promising scheme. It silences and quiets your conscience; it soothes your apprehensions; it enables you to enjoy the society, the engagements, and the amusements of the ungodly; and under its Battering assurances, you can "bless yourself in your heart, and say, Peace and safety! I shall have peace' at last, though' for the present I do walk after the imagination of my own heart,' and am undoubtedly well aware, that my heart yields as yet no obedience to the grace and authority of God."

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But, except you are prepared to relinquish all pretentions to the character of a reasonable being, you cannot object to an examination of this scheme. If it were a mercantile speculation, yea, if it were even no more than a plan concerted to form a party for a pleasurable excursion, you would look at it with a good deal of attention; you would examine all its parts, and see how they were likely to hang together; you would be jealous of its weaknesses and oversights; you would calculate the chances of failure; you would solicit the aid of experience; you would inquire how the same or any similar plan had succeeded in the hands of other persons: and, if you found that there was a radical mistake lurking at the bottom of the whole measure, that it had proved uniformly disappointing and ruinous to all who had persisted in acting upon it, that the few who had escaped its destructive consequences, had so escaped only by changing their plan in the most prompt and essential manner;-you would firmly relinquish it, you would pity the insane folly of those who still persevered in it, and you would bless the friendly monitor who awakened your caution.

So would every prudent person aet, in a case which concerned but the fugitive pleasures, the poor

and perishing profits of this dying world. And, O will you not arouse an unspeakably more lively interest, will you not exercise all the attention and care of which you are capable, in this great, this never-dying, this infinite concern? Alas! that men should be foreseeing, penetrating, prudent, and sagacious, in the affairs of a moment;-and the very same men will act the part of an infatuation the most pitiable in an affair where the prize is eternal happiness, the loss eternal misery, and the perseverance in error is fatal and without remedy!

Join with me, then, I intreat you, in this inquiry; and give me your fair and impartial attention, while I lay before you my reasons for believing that this course of proceeding is utterly worthless, and will prove, to all who trust to it, a complete and most dreadful delusion.

I shall attempt to show, I. that upon the principle which this proposed plan assumes, it is so, precarious and hazardous a scheme as to be almost, if not altogether, imprac ticable. And, II. that the principle thus assumed, and which alone could give to this plan the colour of reason, is totally erroneous, and consequently that the whole fabric built on so ruinous a foundation must fall to entire disappointment and destruction.

I. We are to examine the course in question upon its own assumed principle.

This principle is, that religion is a state of mind and conduct to which a person may attain by his own exertions, and at his own pleasure; a notion which we will, at present, permit to pass without contradiction, and shall examine our subject upon the admission of it as true.

You propose, at some future period, to renounce all your irreligious motives, dispositions, tempers, and passions, acts and habits,

accomplishments, vigour, strength, health itself-give not a moment's assurance of safety from the secret stroke. And is it upon such a foundation as this that you build your expectation of converting yourself from sin to God, escaping the guilt, and power, and fetters of your long-lived rebellions, and working out the mighty task of your own salvation? I can urge it no more. The folly is too big for description. It is equalled only by the wickedness of such a plan.

2. I request you to ask the reasonable query, If I am unwilling now to love and serve God, and obey the requisitions of religion, what probability is there that I should be willing at a future time ?"

The will is governed by the prevailing taste, disposition, or predilection of the mind: and in order to a change in the will, there must be a change in the object presented to the mind, or in the mind's perception and affection towards it. But the great objects of religion, God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, holiness, salvation, heaven, do not change; they are of unalterable excellency and value. If, then, you should become affected with love to those blessed and holy objects to which you are now so indifferent, and even hostile, the mighty change must take place in yourself; and again I ask, How is this change to be produced? By length of continuance in the state and practice of sin, are you the more likely to be released from its infernal fascinations, and its adamantine chains? The farther you wander from God, are you getting the nearer to him?

