sake of a little worldly enjoyment for a little time, consents to part with the very faculty of enjoyment-consents to have his eyes put out, and all his spiritual senses incapacitated for ever.

Were the offer formally made him to barter away all the future for the present, he would perceive and resent the insult. "No," (he would say,) "for the longer I exist, the greater will be my capacity for happiness or for misery. And the future is infinite." Were he the only being on earth endowed with immortality, who would think of offering him the world in exchange for his immortality? "No," (he would say,) "you surely cannot know what is meant by immortality. You are asking me to give up my power of the highest enjoyment for ever, as the price of the lowest enjoyment for a moment. There is no proportion, nothing commensurate between the two." And yet, practically, he is chargeable with the enormous folly. No offer would induce him to part with one of the faculties of his soul. He would spurn with resentment an offer of wealth in exchange for his memory, to have all the past of his life become an utter blank, involving even an oblivion of the very wealth for which he had exchanged it; and yet he is spending life in storing memory with the materials of self-reproach. He would be amazed at the folly which should propose to traffic for his judgment, yet he is hardly less impatient at being warned that he is arming his judgment against him for eternity. Part with his reason! The very proposal, in his eyes, betrays insanity. Yet he thinks little of losing his soul-of acting a part which shall convert his memory, judgment, reason, all his spiritual and immortal nature, into one vast capacity of wretchedness for ever. What will this profit him?

III.

And then mark, thirdly, the remedilessness of the ruin. The text consists of two questions, often confounded, but essentially distinct. The first describes the folly of a man

who should aim to enjoy life by means which could not fail to incur the penalty of death; and the second denotes his willingness to resign every thing in order to accomplish the impossibility of purchasing back again his forfeited life. The first, therefore, contemplates the soul before it is lostwhile it is yet in the process of being lost; the second contemplates it when the irretrievable loss has actually taken place. The first appeals to the judgment on this side death; the second appeals to the imagination, places us on the other side death, and would have us picture our condition there, looking back on the period when we were losing our souls as a period never, never to be regained.

Dear brethren, I am not about to attempt the scene. Some of you may have seen a modern artistic sketch-an engraving-representing the arch-fiend and a human being playing a fearful game, in which the soul of the man is staked. The game is far advanced. The man has already lost several of the pawns, denoting his truth, his peace, his purity, &c. His hope is just going. There can be no doubt that the game will terminate against him. His soul will be lost. The very prospect is dreadful. But the reality-the reality—no pencil can reach it. It is beyond the power of words. It belongs to silent imagination.

This is implied in the form of the text-a question. No answer is given. What shall a man give in exchange for his lost soul? What? Summon such a soul-call for an answer from one of the lost; and what could you receive in reply, but a look of upbraiding despair? Imagine yourself in the abode of the lost; visit and question your future self there. You have been lost; you can look back to the very moment your probation closed; the throne of grace, the offers of mercy, the means of salvation—you looked, and saw that you had left them all behind; and now -the mediation of Christ, the consciousness of hope-you have to look back on them as things long, long passed; you are in a region beyond, where you have no peace; you belong

to another order of things. What would you give in exchange for your soul? The question only awakens you afresh to the consciousness, not only that the period of exchange has passed; but that, even if it had not, you have nothing to give absolutely nothing; that in losing your soul, you lost everything. What would you give in exchange for your soul? You will feel that that is a question which admits of no reply. You will remember that the Saviour himself left it unanswered. And the unanswered question shall remain— a barbed arrow-in the self-convicted breast of the sinner for ever.

Such, brethren, is the incomparable value of the soulsuch the nature of the risk we run of losing it—the absolute infinitude of the loss, and the remedilessness of the ruin. And is it true that some of us reckon ourselves among the saved? And are there those amongst us, and around us, who are still lost? And can we doubt or question our duty respecting them? Why, Christ hath died for them. God hath so loved a world of such, as to give his only-begotten Son for their redemption. Save a soul from death-and think what you have done. You have done more than extinguished all the miseries of all the beings who have lived up to the present time. Take them in their nations and generations, and unnumbered myriads of individuals, and cast up the sum of the whole. their years and their sufferings, after all it is finite. But that soul has before it a history which is infinite. Give it time, and it will overtake the entire amount of emotion which the human race has hitherto known. It will pass beyond that amount. It will immeasurably exceed it. It will have a larger history than the entire world up to the present moment. Is it not true, then, that "he that winneth souls is wise"? He proposes to himself a loftier aim than that of the conquest of a world. He wins a larger tract of spiritual life than all the territories of spiritual death, at

Vast as is the total of

this moment, added together. He rescues from suffering a longer period, and a larger amount of human capacity and emotion, than would be the sum-total of all that man has experienced up to the present time.

Conceive, if you can, that up to the present day you had belonged to a world inhabited by beings in every sense mortal-beings who, after threescore years and ten, ceased, entirely and in every sense ceased, to exist; and that there, in that world, your efforts had all necessarily related to that little span of life. And conceive that, as the reward of your activity there, you had been divinely apprised that you should be promoted to a world inhabited by beings who would never die, and that everything you did to them, and for them, would influence the whole futurity of their being-with what trembling anxiety would you anticipate and assume your momentous charge! But with what additional solemnity would it invest your office, to be told that all these deathless beings were in danger of destruction-on their way to it-hastening to it! And still more, to find that you were to be posted somewhere between them and the place of destruction, to arrest their steps, and to turn them back! Dear brethren, this is almost literally the actual post of every follower of Christ. This is why the ministry of the Gospel is appointed-to warn men to flee from the wrath to come. It is this which gives so much importance to all our great religious societies-for they are societies for saving souls from death-holy confederations for plucking brands from the burning. It is this which at once inspires the faithful preacher with his ardour, and which amply justifies it. "Knowing the terrors of the Lord, we persuade men." "We beseech men, in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God." We see their danger; we hear, by anticipation, their coming doom; and "we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard."

Then what, we may ask, what shall it profit the Christian Church if it should gain the whole world, and lose one soul,

which it might have been the means of saving? If it should gain the friendship of all the worldly, and alliance with all the powerful, and the riches of all the wealthy, and could place the whole at its Master's feet, would He regard it as a compensation for that soul; and would not they, when confronted with that lost soul, willingly give it all back again in exchange for that soul's recovery?

Who that ever thought on the subject but must be struck with the high estimate which the Gospel forms of man compared with that of every other system. Even pantheism, the most pretentious of the whole-which talks. largely of the human soul as a diffused portion of the Deity —robs man of his proper immortality, by teaching that at death that diffused portion is resumed-absorbed back again into the Deity, leaving man no personality, no individual existence, and pointing to a period when all souls shall have lost their separate being, and God alone shall exist, as far as we are concerned, in solitary state.

Far different is the teaching of the Gospel on the subject. It treats man as a personal, accountable, and immortal being, destined to retain his personality for ever. He is in danger, and it unveils a cross on which the Son of God is dying for his redemption. He is giving himself to the pursuit of trifles, but it weighs his soul against the world, and calls us to mark how inappreciably light the world is in the comparison. His earthly lot may be obscure, and even his form repulsive; but it tells us that he is more than a prince in disguise, and is on his way to more joy than time has ever known, or to more suffering than eternity will be able to exhaust. It assures us that worlds are conflicting for the soul of man; that the tear of penitence excites the rapture and feeds the adoration of heaven; that the humblest house of prayer-the place where all the higher elements of man's nature are developed, all his nobler interests recognized— stands in close relation to the heavenly world—is the very "gate of heaven."