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SELECT WORKS

THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D. LL.D,

EIITED BY HIS SOK-IN-LA77,

THE REV. WILLIAM HANNA, LL.D.

VOL. III.

EDINBUEGH : THOMAS CONSTABLE AND CO.

HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO., LONDON.

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SERMONS

THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D.LLD,

VOL. I.

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;:: - T. C^:;STA!;I.E, PRI.NTI-R TO TIER VA.'I:«TV

CONTENTS.

*** In this and the subsequent Volume the reader will find ALL the Sermons published
by Dr. Chalmers himself, as icell as the favourite Discourse on Isaiah vii. 3-5, which was
not published till after his death.

I } ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSES.

PAGE

DISCOUKSE I. A Sketch of the Modern Astronomy.— Psalm viii. 3, 4, . .1

II. The Modesty of True Science.— 1 Cor. viii. 2, . . . .26

III. On the Extent of the Divine Condescension. — Psalm cxiii. 5, 6, . 43

IV. On the Knowledge of Man's Moral History in the Distant Places of

Creation.—! Pet. i. 12, 58

V. On the Sympathy that is felt for Man in the Distant Places of Crea
tion.— Luke xv. 7, 74

VI. On the Contest for an Ascendency over Man amongst the Higher Orders

of Intelligence.— Col. ii. 15, . . . . ' . 87

VII. On the Slender Influence of mere Taste and Sensibility in Matters of

Religion.— Ezek. xxxiii. 32, 101

COMMERCIAL DISCOURSES.

DISCOURSE I. On the Mercantile Virtues which may Exist without the Influence

of Christianity.— Phil. iv. 8, 123

II. The Influence of Christianity in Aiding and Augmenting the Mercan
tile Virtues.— Rom. xiv. 18, ..... 138

III. The Power of Selfishness in Promoting the Honesties of Mercantile

Intercourse. — Luke vi. 33, . . . . . . 152

IV. The Guilt of Dishonesty not to be Estimated by the Gain of it.— Luke

xvi. 10 . . 168

VI CONTENTS

COMMERCIAL DISCOUKSES,— continued.

DISCOUESE V. On the great Christian Law of Reciprocity between Man and Man.— *

Matt. vii. 12, ....... 186

VI. On the Dissipation of Large Cities.— Eph. v. 6. . . . 200

VII. On the Vitiating Influence of the Higher upon the Lower Orders of

Society.— Luke xvii. 1, 2, . . . . . .210

VIII. On the Love of Money.— Job xxxi. 24-28, . . . .233

IX. The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. — 1 John ii. 15, . . 247

X. The Restlessness of Human Ambition.— Psalm xi. 1 ; Iv. 6, . . 263

XL On the Advantages of Christian Knowledge to the Lower Orders of

Society.— Eccles. iv. 13, . . . . . 272

XII. On the Duty and the Means of Christianizing our Home Population. —

Mark xvi. 15, 282

XIII. On the Honour due to all Men. — 1 Peter ii. 17, ... 294

XIV. On the Moral Influence of Fidelity.— Titus ii. 10, ... 305
XV. The Importance of Civil Government to Society. — Rom. iii. 9-19, ~ . 326

SEKMONS ON PUBLIC OCCASIONS.

SERMON I. The Two Great Instruments appointed for the Propagation of the
Gospel ; and the Duty of the Christian Public- to keep them both
in Vigorous Operation. — Rom. x. 17. — (1812.) . . . 355

II. The Blessedness of Considering the Case of the Poor.— Psalm xli. 1.—

(1813.) 372

III. The Utility of Missions ascertained by Experience. — John i. 46. —

(1814.) 391

IV. On the Superior Blessedness of the Giver to that of the Receiver. —

Acts xx. 35.— (1815.) . . . . . .405

V. Thoughts on Universal Peace.— Isaiah ii. 4.— (1816.) . . .427

VI. On the Death of the Princess Charlotte.— Isaiah xxvi. 9.— (1817.) . 446

VII. Doctrine of Christian Charity.— Matt. vii. 3-5.— (1817.) . . 464

VIII. On Cruelty to Animals.— Prov. xii. 10.— (1826.) . . .480

IX. On the Respect due to Antiquity.— Jer. vi. 16.— (1827.) . . 501

X. The Effect of Man's Wrath in the Agitation of Religious Controversies.

—James i. 20.— (1827.) . . . . . .523

XI. On Religious Establishments.— 2 Tim. ii. 2.— (1829.) . . .542

XII. On the Death of the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson.— Heb. xi. 4.—

(1831.) 557

XIII. On Preaching to the Common People.— Mark xii. 37.— (1836.) . 573

CONTENTS. vii

THE TWO KINGDOMS,

THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
Being Discourses of a Character kindred with the Astronomical.

DISCOURSE I. The Constancy of God in His Works an Argument for the Faithful- PA

ness of God in His Word.— Ps. cxix. 89-91. . 597

II. On the Consistency between the Efficacy of Prayer and the Uniformity

of Nature.— 2 Pet. iil 3, 4. ... .617

III. The Transitory Nature of Visible Things.— 2 Cor. iv. 18. . . 635

IV. On the New Heavens and the New Earth.— 2 Pet. iii. 13. . . 645
V. The Nature of the Kingdom of God.— 1 Cor. iv. 20. . . . 657

VI. Heaven a Character and not a Locality. — Rev. xxii. 11. . . 669

DISCOURSES

THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION

VIEWED IN CONNEXION WITH

MODERN ASTRONOMY.

VOL. III.

ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSES.

PREFACE.

THE astronomical objection against the truth of the Gospel
does not occupy a very prominent place in any of our Treatises
of Infidelity. It is often, however, met with in conversation —
and we have known it to be the cause of serious perplexity and
alarm in minds anxious for the solid establishment of their
religious faith.

There is an imposing splendour in the science of Astronomy ;
arid it is not to be wondered at, if the light it throws, or appears
to throw, over other tracks of speculation than those which are
properly its own, should at times dazzle and mislead an inquirer.
On this account, we think it were a service to what we deem a
true and a righteous cause, could we succeed in dissipating this
illusion, and in stripping Infidelity of those pretensions to en
largement, and to a certain air of philosophical greatness, by
which it has often become so destructively alluring to the young,
and the ardent, and the ambitious.

In my first Discourse, I have attempted a sketch of the Modern
Astronomy — nor have I wished to throw any disguise over that
comparative littleness which belongs to our planet, and which
gives to the argument of Freethinkers all its plausibility.

This argument involves in it an assertion and an inference.
The assertion is, that Christianity is a religion which professes
to be designed for the single benefit of our world ; and the infer
ence is, that God cannot be the author of this religion, for He
would not lavish on so insignificant a field such peculiar and
such distinguishing attentions as are ascribed to Him in the
Old and New Testaments.

IV PREFACE.

Christianity makes no such profession. That it is designed
for the single benefit of our world is altogether a presumption of
the infidel himself — and feeling that this is not the only example
of temerity which can he charged on the enemies of our faith, I
have allotted my second Discourse to the attempt of demonstrat
ing the utter repugnance of such a spirit with the cautious and
enlightened philosophy of modern times.

In the course of this Sermon I have offered a tribute of ac
knowledgment to the theology of Sir Isaac Newton ; and in such
terms as, if not farther explained, may be liable to misconstruc
tion. The grand circumstance of applause in the character of
this great man, is, that unseduced by all the magnificence of his
own discoveries, he had a solidity of mind which could resist their
fascination, and keep him in steady attachment to that Book,
whose general evidences stamped upon it the impress of a real
communication from Heaven. This was the sole attribute of his
theology which I had in my eye when I presumed to eulogize it.
I do not think that, amid the distraction and the engrossment of
his other pursuits, he has at all times succeeded in his interpre
tation of the Book ; else he would never, in my apprehension,
have abetted the leading doctrine of a sect or a system, which
has now nearly dwindled away from public observation.

In my third Discourse I am silent as to the assertion, and
attempt to combat the inference that is founded on it. I insist
that upon all the analogies of nature and of providence, we can
lay no limit on the condescension of God, or on the multiplicity
of His regards even to the very humblest departments of cre
ation ; and that it is not for us, who see the evidences of Divine
wisdom and care spread in such exhaustless profusion around us,
to say, that the Deity would not lavish all the wealth of His
wondrous attributes on the salvation even of our solitary species.
At this point of the argument, I trust that the intelligent
reader may be enabled to perceive, in the adversaries of the
Gospel, a twofold dereliction from the maxims of the Baconian
philosophy : that, in the first instance, the assertion which forms
the groundwork of their argument is gratuitously fetched out of
an unknown region, where they are utterly abandoned by the
l;ghl of experience ; and that, in the second instance, the infer
ence they urge from it is in the face of manifold and undeniable
truths, all lying within the safe and accessible field of human
observation.

In my subsequent Discourses, I proceed to the informations

PREFACE. V

of the Eecord. The Infidel objection drawn from Astronomy
may be considered as by this time disposed of; and if we have
succeeded in clearing it away, so as to deliver the Christian
testimony from all discredit upon this ground, then may we sub
mit, on the strength of other evidences, to be guided by its infor
mation. We shall thus learn that Christianity has a far more
extensive bearing on the other orders of creation than the Infidel
is disposed to allow ; and whether he will own the authority of
this information or not, he will at least be forced to admit that
the subject-matter of the Bible itself is not chargeable with that
objection which he has attempted to fasten upon it.

Thus, had my only object been the refutation of the Infidel
argument, I might have spared the last Discourses of the Series
altogether. But the tracks of Scriptural information to which
they directed me, I considered as worthy of prosecution on their
own account ; and I do think that much may be gathered from
these less observed portions of the field of revelation, to cheer,
and to elevate, and to guide the believer.

But in the management of such a discussion as this, though
for a great degree of this effect it would require to be conducted
in a far higher style than I am able to sustain, the taste of the
human mind may be regaled, and its understanding put into a
state of the most agreeable exercise. Now this is quite distinct
from the conscience being made to feel the force of a personal
application ; nor could I either bring this argument to its close
in the pulpit, or offer it to the general notice of the world, with
out adverting, in the last Discourse, to a delusion which I fear
is carrying forward thousands and tens of thousands to an un
done eternity.

I have closed the Series with an Appendix of Scriptural
Authorities.* I found that I could not easily interweave them
in the texture of the Work, and have, therefore, thought fit
to present them in a separate form. I look for a twofold benefit
from this exhibition — first, to those more general readers who
are ignorant of the Scriptures, and of the richness and variety
which abound in them — and, secondly, to those narrow and
intolerant professors, who take an alarm at the very sound and
semblance of philosophy, and feel as if there was an utterly
irreconcilable antipathy between its lessons on the one hand,
and the soundness and piety of the Bible on the other. It

* The Passages which serve to illustrate or to confirm the leading arguments employed,
will, in this Edition, be found at the end of each Discourse.

Yl PREFACE.

were well, I conceive, for our cause that the latter could become
a little more indulgent on this subject ; that they gave up a por
tion of those ancient and hereditary prepossessions which go so
far to cramp and to inthral them ; that they would suffer theo
logy to take that wide range of argument and of illustration
which belongs to her ; and that, less sensitively jealous of any
desecration being brought upon the Sabbath or the pulpit, they
would suffer her freely to announce all those truths, which either
serve to protect Christianity from the contempt of science, or to
protect the teachers of Christianity from those invasions which
are practised both on the sacredness of the office, and on the
solitude of its devotional and intellectual labours.

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

DISCOURSE I.

A SKETCH OF THE MODERN ASTRONOMY.

" When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which th< u
hast ordained ; what is man, that thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that
thou Tisitest him ? "— PSALM viii. 3, 4.

IN the reasonings of the Apostle Paul, we cannot fail to
observe, how studiously he accommodates his arguments to the
pursuits or principles or prejudices of the people whom he was
addressing. He often made a favourite opinion of their own
the starting-point of his explanation ; and educing a dexterous
but irresistible train of argument from some principle upon
which each of the parties had a common understanding, it was
his practice to force them out of all their opposition by a weapon
of their own choosing, — nor did he scruple to avail himself of a
Jewish peculiarity, or a heathen superstition, or a quotation from
Greek poetry, by which he might gain the attention of those
whom he laboured to convince, and by the skilful application of
which he might " shut them up unto the faith."

Now, when Paul was thus addressing one class of an assembly
or congregation, another class might, for the time, have been
shut out of all direct benefit and application from his argu
ments. When he wrote an Epistle to a mixed assembly of
Christianized Jews and Gentiles, he had often to direct such a
process of argument to the former, as the latter would neither
require nor comprehend. Now, what should have been the
conduct of the Gentiles at the reading of that part of the Epistle
which bore almost an exclusive reference to the Jews ? Should
it be impatience at the hearing of something for which they had
no relish or understanding ? Should it be a fretful disappoint
ment because everything that was said was not said for their
edification? Should it be angry discontent with the Apostle,
because, leaving them in the dark, he had brought forward
nothing for them through the whole extent of so many succes
sive chapters ? Some of them may have felt in this way ; but

8 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

surely it would have been vastly more Christian to have sat
with meek and unfeigned patience, and to have rejoiced that the
great Apostle had undertaken the management of those obstinate
prejudices, which kept back so many human beings from the
participation of the Gospel. And should Paul have had reason
to rejoice, that, by the success of his arguments he had recon
ciled one or any number of Jews to Christianity, then it was
the part of these Gentiles, though receiving no direct or personal
benefit from the arguments, to have blessed God, and rejoiced
along with him.

Conceive that Paul were at this moment alive, and zealously
engaged in the work of pressing the Christian religion on the
acceptance of the various classes of society, — Should he not still
have acted on the principle of being all things to all men ?
Should he not have accommodated his discussion to the prevail
ing taste and literature and philosophy of the times? Should
he not have closed with the people, whom he was addressing,
on some favourite principle of their own ; and, in the prosecu
tion of this principle, might he not have got completely beyond
the comprehension of a numerous class of zealous, humble, and
devoted Christians? Now, the question is not, how these would
conduct themselves in such circumstances? — but, how should
they do it ? Would it be right in them to sit with impatience,
because the argument of the Apostle contained in it nothing in
the way of comfort or edification to themselves? Should not
the benevolence of the Gospel give a different direction to
their feelings? And, instead of that narrow, exclusive, and
monopolizing spirit, which I fear is too characteristic of the
more declared professors of the truth as it is in Jesus, ought
they not to be patient, and to rejoice, when to philosophers, and
to men of literary accomplishment, and to those who have the
direction of the public taste among the upper walks of society,
such arguments are addressed as may bring home to their
acceptance also, " the words of this life"? It is under the im
pulse of these considerations that I have, with some hesitation,
prevailed upon myself to attempt an argument, which I think
fitted to soften and subdue those prejudices which lie at the
bottom of what may be called the infidelity of natural science ;
if possible to bring over to the humility of the Gospel those who
expatiate with delight on the wonders and the sublimities of
creation, and to convince them that a loftier wisdom still than
that even of their high and honourable acquirements, is the

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 9

wisdom of him who is resolved to know nothing but Jesus
Christ and Him crucified.

It is truly a most Christian exercise to extract a sentiment of
piety from the works and the appearances of nature. It has the
authority of the Sacred Writers upon its side, and even our
Saviour Himself gives it the weight and the solemnity of His
example. " Behold the lilies of the field ; they toil not, neither
do they spin, yet your heavenly Father careth for them." He
expatiates on the beauty of a single flower, and draws from it the
delightful argument of confidence in God. He gives us to see
that taste may be combined with piety, and that the same heart
may be occupied with all that is serious in the contemplations
of religion, and be at the same time alive to the charms and the
loveliness of nature.

