ing from sin, and in consequence of sin, is something more than suffering; it is punishment.' The sinner consequently has nothing to hope for from God's clemency, if still persisting to have his own way. For the good will which would save him. if penitent and believing, must relentlessly punish him if he will not come within the circle of holy loyalty. The prodigal staying in his far country must starve. The tenant barring himself out-of-doors must shiver and freeze in the cold nightair, burn the lights never so cheerily within. Our argument would not be complete if it omitted to add that God has himself made great use of fear as a christian motive. The Scriptures have as many threatenings in them as promises, a Nay for every Yea. Ebal and Gerizim still confront each other with only as narrow a valley between as ever. If Jesus says" he that believeth shall be saved," what does he say except the reverse, even if he had not given utterance to that terrible reverse in words, "and he that believeth not shall be damned!" The first clause of the sentence virtually gives its counterpart. But he did not pause there; he did actually pronounce the whole sentence; and He the Judge of men has never unsaid it. Now, not to go into a long citation of similar proofs, which the intelligent reader very well knows are scattered all through the inspired pages, notice this - that the express purpose of the convicting Spirit among men is to "convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment." He takes the startling facts of human sin, of Divine righteousness, of coming judgment, and does with them what? Just what the health-officer does with the statistics of small-pox or fever; he uses them to wake up men to danger; rings a firebell to bring from their beds the falsely and fatally secure, when the house is burning around them. He cries in heavy ears-"flee from the wrath to come!" Does God then wish to frighten us? Yes, most undoubtedly; as you would call to a child venturing out on thin ice, in the most searching tones, not to deprive him of the power of escape, but to stimulate every faculty to make that escape. God evidently has distinctly aimed to arouse men's fears. So did his Apostles. "Knowing - *Upham's "Mad. Guyon's Memoirs "; II. 54. therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men." And what is this" terror of the Lord"? The previous verse con tains at least a part of it: :- "For we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad." There was to Paul's not timid mind something appalling in this vision, something which men should fear, and fearing should avoid. We wonder not at it when he has elsewhere written, and probably believed as he wrote—“the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe in that day." Apostolical christianity surely did not disguise the alarming aspects of God's moral government. Sent by his master to speak with a proud Roman ruler on these themes, Paul reasoned with him of "righteousness, temperance, and judgment,” until Felix trembled. So God employed this method of rebuke and of repentance under the prophets. Their ministry was largely that of terror. Nor did Christ spare the proclamations of woe upon woe to the sinners of his day. He told them that, guiltier of more than a Sodom's sin, they should sink to a deeper than a Sodom's hell. Why did he tell those refined and fashionable and fastidious people of Jerusalem and Capernaum this? Certainly to excite a "discreet fear" which might "produce religion." If we look into christian experience we shall find that this element of fear has in some form been very generally present in the earlier stages at least of the renewing work; and that not among the ruder, less intelligent minds alone, but among the cultured, the farthest removed from a superstitious credulity. There is no weakness in looking seriously at a portentous fact, and acting accordingly. There is no superstition in standing in awe of Almighty displeasure. It is a sheer madness which leaps down a Niagara. So sensible persons judge. And if any man feels his spirit quailing within him as he thinks of death and eternity, of God's controversy with his ungodly living, and of the risks of his abandonment to hopeless hardness of heart, he need not therefore blush before any comrade nor apologize to any questioner. It is by such suggestions that the first steps are often induced out of worldliness, frivolity, impiety, towards repentance. The thought that this is the sinner's last call, that if he refuses this, no heavenly word will ever more break again on his heart, that fearful thought has risen up in the soul like a cloud of midnight-darkness, appalling as the shutting in of the long night of endless despair; and the spirit, thus aroused by this "terror of the Lord," has not dared to run the hazard of this tremendous peradventure. Thus being fixed in a determination to defer the business of religion no longer, the mind has yielded itself to other and more elevated considerations through which God's spirit carries onward the new creating work. Thus far the argument, which both logically and theologically we regard as irrefutable. As it is grounded not in the conditions of special stages of barbarism, or semi-civilization, or anything of this factitious or temporary kind, but in elementary