You know that, at present, your heart has no delight in the contemplation of the holy and righteous Jehovah, no love to his pure and perfect law, no aspirations after communion with him, and entire conformity to him; do NEW SERIES, No. 21.

or

you then think it probable that the longer you continue in this temper of estrangement from God, this state of enmity, ingratitude, and rebellion, you will be brought the nearer to the perfectly opposite state of mind and feeling? Will love be produced by hatred; the spirit of dutiful and affectionate obedience by the longer perseverance in hardened and contemptuous disobedience? You cannot be ignorant of the force of habit over the bodies and minds, the actions, dispositions, and characters of mankind; and you must be sensible that one great part of the awful dominion which sin holds over you, consists in wrong thoughts, feelings, and actions, which, by long indulgence, have grown up into a kind of second nature, a very part of yourselves. Do you then suppose that when these sinful habits shall have become a thousand times stronger than they now are, it will be easier for you to break them off? In all other things you know that it is inexpressibly difficult, and often absolutely impossible, to break off any habit which is long established, and become, as it is generally and very properly called, inveterate; and in contradiction to universal experience, do you expect that your habits of wickedness will become more easy to be parted with by the inveteracy of their retention? Sometimes, indeed, men outgrow particular sins. The irregular passions of youth are often checked by the cares and toils, the plans and businesses of middle age, and are, perhaps, extinguished by the infirmities of declining years. But these are only alterations of the channel, and variations of the current; the stream of depravity is still flowing on; the general habit of sin, in its essential characters, the same, however versatile its outward shapes, still remains, and goes on growing and strengthening itself under all

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Thus, in the progress and confirmation of sinful habits, the words of the Most High by his prophet are verified; " If thou say in thine heart, wherefore come these things upon me? By the greatness of thine iniquity, is thy shame discovered, and thy weakness made bare. Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil." Now let me beseech you to give due weight to these considerations, and then ask your reason, ask your conscience, whether it is not the wildest infatuation for you, who are now unwilling to leave your sins, and affectionately embrace the holiness of the gospel, to expect that by continuing in this unwillingness you will become less unwilling? The very statement of your expectation is a contradiction in terms. The knowledge and experience of mankind are against it; your own observation, sense, and consciousness, contradict it; and will you stake your soul, your immortality of bliss or woe, upon this miserable delu

sion?

3. Another circumstance which demonstrates the folly and danger of your expectation, is that dreadful subjection to the will and power of wicked spirits which attaches to the state and character of all unconverted persons.

That many individuals of a superior order of creatures, at a very early period, sinned against their Maker, and fell from their first estate of purity and happiness, is a doctrine plainly revealed in the Scriptures, and is perfectly in unison with all the dictates of reason and analogy. The Holy Scriptures also represent the chief of those wicked and miserable spirits as exercising a dominion over the souls and the actions of wicked men. They who serve not God, serve Satan. They are

truth, "children of the wicked one, children of the devil, and' servants of the devil," and he is described as "the enemy who soweth tares, and who catcheth away the seed out of the hearts" of careless and superficial hearers of the gospel. He is "the prince of invisible power, the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience, the god of this world who blindeth the minds of those who believe not." O dreadful and appalling thought! You, my reader, yea, ALL, however different in other respects, who do not truly and faithfully cleave to Christ as your Sovereign and Saviour, are the vassals and slaves of this vilest of usurpers, this most cruel of tyrants. In the plain and striking language of Scripture," he enters into you, he fills your hearts, he beguiles you, he leads you captive, he holds you in his snare." Now, thus stands the case with those who fancy that they will, at some future convenient time, turn to God and religion; they are now under the power of the prince of darkness, the crafty, restless, savage foe of God and man; they resign themselves meanly and tamely to this base servility; and they imagine that, at this future time, whenever it shall arrive, they will have no difficulty in freeing themselves from it. Fatally enchanted and miserable souls, you invite the hellish deceiver to make your chains more numerous and more fast; and you think that you will afterwards easily burst through them. You give the old serpent ample time to coil and twist his horrid, snaky folds around your wretched soul, while you are aiding his deceptions, and lulling your conscience asleep with the weak belief that you can disentangle yourself at your pleasure. Was ever folly comparable to this? Yes; there is another fact concerning you, and your awful delu