judgments does he daily exercise upon sin and sinners! How many, in punishment of sin, are snatched away in the flower of their age by sudden and unprovided death! How many die in despair! How many, after having long abused God's graces, are given up to a reprobate sense, to a hardness of heart, the worst and most terrible of all his judgments! O! let us tremble at the thoughts of so great a misfortune; let us be convinced that there can be no misery so great as that which we incur by mortal sin; and that we are more our own enemies, and do ourselves more mischief, by consenting to any one mortal sin, than all the men upon earth, and all the devils in hell could do us, though they were all to conspire together to do their worst: because all that they can do, so long as we do not consent to sin, cannot hurt the soul: whereas we ourselves by consenting to any one mortal sin, bring upon our own souls a dreadful and eternal death. Good God! never suffer us to be so blind as to become thus the murderers of our own souls.
5. Consider, O my soul, and tremble at the sight of that multitude of treasons against thy God, by which thou hast so often provoked his indignation in the whole course of thy life. Alas! is it not too true, that thou no sooner didst come to the use of reason than thou didst abandon thy king and thy God, under the wings of whose fatherly protection thou hadst happily past the days of thy innocence? Ah! how early didst thou run away from the best of fathers; and, like the prodigal child, squandering away thy substance in a strange land, hast sought in vain to satisfy thy appetite with the husks of swine. Pass over in thy remembrance, in the bitterness of thy soul, all the years of thy life; and see what treasures of iniquity in thought, word and deed, will discover
