The Substance of a Sermon

THE SUBSTANCE OF A SERMON

Preached On The Occasion.

“If the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down alive into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord. And it came to pass, as he made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder which was under them: and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them, and they perished from among the congregation. And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also,” Numbers 16:30 - 34.

OUR inconsideration requires the loudest calls; and our hardness of heart the heaviest blows. When we were warned by the loud, penitential cries of a giddy, dying young man,f4 upon whom God had laid his hand with uncommon severity; crowds of thoughtless hearers attended the church at his burial. I preached to them from these alarming words of Isaiah: “When thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. Lord, when thy hand is lifted up they will not see, but they shall see.” Many of you saw, and some felt, on that awful occasion. But alas! the relentings of the most ceased with my warning, or vanished with the next morning’s dew. Nay, instead of learning righteousness, too many, by stifling their convictions, hardened themselves, turned the savour of life into the savour of death, and learned to sin with less remorse than ever. What can be done to awaken our stupid, drowsy, dead consciences? Must God lift up his hand in a more conspicuous manner? In order to turn our hearts, must he now subvert our fields, or turn the course of our river? But why do I ask the question? Has he not wrought the double wonder at once? O ye ungodly colliers, that poison the bowels of the earth with your impure and impious breath, see what destruction he has brought upon the solid element in which you get a maintenance.

Ye profane watermen, whose wickedness overflows all the dikes of human and Divine laws oftener than the Severn does its banks, see what a curse has overtaken the river on which you earn your bread! And ye sinners of all ranks and occupations, see the finger of a sin avenging God, laid upon this dismal spot; and by the desolation you behold here, judge of that which our iniquities would long since have brought upon all the earth, if Jehovah had not the patience and long suffering of a God.

However, the axe of his vengeance is not thrown by; it still is laid at the root of the tree; nay, it is lifted high, to strike a blow, general as our wickedness, repeated as our crimes, fearful as our imprecations. But punishment is God’s strange work: and his Son, whom we put to open shame, and crucify afresh by our sins, is not yet weary of interceding for us. Yesterday, when the destroyer asked leave to bury us in heaps of ruins, as he did Job’s feasting sons and daughters; or to bring in an unexpected flood upon us, as he did upon the world of the ungodly in the days of Noah; our compassionate Mediator interposed, and said, “Though they cumber the ground like barren fig trees, let them alone this day, this year also, till I shall dig about them. If they bear fruit, well; and if not, then after that thou shalt cut them down.”

And now, sinners, see with grateful astonishment the prevalence of our Lord’s prayer! We are spared! But tremble with godly fear at the literal fulfilment of his declaration: to make us bring forth fruit meet for repentance, he actually digs about us at a most alarming rate. What trenches! - to rouse our souls he tosses our grounds: to stop us in our sinful career, he absorbs our highway; and to water in our hearts the withered plant of God’s fear, he dams up our navigable river. Nay, he does more still. The Gospel mentions those who take the kingdom of heaven by violence; few of us, alas! seem to be of that happy number; in general we act as if we would storm the kingdom of darkness. We put on the whole armour of Satan; we take up the shield of unbelief, the helmet of presumption, the girdle of deceit, the breastplate of unrighteousness, and the sword of the evil spirit, the word of a lying world. Thus equipped, with undaunted confidence we tread upon the Divine mercies, and go on from sin to sin, from the follies of childhood to the vanity or profligacy of youth, and if we are not killed in the field of intemperance, we crown all by the worldly mindedness and obduracy of old age. Nothing turns us, nothing stops us. But now the angel of the Lord stands with a drawn sword in our way, as he did in that of Balaam. We seem determined to possess ourselves of Tophet; and to carry hell, as it were, sword in hand: but God fortifies it against our desperate assaults. See, sinners, see these newly - formed mounts, and stupendous chasms! Are they not ramparts of his raising, and ditches of his sinking, to make you desist from your mad enterprise? And if, with curses in your mouths, stolen goods in your hands, revenge in your hearts, or unpardoned sin upon your consciences, you force your way through these uncommon bulwarks, to the chambers of death: will you not doubly deserve to be devoured by the sword, which has been so dreadfully brandished over this desolated spot?

If impenitency is the fixed object of our choice; if still shutting our ears to all ordinary and extraordinary calls, and tossing Christ’s easy yoke from off our necks, we equally harden our hearts against the yearning bowels of God’s mercy, and the terrible warnings of his justice; shall we not make our dangerous case desperate? Is it not enough to have paid no attention to the whispers of his grace, must we also slight the thunders of his power? Shall the dreadful peal that was rung here yesterday only lull us asleep on the brink of destruction? By rendering our obstinacy more inexcusable, shall the disregarded terrors of the Lord have no other effect, than that of accidentally fitting us for the aggravated punishment of those relentless cities, where Christ wrought his mighty works in vain? Shall we secure to ourselves the torments of that Jezebel, to whom God gave time to repent, and who nevertheless repented not? Is not the hell of Tyre and Sidon terrible enough for us? Must we also rush into that of Chorazin and Bethsaida? Or do we flatter ourselves that, because the scale of Divine patience yet preponderates, no hills of guilt, no mountains of iniquity can possibly turn the scale of righteous vengeance?

If any are in that fatal error, permit me to undeceive them, by producing the unhappy witnesses mentioned in my text, Dathan and Abiram, with their wives, children, and servants. And that we may improve at once God’s alarming severity toward them, and the riches of his long suffering toward us, inquire we,

FIRST, into their crime, and our imitation of it. Consider we, in the SECOND place, What new thing the Lord did to destroy them from off the earth. Let us,

THIRDLY, Improve the sight of this dreadful phenomenon, by which he warns us to repent, lest the earth swallow us up also. And then you will give me leave to conclude by a suitable address to several classes of hearers.

And thou, mighty God, who, in the midst of judgment, didst yesterday remember mercy, remember it now. Second by thy blessing the strokes of thy rod, and the truths of thy Gospel. Gracious Lord of the harvest! give the increase to the seed that shall be sown in a field which thou hast so strangely ploughed up. And while thy feeble messenger calls upon this multitude to turn, “turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned.” The work is worthy of Omnipotence, worthy of thee. Take then to thyself thy great power and reign. It is thy prerogative to break rocky hearts, as thou hast broken those rocks: and to turn the stream of human affections, as thou hast turned that of yonder river. Once more, great God, make bare thy powerful arm: and to - day work here as gloriously in the moral, as thou didst yesterday in the natural world.

I. Inquire we then, FIRST, what was Dathan and Abiram’s crime? Had they committed your excesses, O ye who are “mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink;” and who (while your indignant neighbours, perhaps your own relations, or creditors, starve) continue adding surfeiting to feasting, or drunkenness to thirst? No: they left that crime, I shall not say to brutes, (because many of them are not brutish enough to commit it,) but to you who make it your chief delight to turn your heated mouths into smoking chimneys, your overloaded stomachs into stewing pots, and your enormous bellies into moving hogsheads. Had they contrived to meet the bottomless pit, by driving perpendicular ways toward the centre of the earth, with mouths full of prayers for other people’s damnation and their own? No: they left that diabolical iniquity to you, impious colliers, who send as many horrid imprecations toward heaven, as if you wanted to rend the roof of your pits over your heads, or to kindle the sulphur of Divine vengeance about your ears. Had they endeavoured to accumulate gold by cheating, stealing, or oppression? No: although they were Jews, they probably detested those crimes, in the commission of which so many nominal Christians are grown brazen - faced and grey - headed. Had they violated matrimonial engagements by seducing their neighbours’ wives, or by fixing upon their daughters an indelible mark of infamy? No: they regarded the seventh commandment; and my text speaks of their wives and children, not of their whores and bastards. Or had they learned Atheism of Pharaoh? Did they say like him, or like our modern infidels, “Who is the Lord? I know not the Lord!” Who is the Messiah? I will not bow to the Messiah! No: on the contrary, they were ambitious of ministering to the Lord, and offering, instead of Aaron, victims that typified the expiatory sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

What was then their crime? “They had provoked the Lord,” says my text. But how? By slighting his servants, exalting themselves, and setting a bad example before their neighbours. “Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram, who said, We will not come up.” By this lordly refusal, in which they persisted to the last, they countenanced lawless liberty, encouraged the contempt of God’s ministers, stamped the neglect of his ordinances, and filled up the measure of their iniquity. A complication of crimes this, which was so much the more heinous, as their rank was more eminent, and their influence over the inferior part of the congregation greater than that of other Israelites.

I grant that we cannot exactly commit their transgression: Moses and the tabernacle are no more: but have we not our places of worship? And has not one greater than Moses promised, that where two or three are gathered together in his name, there he is in the midst of them? They despised Moses the servant, and we despise Christ, the Son of God. Does this extenuate our crime? Certainly not, if the apostle stated the case justly: hear him, Hebrews 10:28, 29: “He that despised Moses’ law, died without mercy: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and done despite to the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, and I will repay, saith the Lord.”

