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 re minds, 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 multi tude 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 Da than 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 pre tenders 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 indeed we are 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 that it is the secret whispers of your hearts.

O ye Christian Dathan's, ye lofty Abiram's, ye, who, like the 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 poor illiterate colliers, waggoners, 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 not they cannot read, secret contempt of Almighty God, on the sleeves, in which they see you sometimes

laugh at godliness? And suppose ye they cannot make out open pollution of his sab. baths, 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, practice 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 an hundred private houses. Oh ! 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 hand? Shall not I visit for these things, saith the Lord? Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?

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Many of you indeed, do not carry profaneness so far as to say with Dathan and Abiram, "We will not come up :" You still come to the house of prayer; but alas! do you not turn it, so far as lies in you, into an house of vanity, by behaving as if your employment there was to see or be seen? do you not consider it as an house of intrigue, rather than a spiritual infirmary; when you come to gaze upon the person that 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 an house of vanity or intrigue; do you not esteem it the house of dulness, a dormitory, the 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 far from him, his ways, his ordinances, and his people?

So long as our practice speaks this dreadful language, is it not 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 ourselves 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 wrapped himself by a strong faith in the mantle of divine power, as St. Peter and St. Paul did afterwards; 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 sur geon cuts off a mortified limb, that the infeetion may not destroy the whole body or rather as a minister of that God, who resist eth 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 gulph 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 ery And so will your gay companions fly at your groans, ye impenitent sinners. When you are just falling from a death-bed into a noisome grave, they will fly from the room where you shall be executed, lest the executioner, (whether it be the small-pox, or a fever,) lay hold of 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 erying, "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, Prov.i 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 over-ruled, or justly punished, it turns to God's praise Every rational being must then answer the end of hisexistence, by glori fying the Author of it one way or another. We must all reflect honour upon our Master, either as a gracious rewarder of those that di ligently seek him, or a just punisher of those that obstinately offend him. Thus, while the Blessed shew 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

midnight cry, Behold! the bridegroom cometh! Careless sinners 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 om nipotence 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 so to consider this blow, that we may all fly 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, Abiṛam, and their families, but to bury this immense congregation. Hundreds of you 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'!

Oye 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, 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. Da. than 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 Europe?

If earthquakes are not terrible enough to make us stand in awe before God; do you not know, that to the tremors 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 Zeboin, suffered vergeance 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 Pompei, 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, by which the whole city was filled and covered.

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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 descriptions 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 earthquakes were slain seven thousand men; and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven,' "Rev. xi. 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 found no more at all," Rev. xviii. 21. And thus, O thus may our sins, (the Babylon within,) be cast this day, as the propliet 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 are ready for that awful change, it will not matter, whether we are let down 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