Practical Sermons (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON III. i PREACH THE GOSPEL. Woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel!?- 1 Cor. ix. 16. The certainty which we possess, from the sacred writings, of a future state, and that our happiness or misery in this state will be determined before the unerring tribunal of the Almighty, must necessarily excite a considerable degree of anxiety in every reflecting mind. If there be a judgment to come, if eternal death will be the certain wages of a sinful life, and if eternal death consist, not in the annihilation of our existence, but in the suffering of those torments which are prepared for the devil and his angels; and if the fire that never can be quenched, and the worm that dieth not, await the sinner,?surely it cannot be an unimportant inquiry to ask, " What shall I do to be saved ?" By those who are just entering into life, and are not yet convinced, from experience, of the vanity and emptiness of all human things, this inquiry may not, perhaps, be regarded with that attention which is due to it; or they may imagine that it may be deferred until they shall have advanced farther in years, when the pleasures and amusements of life shall have lost their relish. But those, whose experience and whose conscience testify to them that here " all is vanity and vexation of spirit;" who have seen many of their contemporaries, the friends of their youth, the sharers of their pleasures and their sorrows, committed to the grave; who have seen the ambitious,, the proud, the rich, the thoughtless, and the avaricious consigned earth to earth, and dust to dust; who have seen that neither wisdom nor talents, nor honour, nor any human virtue or excellence, can supersede that decree which has passed upon all men; who have wept over the departure of venerable age, or lamented the untimely l...