But let us consider a moment our partial imitation of Dathan’s crime. How many are there among us who, when the book, the providence, the ministers of the Lord, call upon us to forsake our sins, and come out of Babylon, that we may not partake of her plagues, show the invincible obstinacy of Abiram! How many, who, when they are entreated to haste to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the New Jerusalem, return, by their haughty or careless behaviour, the answer of rebellious Dathan, “We will not come up:” or that of those more civil rebels, who made light of a solemn invitation to the Gospel feast, and said, “Pray have me excused!”

Numbers of us pay as little regard to the form as to the power of godliness. We are even void of religious decency: the return of the Lord’s day invites, the bells call, our baptismal vow binds, our Christian name reminds, the canons of the Church bid, the law of the land compels, the fourth commandment enjoins, conscience urges, the day of judgment rushes on, and greedy death stalks about: all say, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, and go up to the house, to the table of the Lord.” To give the utmost solemnity to the general invitation, a multitude of ministers and congregations alternately lift up their voices, and say, “Serve the Lord with gladness, and come before his presence with a song. O go your way into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise:” but what answer do most of us return? Alas! the very answer that cost Dathan and Abiram their lives. Our conduct speaks their insolent language: “We will not come up.” You may celebrate the Lord’s praises, explain his law, preach his Gospel, administer his sacraments if you please; but those means of grace are nothing to us. We will neither seek the Lord in his appointed ways, nor edify our ignorant neighbours by setting them a good example: “We will not come up.” Poor enthusiasts may worship God in the face of the sun; but we people of fashion, we men of parts and learning, we busy tradesmen, we votaries of pleasure, we self - righteous moralists, and we immoral pretenders to morality, are all above paying our Creator a public homage: “We will not come up.” If God will bless us, let him wait upon us in our own houses, or in the fields of vanity: we give him leave; but in deed we are so slothful, or so busy; so proud, profane, or virtuous, that we neither will, can, nor need be at the trouble of going to his temple. “We will not come up.” I repeat it, neglecters of God’s worship, this is the plain language of your conduct; and if you know what passes in your breasts, you will find it is the secret whisper of your hearts.

O ye Christian Dathans, ye lofty Abirams, ye who, like those proud Israelites, are in your respective parishes, “princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown,” the eyes of this populous neighbourhood are upon you, especially the eyes of your poor illiterate colliers, wagoners, and watermen. Do you not consider that they mind your examples rather than God’s precepts? Are you not aware that they follow you as a bleating flock follows the first wandering sheep? Because they cannot read the sacred pages, or even tell the first letters of the alphabet; think you they cannot read, Secret contempt of almighty God, on the sleeves on which they sometimes see you laugh at godliness? And suppose ye they cannot make out, Open pollution of the Sabbaths, when they see the remarkable seats which you so frequently leave empty at church? Do you not know, that the lessons of practical Atheism, which you thus give them in the free school of bad example, they learn without delay, practise without remorse, and teach others with unwearied diligence? Alas! the pattern of indevotion, which you set in the house of God, carries, before you are aware, its baneful influence through a hundred private houses. O! how many are now numbered among the dead, who have taken to the ways of destruction by following you! How many are yet unborn, upon whom a curse will be entailed, in consequence of the spreading plague of irreligion, which their parents have caught from you! And shall not their blood be more or less “required at your hands? Shall not I visit for these things, saith the Lord? Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”

Many of you, indeed, do not carry profaneness so far as to say with Dathan and Abiram, “We will not come up.” You will come to the house of prayer; but alas! do you not turn it, so far as it lies in you, into a house of vanity, by behaving as if your employment there was to see and be seen? or do you not consider it as a house of intrigue, rather than a spiritual infirmary, when you come to gaze upon the person who captivates your affections, rather than to wait upon the heavenly Physician, who wounds by repentance, and heals by a pardon, “that the bones which he hath broken may rejoice?” But, if you do not turn the church into a house of vanity or intrigue, do you not esteem it the house of dulness, a dormitory, a temple of sleep, rather than the house of God? In a word, when you say, Our bodies shall come up; do not your wandering minds too often reply, in imitation of the rebels mentioned in my text, “We will rove over the earth, we will not come up. Or, if we do, it shall be only to draw near to God with our lips, while our hearts are from him, his ways, his ordinances, and his people?” So long as our practice speaks this dreadful language, is it surprising that so few should be the better for going up to the house of the Lord? And that the least hint given by the sons of vanity, that we are wanted at an idle dance, an indecent play, a gaming table, a midnight revel, a bloody sport, &c, should find many of us ready to say, We will do our selves the honour of waiting upon you; “we will go up!” On such occasions as these, when the inflexibility of Dathan would be a virtue, how few, alas! stand out as he did! How very few reply, with the unshaken resolution of Abiram, “We will not come up!”

II. We have seen the crime of those men, and our partial imitation of it: consider we next the dreadful punishment which was inflicted upon them, and which we have so narrowly escaped. They would not come up, therefore Moses rose up, and went unto them; and the elders of Israel followed him. And so will some messenger of Divine vengeance come down to us, if we persist in not going up to the house of prayer, to implore Divine mercy. For “how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation,” and to the last, slight the Saviour in his word, his service, his ambassadors, and the sacramental pledges of his dying love?

A crowd of spectators accompanied the man of God, and when he had bid them depart “from the tents of those wicked men,” he wrapt himself, by a strong faith, in the mantle of Divine power, as St. Peter and St. Paul did afterward, when the one was going to punish lying apostates with sudden death, and the other to strike the sorcerer Elymas with blindness. His pastoral rod became “a rod of iron,” stretched out to break in pieces “vessels of dishonour,” that had “fitted” themselves “for destruction;” and lest the spreading plague of their rebellion should bring spiritual death upon myriads, as an experienced surgeon cuts off a mortified limb, that the infection may not destroy the whole body, or rather, as a minister of that God, who resisteth the proud, and is a “consuming fire to the wicked;” he prepared to cut those dangerous men off from the congregation, and sternly spoke the words of my text.

“If these men die the common death of all men, then the Lord has not sent me; but if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down alive into the pit, then shall ye understand that these men have provoked the Lord. And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them; and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all their goods: they, and all that appertained unto them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them, and they perished from among the congregation. And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them, for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also.” What a strange punishment was this, and how wonderfully adapted to their crime! Their throat, like yours, O profane cursers and swearers, was an open sepulchre; they had opened their mouths against Heaven, and now the earth opens her mouth against them, and swallows them up as the grave. They had made a rent in the congregation, and now God rends the earth under their feet. They had endeavoured to draw sinners into the gulf of destruction, and now they plunge into it themselves, in the presence of those whom they had seduced. What a dreadful emblem was this of the perdition of ungodly men, when they shall hear those dreadful words: “Depart, ye cursed,” and shall sink into the bottomless pit - the pit dug for the ungodly, “for the devil and his angels;” the pit, out of which “the smoke of their torment shall ascend for ever and ever.”

A circumstance mentioned in my text deserves our peculiar attention. Dathan and Abiram cried as they disappeared; but, alas! like the foolish virgins, they cried too late. Those who had inclined to their rebellion, far from running to their help, fled at their cry. And so will your gay companions flee at your groans, O ye impenitent sinners. When you are just falling from a death bed into a noisome grave, they will flee from the room where you shall be executed, lest the executioner (whether it be small pox, or a fever) lay hold on them also; or lest the ghastly image of death, reflected from your pale face, force reflection upon their thoughtless minds, or spoil the diversion they are going to pursue. Again: They cried in the jaws of destruction, but probably not to God. They that do not remember him in the days of their prosperity, too often forget him when sorrow comes upon them as pangs upon a woman. Hence it is that we hear so many crying, “O dear! O dear!” And so few saying in earnest, as the blind beggar, “Jesus, have mercy upon me.” But suppose they had said, O Lud! or O Lord! through mere fright, as too many of us do upon every frivolous occasion through mere surprise, would this have saved them? No: for when the Lord by his prophet did spread forth his hands, they regarded not; and now that the day of vengeance is come, to speak after the manner of men, “he laughs at their calamity, and mocks when their fear cometh,” Proverbs 1:26.

God is love, rather than vindictive justice: nor hath he “any pleasure that the wicked should die.” Hence it is that the “ministration of righteousness,” or righteous mercy, “exceeds in glory.” Nevertheless, says St. Paul, “the ministration of condemnation is glorious. The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God;” yet, when that wrath is wisely overruled, or justly punished, it turns to God’s praise. Every rational being must then answer the end of his existence by glorifying the author of it one way or another. We must all reflect honour upon our Master, either as a gracious rewarder of those that diligently seek him, or a just punisher of those that obstinately offend him. Thus, while the blessed show forth in heaven the praises of his holiness and mercy; the wicked in hell display those of his holiness and justice. Therefore, the destruction of the latter, as well as the salvation of the former, is the proper theme of heavenly songs. Take an instance of it.

