God, but in a settled hatred of his character-not in the bare omission of obedience to his commands, but in determined opposition to his great scheme of mercy and grace, is not an unavoidable, and, therefore, harmless infirmity-is not a misfortune, but a crime? Its very essence is ENMITY AGAINST GOD. No one is obliged by the necessity of his nature, to cherish such ENMITY. Its exercise is a voluntary act of the mind. And instead of being obliged to put forth such an act, every moral creature throughout the universe of God, is pressed, by every consideration arising from his condition and relations-his duty and his interests, to love him supremely and forever. He requires this. This he infinitely deserves. Obedience to the requirement, makes and perpetuates heavenly felicity. Ask those seraphim who adore and burn" with holy love, if it would be guiltless in them to begin to burn with emotions of ENMITY AGAINST Him, whose presence is forever to fill their angel minds with new accessions of bliss and glory. Ask the whole "sacramental host of God's elect" on earth, if such enmity is only an infirmity to be pitied rather than punished; and they will point you, for an answer, to those chains of darkness in which lie those seraph minds, which kept not their first estate. O, there is tremendous guilt in the causeless ENMITY of creatures AGAINST the adorable Jehovah.

The subject brings into view the entireness of human depravity. Indeed, from the known properties of mind, the inference might with much safety be drawn, that a state of the affections, which involves the exercise of ENMITY AGAINST GOD, must imply an utter incapacity for exercising the opposite emotions of love. With his existing temper, "Satan cannot love". God. Nor can the regenerate mind cherish feelings of aversion towards him. His seed remaineth in him, and he cannot commit such a sin. He may be left to sin against, but he will be kept from indulging feelings of ENMITY AGAINST GOD. The language of the text clearly marks the dis

tinction between occasional and unallowed sins, and habitual and cherished sins-between unindulged emotions of unreconciliation, and feelings of determined opposition to God. It asserts, that the unrenewed mind sins not merely occasionally and contrary to its better purposes, but constantly and without reluctance-is not simply, at times of peculiar temptation, thrown into an attitude of resistance to the divine allotments, but is uninterruptedly, unhesitatingly, and entirely in its temper, taste, and aims, opposed to the God of the bible. It is ENMITY AGAINST HIM. It is made up of views, and feelings, and purposes, which are all stamped with this single unvarying characteristic of ENMITY AGAINST Him, who is emphatically love.

Such, dear friends, is the mind which is in you, and me, and every other child of Adam, unless through special mercy it has been changed by renewing grace. It is a painful subject to dwell upon; and did I not know it to be a truth most interesting to you as well as to myself a truth which you must feel, before you can feel the joys of pardoned sinners, I should never give you pain, disturb your peace, or awaken your feelings of disgust by introducing it to your notice. Not one of you will blame me for it at another day!

II. The subject presents some views, which may be of service in distinguishing between those convictions of sin, which are produced by the Spirit of truth and the workings of natural conscience. It is one thing to be alarmed from apprehension of danger, and another to be deeply convinced of the reality and nature of the evil which hangs over the unconverted. The alarms of conscience are commonly little more than some transient disturbance of the mind, apart from any very distinct perception of the cause. Dangers in dim and shadowy forms float before the mind, and its vague and broken visions destroy its quiet. But convictions of sin by the Holy Spirit, being effected through the instrumentality of divine truth, are always connected with

