The justice of God in the damnation of sinners. Illustrated in a sermon

2. As you would seek the future prosperity of this society, it is of vast importance that you should avoid contention.

A contentious people will be a miserable people. The contentions which have been among you, since I first became your pastor, have been one of the greatest burdens I have laboured under in the course of my ministry: Not only the contentions you have had with me, but those which you have had one with another, about your lands, and other concerns. Because I knew that contention, heat of spirit, evil-speaking, and things of the like nature, were directly contrary to the spirit of Christianity, and did, in a peculiar manner, tend to drive away God's Spirit from a people, and to render all means of grace ineffectual, as well as to destroy a people's outward comfort and welfare.

Let me therefore earnestly exhort you, as you would seek your own future good, hereafter to watch against a contentious ⟨p. 138⟩spirit. "If you would see good days, seek peace, and ensue it." 1 Pet. iii.10.11. Let the contentions which has lately been about the terms of Christian communion, as it has been the greatest of your contention, so be the last of them. I would, now I am preaching my farewell sermon, say to you, as the apostle to the Corinthians, 2 Cor. xiii.11.: "Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect: Be of one mind: Live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you."