No sooner had St. John seen in a prophetic vision the dreadful fall of Babylon, than he heard the heavenly host shouting, “Hallelujah! salvation, and glory, and power to our God! True and righteous are his judgments, for he hath judged the great whore, which corrupted the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hands. And he heard the voice of a great multitude, as the voice of many waters, and the voice of many thunderings, saying, Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” Yes, he reigneth justly to smite us with an iron sceptre through the loins of them that hate him, and rise against him, as well as to hold out to thee a golden sceptre of mercy, thou humble mourner, who tremblest at his word, and fleest for refuge to the shadow of Jesus’ wings.

There is then the song of Moses, who overthrew Pharaoh and all his host in the Red Sea, as well as “the song of the Lamb who loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood;” and it is your prerogative, O ye servants of the Most High, to sing both those songs alternately: to shout God’s justice, as well as his mercy, and celebrate the destruction of incorrigible criminals, as well as the salvation of penitent believers. We may then, without uncharitableness, join David in the 136th Psalm, and say, “O give thanks to the God of all gods, who only doth great wonders; who smote Egypt with the first born, for his mercy endureth for ever: yea, and slew mighty kings, for his mercy endureth for ever,” &c. The capital punishment of a murderer is a capital kindness shown to thousands. Were the king to reprieve all criminals, his mercy to them would be cruelty to millions. And although charity “rejoiceth not in iniquity,” yet she may, consistently with herself, rejoice in the suppression of triumphant wickedness; and, in order to this, she may acquiesce in the exemplary punishment of obstinate and daring offenders; as Moses did in the destruction of Dathan and Abiram; and St. Peter in that of Ananias and Sapphira.

And now, although we cannot all sing the song of the Lamb, yet (glory be to God!) we may all consider the patience of our offended Creator, who upon these ruins invites us, guilty as we are, to repent and live; to celebrate his sparing mercy in fear, and rejoice in him with reverence. The earth, in the days of Moses, “opened her mouth,” and dreadfully swallowed up two families. The earth yesterday opened her mouth, probably far wider, and yet the only two families that lived here were suffered to make their escape. Hallelujah! praise the Lord! Multitudes of fishes have perished on dry ground, and myriads of land insects in the water; and yet we, sinful insects before God, have neither been drowned in yesterday’s flood, nor buried in these chasms. Hallelujah! God’s tremendous axe has been lifted up: some of yonder green trees have been struck; and we, who are dry trees, we, cumberers of the ground, are graciously spared. Hallelujah! the houses of Dathan and Abiram, with all that appertained unto them, descended into the pit of destruction; and we, who are loaded with mountains of sins, stand yet on firm ground with all our friends. Hallelujah! God, who might have commanded the earth to swallow up a thronged play house, the royal exchange, a crowded cathedral, the parliament house, or the king’s palace, has graciously commanded an empty barn to sink, and give us the alarm. Hallelujah! he might have ordered such a tract of land as this to heave, move, and open in the centre of our populous cities, but mercy has inclined him to fix upon this solitary place. Hallelujah! - he might have suffered the road and the river to be overthrown, when cursing drivers passed with their horses, and blaspheming watermen with their barges, but his compassion made him strike the warning blow with all possible tenderness. “O that men would therefore praise the Lord for his goodness, and declare the wonders that he does for the children of men!”

To excite our thankfulness, let us observe, that if God had permitted the Severn, swelled as it is by the late flood, to be dammed up a little below; if Lincoln hill had run upon Bental Edge, part of which lately fell into the river; if those two high and steep hills, between which the Severn is so remarkably confined, had met by such an accident as befel yonder grove yesterday, how dreadful the consequence might have been! This country would have been submerged, and the devastation might have affected all the western part of the kingdom. But, happily for us, the river was stopt over against that flat meadow, where it could work itself a new channel, without spreading ruin through a hundred villages, and washing away the harvest of a thousand fields. Thus, though destruction hath thrust sore at us, yet God was our help, and we have the greatest reason to sing with David, “The right hand of the Lord hath the pre - eminence, the right hand of the Lord bringeth mighty things to pass; he hath chastened and corrected us, but he hath not dealt with us according to our sins, he hath not given us over unto death.”

And now “what shall we render unto God” for all these deliverances; and above all, for preservation from the horrors of the bottomless pit, and from the billows of the “lake that burneth with fire and brimstone?” Shall we not lay aside the cup of excess, to take that of thanksgiving? Shall we not loudly bless the name of the Lord, who thus redeemed our life from destruction? Dathan and Abiram, while they sunk into the deep, rent the heavens with a shriek of horror: may we be ready to rend it with a shout of wonder, while I endeavour more particularly to consider and improve, in the third part of this discourse, the new thing which the Lord hath done in the earth!

III. I should speak out of character if I expatiated upon the phenomenon before us as a philosopher, and not as a divine. My design is to benefit you by stirring up your hearts to gratitude and repentance: not to entertain vou by solving philosophical problems, or proposing a variety of conjectures. In a point of moral improvement, what signifies it whether this desolation was caused by a slip or an earthquake? Ruin is ruin, whatever be the instrument of it. And a rod is a rod, whether it be cut from the lofty birch, or only torn from the lower osier.

If God permitted this island suddenly to rush into the sea by a slip, or be overturned into it by an earthquake; where would be the difference with respect to us? Did it matter to the drowning world whether God had caused the deluge by breaking up the fountains of the great deep, and opening the windows of heaven; or only by suspending the attraction of the heavenly bodies, to raise a universal tide? When the waves of the Red Sea returned upon Pharaoh and all his host, what did it signify to that multitude of dying pursuers, whether the second cause of their destruction was the west wind, or only the abating of the strong east wind, by which the Lord made the sea to go back all night?

When God does a new thing in the earth, unwise philosophers make it their business to exclude his Divine agency. Our polite towns swarm with disciples of Epicurus, who fancy that God sitteth somewhere above the circle of the heavens, and has committed the government of the material world to I know not what inferior deity, that they call nature. Nor do they probably know themselves that goddess, about whom they make so much ado.

Should the most judicious of them say, that by nature they understand the assemblage of those stated laws, according to which our wise Creator preserves, and generally rules the material world; I reply: can any thing then be more irrational than the exclusion of God’s immediate agency from the works of nature? Who could help smiling at the simplicity of a man, who should affirm that the king’s signing a death warrant is not a royal act, merely because he does it according to the law of his kingdom? And who can help wondering at the prejudice of those who suppose, that what God does according to the law of his natural government, is not his own work? If we believe those men, God made Aaron’s dry rod to blossom once, but nature makes vegetables blossom every year. God appointed the peculiar death of Dathan and Abiram, but nature fixes the exit of the rest of mankind. How wild is the conceit! If God has so little to do in the universe, and nature so much, let us build temples to that powerful goddess. To her let us pray for rain or fair weather, for health and length of days: and when we have asked of God the pardon of our sins, let us say to nature, Give us this day our daily bread.

O ye injudicious philosophers, (I had almost said, ye baptized infidels,) let the prophets teach you true wisdom. They rationally maintain, that God is the first cause of all things, except moral evil. Hear their own words: “God clothes the grass of the field: God sendeth the springs into the rivers: he bringeth forth grass for the cattle, and green herb for the service of man; from the things creeping innumerable, which are in the great and wide sea, to that leviathan, whom God hath made to take his pastime therein, all wait upon him that he may give them meat in due season. He feedeth the young ravens when they cry: he sendeth forth his commandment upon earth: he maketh summer and winter: he giveth snow like wool: he scattereth his hoar frost like ashes: he casteth forth his ice like morsels: he sendeth out his word, and melteth them: he causeth the wind to blow, and the waters to flow; as for his judgments, the heathens,” (and God grant that none of us may verify the saying!) “the heathens have not known them.” But let us hear God himself speaking in Isaiah. “I am the Lord, and there is none else: there is no God beside me. I [not nature] form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. [I create natural, to punish moral evil.] I the Lord do all these things,” Isaiah 45:5 - 7. Hence it is that one of the prophets indirectly reproves Atheistical naturalists, and says: “Shall there be [natural] evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it,” to bring about some spiritual good? Amos 3:6. Have the Birches been overthrown, and the Lord hath not done it? The Lord, is he not the God here as well as in all the earth?

He is, he is: he ordered the other day the fall of the projecting part of the hill, which you call Bental Edge. Above a year ago he commanded an earthquake to alarm this part of the county. Some of you felt it in your beds, and others heard it in your pits. The shock reached Shrewsbury, and struck consternation into its gay inhabitants, one of whom lost her senses on the awful occasion. Foolish virgins heard then the midnight cry: “Behold! the bridegroom cometh!” Careless simmers felt the terrible alarm: “Behold! the Judge is at the door!” And stubborn offenders thought that Divine vengeance pursued them in a chariot moving upon rumbling, thundering wheels. But Omnipotence only threatened to give the blow which it began to strike here yesterday. Mighty God, if thou strike again, strike in mercy; remembering that we are but dust; and help us to consider this blow that we may all flee from the wrath to come, and take refuge in the name of Jesus, where only we can be secure.

Our phenomenon has several parts. Each of them will afford us some important instruction.