The Psalmist takes a still loftier flight. He leaves the
world, and lifts his imagination to that mighty expanse which
spreads above it and around it. He wings his way through
space, and wanders in thought over its immeasurable regions.
Instead of a dark and unpeopled solitude, he sees it crowded with
splendour, and filled with the energy of the Divine presence.
Creation rises in its immensity before him ; and the world, with
all which it inherits, shrinks into littleness at a contemplation
so vast and so overpowering. He wonders that he is not over
looked amid the grandeur and the variety which are on every
side of him ; and passing upward from the majesty of nature
to the majesty of nature's Architect, he exclaims, "What is
man, that thou art mindful of him ? or the son of man, that thou
shouldest deign to visit him?"

It is not for us to say, whether inspiration revealed to the
Psalmist the wonders of the modern astronomy. But even
though the mind be a perfect stranger to the science of these
enlightened times, the heavens present a great and an elevat
ing spectacle — an immense concave reposing on the circular
boundary of the world, and the innumerable lights which are
suspended from on high, moving with solemn regularity along its
surface. It seems to have been at night that the piety of the
Psalmist was awakened by this contemplation, when the moon
and the stars were visible, and not when the sun had risen in
his strength, and thrown a splendour around him, which bore
down and eclipsed all the lesser glories of the firmament. And
there is much in the scenery of a nocturnal sky, to lift the soul
to pious contemplation. That moon, and these stars, what are

10 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

they ? They are detached from the world, and they lift us
above it. We feel withdrawn from the earth, and rise in lofty
abstraction from this little theatre of human passions and human
anxieties. The mind abandons itself to reverie, and is trans
ferred in the ecstacy of its thoughts to distant and unexplored
regions. It sees nature in the simplicity of her great elements,
and it sees the God of nature invested with the high attributes
of wisdom and majesty.

But what can these lights be ? The curiosity of the human
mind is insatiable ; and the mechanism of these wonderful
heavens has, in all ages, been its subject and its employment.
It has been reserved for these latter times to resolve this great
and interesting question. The sublimest powers of philosophy
have been called to the exercise, and astronomy may now be
looked upon as the most certain and best established of the
sciences.

We all know that every visible object appears less in magni
tude as it recedes from the eye. The lofty vessel, as it retires
from the coast, shrinks into littleness, and at last appears in the
form of a small speck on the verge of the horizon. The eagle,
with its expanded wings, is a noble object ; but when it takes
its flight into the upper regions of the air, it becomes less to
the eye, and is seen like a dark spot upon the vault of heaven.
The same is true of all magnitude. The heavenly bodies appear
small to the eye of an inhabitant of this earth, only from the
immensity of their distance. When we talk of hundreds of
millions of miles, it is not to be listened to as incredible. For
remember that we are talking of those bodies which are scattered
over the immensity of space, and that space knows no termination.
The conception is great and difficult, but the truth is unques
tionable. By a process of measurement which it is unnecessary
at present to explain, we have ascertained first the distance, and
then the magnitude of some of those bodies which roll in the
firmament ; that the sun which presents itself to the eye under
so diminutive a form, is really a globe, exceeding, by many
thousands of times, the dimensions of the earth which we in
habit ; that the moon itself has the magnitude of a world ; and
that even a few of those stars which appear like so many lucid
points to the unassisted eye of the observer, expand into large
circles upon the application of the telescope, and are some of
them much larger than the ball which we tread upon, and to
which we proudly apply the denomination of the universe.

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 11

Now, what is the fair and obvious presumption ? The world
in which we live is a round ball of a determined magnitude, and
occupies its own place in the firmament. But when we explore
the unlimited tracts of that space which is everywhere around
us, we meet with other balls of equal or superior magnitude, and
from which our earth would either be invisible, or appear as
small as any of those twinkling stars which are seen on the
canopy of heaven. Why then suppose that this little spot, little
at least in the immensity which surrounds it, should be the ex
clusive abode of life and of intelligence ? What reason to think
that those mightier globes which roll in other parts of creation,
and which we have discovered to be worlds in magnitude, are
not also worlds in use and in dignity ? Why should we think
that the great Architect of nature, supreme in wisdom as He is
in power, would call these stately mansions into existence and
leave them unoccupied ? When we cast our eye over the broad
sea, and look at the country on the other side, we see nothing
but the blue land stretching obscurely over the distant horizon.
We are too far away to perceive the richness of its scenery, or
to hear the sound of its population. Why not extend this prin
ciple to the still more distant parts of the universe ? What
though, from this remote point of observation, we can see nothing
but the naked roundness of yon planetary orbs ? Are we there
fore to say, that they are so many vast and unpeopled solitudes ;
that desolation reigns in every part of the universe but ours ;
that the whole energy of the divine attributes is expended on
one insignificant corner of these mighty works ; and that to this
earth alone belongs the bloom of vegetation, or the blessedness
of life, or the dignity of rational and immortal existence ?

But this is not all. We have something more than the mere
magnitude of the planets to allege in favour of the idea that they
are inhabited. We know that this earth turns round upon itself;
and we observe that all those celestial bodies, which are acces
sible to such an observation, have the same movement. We
know that the earth performs a yearly revolution round the sun ;
and we can detect, in all the planets which compose our system,
a revolution of the same kind, and under the same circumstances.
They have the same succession of day and night. They have
the same agreeable vicissitude of the seasons. To them light
and darkness succeed each other ; and the gaiety of summer is
followed by the dreariness of winter. To each of them the
heavens present as varied and magnificent a spectacle ; and this

12 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

earth, the encompassing of which would require the labour of
years from one of its puny inhabitants, is but one of the lesser
lights which sparkle in their firmament. To them, as well as to
us, has God divided the light from the darkness, and He has
called the light day, and the darkness He has called night. He
has said, Let there be lights in the firmament of their heaven, to
divide the day from the night ; and let them be for signs, and
for seasons, and for days, and for years ; and let them be for
lights in the firmament of heaven, to give light upon their earth ;
and it was so. And God has also made to them great lights.
To all of them He has given the sun to rule the day ; and to
many of them has He given moons to rule the night. To them
He has made the stars also. And God has set them in the firma
ment of heaven, to give light upon their earth ; and to rule over
the day, and over the night, and to divide the li<rht from the
darkness ; and God has seen that it was good.

In all these greater arrangements of divine wisdom, we can
see that God has done the same things for the accommodation
of the planets that He has done for the earth which we inhabit.
And shall we say that the resemblance stops here, because we
are not in a situation to observe it ? Shall we say that this
scene of magnificence has been called into being merely for the
amusement of a few astronomers ? Shall we measure the coun
sels of heaven by the narrow impotence of the human faculties ?
or conceive that silence and solitude reign throughout the mighty
empire of nature ; that the greater part of creation is an empty
parade ; and that not a worshipper of the Divinity is to be found
through the wide extent of yon vast and immeasurable regions?

It lends a delightful confirmation to the argument, when, from
the growing perfection of our instruments, we can discover a
new point of resemblance between our earth and the other bodies
of the planetary system. It is now ascertained, not merely that
all of them have their day and night, and that all of them have
their vicissitudes of seasons, and that some of them have their
moons to rule their night and alleviate the darkness of it ; — we
can see of one, that its surface rises into inequalities, that it swells
into mountains and stretches into valleys ; of another, that it is
surrounded by an atmosphere which may support the respiration
of animals ; of a third, that clouds are formed and suspended
over it, which may minister to it all the bloom and luxuriance
of vegetation ; and of a fourth, that a white colour spreads over
its northern regions as its winter advances, and that on the

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 13

approach of summer this whiteness is dissipated — giving room to
suppose, that the element of water abounds in it, that it rises by
evaporation into its atmosphere, that it freezes upon the applica
tion of cold, that it is precipitated in the form of snow, that it
covers the ground with a fleecy mantle, which melts away from
the heat of a more vertical sun ; and that other worlds bear a
resemblance to our own, in the same yearly round of beneficent
and interesting changes.

Who shall assign a limit to the discoveries of future ages ?
Who can prescribe to science her boundaries, or restrain the
active and insatiable curiosity of man within the circle of his pre
sent acquirements ? We may guess with plausibility what we
cannot anticipate with confidence. The day may yet be coming,
when our instruments of observation shall be inconceivably more
powerful. They may ascertain still more decisive points of re
semblance. They may resolve the same question by the evidence
of sense, which is now so abundantly convincing by the evidence
of analogy. They may lay open to us the unquestionable vestiges
of art, and industry, and intelligence. We may see summer
throwing its green mantle over these mighty tracts, and we may
see them left naked and colourless after the flush of vegetation
has disappeared. In the progress of years or of centuries, we
may trace the hand of cultivation spreading a new aspect over
some portion of a planetary surface. Perhaps some large city,
the metropolis of a mighty empire, may expand into a visible
spot by the powers of some future telescope. Perhaps the glass
of some observer, in a distant age, may enable him to construct
the map of another world, and to lay down the surface of it in
all its minute and topical varieties. But there is no end of con
jecture ; and to the men of other times we leave the full assur
ance of what we can assert with the highest probability, that yon
planetary orbs are so many worlds, that they teem with life, and
that the mighty Being who presides in high authority over this
scene of grandeur and astonishment, has there planted the wor
shippers of His glory.

Did the discoveries of science stop here, we have enough to
justify the exclamation of the Psalmist, " What is man, that thou
art mindful of him ? or the son of man, that thou shouldest deign
to visit him?" They widen the empire of creation far beyond
the limits which were formerly assigned to it. They give us to
see. that yon sun, throned in the centre of his planetary system,
gives light, and warmth, and the vicissitude of seasons, to an ex-

14 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

tent of surface several hundreds of times greater than that of tha
earth which we inhabit. They lay open to us a number of
worlds, rolling in their respective circles around this vast lumi
nary — and prove, that the ball which we tread upon, with all its
mighty burden of oceans and continents, instead of being dis
tinguished from the others, is among the least of them ; and,
from some of the more distant planets, would not occupy a visible
point in the concave of their firmament. They let us know,
that though this mighty earth, with all its myriads of people,
were to sink into annihilation, there are some worlds where an
event so awful to us would be unnoticed and unknown, and
others where it would be nothing more than the disappearance of
a little star which had ceased from its twinkling. We should
feel a sentiment of modesty at this just but humiliating repre
sentation. We should learn not to look on our earth as the
universe of God, but one paltry and insignificant portion of it ;
that it is only one of the many mansions which the Supreme
Being has created for the accommodation of His worshippers,
and only one of the many worlds rolling in that flood of light
which the sun pours around him to the outer limits of the plane
tary system.

But is there nothing beyond these limits? The planetary
system has its boundary, but space has none ; and if we wing
our fancy there, do we only travel through dark and unoccupied
regions ? There are only five, or at most six, of the planetary
orbs visible to the naked eye. What, then, is that multitude of
other lights which sparkle in our firmament, and fill the whole
concave of heaven with innumerable splendours ? The planets
are all attached to the sun ; and, in circling around him, they
do homage .to that influence which binds them to perpetual
attendance on this great luminary. But the other stars do not
own his dominion. They do not circle around him. To all
common observation, they remain immovable ; and each, like
the independent sovereign of his own territory, appears to
occupy the same inflexible position in the regions of immensity.
What can we make of them? Shall we take our adventurous
flight to explore these dark and untravelled dominions ? What
mean these innumerable fires lighted up in distant parts of the
universe? Are they only made to shed a feeble glimmering
over this little spot in the kingdom of nature? or do they serve
a purpose worthier of themselves, to light up other worlds, and
give animation to other systems?

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 15

The first thing which strikes a scientific observer of the fixed
stars, is their immeasurable distance. If the whole planetary
system were lighted up into a globe of fire, it would exceed, by
many millions of times, the magnitude of this world, and yet
only appear a small lucid point from the nearest of them. If a
body were projected from the sun with the velocity of a cannon-
ball, it would take hundreds of thousands of years before it
described that mighty interval which separates the nearest of
the fixed stars from our sun and from our system. If this
earth, which moves at more than the inconceivable velocity of a
million and a half miles a day, were to be hurried from its orbit,
and to take the same rapid flight over this immense tract, it
would not have arrived at the termination of its journey, after
taking all the time which has elapsed since the creation of the
world. These are great numbers, and great calculations ; and
the mind feels its own impotency in attempting to grasp them.
We can state them in words. We can exhibit them in figures.
We can demonstrate them by the powers of a most rigid and
infallible geometry. But no human fancy can summon up a
lively or an adequate conception — can roam in its ideal flight
over this immeasurable largeness — can take in this mighty
space in all its grandeur, and in all its immensity — can sweep
the outer boundaries of such a creation — or lift itself up to the
majesty of that great and invisible arm on which all is sus
pended.

But what can those stars be which are seated so far beyond
the limits of our planetary system ? They must be masses of
immense magnitude, or they could not be seen at the distance
of place which they occupy. The light which they give must
proceed from themselves, for the feeble reflection of light from
some other quarter would not carry through such mighty tracts
to the eye of an observer. A body may be visible in two ways.
It may be visible from its own light, as the flame of a candle,
or the brightness of a fire, or the brilliancy of yonder glorious
sun, which lightens all below, arid is the lamp of the world.
Or it may be visible from the light which falls upon it, as the
body which receives its light from a taper — or the whole assem
blage of objects on the surface of the earth, which appear only
when the light of day rests upon them — or the moon, which,
in that part of it that is towards the sun, gives out a silvery
whiteness to the eye of the observer, while the other part forms
a black and invisible space in the firmament — or as the planets,

16 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

which shine only because the sun shines upon them, and which,
each of them, present the appearance of a dark spot on the side
that is turned away from it. Now apply this question to the
fixed stars. Are they luminous of themselves, or do they derive
their light from the sun, like the bodies of our planetary
system ? Think of their immense distance, and the solution of
this question becomes evident. The sun, like any other body,
must dwindle into a less apparent magnitude as you retire from
it. At the prodigious distance even of the very nearest of the
fixed stars, it must have shrunk into a small indivisible point.
In short, it must have become a star itself, and could shed no
more light than a single individual of those glimmering myriads
the whole assemblage of which cannot dissipate and can scarcely
alleviate the midnight darkness of our world. These stars are
visible to us, not because the sun shines upon them, but because
they shine of themselves, because they are so many luminous
bodies scattered over the tracts of immensity — in a word,
because they are so many suns, each throned in the centre of his
own dominions, and pouring a flood of light over his own portion
of these unlimitable regions.

At such an immense distance for observation, it is not to be
supposed, that we can collect many points of resemblance
between the fixed stars, and the solar star which forms the
centre of our planetary system. There is one point of resem
blance, however, which has not escaped the penetration of our
astronomers. We know that our sun turns round upon himself
in a regular period of time. We also know that there are dark
spots scattered over his surface, which, though invisible to the
naked eye, are perfectly noticeable by our instruments. If
these spots existed in greater quantity upon one side than upon
another, it would have the general effect of making that side
darker; and the revolution of the sun must, in such a case,
give us a brighter and a fainter side, by regular alternations.
Now, there are some of the fixed stars which present this
appearance. They present us with periodical variations of
light. From the splendour of a star of the first or second mag
nitude, they fade away into some of the inferior magnitudes —
and one, by becoming invisible, might give reason to apprehend
that we had lost him altogether — but we can still recognise him
by the telescope, till at length he reappears in his own place,
and, after a regular lapse of so many days and hours, recovers
his original brightness. Now, the fair inference from this is,

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 17

that the fixed stars, as they resemble our sun in being so many
"luminous masses of immense magnitude, resemble him in this
also, that each of them turns round upon his own axis ; so that
if any of them should have an inequality in the brightness of
their sides, this revolution is rendered evident, by the regular
variations in the degree of light which it undergoes.

