alarm us, there is something in the pleasure of restitution which may allure us; it eases our shoulders from the burthen of sin, it appeases the restless anger of conscience, and renders the mind cheerful and serene ;if it takes away the stalled ox, it dissipates hatred; if it leaves the dinner of herbs, they are seasoned with content. Did any man, who had overcome the first difficulty of doing justice, ever repent of the effort he had made?-Did he ever say, my feelings of guilt were better than my feelings of innocence.-I am disappointed by righteousness, and I wish to reclaim the wages of sin which I have unadvisedly refunded? Death, says the son of Sirach, is terrible to him who lives at ease in his possessions; but death is tenfold 'more terrible to him who lives in misery amid his possessions, with the consciousness that he ought never to have enjoyed them; that, year after year, he has been reaping the fruits of injustice; that the time is now gone by in which he might have pacified both God and man; and that nothing remains, but a sorrow which

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no repentance can prevent, and which no time can cure.

If restitution is impossible, compensation is almost always in our power,-a compensation proportioned to our means. There is hardly any man so intrenched in happiness that he is utterly inaccessible to acts of kindness. Any signs of humble benevolence, any real contrition of the heart, towards an an injured person, God will accept; if it is the only compensation which accident enables us to make. The sin which God never will forgive, is that cold and barren penitence, which is only sorrowful because it cannot reconcile the feelings of virtue with the profits of crime. I allow that it is difficult to do justice, that it is difficult to compensate, and difficult to restore; but one great effort is less costly than a thousand moments of remorse ;-it is better to do that violence to your feelings, which every subsequent moment will convert into a more powerful source of happiness, than to retain any object of your desire, which every moment will convert into a more powerful

cause of reproach.-The fruits of fraud and injustice are your's as a diseased limb is your's, for pain and for weakness, not for enjoyment: health does not make it an auxiliary; but adhesion makes it a burden. If the life which God gave has left it, my hand is no hand to me; and if riches, and honor, and power, and every earthly blessing, are not founded upon righteousness, which is their health, and their life, they are not blessings, but burthen, and anguish, and disease, and death.

I have, hitherto, principally insisted upon the necessity of justice, as an ingredient of sincere repentance; but there can be no very sincere repentance without sorrow. Indeed, unless the evils, and apprehensions, to which sin gives birth, are so powerfully impressed upon the mind as to fill it with sadness, there is little security for that part of repentance, which consists in action.-Much is due, also, to the offended Majesty of Heaven; we must not confess our impurities to God with an unshaken spirit; we must not lift up an undaunted face towards his throne, and

breathe out the sad story of our lives in the firm accents of a fearless voice. "The publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes to Heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.-I tell you this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other."

Repentance must not only be sincere and just, but it must be timely;-it must take place at such a period as will enable us to make a solid, real sacrifice of unlawful enjoyment to a sense of Christian duty, Satiety is often mistaken for repentance, and many give up the offence, when they have lost all appetite for its commission ;-change of body is mistaken for change of mind, and he who quits a vice, become unnatural to his period of life, deems himself a progressive penitent; and believes he is receding from pleasure, because pleasure is receding from him.

To repent of passions, when passions are sweet and strong, has the merit of virtue, because it has the difficulty; to oppose languor,

to chain down inertness; and to vanquish imbecility, is to offer, to the Lord our God, that which costs us nothing; and to claim the kingdom of Heaven for not doing that which we cannot do.-Truly blessed is he who arrests himself in the middle career of pleasure, while he has yet numbered but few days, and a fair portion of life is still before him. God loveth the hoary hairs of the righteous; but when they who are far from the grave, when the young, the beautiful, and the strong, turn to the Lord their God in weeping, in fasting, and repentance, then is the great victory of Christ over sin; then, truly, are the ninety and nine just persons forgotten; and the joy in Heaven is exceeding great. Seriousness, in old age, we in some degree attribute to bodily causes; the early and rational repentance of a young person, disgusted with the first aspect of sin, is the most genuine and beautiful form of repentance; it affords us the example of temptation resisted when it is the strongest, apology rejected when it is the most natural, and the laws of religion respected, when the chance of atoning for their violation is the most complete. No exception from the common