1. In the first place, behold there how these words of my text, “The earth opened her mouth,” have had another awful accomplishment. She horribly yawns in our sight, and forms sepulchres wide, long, and deep enough, not only to take in Dathan, Abiram, and their families, but to bury this immense congregation. Hundreds of you now stand in one of them, and cover but an inconsiderable part of its bottom. Glory be to God for not suffering it to shut its mouth over you, as the enormous fish did over the disobedient prophet!

O ye earthly minded, shall our mother earth, of which you are so fond, open her mouth; and shall you stand in her very jaws, without being able to understand her language? Here she fell in labour yesterday: in her throes she removed a road, a wood, a river; and was delivered of those mounts. Her convulsions are over, but she keeps a thousand mouths open; and each of them speaks to an attentive heart, and says, “O earth, earth, earth, hear your parent’s word:” I stand ready to receive you; but are you ready to return to me, and sink into the cold bosom whence you were taken? But, ready or not ready, you must come; and your putrid remains must be mingled with my sordid dust.

Sinners, take the uncommon warning; prepare for dissolution and judgment. Dathan and Abiram are not the only men who, to alarm our fears and hasten our repentance, have descended alive into the grave. Did you never hear of Lima, the metropolis of Peru, which was totally buried by a dreadful earthquake? Have you never read dismal accounts of Port Royal, that rich trading town in Jamaica? and of Catana, that large flourishing city in Sicily, which have shared the horrible fate of Lima? And is not the dire overthrow of Lisbon still fresh in the memory of all Europe? If earthquakes are not terrible enough to make us stand in awe before God; do you not know that to the tremours of the earth he can add deluges of fire? Has he not done it already? Do not Moses and St. Jude inform us that “Sodom and Gomorrah, Adma and Zeboim, suffered vengeance from heaven?” And has not the world shuddered in barely hearing of those broad and deep rivers of liquid fire, which from time to time break out of burning mountains, carrying villages before them, and after flowing several miles, cover large towns with fiery vengeance? In our days the ruins of two, Herculaneum and Pompeii, have been discovered near Mount Vesuvius. Nor is this an idle tale, invented to frighten weak minds. I have walked myself in the streets of one of those unhappy cities, which the king of Naples has partly brought to light by removing part of the stratum of earth and ashes under which it lay buried: and I have reached the theatre or play house of the other, by descending many fathoms through a well sunk in a rocky cinder, that was once the fiery fluid with which the whole city was filled and covered.

To past, we may add future events of this alarming nature: for, when they are clearly foretold in Scripture, they are as certain as if they had already happened. Thus our Lord speaks of earthquakes that shall happen in divers places; and St. John gives us the following description of two, in his prophetic visions: - “The same hour there was a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell; and in the earth quake were slain seven thousand men; and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven,” Revelation 11:13. Here we see the design of such direful phenomena; namely, to frighten men out of their impiety, and to make them give glory to the God of heaven, for his mercy, power, and justice. Again: “A mighty angel took up a stone like a great mill stone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus, with violence, shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be bound no more at all,” Revelation 18:21. And thus, O thus, may our sins (the Babylon within) be cast this day, as the prophet expresses it, into the depth of the sea, into the ocean of God’s mercy, and the streams of the Redeemer’s blood! So shall they be found no more at all: and an uncommon or a common grave shall find us its willing and cheerful prey. For whether we shall be buried alive, as Dathan and many of the inhabitants of Lisbon, or dead, as the people we last committed to the earth, we must all return to the dust.

If we be ready for that awful change, it will not matter whether we are let into a grave six feet long, or into one as enormous as this chasm; nor yet will it signify, whether we are covered by a spadeful of mould, after a minister has said over us, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust;” or whether Divine Providence takes upon itself the minister’s office, and commands an earthquake to do that of the sexton. In either case we must equally moulder away.

Should we, on the contrary, be unprepared, unconverted, our bodies must not only become the noisome prey of corruption and worms, but our souls must be that of insulting fiends; for prophet, the threat fiery grave, is prepared of old; and thither the poor cursing drunkard, though ever so meanly buried, follows the rich uncharitable glutton in all his funeral pomp. “Wo, therefore, unto them that draw iniquity with the cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope: for hell has enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth in wickedness, shall descend into it.” Merciful Lord! keep us from fathoming the horrors of that bottomless chasm, by the line of our own experience.

Impenitent simmers, who stand fearless on its brink, I tremble for you. What shall I say to move you to repentance? And how shall I entreat you to give up your sins? By the miraculous grave of Dathan, by the dying shriek of Abiram, by these tremendous chasms, by the common grave into which you may suddenly drop,f5 and, above all, by the grave of Jesus Christ, I beseech you, loathe, cast away, bury your iniquities: so shall they not be your eternal ruin; and the end of these astonishing graves shall be answered. Grant me this reasonable request; or rather grant it to God, who makes it by this amazing visitation; and when the earth opens her mouth, as at this day, hear the voice of Providence, and harden not your hearts.

2. As our crimes are multiplied, so is our danger, and so are God’s warnings. What is become of the barn that stood by that house yesterday? Has it made itself wings to fly away, as riches frequently do? No: it moved without; and hastening like you, sinners, toward destruction, it did not stop till it sunk into the pit, where you see the remains of its crushed root: So sunk Dathan’s house! “So shall one day sink the wicked and their cruel habitations! They will not know the day of their visitation; and ere long their place shall know them no more.

Come hither, ye that do not build the tower of your hopes upon the rock; ye that, scorning the Redeemer’s inestimable merits, or his holy precepts, make the sand of your Pharisaic righteousness, or of your Antinomian faith, your loose foundation: so shall your expectation of heaven perish, if you persist in your error. The sure word of prophecy has passed his lips: “Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man who built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blow, and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Thus our Lord ended his sermon on the mount, where he invites us to behold how kindly our heavenly Father feeds the fowls of the air, which neither sow, nor gather into barns. And as the wise man bids the sluggard go to the ant, for a pattern of diligence, I am not above pointing you, for an example of vigilance and speedy escape, to some watchful fowls, which roosted yesterday in that building. At the first appearance of danger, they took the providential hint, flew out, and were all preserved. And shall you, careless simmers, be less diligent about your escape out of this transitory world, than those irrational creatures were about theirs out of the transitory barn? The crowing of a cock roused a fallen apostle: when he heard it “he went out and wept bitterly.” And shall not the timely flight of more than one fowl make you pray with David, “O that I had the wings of a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest?” With the wings of prayer and faith I would fly to him, who says, “Come unto me all ye that travail under a sense of your danger, and I will give you rest,” as well as safety: “for God gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life and everlasting rest.” But I should not do justice to this part of my subject, if I kept from you a just observation of the gentleman who rents this ground. “How uncertain,” said he, yesterday, “is every thing below! and how easily can God blast our best - concerted schemes! We hope to secure our money by withdrawing it from the fluctuating stocks; we think to rescue it from the dangers that accompany navigation, by laying it out on a land estate: but now we see that when God commands, a solid building can sink on the land, as easily as a leaky ship can founder at sea.”

O ye that make it your grand business to add house to house, and field to field; ye that say, like the rich farmer in the Gospels “My barns are full: soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry;” own the truth of that observation If ye will not believe that God can say to each of you, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee;” confess at least, upon the fact of which you are now witnesses, that he can say, “Thou fool, to - morrow thy barns or houses shall be required of thee.” And upon such a consideration begin to pay a proper regard to our Lord’s command: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust do corrupt; where the thieves break through and steal;” where fire consumes and water submerges, and where earthquakes subvert and overthrow: “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” where all blessings are as permanent as God himself.

3. Now the barn has disappeared, consider those fields; with hard labour and great expense they have been lately stocked and improved. That fallow was nearly ploughed; but God’s plough has come across that of the husbandmen. See the difference of the furrows! Here is one that looks like a valley! How soon could the Lord of the harvest plough up all the earth with the same implement of destruction! When these fields felt it, they heaved, they moved, they tossed, they precipitated chiefly toward the stream of yonder river. And yet, sinners, when all the curses of God’s broken law are levelled at your corrupt hearts, and all the vials of his righteous wrath are going to burst over your guilty heads, you do not flee to the stream of the Redeemer’s blood: you are insensible and motionless; nay, some of you heartily challenge the descending storm; and to one cold prayer for salvation you breathe perhaps ten fervent wishes for eternal death and endless torments; in a word, for damnation.

Among the sentences which open the service of our Church, we find this Divine command: “Rend your heart, and not your garments; and turn unto the Lord your God,” &c; but how few people obey it after hearing it a thousand times! God yesterday, for the first time, commanded these fields to rend the rocks in their bowels; to tear the green carpets that cover the surface; and to turn some south, others east and west: and he was obeyed. Thus the word of the Lord which is perpetually slighted by the generality of mankind, was instantly submitted to by the inanimate creation. O my fellow sinners, let us regard the word of his patience; or that of his power, which yesterday cut perpendicularly some of these rocks without any instrument, and will cut us asunder in the day of his wrath, and appoint us our portion where, instead of music, “there will be weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.”