spiritual truths, it is an argument as well for the nineteenth century as for the ninth or first. It has a bearing or two of present urgency, inside the Church, which must hold us a page or two longer before closing this paper. The prevalent reluctance of many good people to an outspoken deliverance of the alarming doctrines of our faith, is alike philosophically and religiously wrong. Are they Gospel facts? Then they should be announced. Is "God angry with the wicked every day?" Then it should be known; and if men forget it, then it should be reiterated. It has already been intimated that this susceptibility of fear is not of so lofty a nature as are others of our endowments. Nor do we believe that men ever become christians under its simple prompting. "Fear does not produce virtue; the fact that a man restrains himself from sin to avoid the punishment of hell is no proof that he is converted:- but it goes out into the highways of a blighted and delirious world, and there, like a terrible prophet of the wilderness who foretells the coming of the mild Redeemer, startles and arouses men. Its office is prelim inary, external, awakening; it is the beginning of wisdom."* Then, let the Elijah, the John, though clothed in the rough garb of the desert, fulfil his pioneer ministry, that so the Christ may come in power and grace to the humble, the consciously needy and perishing. You say, that men cannot be driven into religion. True; nor can they be flattered or coaxed into it. But this is the case:- certain aspects of God's law, government, purposes, bear directly and alarmingly on human sinfulness, and are suited to the end of conversion to piety, if so blessed by the Holy Spirit. If presented, conversion may not follow. If withheld, conversion will not, in most instances, be attained. That is, men are not likely to turn unto God with their whole hearts, unless they see very distinctly that there is something exceedingly undesirable and appalling from which to turn. Lot fled in haste to the mountain when he saw Sodom all in a blaze behind him, and the plain beneath him heaving with volcanic throes. Ministers, moreover, are not to be called bigoted, severe, behind the just requirements of the age, who exhibit the sterner shadows of God administration. As well call the surgeon cruel who hurts you in probing a deep wound or in setting a broken bone. The pain he inflicts does not argue the want of a tender spirit. His design is beneficent, and you will thank him when the cure is completed. The teacher of religion is sacredly bound to teach the whole of it, its hard as well as its easy lessons. He too is a spiritual physician, and he must practise like his Divine Master. Nor is it his fault if there is no pain-destroying ether which he can administer, so as that the surgery shall proceed unconsciously to the patient, and he find himself a sound man without knowing how it happened. On the contrary, the very nature of our work requires that every conscious power of the soul be awake to cooperate in this act of a restoration unto God. And whatever can aid in this awakening of the soul to its salvation is demanded to be employed, by the purest good-will, the divinest compassion. They are the cruel men in the pulpit who never send a thrill of alarm through the pews; who prophesy smooth things, who hush God's thunders in the lullabies of Arcadian measures. Bayne's "Christian Life," p. 37. If an orthodox day of judgment be necessary to keep DownEastern lumbermen from plundering each other's logs, (and so, it is said, even Boston liberalism has decided,) who shall show that it and its correllatives are not just as much needed to check our city-merchants from defrauding one another, and in bringing them to contrition and restitution for such sins? We do not mean that topics of this character are to be continually exhibited in the instructions of the sanctuary. They are to be discreetly used in due season and proportion. They are adapted rather to the condition of the careless or the reckless transgressor, to those who "are at ease in Zion," than to the mind already awake to religious inquiry, or to the believer advancing upon the upward road. To these, love has other more befitting accents and appeals. But how shall the masses of ungodly men and women be made to feel the beauty of holiness, the attractiveness of Christ, the spiritual excellence of God? how be arrested to turn an eye toward heaven, except by some lightning-flash, some thunder-peal from those azure depths of mingled light and gloom, splendor and terror? God, who made the mind, understands its wants, its workings. And men who preach his truth will not find a better guide to follow than his own method of dealing with those whom He would have to fear his displeasure that they may be brought to taste his grace. That method is "goodness and severity." It is simple, sensible, rational, biblical. "Of some have compassion, making a difference and others save with fear, [èv póßw, with anxious zeal and with solemn threatenings,] pulling them out of the fire;" feeling ourselves and making them feel that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." ARTICLE VI. IT WAS ALWAYS SO. THE good old times! who has not heard of them? the age when patriotism was unselfish and manners uncorrupt, when |