Shall we say, then, of these vast luminaries, that they were
created in vain ? Were they called into existence for no other
purpose than to throw a tide of useless splendour over the
solitudes of immensity ? Our sun is or^y one of these lumin
aries, and we know that he has worlds in his train. Why
should we strip the rest of this princely attendance ? Why
may not each of them be the centre of his own system, arid give
light to his own worlds ? It is true that we see them not ; but
could the eye of man take its flight into those distant regions,
it would lose sight of our little world before it reached the outer
limits of our system — the greater planets would disappear in
their turn before it had described a small portion of that abyss
which separates us from the fixed stars ; the sun would decline
into a little spot, and all its splendid retinue of worlds be lost
in the obscurity of distance — he would at last shrink into a
small indivisible atom, and all that could be seen of this mag
nificent system, would be reduced to the glimmering of a little
star. Why resist any longer the grand and interesting conclu
sion? Each of these stars may be the token of a system as
vast and as splendid as the one which we inhabit. Worlds roll
in these distant regions ; and these worlds must be the man
sions of life and of intelligence. In yon gilded canopy of
heaven, we see the broad aspect of the universe, where each
shining point presents us with a sun, and each sun with a
system of worlds — where the Divinity reigns in all the grandeur
of His attributes — where He peoples immensity with His won
ders ; and travels in the greatness of His strength through the
dominions of one vast and unlimited monarchy.

The contemplation has no limits. If we ask the number of
suns and of systems, the unassisted eye of man can take in a
thousand, arid the best telescope which the genius of man has
constructed can take in eighty millions. But why subject the
dominions of the universe to the eye of man, or to the powers of
his genius? Fancy may take its flight far beyond the ken of
eye or of telescope. It may expatiate in the outer regions of all
that is visible — and shall we have the boldness to say, that there

VOL, in. B

18 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

is nothing there? that the wonders of the Almighty are at an
end, because we can no longer trace His footsteps? that His
omnipotence is exhausted, because human art can ho longer
follow Him ? that the creative energy of God has sunk into re
pose, because the imagination is enfeebled by the magnitude of
its efforts, and can keep no longer on the wing through those
mighty tracts, which shoot far beyond what eye hath seen, or
the heart of man hath conceived — which sweep endlessly along,
and merge into an awful and mysterious infinity ?

Before bringing to a close this rapid and imperfect sketch of
our modern astronomy, it may be right to advert to two points
of interesting speculation, both of which serve to magnify our
conceptions of the universe, and, of course, to give us a more
affecting sense of the comparative insignificance of this our world.
The first is suggested by the consideration, that if a body be
struck in the direction of its centre, it obtains, from this impulse,
a progressive motion, but without any movement of revolution
being at the same time impressed upon it. It simply goes for
ward, but does not turn round upon itself. But, again, should
the stroke not be in the direction of the centre — should the line
which joins the point of percussion to the centre, make an angle
with that line in which the impulse was communicated, then the
body is both made to go forward in space, and also to wheel
upon its axis. In this way, each of our planets may have had
its compound motion communicated to it by one single impulse ;
and, on the other hand, if ever the rotatory motion be communi
cated by one blow, then the progressive motion must go along
with it. In order to have the first motion without the second,
there must be a twofold force applied to the body in opposite
directions. It must be set a-going in the same way as a spinning-
top, so as to revolve about an axis, and to keep unchanged its
situation in space. The planets have both motions ; and, there
fore, may have received them by one and the same impulse. The
sun, we are certain, has one of these motions. He has a move
ment of revolution. If spun round his axis by two opposite
forces, one on each side of him, he may have this movement, and
retain an inflexible position in space. But if this movement was
given him by one stroke, he must have a progressive motion
along with a whirling motion ; or, in other words, he is moving
forward, he is describing a tract in space ; and in so doing, he
carries all his planets and all their secondaries along with him.

But at this stage of the argument, the matter only remains a

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 19

conjectural point of speculation. The sun may have had his
rotation impressed upon him by a spinning impulse ; or, with
out recurring to secondary causes at all, this movement may be
coeval with his being, and he may have derived both the one
and the other from an immediate fiat of the Creator. But there
is an actually observed phenomenon of the heavens, which ad
vances the conjecture into a probability. In the course of ages,
the stars in one quarter of the celestial sphere are apparently
receding from each other ; and, in the opposite quarter, they are
apparently drawing nearer to each other. If the sun be ap
proaching the former quarter, and receding from the latter, this
phenomenon admits of an easy explanation ; and we are furnished
with a magnificent step in the scale of the Creator's workman
ship. In the same manner as the planets, with their satellites,
revolve round the sun, may the sun, with all his tributaries, be
moving, in common with other stars, around some distant centre,
from which there emanates an influence to bind and to subordi
nate them all. They may be kept from approaching each other
by a centrifugal force ; without which the laws of attraction
might consolidate into one stupendous mass all the distinct globes
of which the universe is composed. Our sun may, therefore, be
only one member of a higher family — taking his part, along with
millions of others, in some loftier system of mechanism by which
they are all subjected to one law and to one arrangement —
describing the sweep of such an orbit in space, and completing
the mighty revolution in such a period of time, as to reduce our
planetary seasons and our planetary movements to a very humble
and fractionary rank in the scale of a higher astronomy. There
is room for all this in immensity, and there is even argument
for all this in the records of actual observation ; and from the
whole of this speculation do we gather a new emphasis to the
lesson, how minute is the place, and how secondary is the im
portance of our world, amid the glories of such a surrounding
magnificence.

But there is still another very interesting track of speculation
which has been opened up to us by the more recent observations
of astronomy. What we allude to, is the discovery of the
nebulce. We allow that it is but a dim and indistinct light
which this discovery has thrown upon the structure of the uni
verse ; but still it has spread before the eye of the mind a field
of very wide and lofty contemplation. Anterior to this discovery,
the universe might appear to have been composed of an indefinite

20 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

number of suns, about equidistant from each other, uniformly
scattered over space, and each encompassed by such a planetary
attendance as takes place in our own system. But we have now
reason to think, that instead of lying uniformly, and in a state
of equidistance from each other, they are arranged into distinct
clusters — that in the same manner as the distance of the nearest
fixed stars so inconceivably superior to that of our planets from
each other, marks the separation of the solar systems, so the
distance of two contiguous clusters may be so inconceivably
superior to the reciprocal distance of those fixed stars which
belong to the same cluster, as to mark an equally distinct sepa
ration of the clusters, and to constitute each of them an indivi-
dual'tQember of some higher and more extended arrangement.
This carries us upwards through another ascending step in the
scale of magnificence, and there leaves us in the uncertainty,
whether even here the wonderful progression is ended ; and, at
all events, fixes the assured conclusion in our minds, that, to an
eye which could spread itself over the whole, the mansion which
accommodates our species, might be so very small as to lie
wrapped in microscopical concealment ; and in reference to the
only Being who possesses this universal eye, well might we
say, " What is man, that thou art mindful of him ? or the son of
man, that thou shouldest deign to visit him?"

And, after all, though it be a mighty and difficult conception,
yet who can question it ? What is seen may be nothing to what
is unseen : for what is seen is limited by the range of our instru
ments. What is unseen has no limit ; and though all which the
eye of man can take in, or his fancy can grasp, were swept
away, there might still remain as ample a field over which the
Divinity may expatiate, and which He may have peopled with
innumerable worlds. If the whole visible creation were to dis
appear, it would leave a solitude behind it — but to the Infinite
Mind that can take in the whole system of nature, this solitude
might be nothing ; a small unoccupied point in that immensity
which surrounds it, and which He may have filled with the
wonders of His omnipotence. Though this earth were to be
burned up, though the trumpet of its dissolution were sounded,
though yon sky were to pass away as a scroll, and every visible
glory which the finger of the Divinity has inscribed on it, were
to be put out for ever — an event so awful to us and to every
world in our vicinity, by which so many suns would be extin
guished, and so many varied scenes of life and of population

SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY. 21

would rush into forgetfulness — what is it in the high scale of the
Almighty's workmanship? — a mere shred, which though scat
tered into nothing, would leave the universe of God one entire
scene of greatness and of majesty. Though this earth and these
heavens were to disappear, there are other worlds which roll
afar : the light of other suns shines upon them, and the sky
which mantles them is garnished with other stars. Is it pre
sumption to say, that the moral world extends to these distant
and unknown regions ; that they are occupied with people ; that
the charities of home and of neighbourhood flourish there ; that
the praises of God are there lifted up, and His goodness rejoiced
in ; that piety has there its temples and its offerings ; and the
richness of the divine attributes is there felt and admired by
intelligent worshippers ?

And what is this world in the immensity which teems with
them — and what are they who occupy it? The universe at
large would suffer as little, in its splendour and variety, by the
destruction of our planet, as the verdure and, sublime magnitude
of a forest would suffer by the fall of a single leaf. The leaf
quivers on the branch which supports it. It lies at the mercy
of the slightest accident. A breath of wind tears it from its
stem, and it lights on the stream of water which passes under
neath. In a moment of time, the life which we know, by the
microscope, it teems with, is extinguished ; and an occurrence
so insignificant in the eye of man, and on the scale of his ob
servation, carries in it, to the myriads which people this little
leaf, an event as terrible and as decisive as the destruction of a
world. Now, on the grand scale of the universe, we, the oc
cupiers of this ball, which performs its little round among the
suns and the systems that astronomy has unfolded — we may
feel the same littleness and the same insecurity. We differ from
the leaf only in this circumstance, that it would require the
operation of greater elements to destroy us. But these elements
exist. The fire which rages within, may lift its devouring
energy to the surface of our planet, and transform it into one
wide and wasting volcano. The sudden formation of elastic
matter in the bowels of the earth — and it lies within the agency
of known substances to accomplish this — may explode it into
fragments. The exhalation of noxious air from below may
impart a virulence to the air that is around us ; it may affect
the delicate proportion of its ingredients ; and the whole of
animated nature may wither and die under the malignity of a

22 SKETCH OF MODERN ASTRONOMY.

tainted atmosphere. A blazing comet may cross this fated
planet in its orbit, and realize all the terrors which superstition,
has conceived of it. We cannot anticipate with precision the
consequences of an event which every astronomer must know to
lie within the limits of chance and probability. It may hurry
our globe towards the sun — or drag it to the outer regions of
the planetary system — or give it a new axis of revolution : and
the effect, which I shall simply announce, without explaining it,
would be to change the place of the ocean, and bring another
mighty flood upon our islands and continents. These are changes
which may happen in a single instant of time, and against which
qothing known in the present system of things provides us with
any security. They might not annihilate the earth, but they
would unpeople it ; and we who tread its surface with such firm
and assured footsteps, are at the mercy of devouring elements,
which, if let loose upon us by the hand of the Almighty,
would spread solitude and silence and death over the dominions
of the world.

Now, it is this littleness, and this insecurity, which make the
protection of the Almighty so dear to us, and bring, with such
emphasis, to every pious bosom, the holy lessons of humility and
gratitude. The God "who sitteth above, and presides in high
authority over all worlds, is mindful of man ; and though at
this moment His energy is felt in the remotest provinces of
creation, we may feel the same security in His providence, as if
we were the objects of His undivided care. It is not for us to
bring our minds up to this mysterious agency. But such is the
incomprehensible fact, that the same Being, whose eye is abroad
over the whole universe, gives vegetation to every blade of grass,
and motion to every particle of blood which circulates through
the veins of the minutest animal ; that though His mind takes
into its comprehensive grasp, immensity and all its wonders,
I am as much known to Him as if 1 4were the single object of
His attention — that He marks all my thoughts — that He gives
birth to every feeling and every movement within me — and
that with an exercise of power which I can neither describe nor
comprehend, the same God who sits in the highest heaven, and
reigns over the glories of the firmament, is at my right hand to
give me every breath which I draw, and every comfort which
I enjoy.

But this very reflection has been appropriated to the use of
Infidelity, and the very language of the text has been made to

SKETCH OF MODEKN ASTRONOMY. 23

bear an application of hostility to the faith. " What is man,
that God should be mindful of him '? or the son of man, that he
should deign to visit him?" Is it likely, says the infidel, that
God would send His eternal Son to die for the puny occupiers
of so ID significant a province in the mighty field of His creation?
Are we the befitting objects of so great and so signal an inter
position ? Does not the largeness of that field which astronomy
lays open to the view of modern science, throw a suspicion over
the truth of the gospel history ? and how shall we reconcile the
greatness of that wonderful movement which was made in heaven
for the redemption of fallen man, with the comparative mean
ness and obscurity of our species ?

This is a popular argument against Christianity, not much
dwelt upon in books, but, we believe, a good deal insinuated in
conversation, and having no small influence on the amateurs of
a superficial philosophy. At all events, it is right that every
such argument should be met and manfully confronted ; nor do
we know a more discreditable surrender of our religion, than to
act as if she had anything to fear from the ingenuity of her most
accomplished adversaries. The author of the following treatise
engages in his present undertaking under the full impression
that a something may be found with which to combat Infidelity
in all its forms ; that the truth of God and of His message
admits of a noble and decisive manifestation, through every mist
which the pride or the prejudice or the sophistry of man may
throw around it ; and elevated as the wisdom of him may be
who has ascended the heights of science, and poured the light
of demonstration over the most wondrous of nature's mysteries,
that even out of his own principles it may be proved, how much
more elevated is the wisdom of him who sits with the docility
of a little child to his Bible, and casts down to its authority all
his lofty imaginations.

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. — Gen. i. 1.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. — Gen. ii. 1.

Behold, the heaven, and the heaven of heavens, is the Lord's thy God, the earth also, with
all that therein is. — Deut. x. 14.

There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help,
and in his excellency on the sky.— Deut. xxxiii. 26.

24 SCRIPTUEAL AUTHORITIES.

And Hezekiah prayed before the Lord, and said, 0 Lord God of Israel, which dwellest
between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth;
thou hast made heaven and earth. — 2 Kings xix. 15.

For all the gods of the people are idols : but the Lord made the heavens. — 1 Chron.
xvi. 26.

Thou, even thou, art Lord alone : thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all
their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein; and
thou preservest them all ; and the host of heaven worshippeth thee. — Neh. ix. 6.

Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea ; which
maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south.— Job ix. 8, 9.

He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.—
Job xxvi. 7.

By his Spirit he hath garnished the heavens. — Job xxvi. 13.

The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament sheweth his handy-work. —
Psalm xix. 1.

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made ; and all the host of them by the breath
of his mouth. — Psalm xxxiii. 6.

Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth ; and the heavens are the work of thy
hands. — Psalm cii. 25.

Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment ; who stretchest out the heavens like a
curtain. — Psalm civ. 2.

He appointed the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down.— Psalm civ. 19.

Ye are blessed of the Lord, which made heaven and earth. The heaven, even the heavens,
are the Lord's : but the earth hath he given to the children of men. — Psalm cxv. 15, 16.

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. — Psalm cxxi. 2.

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. — Psalm cxxiv. 8.

The Lord, that made heaven and earth, bless thee out of Zion. — Psalm cxxxiv. 3.

Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is. — Psalm cxlvi. 6.

The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth ; by understanding hath he established the
heavens. — Prov. iii. 19.

Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with
the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains
in scales, and the hills in a balance ? — Isa. xl. 12.

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of tho earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grass
hoppers ; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to
dwell in.— Isa. xl. 22.

Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that
spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it ; he that giveth breath unto the
people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein. — Isa. xlii. 5.

Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the
Lord that maketh all things ; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone ; that spreadeth abroad
the earth by myself. — Isa. xliv. 24.

I have made the earth, and created man upon it : I, even my hands, have stretched out
the heavens, and all their host have I commanded. — Isa. xlv. 12.

For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth, and
made it ; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited.—
Isa. xlv. 18.

Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath spanned
the heavens : when I call unto them, they stand up together. — Isa. xlviii. 13.

He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by h!s wisdom, and
hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion. — Jer. x. 12.

Ah Lord God ! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and
Btretched-out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee. — Jer. xxxii. 17.

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES. 25

He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and
hath stretched out the heaven by his understanding. — Jer. li. 15.

It is he that buildeth his stories in the heaven, and hath founded his troop in the earth :
he that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth :
The Lord is his name. — Amos ix. 6.

We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you, that ye should turn from
these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all
things that are therein. — Acts xiv. 15.

God hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir

of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. — Heb. i. 2.

Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth ; and the heavens are
the works of thine hands.— Heb. i. 10.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. — lleb. si, 3.

26 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

DISCOURSE II.

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

" And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to
know."— 1 CORINTHIANS viii. 2.

THERE is much profound and important wisdom in that pro
verb of Solomon, where it is said that " the heart knoweth its
own bitterness." It forms part of a truth still more compre
hensive, that every man knoweth his own peculiar feelings
and difficulties and trials, far better than he can get any of his
neighbours to perceive them. It is natural to us all, that we
should desire to engross, to the uttermost, the sympathy of others
with what is most painful to the sensibilities of our own bosom,
and with what is most aggravating in the hardships of our own
situation. But, labour as we may, we cannot, with every power
of expression, make an adequate conveyance, as it were, of all
our sensations, and of all our circumstances, into another's under
standing. There is a something in the intimacy of a man's own
experience, which he cannot make to pass entire into the heart
and mind even of his most familiar companion, — and thus it is,
that he is so often defeated in his attempts to obtain a full and
a cordial possession of his sympathy. He is mortified, and he
wonders at the obtuseness of the people around him — and that
he cannot get them to enter into the justness of his complainings
— nor to feel the point upon which turn the truth and the reason
of his remonstrances — nor to give their interested attention to
the case xof his peculiarities and of his wrongs — nor to kindle,
in generous resentment, along with him, when he starts the
topic of his indignation. He does not reflect, all the while,
that with every human being he addresses, there is an inner
man which forms a theatre of passions and of interests as busy,
as crowded, and as fitted as his own to engross the anxious and
the exercised feelings of a heart which can alone understand its
own bitterness, and lay a correct estimate on the burden of its
own visitations. Every man we meet carries about with him,

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 27

in the unperceived solitude of his bosom, a little world of his
own — and we are just as blind, and as insensible, and as
dull, both of perception and of sympathy, about his engross
ing objects, as he is about ours ; and did we suffer this ob
servation to have all its weight, it might serve to make us
more candid arid more considerate of others. It might serve
to abate the monopolizing selfishness of our nature. It might
serve to soften down all the malignity which comes out of those
envious contemplations that we are so apt to cast on the fancied
ease and prosperity which are around us. It might serve to
reconcile every man to his own lot, and dispose him to bear
with thankfulness his own burden ; arid if this train of senti
ment were prosecuted with firmness and calmness and impar
tiality, it would lead to the conclusion, that each profession in
life has its own peculiar pains, and its own besetting inconveni
ences — that from the very bottom of society up to the 'golden
pinnacle which blazons upon its summit, there is much in the
shape of care and of suffering to be found — that throughout all
the conceivable varieties of human condition, there are trials
which can neither be adequately told on the one side, nor fully
understood on the other — that the ways of God to man are as
equal in this as in every department of His administration — and
that, go to whatever quarter of human experience we may, we
shall find that he has provided enough to exercise the patience
and to accomplish the purposes of a wise and a salutary dis
cipline upon all His children.

I have brought forward this observation, that it may prepare
the way for a second. There are perhaps no two sets of human
beings who comprehend less the movements and enter less into
the cares and concerns of each other, than the wide and busy
public on the one hand, and on the other, those men of close
and studious retirement, whom the world never hears of, save
when, from their thoughtful solitude, there issues forth some
splendid discovery to set the world on a gaze of admiration.
Then will the brilliancy of a superior genius draw every eye
towards it — and the homage paid to intellectual superiority will
place its idol on a loftier eminence than all wealth or than all
titles can bestow — and the name of the successful philosopher
will circulate, in his own age, over the whole extent of civilized
society, and be borne down to posterity in the characters of
ever-during remembrance : and thus it is, that, when we look
back on the days of Newton, we annex a kind of mysterious

28 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

greatness to him, who, by the pure force of his understanding1,
rose to such a gigantic elevation above the level of ordinary
men — and the kings and warriors of other days sink into in
significance around him — and he, at this moment, stands forth
to the public eye, in a prouder array of glory than circles the
memory of all the men of former generations — and while all
the vulgar grandeur of other days is now mouldering in forget-
fulness, the achievements of our great astronomer are still fresh
in the veneration of his countrymen, and they carry him forward
on the stream of time, with a reputation ever gathering, and the
triumphs of a distinction that will never die.

Now, the point that I want to impress upon you is, that the
same public, who are so dazzled and overborne by the lustre of
all this superiority, are utterly in the dark as to what that is
which confers its chief merit on the philosophy of Newton.
They see the result of his labours, but they know not how to
appreciate the difficulty or the extent of them. They look on
the stately edifice he has reared, but they know not what he
had to do in settling the foundation which gives to it all its
stability ; nor are they aware what painful encounters he had to
make, both with the natural predilections of his own heart,
and with the prejudices of others, when employed on the work
of laying together its unperishing materials. They have never
heard of the controversies which this man, of peaceful unam
bitious modesty, had to sustain with all that was proud and all
that was intolerant in the philosophy of the age. They have
never in thought, entered that closet which was the scene of his
patient and profound exercises — nor have they gone along with
him, as he gave his silent hours to the labours of the midnight
oil, and plied that unwearied task to which the charm of lofty
contemplation had allured him — nor have they accompanied him
through all the workings of that wonderful mind, from which, as
from the recesses of a laboratory, there came forth such gleams
and processes of thought as shed an effulgency over the whole
amplitude of nature. All this the public have not done ; for of
this the great majority, even of the reading and cultivated public,
are utterly incapable ; and therefore is it that they need to be
told what that is, in which the main distinction of his philosophy
lies ; that when labouring in other fields of investigation, they
may know how to borrow from his safe example, and how to
profit by that superior wisdom which marked the whole conduct
of his understanding.

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 29

Let it be understood then, that they are the positive dis
coveries of Newton, which in the eye of a superficial public con
fer upon him all his reputation. He discovered the mechanism
of the planetary system. He discovered the composition of
light. He discovered the cause of those alternate movements
which take place on the waters of the ocean. These form his
actual and his visible achievements. These are what the world
look to as the monuments of his greatness. These are doctrines
by which he has enriched the field of philosophy ; and thus it
is, that the whole of his merit is supposed to lie in having had
the sagacity to perceive, and the vigour to lay hold of the proofs,
which conferred upon these doctrines all the establishment of a
most rigid and conclusive demonstration.

But while he gets all his credit, and all his admiration for
those articles of science which he has added to the creed of phi
losophers, he deserves as much credit and admiration for those
articles which he kept out of this creed, as for those which he
introduced into it. It was the property of his mind that it kept
a tenacious hold of every one position which had proof to sub
stantiate it : but it forms a property equally characteristic, and
which, in fact, gives its leading peculiarity to the whole spirit
and style of his investigations, that he put a most determined
exclusion on every one ^position that was destitute of such proof.
He would not admit the astronomical theories of those who went
before him, because they had no proof. He would not give in
to their notions about the planets wheeling their rounds in whirl
pools of ether — for he did not see this ether — he had no proof
of its existence : and, besides, even supposing it to exist, it
would not have impressed on the heavenly bodies such move
ments as met his observation. He would not submit his judg
ment to the reigning systems of the day — for, though they had
authority to recommend them, they had no proof ; and thus it is,
that he evinced the strength and the soundness of his philosophy,
as much by his decisions, upon those doctrines of science which
he rejected, as by his demonstration of those doctrines of science
which he was the first to propose, and which now stand out to
the eye of posterity as the only monuments to the force and
superiority of his understanding.

He wanted no other recommendation for any one article of
science, than the recommendation of evidence — and with this re
commendation he opened to it the chamber of his mind, though
authority scowled upon it, and taste was disgusted by it, and

30 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

fashion was ashamed of it, and all the beauteous speculation of
former days was cruelly broken up by this new announcement
of the better philosophy, and scattered like the fragments of an
aerial vision, over which the past generations of the world had
been slumbering their profound and their pleasing reverie. But,
on the other hand, should the article of science want the recom
mendation of evidence, he shut against it all the avenues of his
understanding ; and though all antiquity lent their suffrages to
it, and all eloquence had thrown around it the most attractive
brilliancy, and all habit had incorporated it with every system of
every seminary in Europe, and all fancy had arrayed it in graces
of the most tempting solicitation — yet was the steady and in
flexible mind of Newton proof against this whole weight of
authority and allurement, and casting his cold and unwelcome
look at the specious plausibility, he rebuked it from his presence.
The strength of his philosophy lay as much in refusing admit
tance to that which wanted evidence, as in giving a place and
an occupancy to that which possessed it. In that march of
intellect which led him onwards through the rich and magnifi
cent field of his discoveries, he pondered every step ; and while
he advanced with a firm and assured movement, wherever the
light of evidence carried him, he never suffered any glare of
imagination or of prejudice to seduce him from his path.

Certain it is, that, in the prosecution of his wonderful career,
he found himself on a way beset with temptation upon every
side of him. It was not merely that he had the reigning taste
and philosophy of the times to contend with ; but he expatiated
on a lofty region, where, in all the giddiness of success, he
might have met with much to solicit his fancy, and tempt him
to some devious speculation. Had he been like the majority of
other men, he would have broken free from the fetters of a sober
and chastised understanding, and, giving wing to his imagina
tion, had done what philosophers have done after him — been
carried away by some meteor of their own forming, or found
their amusement in some of their own intellectual pictures, or
palmed some loose and confident plausibilities of their own upon
the world. But Newton stood true to his principle, that he
would take up with nothing which wanted evidence, and he
kept by his demonstrations, and his measurements, and his
proofs ; and if it be true that he who ruleth his own spirit is
greater than he who taketh a city, there was won, in the soli
tude of his chamber, many a repeated victory over himself,

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 31

which should give a brighter lustre to his name than all the
conquests he has made on the field of discovery, or than all the
splendour of his positive achievements.

I trust you understand, that, though it be one of the maxims
of the true philosophy, never to shrink from a doctrine which
has evidence on its side, it is another maxim, equally essential to
it, never to harbour any doctrine when this evidence is wanting.
Take these two maxims along with you, and you will be at no
loss to explain the peculiarity which, more than any other, goes
both to characterize and to ennoble the philosophy of Newton.
What I allude to is, the precious combination of its strength and
of its modesty. On the one hand, what greater evidence of
strength than the fulfilment of that mighty enterprise, by which
the heavens have been made its own, and the mechanism of un
numbered worlds has been brought within the grasp of the
human understanding ? Now, it was by walking in the light of
sound and competent evidence, that all this was accomplished.
It was by the patient, the strenuous, the unfaltering application
of the legitimate instruments of discovery. It was by touching
that which was tangible, and looking to that which was visi
ble, and computing that which was measurable, and, in one
word, by making a right and reasonable use of all that proof
which the field of nature around us has brought within the
limit of sensible observation. This is the arena on which the
modern philosophy has won all her victories, and fulfilled all
her wondrous achievements, and reared all her proud and endur
ing monuments, and gathered all her magnificent trophies, to
that power of intellect with which the hand of a bounteous
Heaven has so -richly gifted the constitution of our species.

But, on the other hand, go beyond the limits of sensible
observation, and from that moment the genuine disciples of this
enlightened school cast all their confidence and all their intre
pidity away from them. Keep them on the firm ground of
experiment, and none more bold and more decisive in their
announcements of all that they have evidence for — but, off this
ground none more humble, or more cautious of anything like
positive announcements, than they. They choose neither to
know, nor to believe, nor to assert, where evidence is wanting ;
and they will sit, with all the patience of a scholar to his task,
till they have found it. They are utter strangers to that
haughty confidence with which some philosophers of the day
sport the plausibilities of unauthorized speculation, and by which,

32 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

unmindful of the limit that separates the region of sense from
the region of conjecture, they make their blind and their impe
tuous inroads into a province which does not belong to them.
There is no one object to which the exercised mind of a true
Newtonian disciple is more familiarized than this limit, and it
serves as a boundary by which he shapes, and bounds, and regu
lates all the enterprises of his philosophy. All the space which
lies within this limit he cultivates to the uttermost; and it
is by such successive labours, that every year which rolls over
the world is witnessing some new contribution to experimental
science, and adding to the solidity and aggrandizement of this
wonderful fabric. But if true to their own principle, then, in
reference to the forbidden ground which lies without this limit,
those very men, who, on the field of warranted exertion, evinced
all the hardihood and vigour of a full-grown understanding,
show, on every subject where the light of evidence is withheld
from them, all the modesty of children. They give us positive
opinion only when they have indisputable proof — but when they
have no such proof, then they have no such opinion. The
single principle of their respect to truth secures their homage
for every one position where the evidence of truth is present, and
at the same time begets an entire diffidence about every one
position from which this evidence is disjoined. And thus we
may understand how the first man in the accomplishments of
philosophy, which the world ever saw, sat at the book of nature
in the humble attitude of its interpreter and its pupil — how all
the docility of conscious ignorance threw a sweet and softening
lustre around the radiance even of his most splendid discoveries :
and, while the flippancy of a few superficial acquirements is
enough to place a philosopher of the day on the pedestal of his
fancied elevation, and to vest him with an assumed lordship over
the whole domain of natural and revealed knowledge, we can
not forbear to do honour to the unpretending greatness of Newton,
than whom we know not if there ever lighted on the face of our
world, one in the character of whose adjmirable genius so much
force and so much humility were more attractively blended.

I now propose to carry you forward, by a few simple illustra
tions, to ttye argument of this day. All the sublime truths of the
modern astronomy lie within the field of actual observation, and
have the firm evidence to rest upon of all that information
which is conveyed to us by the avenue of the senses. Sir Isaac
Newton never went beyond this field without a reverential im-

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 33

pression upon his mind of the precarionsness of the ground on
which he was standing. On this ground he never ventured a posi
tive affirmation — but, resigning the lofty tone of demonstration,
and putting on the modesty of conscious ignorance, he brought
forward all he had to say in the humble form of a doubt, or a
conjecture, or a question. But what he had not confidence to
do, other philosophers have done after him — and they have
winged their audacious way into forbidden regions — and they
have crossed that circle by which the field of observation is
enclosed — and there have they debated and dogmatized with
all the pride of a most intolerant assurance.

Now, though the case be imaginary, let us conceive, for the
sake of illustration, that one of these philosophers made so ex
travagant a departure from the sobriety of experimental science,
as to pass on from the astronomy of the different planets, and to
attempt the natural history of their animal and vegetable king
doms. He might get hold of some vague and general analogies,
to throw an air of plausibility around his speculation. He
might pass from the botany of the different regions of the globe
that we inhabit, and make his loose and confident applications
to each of the other planets, according to its distance from the
sun, and the inclination of its axis to the plane of its annual
revolution ; and out of some such slender materials, he might
work up an amusing philosophical romance, full of ingenuity,
and having, withal, the colour of truth and of consistency
spread over it.