When these fields fled, and tumbling one upon another in their flight, carrying along with them the hedges that bind, and the stately oaks that crown them, did they not sensibly demonstrate the truth of such scriptures as these: “The time is short: it remains that they who rejoice be as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy as though they possessed not; for the fashion of this world passes away; but the word of God abideth for ever.” And yet, infatuated mortals, we despise that sure foundation, and build our happiness upon earth, a deceitful basis, that passes away as certainly, though not so swiftly, as the river that flows in our sight, or the clouds that fly over our heads.

But I mistake, - yesterday these solid fields flowed as if they had been water: and as they flowed, they washed those trees and bushes along as visibly as the current of the Severn carries down your barges and coracles: and more sensibly than the stream of time carries into eternity the king upon the throne, and the beggar on the dung hill.

All things under the sun are in a fluctuating condition; all move toward ruin or restoration in a future state: but in general we take no notice of our critical and awful circumstances. As mischievous insects, busy in fretting a bale of goods shipped for the other hemisphere, reach the Indies before they are sensible that the ship has set sail; so thousands of busy mortals are landed on the eternal shore before they have considered that the earth is but the great ship, where the inhabitants of a whole kingdom are wafted together into eternity.

“Love not the world, (says St. John,) neither the things that are in the world; for the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that does the will of God abideth for ever.” Now this passing away of the world is as great a mystery to unbelievers, as the host of guardian angels was to the frighted young man in Dothan, before the Lord had opened his eyes, that he might see the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. But as the prophet’s servant was formerly favoured with a sight of his master’s cherubic guard, so were the people of that house permitted yesterday to behold “the world [literally] passing away with the things that are in the world.” And these solid ruins testify that they did not see “the idle fabric of a vision which leaves not a wreck behind them,”’ but an awful reality which ought to leave the most lasting impression upon all our hearts. Believers, if you do not see these fields and buildings in motion, let your faith supply the want of that sight; and let this wreck add strength to your faith.

But need we walk by faith to see the transitoriness of the world and of all that it contains? Is not sight sufficient to give us the alarm? Look which way you please, and you see that all things evidence the winged despatch of the universe. Consider the heaven, and you behold planets continually moving; sun and moon rising and setting; days and nights growing longer or shorter; seasons pushing one another on: clouds formed, driven, and dispersed: winds rising, whistling, and falling; and the weather as unfixed as the gilded cock that shows its variations. Look at the earth, and you discover a perpetual rotation of droughts and land floods, frost and thaw, sowing and reaping, gathering and consuming. Slow ages measure the duration of forests, quicker years that of trees, rapid months that of leaves, weeks or days that of the insects which live upon them. And the impetuous stream of time sweeps days, weeks, months, years, and ages away; as they themselves do all that is limited to the circle of their duration. Read the history of the world, and you will find it nothing but a narrative of the building, enlarging, and destruction of cities: the rise, aggrandizing, and fall of empires. Peruse the weekly publications, and you will find them full of the changes and chances which, like so many billows, toss the court and the exchange, the Church and the state. Cast your eyes over that skeleton of parochial history which we call a register: a perpetual rotation of births, marriages, and burials, makes the whole of the dry performance. Elderly sinner, your name is perhaps in two pages already, and your envious competitor would not be sorry to see it in the third. Your youth is gone, your beauty fades, your strength decays, grey hairs steal in upon your temples, and wrinkles mark you out in the forehead, as a prey almost ready for the grave. While all your friends tell one another “how fast you break,” and how strangely you are altered;” will you never consider it yourself? Will you mind nothing but the fall of the market, and the changes in the ministry, or in the fashion? Shall a greedy heir see your name written in the register of burials, before it be written in the book of life? And when the world passes away; when all things around you are in motion, will you, to the last, be as he that “lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that sleepeth on the top of a mast?”

If you say that I carry matters too far, with respect to the transitoriness of the world; and if you oppose to my reflections the solidity of rocks, and the stability of the earth; before all these witnesses, I appeal to matter of fact, and aver, without fear of being contradicted, that yesterday the rocks rent and shifted here, as the sails of a ship do in a violent storm; while the earth streamed like yonder river, and rolled about like the waves of the sea. Up then! for “this is not your rest.” If you will find a solid rock, seek the “Rock of Ages” - the Lord Jesus Christ: if you will inhabit a permanent city, set out for the New Jerusalem; and if you will dwell on a truly stable earth, “look for, and hasten unto the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

4. But has God laid his hands upon the fields only? Has he not done a new thing in the vegetable creation also? Have not these stately trees, has not that whole wood (although fastened to the earth by ligaments innumerable) moved as fast as if the roots had been the wheels of a flying chariot? Another instance this of the transitoriness of the most steadfast things in the world!

Some of those itinerant oaks that stand as upright and green as ever, though they have been violently shaken, and carried into the midst of the river, represent you, righteous men, whom the Scriptures call “trees of righteousness,” and compare to trees planted by the water side, that bring forth their fruit in due season, and whose leaf shall not wither. In the midst of the most uncommon concussions and dreadful alarms, like those upright oaks, you may steadily lift up your heads to heaven; “confessing that you are strangers and pilgrims upon earth;” witnessing that the Christian is well, wherever Providence casts his lot; and experiencing that God “delivers obedient Israel out of all his troubles.”

May not others of those oaks which bend forward, and hang down their lofty heads, represent you, unconverted men, who bend under the weight of threescore years spent in iniquity, and are just ready for a final overthrow? And may we not also gather instruction from those that lie flat upon the ground, or across the stream, with their branches broken, and their roots turned up? May we not learn from them “how transgressors shall be rooted out of the earth?” Yes, sinners, whose hearts, harder than oak, yield to no tender entreaty, no solemn warning, no awful threatening; if you persist in your impenitency, a fit of sickness, perhaps a terrible accident, will turn up your roots. Nor will your strong constitutions, and green strength, avert the descending stroke. You may as easily be extirpated in the spring of your days, as some of those trees were in this fine month; and on the sweet morn that yesterday dawned upon them. It behooves you then to remember the saying of the wise man: “Where the tree falls there it lies.” If you fall among the wicked, you must lie with them; not across the gentle stream of the Severn, but across the fiery stream of Divine indignation, which will run against your stubborn spirits as that river beats upon those vanquished oaks.

In the meantime you may flourish as the crab tree did, that was yesterday in the opposite meadow, and is now battered in the middle of the river; you may even as much surpass your neighbours in honours, riches, and impiety, as those fallen trees did the bushes that grew under their shade; but take care that your impious stateliness be not the occasion of your aggravated ruin. By rising high, and spreading wide the branches of your wickedness, you may draw the lightning of Divine vengeance the sooner; as a lofty oak that towered some years ago on that very spot. Hundreds in this congregation may remember that it was even more suddenly blasted by fire from the clouds than some of yonder trees were overthrown by the heavings of the earth or the onsets of the river. We were then spared as we are now, and God, by shattering to pieces one of the tallest oaks at the Birches, showed what he could have done then, and what he will one day do to the great men of the world, who lift up their Atheistical foreheads against Heaven: yea, and you too, abject sinners, who are brambles in point of human grandeur - and yet cedars in point of diabolical wickedness.

5. But, withdrawing our attention from the trees, let us fix it upon the road What a strange alteration - what a dreadful overthrow is here! Toward Madeley, it is blocked up by bushes, hedges, and enormous clods, promiscuously tumbled on the ruins of a bridge. Nearer us it is forced up, shattered as the craggy sides of a volcano, sunk in, contracted, or inclining on one side; while toward Buildwas it has totally disappeared; having been carried away in ruinous heaps, to a consider able distance. And shall we reap no benefit from this new thing that the Lord has done in the earth? Shall nobody take this occasion to deplore the profaneness of the great, who brim a curse upon roads by the pleasure journeys they take on the days of sacred rest, which they should keep holy with their families in the house of God?

Shall no well wisher to our Church and country take this opportunity of lamenting the uncommon wickedness of wagoners and drivers of horses? How often have our ears been struck with their dire imprecations: and our eyes with their savage, unmerciful, reeling drunkenness, or stupid insolence! As I might ask, which of these subverted fields has not been yearly polluted by the impious, uncharitable, or unchaste actions or expressions of wanton reapers, or libidinous hay makers; so I may inquire, which of the overthrown bushes, which yesterday formed the hedges of yonder subverted grove, has not been witness to the flagrant wickedness of the men that travel it.

