to swallow a mortal poison, would you put off to another day the trial of the only antidote which might save your life? Would the agent of death, which you carried in your bowels, allow of delays and neglect? Such is your state. If you be wise, have instant recourse to your precautions. You carry death in your soul, since in it you carry sin; hasten to apply the remedy, since every moment is precious to him who cannot depend on one. The poisonous beverage which infects your soul cannot long be trifled with; the goodness of God still holds out to you a cure; hasten, once more I say, to secure it, while it is not yet too late. Should entreaties be necessary to determine your compliance, ought not the prospect of relief to be sufficient? Is it necessary to exhort an unfortunate wretch, just sinking in the waves, to exert his endeavours to save himself? Ought you, in this matter, to have occasion for our ministry? Your last hour approaches; you soon shall have to appear before the tribunal of God. You may usefully employ the moment which yet remains to you; almost all those, whose departure from this world you are daily witnessing, allow it to slip from them, and die without having reaped any advantage from it. You imitate their neglect; the same surprise awaits you, and, like them, you will be cut off before the work of reformation has commenced. They had been warned of it, and in the same manner we warn you; their misery touches you not; and the unfortunate lot which awaits you, will not more sensibly affect those to whom we shall one day announce it; it is a succession of blindness, which passes from father to son, and is perpetuated on the earth: we all wish to live better, and we all die before we have begun to reform.
Such, my brethren, are the prudent and natural reflections which the uncertainty of our last hour should lead us to make. But if, on account of its uncertainty, you are imprudent in paying no more attention to it, than as if it were never to arrive, the fearful portion attending its certainty still less excuses your folly, in striving to remove that melancholy image from your mind, under the pretence of its only tending to empoison every comfort, and to destroy the tranquillity of life. This is what I have still to lay before you.
Part II. — Man loves not to dwell upon his nothingness and meanness; whatever recalls to him his origin puts him in mind also of his end, wounds his pride, interests his self-love, attacks the foundation of all his passions, and gives birth to gloomy and disagreeable ideas. To die, to disappear from the earth, to enter the dark abyss of eternity, to become a carcass, the food of worms, the horror of men, the hideous inmate of a tomb; that sight alone revolts every sense, distracts reason, blackens imagination, and empoisons every comfort in life; we dare not fix our looks on so hideous an image; we reject that thought, as the most gloomy and bitter of all. We dread, we fly from every thing which may force its remembrance on our mind, as though it would hasten the approach of the fatal hour. Under a pretence of tenderness, we love not to