I can conceive how a superficial public might be delighted by
the eloquence of such a composition, and even be impressed
by its arguments ; but were I asked, which is the man of all
the ages and countries in the world, who would have the least
respect for this treatise upon the plants which grow on the
surface of Jupiter, I should be at no loss to answer the question,
I should say, that it would be he who had computed the motions
of Jupiter — that it would be he who had measured the bulk and
the density of Jupiter — that it would be he who had estimated
the periods of Jupiter — that it would be he whose observant eye
and patiently calculating mind, had traced the satellites of
Jupiter through all the rounds of their mazy circulation, and
unravelled the intricacy of all their movements. He would see
at once that the subject lay at a hopeless distance beyond the
field of legitimate observation. It would be quite enough for
him that it was beyond the range of his telescope. On this

VOL. HI. c

34 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

ground, and on this ground only, would he reject it as one of
the puniest imbecilities of childhood. As to any character of
truth or of importance, it would have no more effect on such a
mind as that of Newton, than any illusion of poetry ; and from
the eminence of his intellectual throne, would he cast a pene
trating glance at the whole speculation, and bid its gaudy
insignificance away from him.

But let us pass onward to another case, which, though as
imaginary as the former, may still serve the purpose of illustra
tion.

This same adventurous philosopher may be conceived to shift
his speculation from the plants of another world, to the character
of its inhabitants. He may avail himself of some slender
correspondencies between the heat of the sun and the moral
temperament of the people it shines upon. He may work up
a theory, which carries on the front of it some of the characters
of plausibility ; but surely it does not require the philosophy of
Newton to demonstrate the folly of such an enterprise. There
is not a man of plain understanding, who does not perceive that
this ambitious inquirer has got without his reach — that he has
stepped beyond the field of experience, and is now expatiating
on the field of imagination — that he has ventured on a dark
unknown, where the wisest of all philosophy is the philosophy
of silence, and a profession of ignorance is the best evidence of
a solid understanding — that if he thinks he knows anything on
such a subject as this, " he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to
know." He knows not what Newton knew, and what he kept
a steady eye upon throughout the whole march of his sublime
investigations. He knows not the limit of his own faculties.
He has overleaped the barrier which hems in all the possibilities
of human attainment. He has wantonly flung himself off from
the safe and firm field of observation, and got on that undisco-
verable ground, where, by every step he takes, he widens his
distance from the true philosophy, arid by every affirmation he
utters, he rebels against the authority of all its maxims.

I can conceive it to be your feeling, that I have hitherto in
dulged in a vain expense of argument, and it is most natural
for you to put the question, " What is the precise point of con
vergence to which I am directing all the light of this abundant
and seemingly superfluous illustration?"

In the astronomical objection which Infidelity has proposed
against the truth of the Christian revelation, there is first an

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 35

assertion, and then an argument. The assertion is, that Chris
tianity is set up for the exclusive benefit of our minute and
solitary world. The argument is, that God would not lavish
such a quantity of attention on so insignificant a field. Even
though the assertion were admitted, I should have a quarrel
with the argument. But the futility of the objection is not laid
open in all its extent, unless we expose the utter want of all
essential evidence even for the truth of the assertion. How do
infidels know that Christianity is set up for the single benefit
of this earth and its inhabitants ? How are they able to tell us,
that if you go to other planets, the person and the religion of
Jesus are there unknown to them ? We challenge them to the
proof of this announcement. We see in this objection the same
rash and gratuitous procedure, which was so apparent in the
two cases that we have already advanced for the purpose of
illustration. We see in it the same glaring transgression on
the spirit and the maxims of that very philosophy which they
profess to idolize. They have made their argument against us,
out of an assertion which has positively no ascertained fact to
rest upon — an assertion which they have no means whatever of
verifying — an assertion, the truth or the falsehood of which can
only be gathered out of some supernatural message, for it lies
completely beyond the range of human observation. It is will
ingly admitted, that by an attempt at the botany of other worlds,
the true method of philosophizing is trampled on ; for this is a
subject that lies beyond the range of actual observation, and
every performance upon it must be made up of assertions with
out proofs. It is also willingly admitted, that an attempt at
the civil and political history of their people, would be an equally
extravagant departure from the spirit of the true philosophy ;
for this also lies beyond the field of actual observation ; and all
that could possibly be mustered up on such a subject as this,
would still be assertions without proofs. Now, the theology of
these planets is, in every way, as inaccessible a subject as their
politics or their natural history ; and therefore it is, that the
objection, grounded on the confident assumption of those infidel
astronomers, who assert Christianity to be the religion of this
one world, or that the religion of these other worlds is not our
very Christianity, can have no influence on a mind that has
derived its habits of thinking from the pure and rigorous school
of Newton ; for the whole of this assertion is just as glaringly
destitute of proof as in the two former instances.

36 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

The man who could embark in an enterprise so foolish and so
fanciful, as to theorize on the details of the botany of another
world, or to theorize on the natural and moral history of its
people, is just making as outrageous a departure from all sense,
and all science, and all .sobriety, when he presumes to specu
late or to assert on the details or the methods of God's admini
stration among its rational and accountable inhabitants. He
wings his fancy to as hazardous a region, and vainly strives a
penetrating vision through the mantle of as deep an obscurity.
All the elements of such a speculation are hidden from him.
For anything he can tell, sin has found its way into these other
worlds. For anything he can tell, their people have banished
themselves from communion with God. For anything he can
tell, many a visit has been made to each of them, on the subject
of our common Christianity, by commissioned messengers from
the throne of the Eternal. For anything he can tell, the re
demption proclaimed to ns is not one solitary instance, or not
the whole of that redemption which is by the Son of God — but
only our part in a plan of mercy, equal in magnificence to all
that astronomy has brought within the range of human contem
plation. For anything he can tell, the moral pestilence, which
walks abroad over the face of our world, may have spread its
desolations over all the planets of all the systems which the
telescope has made known to us. For anything he can tell,
some mighty redemption has been devised in heaven, to meet
this disaster in the whole extent and malignity of its visitations.
For anything he can tell, the wonder-working God, who has
strewed the field of immensity with so many worlds, and spread
the shelter of His omnipotence over them, may have sent a
message of love to each, and re-assured the hearts of its despair
ing people by some overpowering manifestation of tenderness.
For anything he can tell, angels from paradise may have sped
to every planet their delegated way, and sung, from each azure
canopy, a joyful annunciation, and said, " Peace be to this resid
ence, and good-will to all its families, and glory to Him in the
highest, who, from the eminency of His throne, has issued an act
of grace so magnificent, as to carry the tidings of life and of
acceptance to the unnumbered orbs of a sinful creation." For
anything he can tell, the Eternal Son, of whom it is said, that
by Him the worlds were created, may have had the government
of many sinful worlds laid upon His shoulders; and by the
power of His mysterious word, have awoke them all from that

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 37

spiritual death, to which they had sunk in lethargy as profound
as the slumbers of non-existence. For anything he can tell,
the one Spirit who moved on the face of the waters, and whose
presiding influence it was that hushed the wild war of nature's
elements, and made a beauteous system emerge out of its dis
jointed materials, may now be working with the fragments of
another chaos; and educing order, and obedience, and harmony,
out of the wrecks of a moral rebellion, which reaches through
all these spheres, and spreads disorder to the uttermost limits
of our astronomy.

But here I stop — nor shall I attempt to grope further my
dark and fatiguing way, among such sublime and mysterious
secrecies. It is not I who am offering to lift this curtain. It
is not I who am pitching my adventurous flight to the secret
things which belong to God, away from the things that are
revealed, and which belong to us and to our children. It is
the champion of that very Infidelity which I am now combat
ing. It is he who props his unchristian argument by presump
tions fetched out of those untravelled obscurities which lie on
the other side of a barrier that I pronounce to be impassable.
It is he who transgresses the limits which Newton forbore to
enter ; because, with a justness which reigns throughout all his
inquiries, he saw the limit of his own understanding, nor would
he venture himself beyond it. It is he who has borrowed from
the philosophy of this wondrous man a few dazzling con
ceptions, which have only served to bewilder him — while, an
utter stranger to the spirit of this philosophy, he has carried a
daring and an ignorant speculation far beyond the boundary
of its prescribed and allowable enterprises. It is he who has
mustered against the truths of the Gospel, resting as it does on
evidence within the reach of his faculties, an objection, for the
truth of which he has no evidence whatever. It is he who puts
away from him a doctrine, for which he has the substantial and
the familiar proof of human testimony; and substitutes in its
place a doctrine, for which he can get no other support than
from a reverie of his own imagination. It is he who turns
aside from all that safe and certain argument, that is supplied
by the history of this world, of which he knows something ; and
who loses himself in the work of theorizing about other worlds,
of the moral and theological history of which he positively
knows nothing. Upon him and not upon us, lies the folly of
launching his impetuous way beyond the province of observa-

38 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

tion — of letting his fancy afloat among the unknown of distant
and mysterious regions — and, by an act of daring, as impious as
it is unphilosophical, of trying to unwrap that shroud, which,
till drawn aside by the hand of a messenger from heaven, will
ever veil from human eye the purposes of the Eternal.

If you have gone along with us in the preceding observations,
you will perceive how they are calculated to disarm of all its
point, and of all its energy, that flippancy of Voltaire, when, in
the examples he gives of the dotage of the human understand
ing, he tells us of Bacon having believed in witchcraft, and Sir
Isaac Newton having written a commentary on the Book of
Revelation. The former instance we shall not undertake to
vindicate ; but, in the latter instance, we perceive what this
brilliant and specious but withal superficial apostle of Infidelity,
either did not see, or refused to acknowledge. We see in this
intellectual labour of our great philosopher, the working of the
very same principles which carried him through the profoundest
and the most successful of his investigations ; and how he kept
most sacredly and most consistently by those very maxims, the
authority of which he, even in the full vigour and manhood of
his faculties, ever recognised. We see in the theology of New
ton, the very spirit and principle which gave all its stability,
and all its sureness, to the philosophy of Newton. We see the
same tenacious adherence to every one doctrine, that had such
valid proof to uphold it, as could be gathered from the field of
human experience; and we see the same firm resistance of every
one argument, that had nothing to recommend it, but such
plausibilities as could easily be devised by the genius of man,
•when he expatiated abroad on those fields of creation which the
eye never witnessed, and from which no messenger ever came
to us with any credible information. Now, it was on the former
of these two principles that Newton clung so determinedly to
his Bible, as the record of an actual annunciation from God to
the inhabitants of this world. When he turned his attention to
this book, he came to it with a mind tutored to the philosophy
of facts — and when he looked at its credentials, he saw the stamp
and the impress of this philosophy on every one of them. He
saw the fact of Christ being a messenger from heaven, in the
audible language by which it was conveyed from heaven's canopy
to human ears. He saw the fact of his being an approved am
bassador of God, in those miracles which carried their own
resistless evidence along with them to human eyes. He saw

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 39

the truth of this whole history brought home to his own convic
tion, by a sound and substantial vehicle of human testimony.
He saw the reality of that supernatural light, which inspired the
prophecies he himself illustrated, by such an agreement with the
events of a various and distant futurity as could be taken cog
nisance of by human observation. He saw the wisdom of God
pervading the whole substance of the written message, in such
manifold adaptations to the circumstances of man, and to the
whole secrecy of his thoughts, and his affections, and his spiri
tual wants, and his moral sensibilities, as even in the mind of
an ordinary and unlettered peasant, can be attested by human
consciousness. These formed the solid materials of the basis
on which our experimental philosopher stood ; and there was
nothing in the whole compass of his own astronomy, to dazzle
him away from it ; and he was too well aware of the limit be
tween what he knew and what he did not know, to be seduced
from the ground he had taken, by any of those brilliancies,
which have since led so many of his humbler successors into the
track of Infidelity. He had measured the distances of these
planets. He had calculated their periods. He had estimated
their figures, and their bulk, and their densities, and he had
subordinated the whole intricacy of their movements to the
simple and sublime agency of one commanding principle. But
he had too much of the ballast of a substantial understanding
about him, to be thrown afloat by all this success among the
plausibilities of wanton and unauthorized speculation. He knew
the boundary which hemmed him. He knew that he had not
thrown one particle of light on the moral or religious history of
these planetary regions. He had not ascertained what visits of
communication they received from the God who upholds them.
But he knew that the fact of a real visit made to this planet,
had such evidence to rest upon, that it was not to be disposted
by any aerial imagination. And when I look at the steady and
unmoved Christianity of this wonderful man, so far from seeing
any symptom of dotage and imbecility, or any forgetfulness of
those principles on which the fabric of his philosophy is reared
— do I see, that in sitting down to the work of a Bible commen
tator, he hath given us their most beautiful and most consistent
exemplification.

I did not anticipate such a length of time and of illustration
in this stage of my argument. But I will not regret it, if I have
familiarized the minds of any of my readers to the reigning prin-

40 THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE.

ciple of this Discourse. We are strongly disposed to think, that
it is a principle which might be made to apply to every argu
ment of every unbeliever — and so to serve not merely as an
antidote against the Infidelity of astronomers, but to serve as an
antidote against all Infidelity. We are all aware of the diversity
of complexion which Infidelity puts on. It looks one thing in
the man of science arid of liberal accomplishment. It looks an
other thing in the refined voluptuary. It looks still another
thing in the commonplace railer against the artifices of priestly
domination. It looks another thing in the dark and unsettled
spirit of him, whose every reflection is tinctured with gall, and
who casts his envious and malignant scowl at all that stands
associated with the established order of society. It looks another
thing in the prosperous man of business, who has neither time
nor patience for the details of the Christian evidence — but who,
amid the hurry of his other occupations, has gathered so many
of the lighter petulancies of the infidel writers, and caught from
the perusal of them so contemptuous a tone towards the religion
of the New Testament, as to set him at large from all the
decencies of religious observation, and to give him the disdain
of an elevated complacency over all the follies of what he counts
a vulgar superstition. And, lastly, for Infidelity has now got
down amongst us to the humblest walks of life, may it occa
sionally be seen lowering on the forehead of the resolute and
hardy artificer, who can lift his menacing voice against the
priesthood, and, looking on the Bible as a jugglery of theirs, can
bid stout defiance to all its denunciations. Now, under all these
varieties, we think that there might be detected the one and
universal principle which we have attempted to expose. The
something, whatever it is, which has dispossessed all these people
of their Christianity, exists in their minds, in the shape of a
position, which they hold to be true, but which, by no legiti
mate evidence, they have ever realized — and a position, which
lodges within thorn as a wilful fancy or presumption of their own,
but which could not stand the touchstone of that wise and solid
principle, in virtue of which the followers of Newton give to
observation the precedence over theory. It is a principle alto
gether worthy of being laboured — as, if carried round in faithful
and consistent application amongst these numerous varieties, it
is able to break up all the existing Infidelity of the world.