Incredible as the assertion may appear, I can testify before God, that over against us is the very place where I met one of them committing a shameful crime in the middle of the highway. I blushed to see him; but, as great a stranger to faith as the pack of horses which went before, he did not blush before God and angels. Unclean wretch, if thou art hid in the skirts of this congregation, and if shame will give thee leave to look back, see the spot which thou hast defiled. Behold! it has heaved under the burden of that crime which thou hast probably repeated. The holy God, who overthrew Sodom, has overthrown it. It hangs on one side, and testifies, that if thou hast not repented, thou art at this moment hanging over the pit of destruction. Before thou fallest in, hide thy blushing face in the dust at Jesus’ feet: flee with Mary Magdalene to the “fountain opened for sin and uncleanness;” or, like filthy, leprous Naaman, “wash seven times, yea, seventy times seven,” in the Jordan of his precious blood. Go, sinner, polluted as thou art, thou mayest yet be made clean. Christ himself invites thee in the Gospel. “Come unto me,” says he, “let us reason together, and though thy sins be red as crimson, or black as hell, they shall be made white as snow.” Arise, unchaste prodigal, go to thy merciful Father by that compassionate Mediator. “He is the way,” - a highway to God, a sure though narrow way to heaven; a way so straight, that a traveller to Sion, though a fool, need not miscarry - a royal way, that no forces of hell can obstruct - a way everlasting, that no earthquakes can overthrow. Only remember, that it is a clean way, and if thou attempt to pollute it, by returning to thy sins as a dog to his vomit, it will rise like yonder road, and cast thee off with an abhorrence suitable to thy filthiness, and the purity of him that cast it up. “Serve then the Lord in fear, and kiss the Son, with holy reverence, lest you perish out of the way, if his wrath is kindled, yea, but a little.”

6. But let us look beyond the road, and consider what new thing the Lord has done in yonder field of oats. Yesterday it promised, perhaps, as fine a crop as any in the county; and to - day how strangely is it worked by the destroyer’s tool! How unexpectedly are the husbands man’s hopes and labour cut off! What deep cuts! What wide gashes! How much wider and deeper are many of them than common graves!

Can we see them, and not thank God we are not hewn in pieces before the Lord by the destroyer, as wicked Agag was by Samuel?

God said yesterday, “Sword, go through that field:” and that overthrow instantly ensued. If he should say now, “Sword, go through that congregation,” how swiftly would the messenger of his vengeance go forth! How soon should we be like Sennacherib’s army, dead corpses on these ruins! And, O! how many would be damned souls in hell! Alas! as many as are sly lovers of this world, like lying Ananias; as many as have scorned to make “their robes white in the blood of the Lamb,” like the proud Pharisee, and as many as are fast asleep in their sins, like the foolish virgins; and utterly unprepared for death, like the rich glutton.

7. But what appears still more extraordinary than the mangling of this field, is the sudden sinking of the eminences, and rise of the hollows that were in it; in a word, it is the formation of those mounts. Tell us, ye that prefer the name of philosopher to that of Christian, what mighty spur pricked that dull field, when it is thus reared up? If royal power had pent under it a herd of elephants, could they have heaved together as moles so as to form that shattered mount? O confess your ignorance; while you try to find out the mysteries of the natural world, be no longer ashamed publicly to confess the God of nature, and humbly to adore the God of grace.

David tells you who is the author of that phenomenon, where he says: “Behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he has made in the earth,” to punish or warn its sinful inhabitants. The God that formerly shook Mount Sinai, and continues to raise Mount Vesuvius,f6 has formed these eminences to confound your unsanctified wisdom, and alarm your ungodly fears.

O! - may a salutary dread of this almighty God be in you “the beginning of true wisdom!” May you be found restored to his favour and image, when he shall fulfil this awful prophecy: “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven; which signifies the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made: that those things which cannot be shaken may remain,” Hebrews 12:26.

In that awful day, foretold by St. Peter, and mentioned by Ovid, f7 when the “visible heavens, and this accursed earth, which are reserved unto fire, shall melt with fervent heat,” where will you hide your guilty distracted heads, if ye persist to slight your Saviour, and to represent the love of God and man as rank enthusiasm? Will you cry to such a valley as this chasm to receive you? Or will you call on such a hill as that mount to cover you? Are ye gods, instantly to sink the one, or raise the other? “ O! how shall you escape, if you neglect such great salvation as is offered vou in the Gospel!” Rather, seeing you have no chance of escape, “Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die, O house of Israel?”

8. But leaving the newly formed mounts, through heaps of ruins, go to the ancient bank of the Severn. You come to it, but the river is gone. You are in the middle of her old bed, nay, you cross it before you suspect that you have reached her shore: you stand in the deepest part of her channel, and yet you are in a wood: large oaks spread their branches where bargemen unfurled their sails: you walk to day on solid ground, where fishes yesterday swam in twenty feet of water. A rock, that formed the bottom of the river, has mounted up as a cork, and gained a dry place on the bank, while a travelling grove has planted itself in the waters, and a fugitive river has invaded dry land. Other instances these of the instability of all below: new prodigies wrought by the God of nature, to show us our need of standing upon a rock more solid than that which yesterday rose up many feet without pulleys, and burst in ten thousand pieces without gunpowder! O! ye that call pleasant groves and delightful rivers after your names, cast your eyes upon the changes wrought yonder; and may the confusion of this estate make you remember the words of the apostle: “Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth, and seek those things which are above, where a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeds out of the throne of God and the Lamb: and where, on either side of the river, the tree of life bears leaves for the healing, and twelve manner of fruits for the refreshing of the nations.” Those paradisiacal trees, and that celestial river, will not jostle together; nor will earthquakes overturn the “inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who have chosen the one thing needful, Mary’s good part, that shall never be taken away from you.”

When we behold how some of these fields arose, while others fled; and how that overflowing river was dashed out of its rocky channel, and forced upward, may we not apply to those singular events the sublime words of the psalmist: “Thou art the God that doth wonders: thou hast declared thy power among the people. The waters saw thee, O Lord, the waters saw thee and were afraid; the depths were troubled; the earth was moved, and shook withal: the river saw thy rod, and fled. Severn was driven back.” These fields “skipped like rams, and those little hills like young sheep. What ailed thee,” O mighty river, “that thou fleddest? Thou Severn, that thou wast driven back?” Did the impiety of the inhabitants of Madeley Wood and Broseley shock thee back to thy source? Didst thou flee with horror from the guilty shores, where obdurate artists, drivers, and wagoners, so frequently echo back the imprecations of cursing colliers and swearing watermen? Had their brutish excesses, loud quarrels, and savage fights, which chill the blood of a few righteous Lots among us, frighted thee from the cruel habitations that line thy banks? Or restraining thy streams to sink our vessels, and ruin our trade, wilt thou break the staff of our bread and dry up the stream of our sins? “What ailed thee, that thou fleddest? Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who is glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing” new prodigies, and repeating old “wonders.”

God spake formerly, and Jordan turned back. He spake again yesterday, and Severn imitated Jordan. Did not the dreadful noise of her recoiling waves cry to us, “Impetuous as I am, when God commands I turn.” Turn ye then also, sinners, at this terrible reproof. When ye hear the roar of a turning river, will ye not be converted? When its senseless streams flow back without wind or tide, will ye not consider? When its rocky bottom mounts toward heaven, will ye not lift up your hearts? And when a whole grove marches to obstruct the navigation that maintains you, will you remain rooted in your sins?

Forbid it, gracious Redeemer! Look upon us in mercy, and suffer us not to do “despite to the Spirit of grace,” in sight of so many prodigies. Let them rather bring to our remembrance the profusion of the unnatural sweat in Gethsemane, and the streams of thy precious blood on Calvary. Let them remind us of the tearing of thy sacred body, the breaking of the rocks around thy cross, the rending of the veil in the temple; and the double earthquake, that added terror to thy death, and triumph to thy resurrection.

9. If our Lord taught his disciples by comparisons and parables, taken from natural things and daily occurrences, I hope I shall not be deemed a flighty, enthusiastical preacher, for concluding this head of my discourse by grafting one or two moral or spiritual observations upon the branches of our phenomenon.

(1.) So long as we fight against God by our sins, the multiplied curses, which this world groans under, will point out and begin to punish our crimes.

Hissing currents of air and forked streams of fire, together with conflicting, thundering clouds, have frequently spread terror over every part of the earth: but yesterday God changed the scene in this place, and scourged us by the dissension of the grosser elements. Streaming lands and bursting rocks, militating with an impetuous overflowing river, were commanded to show us the dreadfu1 effects of sin. We contend with one another in ridiculous quarrels, or unjust law suits; and God, to frighten us into harmony, bids the jarring elements give one another battle in our sight, and make us feel the fatal consequence of discord. Let not this dreadful, though indirect reproof, be given you in vain, ye whose quarrelsome disposition is your neighbourhood’s nuisance. In these fields, which yesterday crushed each other, or tore themselves, but now are peaceful and tranquil, for the mild Jesus’ sake drop all your animosities; be ready to fall upon the neck of your offending or offended neighbour; nor let it be said that contentions are sooner over in the natural than in the moral world.

(2.) My last observation is intended for you “who believe in the Son of God, and love one another.” When the river had obeyed the God of nature in quitting her bed and flowing back to her source, she soon received orders to pursue her journey. Though her bed was lost, and her way obstructed, she submitted, and with incredible violence tore all before her, till she found a free passage again.

So should you, believers, be ever ready to fulfil the Divine commands. If the Severn, at a moment’s warning, left the deep, favourite part of her bed; should you not be ready to leave your houses, your estates, and this world itself for Christ’s sake and the Gospel, whenever God calls you to that important act of self denial? And should you not, through all difficulties and obstacles, “run with patience the race that is set before you; looking unto Jesus,” and tending as incessantly toward the New Jerusalem and heaven, as the Severn does toward Bristol and the sea!