such views of sin, as are alone to be gained by the strong light, which divine truth thus attended, pours in upon the mind. It is by the word of God, that the convicted sinner learns the nature and strength of his inherent depravity, and the greatness, the universality, and the guiltiness of his sins. He detects them in forms and numbers without number, where an awakened conscience would only gain some faint glimpses of moral delinquencies, foreboding that all is not right, and that dangers thicken along the impenetrable obscurity of the future. Though the Spirit of truth adapts his revelations of the sin, and guilt, and peril of the awakened, to their power of sustaining the oppressive view, and may never give a full developement of their condition to their minds, yet his disclosures are just and accurate. Though they are mercifully relieved from seeing all, yet they are, from time to time, brought to survey such partial exhibitions, as may teach them how unable they are to bear a view of the whole. By the law is the knowledge of sin. They are brought to view themselves in that mirror to measure themselves by that standard-to see how the number and magnitude of their sins multiply and swell, as the commandment comes in the length and breadth of its exceeding strictness and spirituality. They see, how sins and guilt have been accumulated in cherishing a mind, which is now perceived to have been ENMITY AGAINST GOD. Now, such ENMITY appears in each act of disobedience to a law thus holy, just, and good. Now, they are enabled to perceive, that but for such ENMITY, they would have continually delighted in this law after the inward man. In a word, they are convinced of having exercised this terrible ENMITY AGAINST GOD, in every attitude, in which he has been pleased to reveal himself to the guilty children of men. Against thee, thee only have I sinned, is the instinctive acknowledgement of those, whom the Spirit of God effectually convinces of sin. Among the sins, which will rise up to the view of their minds, will

be many unkind and unjust speeches, actions, and feelings towards their fellow men; but they now see that the Most High is chiefly respected in them all, and that ENMITY AGAINST Him constitutes the cause and essence of every sin. To be opposed in heart to him, appears so great an evil, that if it were not seen to be the source and spring of every offence against man, it would absorb, in the minds of the truly convicted, all their feelings of solicitude, and leave them only anxious to have their ENMITY wholly slain, and their mountain of sins removed. And yet such is their sense of the utter unreasonableness of their ENMITY AGAINST GOD, that they have a most full conviction, that he would be entirely just and good, were he to leave them to the inevitable consequence of such an unprovoked and causeless hostility to his law, government, and salvation.

Convictions, created by the Holy Spirit through the instrumentality of divine truth, are convictions no less of the misery than of the greatness and guilt of sin. O to feel the long indulged, and long strengthened, depraved inclinations now refusing to heed the dictates of reason, impelling them onward, in more and more marked acts of cordial ENMITY AGAINST Him, who is omnipotent, and just, and holy-O, to feel that they have been so long rivetting the chains of their spiritual bondage, that none but the Almighty One, whom they have been binding themselves to oppose, can break the cruel fetters and set them free-Ah! yes, and to feel something in their hearts, that will resist their application to him for help, though everlasting ruin must abide them, unless such help is granted-this, this is a misery, nearly allied to that which can never know the alleviation of one smiling hope!

It is a distressing consideration, and I may be thought to expose some of my hearers to needless pain, by suggesting it, that many are entertaining favorable views of their religious condition, who know nothing of such convictions as have now been described. But it must

not be disguised, though a few may be unnecessarily distressed by the remark, that the fair fabric of the religious hopes of many nominal christians, has arisen from a foundation, that was not laid in the deep work of thorough conviction. A slight uneasiness, created by the feeble actings of an excited conscience, succeeded by the calm of a conscience pacified by outward duties, has become the foundation on which the religious hopes of men are not seldom built. The great defects in such foundation, consist in their necessarily not being laid in the spirit of deep humiliation before God. The work of conviction not having laid low every thing, that exalts itself against God, there can, in such cases, be no strong impression of their need, and no affecting view of their unworthiness, of the sovereign mercy of God in Christ Jesus their Lord. Their wound was not the deeply inflicted wound of the sword of the Spirit, and it became healed without an application to the alone adequate Physician of the wounded spirit. In instances of this kind, what was wanting in the beginning of their religious course, continues a marked defect throughout. They obtain no experience, which enables them to make it out to the full satisfaction of their own minds, (plain as it is stated in the word of God,) that THE CARNAL MIND IS ENMITY AGAINST him. Alike indistinct and vague are their apprehensions of all those doctrines of the gospel, which are involved in christian experience. They know scarcely nothing at all of the true reason, why it is, that persons avowedly of the same faith with themselves, have such implicit and unshaken belief in the leading truths of the bible. While they coldly assent to them, as matters of speculation, others feel them as matters of experience. While too, others are mourning over, and contending against the still unsubdued sins of the heart, they are not in trouble on this account, have no painful changes in their religious career, and are surprised, that so much should be said of the spiritual conflicts of believers. Now, let it be said in faith