ful thunders and lightnings, that awful and strict divine Judge, formerly a God of love and mercy, but now a God of wrath and anger and vengeance; a God armed with the thunderbolt! See whole legions of spirits soaring through the air, all ready to take vengeance on the sinner! See those sinners formerly so desirous of honors now put to shame before the whole world; how they stamp with their feet in their fury! How they struggle with the chains that bind them!” These and similar things the zealous preacher described to his audience in a voice of thunder. They were all as still as possible; all overwhelmed with fear; all hearts were moved to contrition, and at last the whole congregation broke out into tears. When the preacher saw the people so well disposed, he stretched forth his hand and ordered them to refrain from weeping, and to listen to the remainder of the sermon. “I have,” he continued, “a more terrible thing to tell you than all that I have described hitherto: a thing that alone ought to be bewailed with bitter tears.“The people waited eagerly to hear what was to come. “The most terrible thing of all,” burst forth the preacher with flaming eyes and awful voice, “the greatest misery of all is that you who are now filled with a well-grounded fear, and who are shedding tears of true contrition, after the lapse of one quarter of an hour will forget everything you have heard here to-day; all your present feelings, devotion, and zeal shall vanish; you will go back to your former sins, and to much worse ones; you will fall still deeper into the mire, heap sin on sin, and at last die in sin and be sent to hell on the last day. This is indeed the worst of all evils: to hear those terrible eternal truths, to take them to heart and acknowledge them, to weep bitterly, and mourn with a contrite heart at the recollection of them, and yet not to change for the better, or to give up old bad habits. What can be more deserving of wonder than this? It is like the marble of which the altar is made; it weeps when the warm noon-day wind blows through the church, and becomes so damp that one might think it quite softened; but it is marble all the same, and harder than before.” So spoke the preacher, and left his audience filled with shame at his stinging reproof. Ah, my dear brethren, it is this very thing that seems so terrible to me too, that namely, after all that we have heard about our divine Judge and meditated about Him, to conceive a greater horror of sin, nevertheless most people still persist in their old vicious ways: the unchaste return to their filthy pleasures, the