If your spiritual adversaries triumph, if this is a day of “rebuke and blasphemy;” nay, if it is “the hour and the power of darkness;” yet despair not; you are still in the field; the day is not lost. Strengthen yourselves in the Lord. Once more grasp the shield of faith, and in the name of Him who waded forty days and forty nights through floods of horrid temptations in the wilderness, who sweated blood in an agony of prayer in Gethsemane, who passed through a dreadful desertion upon the cross, and (notwithstanding all) cried at last with a loud voice, “It is finished,” I have won the day: in his name, I say, attack your enemy with recruited courage, and the Lord will enable you to break through all, and enter in triumph into the heavenly Canaan. Thus shall you be like that river, which yesterday was worsted, and for awhile retreated before those embattled oaks; but to - day flows triumphant in a wider channel, and bears down all that opposes its course.

IV. We have seen what new thing the Lord did formerly to punish stubborn offenders; and what he did yesterday to alarm the flagitious part of the country. Permit me now to close this discourse by some addresses suited to your various states and to this present occasion.

(1.) Unconverted sinners, your danger is most imminent, and therefore I address you first. You stand in slippery places. The stream of your iniquities has long undermined the foundation of your hopes. Hills of guilt and mountains of vengeance wait only for the beck of the Lord to crush your impure bodies into the grave, and press your polluted souls down to the nethermost hell. Were the eyes of your understanding open, you would see yourselves as near the brink of eternal misery, as you are the margin of this chasm. But alas! instead of securing yourselves by a penitential flight from sin and a believing recourse to Christ, you are easy; you sleep; you dream of heaven. And if at any time your consciences are disturbed, instead of shaking yourselves like Samson, you go to sleep again; after calling the faithful watchmen of Israel enthusiastical disturbers of your peace. O! may this phenomenon, seconded by the Redeemer’s grace, do what neither sermons nor sicknesses, neither public nor private visitations have yet effectually done! May your conscience awake and sleep no more! May each of you take the alarm, and cry out as the trembling jailer, “What must I do to be saved?”

If this be your important question, I answer: - Be all as intent upon forsaking your sins, as Lot was upon running out of Sodom, when the dreadful artillery of heaven began to play upon it; and when a thousand flashes of lightning showed him his way to the mountain. Go all to Christ by prayer, with as much haste as Noah went into the ark, when the lowering sky was just going to dissolve in ceaseless showers over the condemned world. Leave your sinful companions with as much precipitation as the Israelites left the infatuated Egyptians groaning under the strokes of the destroyer’s sword. And be as ready to run from your places of sinful diversions, as the frighted rebels were to start from the place where screaming Dathan was swallowed up alive. Nay let your hurry, if it be possible, be a thousand times greater. Is not damnation more dreadful than an untimely grave? And the bottomless pit ten thousand times more terrible than these chasms?

O careless sinners, had you seen the diligence with which those frightened families yesterday made their escape, you might guess at the trembling haste with which you should now make yours, out of an infinitely greater danger. And had you beheld them when they gladly forsook all their property to save their lives, you might form some just idea of the meaning of our Lord’s prophetic warning, Luke 21, and Matthew 24: “There shall be great earthquakes, and distress of nations, with perplexity; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth. Then let him that is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house; neither let him that is in the field return back to take his clothes.” Follow the important advice, sinners. In these desolated fields begin to provide for the safety of your souls; and, instead of returning back to the vanities of this wicked world, “watch and pray always, that you may be accounted worthy to escape what shall come to pass; and to stand before the Son of man.”

The merciful Lord, that warned the old world by Noah, Lot by the angels, and those families by the man who first saw this desolation, warns you now by me. Nay, he who warned you yesterday by him; a Jonah was graciously spared to preach to us. When warm gratitude loosed his tongue, did not many of you hear him say, “O! if the world had seen what I saw this morning, they would have been frightened out of their sins. Surely it was enough to break the hardest heart, and make a heart of stone to bleed. What a mercy was it that we fled the right way! If we had run across those overthrown fields, we should have been lost.”

O do as he did: escape for your lives. Stay not in all the plain of Sodom: flee to the mountain; to Calvary; to the Friend of sinners; to a dying Jesus. Flee from the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and your own evil hearts. Flee the right way. By penitential faith flee upward, heavenward. If you go to the world for comfort, you will be ten thousand times more dreadfully disappointed than the people of that house would have been had they fled for shelter into the mouths of the opening earth. But this is not all, flee now. “Now is the day of” escape and “salvation.” To - morrow may be that of vengeance and final ruin. And, as you flee, “look not behind you. Remember Lot’s wife,” and the Israelites who perished; the one for looking back toward Sodom, and the others for going back in their hearts toward Egypt. Above all, be not ashamed to run from the bottomless pit; nor blush to secure a crown of glory. And now you have seen the mouth of the earth opened, and the rocks rent, imitate the repentance of our Lord’s murderers, who, when they had seen the rocks of Calvary rent by an earthquake, smote upon their breasts and returned. But to that penitential gesture, add the contrite publican’s prayer: “God be merciful to me a sinner!” And may the merciful God, who “justifies the ungodly” that repent of their ungodliness, and believe in Jesus; and who permitted the publican “to go down to his house justified,” grant you to return home justified from all your crimes, earnestly praying that as the rest of your life hereafter may be pure and holy; so that at the last you may come to his eternal joy, through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

(2.) A word to you who will neither flee yourselves into the city of refuge, nor suffer others to make their escape out of the “city of destruction.” If yesterday you had met with the people of that house, running toward yonder wood with their children in their arms; if you had cursed them for fools that were frighted at nothing; and if by such means you had prevailed upon them to go back and run into the jaws of these opening and closing graves, you would have been just as kind to their bodies as you are to the souls of your friends who begin to run out of their sins, and consequently out of the jaws of hell and destruction.

Ye laugh at them: ye, perhaps, curse them for Methodistical fools; and “wonder why they make so much ado;” when they tell you in Scripture language that they “flee from the wrath to come,” and run for a crown of life: far from hearing reason, to cruel mockings ye add cutting detraction. Ye that stand infatuated on the brink of eternal ruin presume to call them fools because they are not so fool hardy as yourselves: ye that spend the awful, critical, important, irretrievable moment allotted you to make your escape, in passing idle jests, in catching the butterfly of honour, or in grasping the bubble of pleasure: ye not only pretend to be wise; but setting yourselves up as judges of others, from the scorners’ chair ye pass sentence of madness on all that show yet some respect for common sense, Scripture, and matter of fact. Was ever any thing more absurd? And if folly has a throne, is it not fixt in your own hearts? O that with the prodigal son you might come at last to yourselves! O that you were wise, and understood in time what dreadful injury such conduct does your friends, your Saviour, and your souls!

(3.) A word to you, also, who affect to pass for freethinkers, though probably you never allowed yourselves one day freely to think on your latter end, or one hour candidly to weigh the evidences of Christianity. You pretend that you “cannot believe the Bible, because it mentions so many uncommon and incredible events.” But let me encounter you upon this spot, and your argument will possibly be overthrown as these fields; and the idleness of your objection brought to light as the shattered bottom of that river.

If I had told you yesterday that you would walk across the bed of the Severn in the deepest place to day without so much as wetting your feet, with supercilious pity in your looks would you not have said, “We philosophers, in this enlightened age, cannot so easily be the dupes of priestcraft. I would as soon believe that Moses made the Israelites cross an arm of the Red Sea, dry shod?”

If one had intimated to you, that the tree which flourished yesterday in the meadow on the other side of the river would, like the sycamore mentioned by our Lord, be planted to - day in the middle of the river without the touch of a human hand; that a multitude of spectators would stand in the deepest part of the Severn’s channel, and be shaded there by stately oaks, suddenly transplanted by an invisible power; that fields and hedges, a building and a road, would travel of their own accord; and that the hollows of yonder field would rise into mounts, and the mounts sink into hollows; would you not have said, “This is only repetition of the absurd tale about Joshua crossing Jordan when it overflowed its banks, without the help of either bridge or boat; this is the wild story of David about Mount Sinai skipping like a ram and little hills like young sheep?”

If one had assured you that Providence would make bare her arm, and that you would find fishes suddenly left dry in overflowed lands, and barges overset for want of water in the channel of a deep river, at a time when profane watermen had just horribly cursed its uncommon flood, would you not have replied, “I will as soon believe that the Nile was turned into blood by a touch of Moses’ rod, or that a stormy sea was suddenly calmed by a word of Jesus Christ?”

If I had informed you that the rocky bottom of the Severn, in a place where it was near twenty feet deep, would instantly spring up and rise many feet above the surface of the water; and that a great river, with out wind or tide, would flow back toward her source; would you not have answered, “ We do not live in the time of miracles; the old women who believe that the sun forgat his going down in the days of Joshua, that iron swam in the days of Elisha, and that an ass spoke in the days of Balaam, may believe such absurdities?”

