Consider, in the next place, in what manner you are imprest by the sense of your sins.  The question is not whether you have any sins,—­none can admit a doubt on this point; the only inquiry is, how you are affected by those sins?  Are they remembered by you with a sentiment of tender regret, of deep confusion and humiliation, that you should ever have so requited such infinite goodness?  And is this sentiment combined with a sacred resolution to go and sin no more,—­to devote yourself to the service of your divine Benefactor?  If you can live without an habitual sense of penitential tenderness and reverential fear, be assured you can not love God; you have no experience of those Scripture declarations:  “They shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days;” “There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayst be feared;” you know not that “the goodness of God leadeth to repentence.”  If the mind is softened by the love of God, all His favors serve to inflame its gratitude, and confirm its devotion to His will:  but he who has no love of God in his soul, thinks of nothing but how he may escape from God’s hand, and selfishly devours all His favors, without an emotion of gratitude to the Giver.

Finally, let me remind you to consider how you are affected to the present world.  If you could only be exempt from its afflictions, would you wish it to be your lasting home?  If you could surround yourself with all its advantages and enjoyments, would you be content to dwell in it forever?  Yet you know that it is a place of separation and exile from the divine majesty; that it is a scene of darkness, in comparison with heaven, very faintly illuminated with the beams of His distant glory; that its inhabitant is constrained to say, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but mine eye hath not yet seen thee";—­while heaven is the proper dwelling-place of God and His people!  Could you then consent to remain here always, without ever seeing as you are seen—­seeing light in His light—­without ever beholding His glory; without ever drinking at the fountain, and basking in that presence which is fulness of joy, and life forevermore? always to remain immersed in the shadows of time—­entombed in its corruptible possessions? never to ascend up on high to God and Christ and the glories of the eternal world?  If such is the state of your spirit, you want the essential principle of a Christian—­you want the love of God.  The genuine Christian, the lover of God, is certain to feel himself a “stranger on the earth.”  No splendor, no emolument of this world,—­not all the fascinations of sensual pleasure,—­can detain his heart below the skies, or keep him from sympathizing with the sentiment of the psalmist:  “As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I wake in thy likeness.”  I do not ask whether you have, at present, “a desire to depart”:  perhaps you may not be as yet sufficiently prepared and established to entertain