concerned) reveal his fate, but speak his woes.  But suppose he escape detection, and is only exposed to the naked and fearful grandeur of that law which God has written in the heart.  He hears its thunders, and he feels its fires.  He his taken from some fellow being his hard earnings; and sees him and perhaps his children mourning their misfortune and suffering the miseries of adversity.  Guilt takes possession of his soul, and misery, which the hand of time cannot extinguish, rolls its dark waves of damnation upon him, and drowns his dearest joys, while poverty marks him for her own.

God has so constituted his plans in the government of the world that the plunderer cannot prosper.  Inward horrors and fears of detection abstract his mind from the proper duties of life, so that misfortune and defeat find their way into his plans, which might otherwise by calm deliberation have succeeded, and disappointment and misery, satiety and disgust, and all the evils that are the offspring of his iniquity, commingling in a thousand ways, render his existence wretched.  Relying upon dishonesty for support, he becomes but a midnight beggar.  His slumbers are haunted by frightful dreams; and fear of detection, prisons and dungeons are torturing his imagination and incessantly sporting with his broken peace.  He is a stranger to those solid joys arising from the practice of virtue, is doomed to encounter all the miseries that attend his ill-chosen career, and to drink every drug of wormwood and gall that heaven has mingled in the cup of dishonor.  He lives a nuisance and pest to society, and dies covered with infamy.

In all this we shall see the truth of our text exemplified, that God rules in the kingdom of men, and brings punishment, not only upon a haughty monarch seated on the throne of nations, but upon every transgressor however obscure may be his condition in the walks of private life.  The sovereign decree of his empire is—­“THOUGH HAND JOIN IN HAND, YET SHALL THE WICKED NOT GO UNPUNISHED.”

But we take our leave of flagitious crimes and proceed to notice men in the common walks of life.  Every man who makes riches, or public honors the chief end of all his pursuits, and gives all his attention to the attainment of his object, and over-reaches in bargains whenever an opportunity offers, or sets various prices on his merchandise, according to the person with whom he deals—­such a man will never feel himself filled with riches, nor satisfied with honors.  The reasons are obvious.  He commences his career under the impression that happiness, contentment and all the rational enjoyments of life consist in wealth, and in human greatness.  He soon finds himself in possession of as large a fortune as he first supposed would make him happy.  But his desires for more, having imperceptibly expanded, he finds within an increased restlessness, and even greater desires for more than when he first set out.  He still believes, according to his original impression, that