not us, is so affected with our misery, how should we
sympathize with our own misery! God seems to be affected with it, though
there be no shadow of turning in him. Yet he clothes his words with such
affections, "Why will ye die?" "O that my people had hearkened unto me!"
He sounds the proclamation before the stroke, if it be possible to move
you to some sense of your condition, that concerns you most nearly. Yet
who judges himself that he may not be judged? The ministers of the Lord,
or Chris