at this moment guilty of living on in a state of
presumptuous impenitence--salvation unsought--Jesus a stranger--His name
unhonoured--His Bible unread--His promises unappropriated--His wrath
undreaded--defeating all His marvellous appliances of love, and
remonstrance, and forbearance--meeting a prodigal expenditure of
patience and long-suffering with cold and chilling indifference and
neglect--casting away from you the hoarded riches of eternity which He
has been holding out for your acceptance? In that sacred Bethany ground,
as ye mark these falling tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have
been a tear for _you_! Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He
to whom "a thousand years are as one day," marked even _then_ your
present ungrateful apostacy or guilty alienation--there was a tear then
which stole down that cheek on account of unrequited love?

Is that tear to flow in vain? Are you to mock His tender sympathy still
with cold formalism, or persisted-in impenitency? Are you to think of
Bethany and its tear-drops and still go on in sin?

Ah, never was sermon preached to an erring or impenitent sinner half so
eloquent as _this_. Paul was not given to weeping, and it makes his
fervid love of souls all the more striking when we find him confessing
that he had wept like a child over those who were "enemies to the cross
of Christ." We have often felt Paul's burning tears over hardened
sinners to be touching and impressive. But what are they, after all, in
comparison with those of Paul's Lord?

He, the Great Sun of the World--the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in
a few brief days behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness
and blood--His last rays seem now lingering over the crest of
Olivet--His tears seem to tell that He has clung till He can cling no
more to the fond hope that an impenitent nation and guilty city will yet
turn at His reproof, believe and live.

And still does He linger among _us_. Though the night cometh, the beams
of mercy are still tardily lingering, as if loth to leave the
backsliding to their wanderings, or the impenitent to their own
midnight of despair.

O Reader! leave not _this_ subject--leave not the graveyard of Bethany
till you think of Jesus as then weeping for _thee_. Yes! for _thee_--thy
pitiable condition--thy perverse ingratitude--thy slighting of His
warnings--thy grieving of His spirit--thy unkindness to _Him_--thine
obstinate disregard of thine own everlastin