Even you, my brethren^ when the awful solemnity of that grand event hath sometimes intruded on your thoughts, have been unable to check feelings of compunction and dread. But these have been only transitory fears; more smiling and more agreeable ideas have speedily effaced them, and recalled to you your former calm. Alas! in the happy days of the church, it would have been considered as renouncing faith not to have longed for the day of the Lord. The only consolation of those first disciples of faith was in looking forward to it, and the apostles were obliged even to moderate, on that point, the holy eagerness of believers; and, at present, the church finds itself under the necessity of employing the whole terror of our ministry, in order to recall its remembrance to Christians, and the whole fruit of our discourses is confined to making it dreaded.
I mean not, however, to display to you here the whole history of that awful event. I wish to confine myself to one of its circumstances, which has always appeared to me as the most proper to make an impression on the heart: it is the manifestation of consciences.
Now, behold my whole design. On this earth the sinner never knows himself such as he is, and is only half-known to men; he lives, in general, unknown to himself, through his blindness, and to others through his dissimulation and cunning. In that grand day he will know himself, and will be known. The sinner laid open to himself, the sinner laid open to all creatures! Behold the subject upon which I have resolved to make some simple, and, I trust, edifying reflections.
Part I. — "All things are reserved for a future day," says the sage Ecclesiastes, * and no man knoweth them here below, for all things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good, and to the clean and to the unclean: to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner."
What idea, indeed, should we have of Providence in the government of the universe, were we to judge of its wisdom and justice only from the diverse lots which it provides on this earth for men? What! the good and the evil should be dispensed on the earth, without choice, respect, or discrimination? The just man should almost always groan under affliction and want, whilst the wicked should live surrounded with glory, pleasures, and affluence, and, after fortunes so different, and manners so dissimilar, both should alike sink into an eternal oblivion; and that just and avenging God, whom they should afterward meet, would not deign either to weigh their deeds, or to distinguish their merits? Thou, O Lord, art just, and will render to each according to his works.
This grand point of Christian faith, so consistent even with natural equity, supposed, — I say, that, in that terrible day, when, in the face of the universe, the sinner shall appear before that awful tribunal accompanied by his works, the manifestation of consciences
