Page:Sermons preached in the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas', Philadelphia.djvu/224

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a sacred nearness
[ser. xi.

with complacency, either upon man or angel, that does not, in his measure, bear his moral image and likeness. There is a perpetual war between the two. God has no fellowship with the wicked. And the wicked have no communion with him. "The carnal mind is enmity against God." The final issue of this hostility, according to the sacred oracles, will be terrible in the extreme. They teach us that "the day cometh, when all the proud" contemners of God's law, "and all that do wickedly," shall, at the awful sentence of the Judge, "go away into everlasting punishment, where shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." Awfully tremendous is the doom that awaits the finally impenitent. But as our heavenly Father "hath no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his wickedness and live," he has in infinite kindness devised a plan by which he may escape that misery to which his native opposition to God will certainly