But there is one other most important conclusion to which
it carries us. It carries us, with all the docility of children, to

THE MODESTY OF TRUE SCIENCE. 41

the Bible ; and puts us down into the attitude of an unreserved
surrender of thought and understanding to its authoritative
information. Without the testimony of an authentic messenger
from Heaven, I know nothing of Heaven's counsels. I never
heard of any moral telescope that can bring to my observation
the doings or the deliberations which are taking place in the
sanctuary of the Eternal. I may put into the registers of my
belief, all that comes home to me through the senses of the outer
man, or by the consciousness of the inner man. But neither
the one nor the other can tell me of the purposes of God ; can
tell me of the transactions or the designs of His sublime mon
archy ; can tell me of the goings forth of Him who is from
everlasting unto everlasting ; can tell me of the march and the
movements of that great administration which embraces all
worlds, and takes into its wide and comprehensive survey the
mighty roll of innumerable ages. It is true that my fancy may
break its impetuous way into this lofty and inaccessible field ;
and, through the devices of my heart, which are many, the
visions of an ever-shifting theology may take their alternate
sway over me ; but the counsel of the Lord, it shall stand.
And I repeat it, that if true to the leading principle of that
philosophy which has poured such a flood of light over the
mysteries of nature, we shall dismiss every self-formed con
ception of our own, and wait, in all the humility of conscious
ignorance, till the Lord himself shall break His silence, and
make His counsel known by an act of communication. And
now, that a professed communication is before me, and that it
has all the solidity of the experimental evidence on its side, and
nothing but the reveries of a daring speculation to oppose it,
what is the consistent, what is the rational, what is the philoso
phical use that should be made of this document, but to set me
down like a school-boy to the work of turning its pages and
conning its lessons, and submitting the every exercise of my
judgment to its information and its testimony? We know that
there is a superficial philosophy which casts the glare of a most
seducing brilliancy around it ; and spurns the Bible, with all the
doctrine and all the piety of the Bible, away from it ; and has
infused the spirit of Antichrist into many of the literary esta
blishments of the age ; but it is not the solid, the profound, the
cautious spirit of that philosophy which has done so much to
ennoble the modern period of our world ; for the more that this
spirit is cultivated and understood, the more will it be found in

42 SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

alliance with that spirit in virtue of which all that exalteth

itself against the knowledge of God is humbled, and all lofty

imaginations are cast down, and every thought of the heart is
brought into the captivity of the obedience of Christ.

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

The secret things belong unto the Lord our God ; but those things which .are revealed be
long unto us and to our children for eyer, that we may do all the words of this law. — Deut.
xxix. 29.

I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause ; which doeth great
things and unsearchable ; marvellous things without number. — Job v. 8, 9.

Which doeth great things past finding out ; yea, and wonders without number. — Job
ix. 10.

Canst thou by searching find out God ? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection ?
—Job xi. 7.

Hast thou heard the secret of God ? and dost thou restrain wisdom to thyself ?— Job
xv. 8.

Lo, these are parts of his ways ; but how little a portion is heard of him ? but the thunder
of his power who can understand ? — Job xxvi. 14.

Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be
searched out. — Job xxxvi. 26

God thundereth marvellously with his voice: great things doeth he, which we cannot
comprehend. — Job xxxvii. 5.

Touching the Almighty, we cannot find him out : he is excellent in power, and in judg
ment, and in plenty of justice. — Job xxxvii. 23.

Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.
—Psalm Ixxvii. 19.

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised ; and his greatness is unsearchable.— Psalm
cxlv. 3.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and
my thoughts than your thoughts. — Isa. Iv. 8, 9.

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not
enter into the kingdom of heaven. — Matt, xviii. 3.

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child,
shall in nowise enter therein. — Luke xviii. 1 7.

0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! how unsearchable
are his judgments, and his ways past finding out ! For who hath known the mind of the
Lord ? or who hath been his counsellor ? — Rom. xi. 33, 34.

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world,
let him become a fool, that he may be wise.— 1 Cor. iii. 18.

For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself. —
Gal. vi. 3.

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of
men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. — Col. ii. 8.

O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain bab
blings, and oppositions of science falsely so called. — 1 Tim. vi. 20.

EXTENT OF THE DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 43

DISCOUESE III.

ON THE EXTENT OF THE DIVINE CONDESCENSION.

"Who is like unto the Lord our God, who dwelleth on high, who humbleth himself to behold
the things that are in heaven, and in the earth !" — PSALM cxiii. 5, 6.

IN our last Discourse, we attempted to expose the total want
of evidence for the assertion of the infidel astronomer — and this
reduces the whole of our remaining controversy with him to the
business of arguing against a mere possibility. Still, however,
the answer is not so complete as it might be, till the soundness
of the argument be attended to, as well as the credibility of the
assertion — or, in other words, let us admit the assertion, and
take a view of the reasoning which has been constructed
upon it.

We have already attempted to lay before you the wonderful
extent of that space, teeming with unnumbered worlds, which
modern science has brought within the circle of its discoveries.
We even ventured to expatiate on those tracts of infinity which
lie on the other side of all that eye or that telescope hath made
known to us — to shoot afar into those ulterior regions which are
beyond the limits of our astronomy — to impress you with the
rashness of the imagination, that the creative energy of God
had sunk exhausted by the magnitude of its efforts, at that very
line, through which the art of man, lavished as it has been on
the work of perfecting the instruments of vision, has not yet
been able to penetrate ; and upon all this we hazarded the asser
tion, that though all these visible heavens were to rush into
annihilation, and the besom of the Almighty's wrath were to
sweep from the face of the universe those millions and millions
more of suns and of systems which lie within the grasp of our
actual observation — that this event, which, to our eye, would
leave so wide and so dismal a solitude behind it, might be
nothing in the eye of Him who could take in the whole, but the

44 THE EXTENT OF THE

disappearance of a little speck from that field of created things
which the hand of His omnipotence had thrown around Him.

But to press home the sentiment of the text, it is not neces
sary to stretch the imagination beyond the limit of our actual
discoveries. It is enough to strike our minds with the insignifi
cance of this world, and of all who inhabit it, to bring it into
measurement with that mighty assemblage of worlds which lie
open to the eye of man, aided as it has been by the inventions
of his genius. When we told you of the eighty millions of suns,
each occupying his own independent territory in space, and dis
pensing his own influences over a cluster of tributary worlds ;
this world could not fail to sink into littleness in the eye of him
who looked to all the magnitude and variety which are around
it. We gave you but a feeble image of our comparative insig
nificance, when we said that the glories of an extended forest
would suffer no more from the fall of a single leaf, than the
glories of this extended universe would suffer though the globe
we tread upon, " and all that it inherits, should dissolve." And
when we lift our conceptions to Him who has peopled immensity
with all these wonders — who sits enthroned on the magnificence
of His own works, and by one sublime idea can embrace the
whole extent of that boundless amplitude, which He has filled
with the trophies of His Divinity ; we cannot but resign our
whole heart to the Psalmist's exclamation of " What is man,
that thou art mindful of him ; or the son of man, that thou
shouldest deign to visit him I"

Now, mark the use to which all this has been turned by the
genius of Infidelity. Such an humble portion of the universe as
ours could never have been the object of such high and distin
guishing attentions as Christianity has assigned to it. God
would not have manifested Himself in the flesh for the salvation
of so paltry a world. The monarch of a whole continent would
never move from his capital, and lay aside the splendour of
royalty, and subject himself for months, or for years, to perils,
and poverty, and persecution, and take up his abode in some
small islet of his dominions, which, though swallowed by an
earthquake, could not be missed amid the glories of so wide au
empire ; and all this to regain the lost affections of a few families
upon its surface. And neither would the eternal Son of God —
He who is revealed to us as having made all worlds, and aa
holding an empire, amid the splendours of which the globe that
we inherit is shaded in insignificance ; neither would He strip

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 45

Himself of the glory He had with the Father before the world
was, and light on this lower scene for the purpose imputed to
Him in the New Testament. Impossible, that the concerns of
this puny ball, which floats its little round among an infinity of
larger worlds, should be of such mighty account in the plans of
the Eternal, or should have given birth in heaven to so wonder
ful a movement, as the Son of God putting on the form of our
degraded species, and sojourning amongst us, and sharing in all
our infirmities, and crowning the whole scene of humiliation by
the disgrace and the agonies of a cruel martyrdom.

This has been started as a difficulty in the way of the Chris
tian Eevelation ; and it is the boast of many of our philoso
phical Infidels, that, by the light of modern discovery, the light
of the New Testament is eclipsed and overborne ; and the mis
chief is not confined to philosophers, for the argument has got
into other hands, and the popular illustrations that are now
given to the sublimest truths of science, have widely dissemi
nated all the Deism that has been grafted upon it ; and the
high tone of a decided contempt for the Gospel is now associated
with the flippancy of superficial acquirements ; and while the
venerable Newton, whose genius threw open those mighty fields
of contemplation, found a fit exercise for his powers in the inter
pretation of the Bible, there are thousands and tens of thousands,
who, though walking in the light which he holds out to them,
are seduced by a complacency which he never felt, and inflated
by a pride which never entered into his pious and philosophical
bosom, and whose only notice of the Bible is to depreciate, and
to deride, and to disown it.

Before entering into what we conceive to be the right answer
to this objection, let us previously observe, that it goes to strip
the Deity of an attribute which forms a wonderful addition to
the glories of His incomprehensible character. It is indeed
a mighty evidence of the strength of His arm, that so many
millions of worlds are suspended on it ; but it would surely
make the high attribute of His power more illustrious, if, while
it expatiated at large among the suns and the systems of
astronomy, it could, at the very same instant, be impressing a
movement and a direction on all the minuter wheels of that
machinery which is working incessantly around us. It forms a
noble demonstration of His wisdom, that He gives unremitting
operation to those laws which uphold the stability of this great
universe ; but it would go to heighten that wisdom inconceiv-

46 THE EXTENT OF THE

ably, if, while equal to the magnificent task of maintaining the
order and harmony of the spheres, it was lavishing its inex
haustible resources on the beauties, and varieties, and arrange
ments, of every one scene, however humble, of every one field,
however narrow, of the creation He had formed. It is a cheer
ing evidence of the delight He takes in communicating happi
ness, that the whole of immensity should be so strewed with
the habitations of life and of intelligence ; but it would surely
bring home the evidence with a nearer and a more affecting im
pression to every bosom, did we know, that at the very time
His benignant regard took in the mighty circle of created
beings, there was not a single family overlooked by Him, and
that every individual in every corner of His dominions was as
effectually seen to, as if the object of an exclusive and undivided
care. It is our imperfection, that we cannot give our attention
to more than one object at one and the same instant of time ;
but surely it would elevate our every idea of the perfections of
God, did we know, that while His comprehensive mind could
grasp the whole amplitude of nature, to the very outermost of
its boundaries, He had an attentive eye fastened on the very
humblest of its objects, and pondered every thought of my heart,
and noticed every footstep of my goings, and treasured up in
His remembrance every turn and every movement of my history.
And, lastly, to apply this train of sentiment to the matter
before us, let us suppose that one among the countless myriads
of worlds should be visited by a moral pestilence, which spread
through all its people, arid brought them under the doom of a
law whose sanctions were unrelenting and immutable ; it were
no disparagement to God, should He, by an act of righteous
indignation, sweep this offence away from the universe which it
deformed — nor should we wonder, though, among the multitude
of other worlds, from which the ear of the Almighty was regaled
with the songs of praise, and the incense of a pure adoration
ascended to His throne, He should leave the strayed and solitary
world to perish in the guilt of its rebellion. But, would it not
throw the softening of a most exquisite tenderness over the
character of God, should we see Him putting forth His every
expedient to reclaim to Himself those children who had wan
dered away from Him — and, few as they were when compared
with the host of His obedient worshippers, would it not just
impart to His attribute of compassion the infinity of the God
head, that rather than lose the single world which had turned

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 47

to its own way, He should send the messengers of peace to woo
and to welcome it back again ; and if justice demanded so
mighty a sacrifice, and the law behoved to be so magnified and
made honourable, would it not throw a moral sublime over the
goodness of the Deity, should He lay upon His own Son the
burden of its atonement, that He might again smile upon the
world, and hold out the sceptre of invitation to all its families ?

We avow it, therefore, that this infidel argument goes to
expunge a perfection from the character of God. The more we
know of the extent of nature, should not we have the loftier
conception of Him who sits in high authority over the concerns
of so wide a universe ? But is it not adding to the bright
catalogue of His other attributes, to say, that while magnitude
does not overpower Him, minuteness cannot escape Him, and
variety cannot bewilder Him, and that at the very time while
the mind of the Deity is abroad over the whole vastness of
creation, there is not one particle of matter, there is not one
individual principle of rational or of animal existence, there is
not one single world in that expanse which teems with them,
that His eye does not discern as constantly, and His hand does
not guide as unerringly, and His spirit does not watch and care
for as vigilantly, as if it formed the one and exclusive object of
His attention ?

The thing is inconceivable to us, whose minds are so easily
distracted by a number of objects, and this is the secret principle
of the whole Infidelity I am now alluding to. To bring God to
the level of our own comprehension, we would clothe Him in the
impotency of a man. We would transfer to His wonderful mind
all the imperfection of our own faculties. While we are taught
by astronomy, that He has millions of worlds to look after, and
thus add in one direction to the glories of His character ; we
take away from them in another, by saying, that each of these
worlds must be looked after imperfectly. The use that we make
of a discovery, which should heighten our every conception of
God, and humble us into the sentiment, that a Being of such
mysterious elevation is to us unfathomable, is to sit in judgment
over Him, and to pronounce such a judgment as degrades Him,
and keeps Him down to the standard of our own paltry imagina
tion ! We are introduced by modern science to a multitude of
other suns and of other systems ; and the perverse interpretation
we put upon the fact, that God can diffuse the benefits of His
power and of His goodness over such a variety of worlds, is that

48 THE EXTENT OF THE

He cannot, or will not, bestow so much goodness on one of those
worlds, as a professed revelation from heaven has announced to
us. While we enlarge the provinces of His empire, we tarnish
all the glory of this enlargement, by saying, He has so much to
care for, that the care of every one province must be less com
plete, and less vigilant, and less effectual, than it would otherwise
have been. By the discoveries of modern science, we multiply
the places of the creation ; but along with this, we would impair
the attribute of His eye being in every place to behold the evil
and the good; and thus while we magnify one of His perfec
tions, we do it at the expense of another ; and, to bring Him
within the grasp of our feeble capacity, we would deface one
of the glories of that character, which it is our part to adore, as
higher than all thought, and as greater than all comprehension.

The objection we are discussing, I shall state again in a single
sentence. Since astronomy has unfolded to us such a number of
worlds, it is not likely that God would pay so much attention
to this one world, and set up such wonderful provisions for its
benefit, as are announced to us in the Christian Eevelation.
This objection will have received its answer, if we can meet it
by the following position : — that God, in addition to the bare
faculty of dwelling on a multiplicity of objects at one and the
same time, has this faculty in such wonderful perfection, that
He can attend as fully, and provide as richly, and manifest all
His attributes as illustriously, on every one of these objects, as
if the rest had no existence, and no place whatever in His
government or in His thoughts.

For the evidence of this position, we appeal, in the first place,
to the personal history of each individual among you. Only
grant us, that God never loses sight of any one thing He has
created, and that no created thing can continue either to be, or
to act independently of Him ; and then, even upon the face of
this world, humble as it is on the great scale of astronomy, how
widely diversified, and how multiplied into many thousand dis
tinct exercises, is the attention of God ! His eye is upon every
hour of my existence. His Spirit is intimately present with
every thought of my heart. His inspiration gives birth to every
purpose within me. His hand impresses a direction on every
footstep of my goings. Every breath I inhale, is drawn by an
energy which God deals out to me. This body, which, uopn
the slightest derangement, would become the prey of death, or
of woful suffering, is now at ease, because He at this moment

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 49

is warding off from me a thousand dangers, and upholding the
thousand movements of its complex and delicate machinery.
His presiding influence keeps by me through the whole current
of my restless and ever-changing history. When I walk by the
wayside, He is along with me. When I enter into company,
amid all my forgetfulness of Him, He never forgets me. In the
silent watches of the night, when my eyelids have closed, and
my spirit has sunk into unconsciousness, the observant eye of
Him, who never slumbers is upon me. I cannot fly from His
presence. Go where I will, He tends me, and watches me, and
cares for me ; and the same Being who is now at work in the re
motest domains of Nature and of Providence, is also at my right
hand to eke out to me every moment of my being, and to uphold
me in the exercise of all my feelings, and of all my faculties.

