Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/104

 its very nature, of a destructive and murderous tendency: and when God speaks, there is a meaning in His words, which penetrates to the very essences of things; and therefore it is, that in the whole Word of God, there is a spiritual sense, deeper than that which appears in the letter. But this we shall see more clearly, when we come to treat of the spiritual sense of this Commandment.

He, then, who commits deliberate and malicious murder, plunges himself into the lowest hell: he settles himself down among the very foundations of evil—and there he is fixed for ever. When such a man, therefore, from his execution-scaffold, speaks to a gazing crowd, and, for a show, makes an apparently humble, but in secret, perhaps, a boasting confession of his crimes, (for a man may come to such a perverted state as to be even proud of crimes,)—and ends with making a formal profession of repentance for the course of his past life—we should be slow to believe that repentance sincere. When a man's life has been spent in sin, a death-bed repentance can be of but little avail. It can hardly be a genuine repentance. A man is not himself at such a time: He is acting under the influence of temporary external feelings, which play over the surface of his heart, while all the centre is a black mass of evil and corruption. His state is like that of one who, while lying on a bed of sickness, grieves over his past sins, and promises to himself, and to others, and to God, amendment in the time to come; but restore him to health, and let him go forth, and see how he will return to his loved evils again! So, the