kingdom prepared for you.' More than a mansion, a city, a province a kingdom, is yours; honor in its fountain; unbounded resources; freedom and dominion not to be questioned; royalty shared with the King of kings. A kingdom prepared, adapted in all its arrangements to your renewed natures; a state in which your lofty aspirations and desires have been amply and expressly provided for. While on earth you evinced the royalty of your descent; you exercised dominion over sin; you sought to give laws to the world; to establish a new reign upon earth; you cultivated the noblest principles; pursued high and regal objects; now realize your most enlarged desires, ascend your thrones, and assume your crowns. The kingdom was prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Your happiness engaged the eternal mind before the world began: he purposed it, planned it, secured it, ages before your existence. If wisdom rejoiced, from eternity, in the habitable parts of the earth; if she shared her delights, prospectively, with the sons of men, while they would be passing their probationary state, how much more would she love to ponder the vision of their final glorification in heaven; if the bare anticipation of providing for their reception on earth, of mingling with them, taking to them blessings from heaven, and seeing them provisionally happy in the low vale of mortality; if the prospect of this filled her with joy, how much more would the completion of all her plans, and the consummation of their happiness, in the crowns and thrones of the heavenly state, engage her care and enrapture her with delight. Come possess a kingdom which existed for you in the divine idea before the earth itself was made.

O what a welcome this! Yet vast as it is, he seems only to ease his infinite heart in uttering it. What fragrant breathings of grace, filling the universe with vital odors!

What ravishing accents to those addressed! they will feel that till then they never heard the sound of music! Then first will they begin to respire. Then will their glory reach its meridian to know no decline. Then will their joy attain its fulltide mark, to know no ebb. Less than this would not satisfy the blessed Lord himself. For this he guaranteed, as the reward of his mediation; on this his heart has ever been set. Could he not bring forth, on the occasion, all the reserved treasures of the Godhead, he would account himself dishonored and defeated. But even he shall be satisfied: even He, as he looks on his people, shall say, both for himself and for them, 'It is enough. Glory shall then cast off its last veil; and as it offers itself to their fulleyed view, and looks forth upon them, they shall open to it their inmost souls, they shall themselves become glory.

'Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' Of heaven it is said it was prepared for the righteous; prepared for them from the foundation of the world: but it is not said of hell that it was prepared for the ungodly; that was prepared originally for the devil and his angels. Hell did not form a primary part of the creation; there was a time when there was no hell in the universe; such a place did not enter into God's primitive design; it was, so to speak, accidental, made necessary by sin; it was an after-creation, forced on the Almighty that he might provide a receptacle for guilt. Now, if he prepared heaven from the first, it shows that he created man to be happy and if he did not from the first prepare a hell, it shows that he did not create any for misery. No, hell was not provided, its flames were not kindled at first for man, but for Satan and his angels. Yet, being prepared, the dreadful place can receive any other

rebels as well as they: and as sinners league with them now, and do the works of the devil, they must finally share in the same suffering, in the same place. The sinner renders their place his own; and the sentence of the last day ratifies the awful arrangement.

And who can tell the terrible import of this curse! A curse uttered by God: by the lips of him whose supreme delight it is to bless! What must sin be, that it can force a curse from infinite goodness; that it can move the divine temperament to displeasure; that it can make it an appropiate act, a worthy, becoming, and even godlike act for infinite love to utter a malediction on the work of his own hands, ! And such a malediction! Every accent is lightning; every word is loaded with misery, is full of perdition. It is a sentence, every clause of which adds a hell to the misery already denounced, till it reaches the climax of woe-a sentence in which one vial after another of Almighty wrath is poured out, till the whole is discharged; the wrath of God distilled--a sentence, in which are gathered up, and compressed into one, all the curses of God, requiring an eternity to comprehend and exhaust them. But it is not for tongue to describe it; it is for the heart to ponder, for the imagination to conceive; and muse on it the most fertile conception may, without any danger of excess. Then first will the ungodly know what is meant by punishment. Then will they begin to estimate truly the dreadful nature of their situation. And oh! when the prospect shall first open upon them, when they shall find that God himself is against them, when they shall hear themselves outlawed by divine proclamation, when they shall find that on God saying depart, every thing else, every being, every place, but hell, shall repeat depart; casting them forth, disowning, refusing them sympathy and refuge; when they shall feel that the curse is made to enter and possess the very centre of their being;

that it is not a mere stigma branded on their foreheads, but a substantial curse, written upon their hearts in characters of living fire; burnt in, scorching and consuming their immortality; that they have the wrath of God for a soul, will they not call on universal nature to mourn with them to aid them in expressing their mighty grief, to assist them in bewailing the immensity and eternity of their loss?

'And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.' Then the future punishment of the finally impenitent will be eternal. They shall not see life;' 'their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched.' If they continued to deteriorate here under a remedial economy of grace, is their character likely to be ameliorated in a state where all the elements of universal evil shall be collected and combined together? Whatever may be the punishment inflicted upon them from without, it is certain its sting will be supplied from an angry conscience, and its hottest fervors from the inkindled passions within them; and as these belong to the soul, as they number among its essential qualities, they will be immortal like the soul itself. And not only has our Lord employed the same term to denote the duration of misery, which he has applied to the duration of happiness, thus implying that they will be parallel to each other; not only has he employed posi tive terms, which, indeed, may be understood in various degrees of latitude; he has also used negative terms, and a negation admits of no degrees; he has spoken of future punishment as a state of endless privation. He has threatened it as the worst evil, the consummation of all evil; but if it were temporary and remedial, if it meant only a quantum of suffering bearing a relation to eventual happiness, it should rather be spoken of, like the present afflictions of the righteous, not in the language of threatening, but of promise. But the wicked shall go away into everlasting

punishment' and though it may now be impossible, with our present human feelings and limited faculties, to comprehend the idea; for aught we know the existence of eternal misery may hereafter be shown not only to consist with, but to be even the necessary effect of a perfect government, and of supreme goodness.

But while ultimate justice shall be conducting the wicked away into everlasting darkness, what shall become of the righteous? They will be severed from the heirs of wrath, as far as heaven and hell assunder. Our Lord teaches us that they shall see God:' whether the bodily eye shall share in the vision or not, may probably depend on the degree in which their material part shall be refined and made spiritual; but they shall see him with that which is the true organ of sight in divine things, the renewed heart; they shall behold every feature of his image reflected in the mirror of their purified nature. They shall be 'equal unto the angels ;' they shall be able to approach as closely to the throne of God, and to gaze as stedfastly on the unveiled splendors of that throne: they will be able to fill every office that angels fill, to soar to equal heights, and to maintain as untiring a flight in the service of God; they will in every way be worthy of the angelic brotherhood, and able to run with them in the race of divine perfection. They shall then 'be with him where he is, to behold his glory;' to be conducted by him into the inmost recesses of his glory; to see him throw open and bring out all the glory that is peculiarly his; to be the objects on which that glory shall fall and accumulate: to have their nature wedded to happiness and him for ever. Then shall his ardent desire be gratified, 'that they all may be one in him:' by being one in all, he will make all one; by being all in every part, he will become the unity of the whole; so that they shall ever be viewed, and spoken of, and treated as