If one had declared to you, that the wicked watermen and profane drivers of horses could provoke God suddenly to dam up the river, overthrow their road, and put a temporary stop, both to their navigation and travelling; would you not have said with a shrewd smile, “I must believe the Bible, if God does such a thing?” Well then, believe it, for the Lord has done it. The fact is indubitable; and if you will not believe me, believe your own eyes, believe thousands of witnesses.

In some hundred years, (if this Sodom be suffered to subsist so long,) when all these apertures shall have been washed by rains or floods, or trodden in by the feet of man and beast; and when the plough shall have levelled these heaps of ruins into fields crowned with a waving harvest; posterity will find it almost as hard to credit what you now see, as you do to believe what the Israelites formerly saw; and some future disbelievers will probably wonder at your supposed credulity, just as you do at our believing the wonders recorded in the Bible.

O! that reason and experience might make you ashamed of your unbelief! O! that human and Divine testimony, arguments and facts, spiritual and sensible demonstration, which meet to day before you, might turn the stream of your infidelity, as the Lord turned yesterday the course of that turbid river! O! that you would bow to the God of your fathers, the Creator, Redeemer, and Comforter of returning sinners! Trees have danced, fields have run, mounts have skipped, and “the floods have clapped their hands before the Lord;” God has answered you by water and earth: O that you would shout with the perplexed Israelites, when God answered them by fire! “The Lord he is the God! The Lord he is the God!” O that you might cry out in a transport of faith, as unbelieving Thomas, when he had seen the scars in the hands and side of his risen Saviour, “My Lord and my God!”

Those earthen pyramids, which the invisible hand of Providence has suddenly cut out of the bosom of the earth will soon disappear; those disparted rocks, which are now such striking instances of God’s power, will one day decay; but if, on this awful occasion, you turn from your unbelief to your Saviour, and continue in the faith, you will be lasting monuments of his restoring grace, and eternal objects of the joy with which he welcomes returning prodigals to the open arms of his mercy, and penitent infidels to the unsearchable treasures of his love.

(4.) And ye that are awakened to a sight of your spiritual danger, and behold around you the blind leading the blind into the pit of destruction, suffer also the word of exhortation. Imitate the warning love of the illiterate man of that house, who gave his family the alarm, and excited them by his words and example, to flee from the impending ruin. Rouse your relations, your friends, your neighbours, your very enemies, as they can bear it. Tell them, in the language of St. Peter, “that the heavens and the earth, which are now, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, and perdition of ungodly men. Declare to them, that God is long suffering to us ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance: and yet assure them, that the day of the Lord will certainly come, and that it will come as unexpectedly by most, as a thief in the night; and as suddenly to all, as this desolation came yesterday morning.

Then shall all that is under the curse pass away; and O! with what noise! If the removal of some acres of land and a river was yesterday so dreadful; how inconceivably terrible will be the passing away of all the plains and mountains, all the islands and continents, all the rivers and seas in the universe! Lord, give us the helmet of salvation, before the coming of “that great and terrible day.”

In the meantime, whosoever thou art that fearest God, I address thee in the language of the angels to Lot: “Hast thou here any beside thy self, son in law, and thy sons, and thy daughters?” Bring them out of this immense Sodom, this wicked world. Say to them, “Up! get ye out of this place,” this vale of sin, tears, and misery: “for the Lord will destroy it: and have your conversation in heaven, whence Jesus Christ shall be revealed with ten thousand of his angels in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.” And if thou “seem to them as one that mocks;” or if they say of thee, as the Pharisees did of our Lord, “He has a devil, and is mad; why hear ye him?” Yet do not give them up. Consider that “charity hopeth all things.” Mourn for them in secret places: and remember, that many who had stood proof against the most rational exhortations, have at last been sweetly overcome by the power of humble, warm, persevering prayer.

(5.) But ye want perhaps some encouragement yourselves, ye that tremble at God’s word, and at this desolation. Ye see by this sample, what terrible destruction will one day come upon all the earth; and ye desire to meet the general overthrow, not only with calm resignation, but with triumphant joy. In order to this, give me leave once more to point you “to the hills whence our salvation comes; to the blood of sprinkling, that speaks better things than the blood of Abel; and to Jesus, the” once crucified, but now for ever exalted “Mediator of the new covenant.”

By the importunate actings of a penitential faith in his blood, and by a heart felt dependence upon his infinite merits, flee to his mediatorial protection, as the man slayer, pursued by the avenger of blood, fled to the city of refuge. And if the burden of your sins, increased by the sense of your natural impotence, render your hearts so heavy that you cannot lift them up to heaven; do as a lame child, who escaped yesterday out of this overthrow. Seeing all who were in the house ready to run out of it for their lives; and conscious that he could not save himself by a speedy flight, he cried out, “And what shall I do, father?” Imitate him, poor sinners, who are spiritually maimed, halt, blind, and full of putrefying sores: cry to the Saviour of the lost, “And what shall we do, Lord? Without thee we can do nothing: save us, O Lamb of God, or we perish.”

And O! may the countryman’s pity for the lame child be an emblem to you of the Redeemer’s compassion for every distressed soul that looks to him for help! “I will carry thee, my child,” answered the father with yearning bowels, as he took him up in his arms to run out of the house. And so will Christ: hear his own gracious words: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, she may forget, yet I will not forget thee. The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee. Why sayest thou, O worm Jacob, My way is hid from the Lord? Hast thou not heard that the everlasting God fainteth not? He giveth power to the weak, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even youths shall be weary. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.” Only beware of making your profession of dependence upon the Lord an occasion of indulging spiritual sloth. Instead of saying, like Solomon’s sluggard, “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep,” do as the lame child did, when he was carried across yonder field. Having then an opportunity of seeing over his father’s shoulder what passed around him, far from composing himself to sleep, he earnestly cried out, “Run, father, run! for the barn, trees, and hedges go faster than we.” Run also, penitent sinner, run the race of obedience that is set before you: run the circle of all the good works prepared for you to walk in: run, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith; and as you run, pray in the language of the spouse: “Draw us more and more, Lord, and we will run faster and faster after thee.” Nor be satisfied with running to - day: while you are in this world go to the Father by Christ: believe, obey, and take up your cross daily: a life of holiness is the race, and heaven is the prize. Do not run back unto perdition: “So run that you may obtain:” endure unto the end of the race, and you shall be eternally saved.

(6.) And shall I forget to congratulate you on this occasion, ye happy believers, whose hearts are sprinkled with the blood of the true Paschal Lamb, and whose faith unfeigned works by obedient love? No. I must remind you of your inestimable privileges; it is your prerogative to glorify God in the fires, and shout his power on these ruins. Our Lord himself gives you leave to triumph, not only when the powers of the earth, but those of heaven shall be shaken. “When these things,” says he, “begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.”

The destroyer may be suffered to tempt and afflict you, as severely and as long as he did the patient man: but ye may say with him, “Though God slay us, yet we will trust in him.” You serve an almighty Protector. “Because you have set your love upon the Lord, therefore will he deliver you from the noisome pestilence; he shall defend you under his wings; his faithfulness and truth shall be your shield and buckler. Ye shall not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the sickness, or earthquake that destroyeth in the noonday. A thousand shall fall beside you, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come nigh you, to overthrow your souls, or to destroy your peace. Yea, with your eyes shall ye behold and see the reward of the ungodly.”

So long as ye hear your Shepherd’s voice, and follow his steps, he numbers you among his sheep, and none shall pluck you out of his hand. Who or what shall harm you, if you are followers of that which is good? Were those fields this instant to reel again to and fro like a drunken man: did the earth open before your eyes a thousand new mouths as wide as this chasm, and burst all her rocks in ten thousand pieces under your feet: did impetuous rivers bend their course against you, and roaring seas roll mountainous waves around you; you would experience the serenity of mind which (even a poor heathen being judge) is the privilege of the just.f8 “The wreck of the world would crush your bodies without disturbing your souls.” With trembling awe you could in that extremity rejoice in God your Saviour, and say with David, “The Lord is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble: therefore will we not fear though the earth be moved, and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea: though the waters thereof rage and swell, and though the mountains shake at the tempest of the same. The kingdoms are moved, but God hath showed his voice. The earth itself shall melt away, but we will not fear what roaring storms, bellowing earthquakes, wicked men, and raging devils, can do unto us: for “the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.” Yes, O ye righteous, who walk as becomes the Gospel of his grace, he is your eternal refuge, and will be your exceeding great reward. The power that yesterday rent these rocks, opened these fields, and raised these mounts, will one day rend your tombs, open your graves, raise your dust, and place your immortal bodies upon Mount Sion that cannot be moved. There shall you shine as the sun in the innumerable company of angels, and in the assembly of just men made perfect. There brazen - faced scoffers and rioters, who glory in their shame, will interrupt your devotions no more: and there, with unutterable transports of joy and inexpressible ravishments of love, we shall meet again, to ascribe the glory of our present deliverance, and of an eternal salvation “to him that sitteth upon the throne and to the Lamb for ever and ever.”