Now, what God is doing with me, He is doing with every
distinct individual of this world's population. The intimacy of
His presence, and attention, and care, reaches to one and to all
of them. With a mind unburdened by the vastness of all its
other concerns, He can prosecute, without distraction, the go
vernment and guardianship of every one son and daughter of
the species. And is it for us, in the face of all this experience,
ungratefully to draw a limit around the perfections of God — to
aver, that the multitude of other worlds has withdrawn any
portion of His benevolence from the one we occupy — or that
He, whose eye is upon every separate family of the earth, would
not lavish all the riches of His unsearchable attributes on some
high plan of pardon and immortality in behalf of its countless
generations ?

But, secondly, were the mind of God so fatigued, and so occu
pied with the care of other worlds, as the objection presumes
Him to be, should we not see some traces of neglect or of care
lessness in His management of ours ? Should we not behold, in
many a field of observation, the evidence of its master being
overcrowded with the variety of His other engagements? A man
oppressed by a multitude of business, would simplify and reduce
the work of any new concern that was devolved upon him. Now,
point out a single mark of God being thus oppressed. Astronomy
has laid open to us so many realms of creation, which were be
fore unheard of, that the world we inhabit shrinks into one
remote and solitary province of His wide monarchy. Tell us
then, if, in any one field of this province which man has access
to, you witness a single indication of God sparing Himself — of

VOL. III. D

50 THE EXTENT OF THE

God reduced to languor by the weight of His other employments
— of God sinking under the burden of that vast superintendence
which lies upon Him — of God being exhausted, as one of our
selves would be, by any number of concerns however great, by
any variety of them however manifold ; and do you not perceive,
in that mighty profusion of wisdom and of goodness, which is
scattered everywhere around us, that the thoughts of this un
searchable Being are not as our thoughts, nor His ways as our
ways ?

My time does not suffer jne to dwell on this topic, because,
before I conclude, I must hasten to another illustration. But
when I look abroad on the wondrous scene that is immediately
before me — and see that in every direction it is a scene of the
most various and unwearied activity — and expatiate on all the
beauties of that garniture by which it is adorned, and on all the
prints of design and of benevolence which abound in it — and
think that the same God who holds the universe with its every
system in the hollow of His hand, pencils every flower, and gives
nourishment to every blade of grass, and actuates the movements
of every living thing, and is not disabled, by the weight of His
other cares, from enriching the humble department of nature I
occupy with charms and accommodations of the most unbounded
variety — then, surely if a message, bearing every mark of au
thenticity, should profess to come to me from God, and inform
me of His mighty doings for the happiness of our species, it is
not for me, in the face of all this evidence, to reject it as a tale
of imposture, because astronomers hath told me that He has so
many other worlds and other orders of beings to attend to, —
and, when I think that it were a deposition of Him from His
supremacy over the creatures He has formed, should a single
sparrow fall to the ground without His appointment, then let
science and sophistry try to cheat me of my comfort as they may
— I will not let go the anchor of my confidence in God — I will
not be afraid, for I am of more value than many sparrows.

But, thirdly, it was the telescope, that, by piercing the ob
scurity which lies between us and distant worlds, put Infidelity
in possession of the argument against which we are now con
tending. But, about the time of its invention, another instru
ment was formed which laid open a scene no less wonderful, and
rewarded the inquisitive spirit of man with a discovery which
serves to neutralize the whole of this argument. This was the
microscope. The one led me to see a system in every star. The

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 51

other leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught
me, that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people
and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field of
immensity. The other teaches me^ that every grain of sand may
harbour within it the tribes and the families of a busy popula
tion. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I tread
upon. The other redeems it from all its insignificance; for it
tells me that in the leaves of every forest, and in the flowers of
every garden, and in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds
teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firma
ment. The one has suggested to me, that beyond and above all
that is visible to man, there may lie fields of creation which
sweep immeasurably along, and carry the impress of the Al
mighty's hand to the remotest scenes of the universe. The other
suggests to me, that within and beneath all that minuteness
which the aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may
lie a region of invisibles ; and that, could we draw aside the
mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, we might
there see a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy has un
folded, a universe within the compass of a point so small, as to
elude all the powers of the microscope, but where the wonder
working God finds room for the exercise of all His attributes,
where He can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and
animate them all with the evidences of His glory.

Now, mark how all this may be made to meet the argument
of our infidel astronomers. By the telescope, they have dis
covered that no magnitude, however vast, is beyond the grasp
of the Divinity. But by the microscope, we have also discovered
that no minuteness, however shrunk from the notice of the
human eye, is beneath the condescension of His regard. Every
addition to the powers of the one instrument, extends the limit
of His visible dominions. But by every addition to the powers
of the other instrument, we see each part of them more crowded
than before with the wonders of His unwearying hand. The
one is constantly widening the circle of His territory. The other
is as constantly filling up its separate portions with all that is.
rich arid various and exquisite. In a word, by the one I am told
that the Almighty is now at work in regions more distant than
geometry has ever measured, and among worlds more manifold
than numbers have ever reached. But, by the other, I am also
told, that with a mind to comprehend the whole, in the vast com
pass of its generality, He has also a mind to concentrate a

52 THE EXTENT OF THE

and a separate attention on each and on all of its particulars ;
and that the same God, who sends forth an upholding influence
among the orbs and the movements of astronomy, can fill the
recesses of every single atom with the intimacy of His presence,
and travel, in all the greatness of His unimpaired attributes,
upon every one spot and corner of the universe He has formed.
They, therefore, who think that God will not put forth such a
power, and such a goodness, and such a condescension in behalf
of this world, as are ascribed to Him in the New Testament,
because He has so many other worlds to attend to, think of Him
as a man. They confine their view to the informations of the
telescope, and forget altogether the informations of the other
instrument. They only find room in their minds for His one
attribute of a large and general superintendence ; and keep out
of their remembrance the equally impressive proofs we have for
His other attribute, of a minute and multiplied attention to all
that diversity of operations, where it is He that worketh all in
all. And when I think that as one of the instruments of philo
sophy has heightened our every impression of the first of these
attributes, so another instrument has no less heightened our im
pression of the second of them — then I can no longer resist the
conclusion, that it would be a transgression of sound argument,
as well as a daring of impiety, to draw a limit around the doings
of this unsearchable God — and should a professed revelation
from heaven tell me of an act of condescension in behalf of some
separate world, so wonderful that angels desired to look into it,
and the Eternal Son had to move from His seat of glory to carry
it into accomplishment, all I ask is the evidence of such a reve
lation ; for, let it tell me as much as it may of God letting
Himself down for the benefit of one single province of His domi
nions, this is no more than what I see lying scattered, in num
berless examples before me — and running through the whole
line of my recollections — and meeting me in every walk of ob
servation to which I can betake myself; and, now that the
microscope has unveiled the wonders of another region, I see
strewed around me, with a profusion which baffles my every
attempt to comprehend it, the evidence that there is no one por
tion of the universe of God too minute for His notice, nor too
humble for the visitations of His care.

As the end of all these illustrations, let me bestow a single
paragraph on what I conceive to be the precise state of this
argument.

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 53

It is a wonderful thing that God should be so unencumbered
by the concerns of a whole universe, that He can give a con
stant attention to every moment of every individual in this
world's population. But, wonderful as it is, you do not hesitate
to admit it as true, on the evidence of your own recollections.
It is a wonderful thing that He, whose eye is at every instant
on so many worlds, should have peopled the world we inhabit
with all the traces of the varied design and benevolence which
abound in it. But great as the wonder is, you do not allow so
much as the shadow of improbability to darken it, for its reality
is what you actually witness, and you never think of question
ing the evidence of observation. It is wonderful, it is passing-
wonderful, that the same God, whose presence is diffused
through immensity, and who spreads the ample canopy of His
administration over all its dwelling-places, should, with an
energy as fresh and as unexpended as if He had only begun the
work of creation, turn Him to the neighbourhood around us,
and lavish on its every handbreadth all the exuberance of His
goodness, and crowd it with the many thousand varieties of
conscious existence. But, be the wonder incomprehensible as it
may, you do not suffer in your mind the burden of a single
doubt to lie upon it, because you do not question the report
of the microscope. You do not refuse its information, nor turn
away from it as an incompetent channel of evidence. But to
bring it still nearer to the point at issue, there are many who
never looked through a microscope, but who rest an implicit
faith in all its revelations ; arid upon what evidence, I would
ask? Upon the evidence of testimony — upon the credit they
give to the authors of the books they have read, and the belief
they put in the record of their observations. Now, at this
point I make my stand. It is wonderful that God should be so
interested in the redemption of a single world, as to send forth
His well-beloved Son upon the errand ; arid He to accomplish
it, should, mighty to save, put forth all His strength, and travail
in the greatness of it. But such wonders as these have already
multiplied upon you ; and when evidence is given of their truth,
you have resigned your every judgment of the unsearchable
God, and rested in the faith of them. I demand, in the name
of sound and consistent philosophy, that you do the same in the
matter before us — and take it up as a question of evidence —
and examine that medium of testimony through which the
miracles and informations of the Gospel have come to your door

54 THE EXTENT OF THE

— and go not to admit as argument here, what would not be
admitted as argument in any of the analogies of nature and
observation — and take along with you in this field of inquiry, a
lesson which you should have learned upon other fields — even
the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge
of God, that His judgments are unsearchable, and His ways are
past finding out.

I do not enter at all into the positive evidence for the truth
of the Christian Revelation, my single aim at present being to
dispose of one of the objections which is conceived to stand in
the way of it. Let me suppose, then, that this is done to the
satisfaction of a philosophical inquirer ; arid that the evidence
is sustained ; and that the same mind that is familiarized to all
the sublimities of natural science, and has been in the habit of
contemplating God in association with all the magnificence
which is around him, shall be brought to submit its thoughts to
the captivity of the doctrine of Christ. Oh ! with what venera
tion, and gratitude, and wonder, should he look on the descent
of Him into this lower world, who made all these things, and
without whom was not anything made that was made. What a
grandeur does it throw over every step in the redemption of a
fallen world, to think of its being done by Him who unrobed
Him of the glories of so wide a monarchy, and came to this
humblest of its provinces, in the disguise of a servant, and took
upon Him the form of our degraded species, and let Himself
down to sorrows and to sufferings and to death for us ! In
this love of an expiring Saviour to those for whom in agony
He poured out His soul, there is a height, and a depth, and a
length, and a breadth, more than I can comprehend ; and let
me never from this moment neglect so great a salvation, or
lose my hold of an atonement, made sure by Him who cried
that it was finished, and brought in an everlasting righteous
ness. It was not the visit of an empty parade that He made to
us. It was for the accomplishment of some substantial purpose;
and if that purpose is announced, and stated to consist in His
dying the just for the unjust, that He might bring us unto God,
let us never doubt of our acceptance in that way of communi
cation with our Father in heaven, which He hath opened and
made known to us. In taking to that way, let us follow His
every direction, with that humility which a sense of all this
wonderful condescension is fitted to inspire. Let us forsake all
that He bids us forsake. Let us do all that He bids us do.

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 55

Let us give ourselves up to His guidance with the docility of
children overpowered by a kindness that we never merited, and
a love that is unquelled by all the perverseness and all the
ingratitude of our stubborn nature — for what shall we render
unto Him for such mysterious benefits — to Him who has thus
been mindful of us — to Him who thus has deigned to visit us ?

But the whole of this argument is not yet exhausted. We
have scarcely entered on the defence that is commonly made
against the plea which Infidelity rests on the wonderful extent
of the universe of God, and the insignificancy of our assigned
portion of it. The way in which we have attempted to dispose
of this plea, is by insisting on the evidence that is everywhere
around us, of God combining, with the largeness, of a vast and
mighty superintendence, which reaches the outskirts of creation,
and spreads over all its amplitudes — the faculty of bestowing as
much attention, and exercising as complete and manifold a
wisdom, and lavishing as profuse and inexhaustible a goodness,
on each of its humblest departments, as if it formed the whole
extent of His territory.

In the whole of this argument we have looked upon the earth
as isolated from the rest of the universe altogether. But, ac
cording to the way in which the astronomical objection is com
monly met, the earth is not viewed as in a state of detachment
from the other worlds, and the other orders of being which God
has called into existence. It is looked upon as the member of
a more extended system. It is associated with the magnificence
of a moral empire, as wide as the kingdom of nature. It is not
merely asserted, what in our last Discourse has been already
done, that for anything we can know by reason, the plan of
redemption may have its influences and its bearings on those
creatures of God who people other regions, and occupy other
fields in the immensity of His dominions ; that to argue, there
fore, on this plan being instituted for the single benefit of the
world we live in, and of the species to which we belong, is a
mere presumption of the Infidel himself; and that the objection
he rears on it must fall to the ground, when the vanity of the
presumption is exposed. The Christian apologist thinks he can
go farther than this — that he can not merely expose the utter
baselessness of the Infidel assertion, but that he has positive
ground for erecting an opposite and a confronting assertion in
its place — and that, after having neutralized their position, by
showing the entire absence of all observation in its behalf, he

56 THE EXTENT OF THE

can pass on to the distinct and affirmative testimony of the
Bible.

We do think that this lays open a very interesting tract, not
of wild and fanciful, but of most legitimate and sober-minded
speculation. And anxious as we are to put everything that
bears upon the Christian argument into all its lights ; and fear
less as we feel for the result of a most thorough sifting of it ;
and thinking as we do think it, the foulest scorn that any pigmy
philosopher of the day should mince his ambiguous scepticism
to a set of giddy and ignorant admirers, or that a half-learned
and superficial public should associate with the Christian priest
hood, the blindness and the bigotry of a sinking cause — with
these feelings we are not disposed to shun a single question that
may be started on the subject of the Christian Evidences. There
is not one of its parts or bearings which needs the shelter of a
disguise thrown over it. Let the priests of another faith ply
their prudential expedients, and look so wise and so wary in the
execution of them. But Christianity stands in a higher and a
firmer attitude. The defensive armour of a shrinking or timid
policy does not suit her. Hers is the naked majesty of truth ;
and with all the grandeur of age, but with none of its infirmities,
has she come down to us, and gathered new strength from the
battles she has won in the many controversies of many genera
tions. With such a religion as this there is nothing to hide.
All should be above boards. And the broadest light of day
should be made fully and freely to circulate throughout all her
secrecies. But secrets she has none. To her belong the frank
ness and the simplicity of conscious greatness ; and whether she
has to contend with the pride of philosophy, or stand in fronted
opposition to the prejudices of the multitude, she does it upon
her own strength, and spurns all the props and all the auxiliaries
of superstition away from her.

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

But will God indeed dwell on the earth ? Behold, the heaven, and heaven of heavens,
cannot contain thee ; how mucTi less this house that I have builded ! Yet have thou respect
unto the prayer of thy servant, and to his supplication, 0 Lord my God, to hearken unto the
cry and to the prayer which thy servant prayeth before thee to-day: that thine eyes may be
open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My
name shall be there ; that thou mayest hearken unto the prayer which thy servant shall
make toward this place.— 1 Kings viii. 27-29.

DIVINE CONDESCENSION. 57

For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven.— Job
xxviii. 24.

For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings. — Job xxxiv. 21.

Though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly. — Psalm cxxxviii. 6.

0 Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine
up-rising ; thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest iny path, and my
lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue,
but, lo, 0 Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and
laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is high, I cannot
attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit ? or whither shall I flee from thy pre
sence ? — Psalm cxxxix. 1-7.

