by. You cannot give up Sunday altogether to religious duties just at present; but your business will take another turn, you expect, one of these days: your family will grow up and take less of your time and care, and then you will do very differently. Then you will think less of this world, and more of the world to come. You will be diligent in your use of all the means of grace, private and public. But the warning is repeated other servants come and ask for the fruit which the Householder expects, and has every right to receive. Your more convenient season has not yet arrived: you know what you ought to do, but you do not find it at all easier now than it used to be: the very feeling of time lost and warning slighted vexes you, and you get rid of the second warning with sharpness and violence; and so you go on,-the servants of the Householder are at last killed. You resist the motions of the Holy Ghost in your hearts till you have quenched the Spirit. You have lulled conscience into a sleep from which it will not wake: you have turned a deaf ear to the warnings of God's Word and providence till you now do not know that those warnings ought to have any influence on your heart and conduct. All the time you bear the name of Christians. You know the way of salvation; but you hold the truth in

unrighteousness, or in indifference and carelessness; and if this continues to the end of your lives, what will you have done but rejected for yourselves the Son of God? The Apostle could suppose such cases possible, even worse than this, in those who had promised better things: he speaks of those who crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open

shame.b

Are we altogether safe from doing so?

C

There is a strange and fearful uniformity of character about sin. One generation of men may differ from another in manner of life, in civilization, in learning, in very many points; but as in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man. All along, age after age, there is the same earthly, wilful temper there, prone to depart from the living God; and accordingly, strange as many of the usages and practices of which we read in the Bible seem to us, whatever we are told of men's conduct, of their way of thinking and acting, shews us to ourselves as if they had lived under the same circumstances as ourselves, and not thousands of years ago, in another quarter of the globe, under a wholly different dispensation of God's will.

As of old, so now, one sin leads to another;

b Heb. vi. 6.

c Prov. xxvii. 19.

and therefore it is that going on in anything which you know to be wrong is so very dangerous. Never allow yourselves to think lightly of any sin, however slight it may be. There are many sins of which you will be tempted to think lightly, many sins of which the world speaks lightly, and even merrily; but do not you follow a multitude in thus doing evil. God's Word calls them fools who make a mock at sin.d You can never be too careful about the first beginning of sin: the first wrong step may be fatal. You never think of grossly breaking God's commandments; or if the thought of being thieves, or murderers, does enter your hearts, you put it from you with horror. But do you never covet that which is your neighbour's? do you never set your heart upon things which God's providence has not given you? are none of your affections inordinate? Do you never pass harsh judgments on your neighbours? never indulge anger and passion, sullenness, and a settled dislike towards those who, you think, have wronged you? In all this you are breaking the law which Christ has given you, you are casting off His authority as your King, you refuse to listen to Him as the great Prophet, you, in fact, say that you have no need of that full and perfect Sacrifice which He,

d Prov. xiv. 9.

as on this day, offered as the great High-Priest, once for all. You league yourselves with those who nailed Him on His cross. This seems shocking. So also did the priests and scribes think the declaration, that the husbandmen who rendered no fruit should be destroyed, and the vineyard given to others. They said, God forbid! No doubt they felt what they said; but did it do them any good? did they hang back at all the more from their wish to seize upon the Heir and cast Him out of the vineyard, and slay Him? did they act upon their own prayer that God would turn aside such awful consequences? No! they were as Balaam was: he could say, Let me die the death of the righteous, let my last end be like his! but he loved the wages of unrighteousness too much to separate from the enemies of God's people; and, prophet as he was, he died the death of a sinner. The vineyard was taken from those who killed the Son of God, it was given to others; and from the day that the preaching of the Apostles first invited a new set of husbandmen into it, it has at times passed from hand to hand, as the great Householder has seen good. Many a church that once flourished as the garden of the Lord, is now a waste howling wilderness. We are now intrusted with the

e Numb. xxiii. 10.

f Ibid. xxxi. 8.

vineyard: are we rendering the fruits in their season? If not, if we are deaf to all the calls upon us, if we crucify the Son of God afresh, the vineyard shall be taken from us: others shall render the fruit which we withhold. God's word shall not return unto Him void, but shall prosper in the thing whereto He sent it, whether we will hear, or whether we will forbear.

National sins bring national punishments: Church and people suffer when Church and people have done what they can to reject Christ. But what are the sins of nations and churches? They are the sins of this man and that man, of this woman and that woman, of this child and that child; living in the same country, members of the same Church, all put together, and yet seen distinct by the eyes of Him who on this day tasted the sharpness of death for us, and who we believe shall come in glory "to be our Judge."

Isaiah lv. 11.