III. Apply these reflections to yourself. Reflect, 1. What gifts and benefits you have received from God. 2. How you have abused them, even against God Himself. 3. The sin of the angels was but one, and the sin of a moment; your sins deliberate and innumerable in thought, word, and deed. Wonder, lament, and implore mercy.
The Sin of Our First Parents.
I. Consider the happy state in which Almighty God created Adam and Eve. 1. They were created "to the likeness of God," and endowed with free-will. 2. They were then immortal and not subject to any misery. 3. They were supplied with abundant graces. 4. Their inferior appetites were perfectly subject to reason, in consequence of the original justice which they possessed. 5. Nothing was wanting, nothing more could be desired, in Paradise in which they dwelt. 6. From Paradise they were destined to ascend to heaven, without dying or experiencing the pains which mortals now suffer when they leave this world. How happy should we be, had they never sinned!
II. They were commanded to abstain from the fruit of a certain tree. How easy the command! But Satan induced the curious Eve, and she her husband, to transgress the divine injunction; they were immediately deprived of the ornaments of grace, and they fell under the dreadful sentence, "Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return." (Gen. iii. 19.) What misfortunes has this sin entailed on mankind, and yet the transgression seems trivial! — How terrible must sin be!
III. How much severer punishments, and how much more terrible judgments, you have deserved, who have
