DISCOURSE X.

LUKE, xvii. 32.-"Remember Lot's wife."

I SUPPOSE, my brethren, that all who ever read or heard the story of this unhappy person remembers it right well, as far as the facts connected with it are concerned. You recollect that, seduced by the pomp, fertility, and beauty of that ample and luxurious plain where Sodom and her sisters reared their royal towers, and Jordan, with his pomp of waters and multitude of tributary rills, made all the landscape one living emerald,—a plain, to use the language of the sacred historian, "well watered every where, even as the garden of the Lord and as the land of Egypt,"-then the granary of nations, Lot and his family had ventured to pitch their patriarchal tents in the vicinity of Sodom, the mother city of that smiling champaign, and afterwards, as would appear, to fix their residence within her very walls. Deluded that they were,they knew not, or they cared not, that the richest

exuberance of outward advantages may be purchased too dear by voluntary exposure to moral loss and spiritual harm,—that too often in association with, under the covert of, all that is externally splendid, and attractive, and inviting, there is rank corrup tion mining all within,—a serpent lurking among the fairest flowers,-a taint of moral pestilence infecting the most genial and pellucid air,-nay, that the very overflow of sensual gratifications and outward luxuries is often the very means of producing and cherishing, whether in individual or in national character, that full-blown corruption, that recklessness of depravity, which ripens a soul or a people for destruction. Such, according to the description of the Prophet Ezekiel, was the case with the guilty cities of the plain. "Behold this was the iniquity of Sodom,-pride, and fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters; and they were haughty, and committed abomination before the Lord.”—“ The men of Sodom," says the inspired historian, "were wicked, and sinners before the Lord exceedingly." The time had at length arrived when the cup of their iniquity was full, and their transgressions were clamorous to heaven for vengeance. Jehovah had "whetted his glittering sword," and "made his arrows ready upon the string." He had prepared for Sodom the materials and the instruments of a condign and resistless doom, which, next to the record of the

deluged world, should serve to all coming genera tions as the most terrible memorial recorded in the earthly history of man of the power of Jehovah's wrath. A thousand thunders were mustered and marshalled in the sky, with all their fierce artillery of levin-fire pointed already at the godless towers; and, under her deep foundations, volcano and giant earthquake awaited only the signal-thunder, to leap up in their mighty rage, and, " hushed in grim repose, expected their evening prey." The morning had already dawned, big with the vast catastrophe of fiery desolation. The sun had risen upon the earth, the sun which, so long the spectator of Sodom's unexampled crimes, was now to be the witness of her equally unparalleled destruction,―to see her bulwarks and her pinnacles hurled down from their pride of place by heaven's vindictive bolts, and shaken into boundless ruin from the face of the torn and heaving earth,-to behold the lava-flood, with its red surge and fiery foam, sweep remorseless over the shattered heaps, once the houses and now the sepulchres of thousands, and then give place to the waters of that drear and sluggish lake which now veils the scene of that terrible destruction,-a sea which no fish inhabits, and whose bosom bears no gliding sail,-overhung with sullen and bituminous vapours, and shedding sterility around over the once verdurous slopes of the surrounding hills,-80 that, to use the description of Moses, "the whole

land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning; it is not sown, nor beareth, neither any grass groweth therein, since the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and his wrath." The day, I said, the appointed day of this overwhelming overthrow had come, but its execution had not yet begun,-when Jehovah was pleased, for the love he bare to Abraham his friend, and that, in the person of just Lot, he might demonstrate that he "knoweth how to deliver the righteous out of trial, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished," to open up a way of escape for Lot and his family, from under the imminent cloud of vengeance,from within the sphere of the wide-wasting inundation. The angel-messengers of Jehovah's indignation and his mercy,-the ministers of his goodness and severity," laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth and set him without the city. And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain: escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed." And then, at Lot's request, having appointed the little city of Zoar to be the place of refuge for him and for his family, he added, "Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do any thing till thou be come thither."

In obedience to this imperious and urgent charge their steps doubly winged,-pushed by terror, and drawn by hope, they eagerly set forward, and persevered, the greater part of them, till "they had laid hold upon the hope set before them,"-till they had their feet established on the rock of refuge,— their abiding-place made good in the city of security and rest. The greater part, I said,—for there was one sad exception; the wife of Lot, we are told, "looked back from behind him, and she became a statue,” or “pillar, of salt.” On the very instant that she presumed to break the Divine commandment," Escape for thy life; look not behind thee," the Divine vengeance fell upon her in a strange and fearful form, and put an end for ever to the opportunity of choosing between flight and tarrying,-between escape and ruin. At the sudden touch of death's petrific rod, she stiffened where she stood; and, encrusted, as would appear, with the saline and bituminous elements which, stirred by God's own hand, were moving to bear their part in the coming overthrow, she so remained for generations, a sign of wonder and of fear, upon the shore of that sullen and deathful sea, which had overwhelmed the cities of her love,-the salt statue gazing over the salt sea, and presenting so to all spectators a terrible example of that community of punishment which awaits all those who are joined to transgressors in community of affection,-a terrible