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all the songs and triumphs of the heavenly world in the day of such a divine and glorious release of these prisoners.

But I feel myself under a necessity of confessing, that I am utterly unable to solve these difficulties according to the discoveries of the New Testament, which must be my constant rule of faith, and hope, and expectation, with regard to myself and others. I have read the strongest and best writers on the other side, yet after all my studies I have not been able to find any way how these difficulties may be removed, and how the divine perfections, and the conduct of God in his word, may be fairly vindicated without the establishment of this doctrine, as awful and formidable as it is.

'The ways' indeed of the great God and his 'thoughts are above our thoughts and our ways, as the heavens are above the earth;' yet I must rest and acquiesce where our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father's chief Minister, both of his wrath and his love, has left me in the divine revelations of Scripture; and 1 am constrained therefore to leave these unhappy crea tures under the chains of everlasting darkness, into which they have cast themselves by their wilful ini mugnty, and nis everlasting anger, which the of the great God denounces, may awaken som timely to bethink themselves of the dreadful into which they are running, before these terror them at death, and begin to be executed upon without release and without hope.

Note. Where these Discourses shall be used as a religious se private families on Lord's-day evenings, each of them will afford a near the middle, lest the service be made too long and tiresome.

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DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION.

SECTION I.

The introduction or proposal of the question, with a distinction of the persons who oppose it.

IT is confessed that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead at the last day, and the everlasting joys, and the eternal sorrows, that shall succeed it, as they are described in the New Testament, are a very awful sanction to the gospel of Christ, and carry in them such principles of hope and terror as should effectually discourage vice and irreligion, and become a powerful attractive to the practice of faith and love, and universal holiness.

But so corrupt and perverse are the inclinations of men in this fallen and degenerate world, and their passions are so much impressed and moved by things that are present or just at hand, that the joys of heaven, and the sorrows of hell, when set far beyond death and the grave at some vast unknown distance of time, would have but too little influence on their

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