so exalted a desire; but still, if you have received a new heart, you will deprecate nothing so much as having your portion in this life,—­as having your eternal abode on earth.  It is the character of faith to dwell much in eternity:  the apostle says, in the name of all real believers, “We look not at the things that are seen, but the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.”

And now, my brethren, supposing the preceding remarks to have produced in any of you the conviction that you have not the love of God in you, permit me very briefly to point out the proper improvement of such a conviction.

First, it should be accompanied with deep humiliation.  If you labored under the privation of some bodily organ, requisite to the discharge of an animal function, you would feel it as in some degree a humiliating circumstance; but what would be any defect of this kind, however serious, in comparison with that great want under which you labor—­the want of piety, the calamity of a soul estranged from the love of God!  What are the other subjects of humiliation compared with this—­a moral fall, a spiritual death in sin:  and this, unless it be removed, the sure precursor of the second death—­eternal ruin!  “This is a lamentation indeed, and it shall be for a lamentation.”

Suppose the children of a family, reared and provided for by the most affectionate of parents, to rise up in rebellion against their father, and cast off all the feelings of filial tenderness and respect; would any qualities those children might possess, any appearance of virtue they might exhibit in other respects, compensate for such an unnatural, such an awful deformity of character?  Transfer this representation to your conduct in relation to God:  “If I,” says He, “am a father, where is my fear? if I am a master, where is my honor?” “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!  I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me:  the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib:  but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.”

And let your humiliation be accompanied with concern and alarm.  To be alienated from the great Origin of being; to be severed, or to sever yourself from the essential Author and element of all felicity, must be a calmity which none can understand, an infinite wo which none can measure or conceive.  If the stream is cut off from the fountain, it soon ceases to flow, and its waters are dissipated in the air:  and if the soul is cut off from God, it dies!  Its vital contact with God,—­its spiritual union with the Father of spirits through the blest Mediator, is the only life and beauty of the immortal soul.  All, without this, are dead—­“dead in trespasses and sins”!  A living death—­a state of restless wanderings, and unsatisfied desires!  What a condition theirs!  And, oh! what a prospect for such, when they look beyond this world! who will give them a welcome when they enter an eternal state?  What reception will they meet with, and where?  What consolation amid their losses and their sufferings, but that of the fellow-sufferers plunged in the same abyss of ruin?  Impenitent sinners are allied to evil spirits, they have an affinity with the kingdom of darkness; and when they die, they are emphatically said to “go to their own place”!