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, 0 God ! how great is the sum of them ! If
I should count them, they are more in number than the sand : when I awake, I am still
with thee. — Psalm cxxxix. 17, 18.

The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. — Prov. xv. 3.

Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him ? saith the Lord : do not
I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord.— Jer. xxiii. 24.

Behold the fowls of the air : for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into
barns ; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they ? And
why take ye thought for raiment ? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they
toil not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon, in all his glory,
was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field,
which to-day is, and to-morrow- is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you,
O ye of little faith ?— Matt. vi. 26, 28-30.

But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. — Matt. x. 30.

Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight : but all things are naked
and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. — Heb. iv. 13.

58 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

DISCOURSE IV.

ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY IX THE DISTANT PLACES
OF CREATION.

" Which things the angels desire to look into."— 1 PETER i. 12.

THERE is a limit, across which man cannot carry any one of
his perceptions, and from the ulterior of which he cannot gather
a single observation to guide or to inform him. While he keeps
by the objects which are near, he can get the knowledge of
them conveyed to his mind through the ministry of several of
the senses. He can feel a substance that is within reach of his
hand. He can smell a flower that is presented to him. He
can taste the food that is before him. He can hear a sound of
certain pitch and intensity ; and, so much does this sense of
hearing widen his intercourse with external nature, that, from
the distance of miles, it can bring him in an occasional inti
mation.

But of all the tracts of conveyance which God has been
pleased to open up between the mind of man, and the theatre by
which he is surrounded, there is none by which he so multiplies
his acquaintance with the rich and the varied creation on every
side of him, as by the organ of the eye. It is this which gives
to man his loftiest command over the scenery of nature. It is
this by which so broad a range of observation is submitted to
him. It is this which enables him, by the act of a single
moment, to send an exploring look over the surface of an ample
territory, to crowd his mind with the whole assembly of its
objects, and to fill his vision with those countless hues which
diversify and adorn it. It is this which carries him abroad
over all that is sublime in the immensity of distance ; which
sets him as it were on an elevated platform, from whence he
may cast a surveying glance over the arena of innumerable
worlds ; which spreads before him so mighty a province of con
templation, that the earth he inhabits only appears to furnish
him with the pedestal on which he may stand, and from which

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 59

he may descry the wonders of all that magnificence which the
Divinity has poured so abundantly around him. It is by the
narrow outlet of the eye that the mind of man takes its excur
sive flight over those golden tracks, where, in all the exhaust-
lessness of creative wealth, lie scattered the suns and the systems
of astronomy. But how good a thing it is, and how becoming
well, for the philosopher to be humble even amid the proudest
march of human discovery, and the sublimest triumphs of the
human understanding, when he thinks of that unsealed barrier,
beyond which no power, either of eye or of telescope, shall ever
carry him ; when he thinks that, on the other side of it, there
is a height, and a depth, and a length, and a breadth, to which
the whole of this concave and visible firmament dwindles into
the insignificancy of an atom — and, above all, how ready should
he be to cast every lofty imagination away from him, when he
thinks of the God who, on the simple foundation of His word,
has reared the whole of this stately architecture, and, by the
force of His preserving hand, continues to uphold it ; and should
the word again come out from Him, that this earth shall pass
away, and a portion of the heavens which are around it, shall
fall back into the annihilation from which He at first summoned
them — what an impressive rebuke does it bring on the swelling
vanity of science, to think that the whole field of its most
ambitious enterprises may be swept away altogether, and still
there remain before the eye of Him who sitteth on the throne,
an untravelled immensity, which He hath filled with innumer
able splendours, and over the whole face of which He hath
inscribed the evidence of His high attributes, in all their might,
and in all their manifestation.

But man has a great deal more to keep him humble of his
understanding, than a mere sense of that boundary which skirts
and which terminates the material field of his contemplations.
He ought also to feel, how, within that boundary, the vast
majority of things is mysterious and unknown to him — that even
in the inner chamber of his own consciousness, where so much
lies hidden from the observation of others, there is also to him
self a little world of incornprehensibles ; that if stepping beyond
the limits of this familiar home, he look no farther than to the
members of his family, there is much in the cast and the colour
of every mind that is above his powers of divination ; that in
proportion as he recedes from the centre of his own personal
experience, there is a cloud of ignorance anfl secrecy which

60 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

spreads, and thickens, and throws a deep and impenetrable veil
over the intricacies of every one department of human contem
plation ; that of all around him, his knowledge is naked and
superficial, and confined to a few of those more conspicuous
lineaments which strike upon his senses ; that the whole face,
both of nature and of society, presents him with questions which
he cannot unriddle, and tells him that beneath the surface of
all that the eye can rest upon, there lies the profoundness of a
most unsearchable latency ; and should he in some lofty enter
prise of thought, leave this world, and shoot afar into those
tracks of speculation which astronomy has opened — should he,
baffled by the mysteries which beset his footsteps upon earth,
attempt an ambitious flight towards the mysteries of heaven, —
let him go, but let the justness of a pious and philosophical
modesty go along with him — let him forget not, that from the
moment his mind has taken its ascending way for a few little
miles above the world he treads upon, his every sense abandons
him but one — that number, and motion, and magnitude, and
figure, make up all the bareness of its elementary informations
— that these orbs have sent him scarce another message than
told by their feeble glimmering upon his eye, the simple fact of
their existence — that he sees not the landscape of other worlds
— that he knows not the moral system of any one of them — nor
athwart the long and trackless vacancy which lies between, does
there fall upon his listening ear the hum of their mighty popu
lations.

But the knowledge which he cannot fetch up himself from
the obscurity of this wondrous but untravelled scene, by the
exercise of any one of his own senses, might be fetched to him
by the testimony of a competent messenger. Conceive a native
of one of these planetary mansions to light upon our world, and
all we should require would be, to be satisfied of his credentials,
that we may give our faith to every point of information he had
to offer us. With the solitary exception of what we have been
enabled to gather by the instruments of astronomy, there is not
one of his communications about the place he came from, on
which we possess any means at all of confronting him ; and
therefore, could he only appear before us invested with the cha
racters of truth, we should never think of anything else than
taking up the whole matter of his testimony just as he brought
it to us.

It were well* had a sound philosophy schooled its professing

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 61

disciples to the same kind of acquiescence in another message,
which has actually come to the world ; and has told us- of mat
ters still more remote from every power of unaided observation ;
and has been sent from a more sublime and mysterious distance,
even from that God of whom it is said that " clouds and dark
ness are the habitation of his throne ;" and treating of a theme
so lofty arid so inaccessible, as the counsels of that Eternal Spirit,
"whose goings forth are of old, even from everlasting," challenges
of man that he should submit his every thought to the authority
of this high communication. Oh ! had the philosophers of the
day known as well as their great master, how to draw the vigor
ous landmark which verges the field of legitimate discovery,
they should have seen when it is that philosophy becomes vain,
and science is falsely so called ; and how it is, that when philo
sophy is true to her principles, she shuts up her faithful votary
to the Bible, and makes him willing to count all but loss, for the
knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of Him crucified.

But let it be well observed, that the object of this message is
not to convey information to us about the state of these planet
ary regions. This is not the matter with which it is fraught.
It is a message from the throne of God to this rebellious province
of His dominions ; and the purpose of it is, to reveal the fearful
extent of our guilt and of our danger, and to lay before us the
overtures of reconciliation. Were a similar message sent from
the metropolis of a mighty empire to one of its remote and revo
lutionary districts, we should not look to it for much information
about the state or economy of the intermediate provinces. This
were a departure from the topic on hand — though still there
may chance to be some incidental allusions to the extent and
resources of the whole monarchy, to the existence of a similar
spirit of rebellion in other quarters of the land, or to the general
principle of loyalty by which it was pervaded. Some casual re
ferences of this kind may be inserted in such a proclamation, or
they may not — and it is with this precise feeling of ambiguity
that we open the record of that embassy which has been sent us
from heaven, to see if we can gather anything there, about
other places of the creation, to meet the objections of the infidel
astronomer. But, while we pursue this object, let us be careful
not to push the speculation beyond the limits of the written
testimony ; let us keep a just and a steady eye on the actual
boundary of our knowledge, that, throughout every distinct step
of our argument, we might preserve that chaste and unambitious

62 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

spirit, which characterizes the philosophy of him who explored
these distant heavens, and, by the force of his genius, unravelled
the secret of that wondrous mechanism which upholds them.

The informations of the Bible upon this subject are of two
sorts — that from which we confidently gather the fact, that the
history of the redemption of our species is known in other and
distant places of the creation — and that from which we indis
tinctly guess at the fact, that the redemption itself may stretch
beyond the limits of the world we occupy.

And here it may shortly be adverted to, that, though we
know little or nothing of the moral and theological economy of
the other planets, we are not to infer, that the beings who occupy
these widely-extended regions, even though not higher than we
in the scale of understanding, know little of ours. Our first
parents, ere they committed that act by which they brought
themselves and their posterity into the need of redemption, had
frequent and familiar intercourse with God. He walked with
them in the garden of paradise, and there did angels hold their
habitual converse ; and, should the same unblotted innocence
which charmed and attracted these superior beings to the haunts
of Eden, be perpetuated in every planet but our own, then
might each of them be the scene of high and heavenly com
munications, and an open way for the messengers of God be kept
up with them all, and their inhabitants be admitted to a share
in the themes and contemplations of angels, and have their
spirits exercised on those things, of which we are told that the
angels desire to look into them ; and thus, as we talk of the
public mind of a city, or the public mind of an empire — by the
well-frequented avenues of a free and ready circulation, a public
mind might be formed throughout the whole extent of God's
sinless and intelligent creation — and just as we often read of the
eyes of all Europe being turned to the one spot where some
affair of eventful importance is going on, there might be the
eyes of a whole universe turned to the one world, where rebellion
against the Majesty of heaven had planted its standard ; and for
the read mission of which within the circle of His fellowship, God,
whose justice was inflexible, but whose mercy He had, by some
plan of mysterious wisdom, made to rejoice over it, was putting
forth all the might, and travailing in all the greatness of the
attributes which belonged to Him.

But, for the full understanding of this argument, it must be
remarked, that while in our exiled habitation, where all is dark-

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 63

ness and rebellion and enmity, the creature engrosses every
heart, and our affections, when they shift at all, only- wander
from one fleeting vanity to another, it is not so in the habitations
of the nnfallen. There, every desire and every movement is
subordinated to God. He is seen in all that is formed, and in
all that is spread around them — and, amid the fulness of that
delight with which they expatiate over the good and the fair of
this wondrous universe, the animating charm which pervades
their every contemplation, is, that they behold on each visible
thing, the impress of the mind that conceived, and of the hand
that made and that upholds it. Here, God is banished from the
thoughts of every natural man, and, by a firm and constantly
maintained act of usurpation, do the things of sense and of time
wield an entire ascendency. There, God is all in all. They
walk in His light. They rejoice in the beatitudes of His pre
sence. The veil is from off their eyes ; and they see the cha
racter of a presiding Divinity in every scene, and in every event
to which the Divinity has given birth. It is this which stamps
a glory arid an importance on the whole field of their contem
plations ; and when they see a new evolution in the history of
created things, the reason they betid towards it so attentive an
eye, is, that it speaks to their understanding some new evolution
in the purposes of God — some new manifestation of His high
attributes — some new and interesting step in the history of His
sublime administration.

Now, we ought to be aware how it takes off, not from the
intrinsic weight, but from the actual impression of our argument,
that this devotedness to God which reigns in other places of the
creation ; this interest in Him as the constant and essential
principle of all enjoyment ; this concern in the untaintedness of
His glory ; this delight in the survey of His perfections and His
doings, are what the men of our corrupt and darkened world
cannot sympathize with.

But however little we may enter into it, the Bible tells us, by
many intimations, that amongst those creatures who have not
fallen from their allegiance, nor departed from the living God,
God is their all — that love to Him sits enthroned in their hearts,
and fills them with all the ecstasy of an overwhelming affection
— that a sense of grandeur never so elevates their souls, as when
they look at the might and majesty of the Eternal — that no field
of cloudless transparency so enchants them by the blissfulness
of its visions, as when, at the shrine of infinite and unspotted

64 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

holiness, they bend themselves in raptured adoration — that
no beauty so fascinates and attracts them, as does that moral
beauty which throws a softening lustre over the awfulness of the
Godhead — in a word, that the image of His character is ever
present to their contemplations, and the unceasing joy of their
sinless existence lies in the knowledge and the admiration of
Deity.

Let us put forth an effort, and keep a steady hold of this con
sideration, for the deadness of our earthly imaginations makes an
effort necessary ; and we shall perceive, that though the world
we live in were the alone theatre of redemption, there is a some
thing in the redemption itself that is fitted to draw the eye of
an arrested universe towards it. Surely, where delight in God
is the constant enjoyment, and the earnest intelligent contempla
tion of God is the constant exercise, there is nothing in the whole
compass of nature or of history, that can so set His adoring
myriads upon the gaze, as some new and wondrous evolution of
the character of God. Now this is found in the plan of our
redemption ; nor do we see how, in any transaction between the
great Father of existence, and the children who have sprung
from Him, the moral attributes of the Deity could, if we may so
express ourselves, be put to so severe and so delicate a test. It is
true, that the great matters of sin and of salvation fall without
impression on the heavy ears of a listless and alienated world.
But they who, to use the language of the Bible, are light in the
Lord, look otherwise at these things. They see sin in all its
malignity, and salvation in all its mysterious greatness. And it
would put them on the stretch of all their faculties, when they
saw rebellion lifting up its standard against the Majesty of
heaven, and the truth and the justice of God embarked on the
threatenings He had uttered agair.st all the doers of iniquity,
and the honours of that august throne, which has the firm
pillars of immutability to rest upon, linked with the fulfilment
of the law that had come out from it ; and when nothing else
was looked for, but that God, by putting forth the power of His
wrath, should accomplish His every denunciation, and vindicate
the inflexibility of His government, and, by one sweeping deed
of vengeance assert, in the sight of all His creatures, the sove
reignty which belonged to Him — with what desire must they
have pondered on His ways, when, amid the urgency of all
those demands which looked so high and so indispensable, they
saw the unfoldings of the attribute of mercy — and that the

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 65

supreme Lawgiver was bending upon His guilty creatures an
eye of tenderness — and that, in His profound and unsearchable
wisdom, He was devising for them some plan of restoration —
and that the eternal Son had to move from His dwelling-place
in heaven, to carry it forward through all the difficulties by
which it was encompassed — arid that, after by the virtue of His
mysterious sacrifice He had magnified the glory of every other
perfection, He made mercy rejoice over them all, and threw open
a way by which we sinful and polluted wanderers might, with
the whole lustre of the Divine character untarnished, be re
admitted into fellowship with God, and be again brought back
within the circle of His loyal and affectionate family.

Now, the essential character of such a transaction, viewed as
a manifestation of God, does not hang upon the number of
worlds over which this sin and this salvation may have extended.
We know that over this one world such an economy of wisdom
and of mercy is instituted — and, even should this be the only
world that is embraced by it, the moral display of the Godhead
is mainly and substantially the same, as if it reached throughout
the whole of that habitable extent which the science of astro
nomy has made known to us. By the disobedience of this one
world, the law was trampled on — and, in the business of making
truth and mercy to meet, and have a harmonious accomplish
ment on the men of this world, the dignity of God was put to
the same trial ; the justice of God appeared to lay the same im
movable barrier ; the wisdom of God had to clear away through
the same difficulties ; the forgiveness of God had to find the
same mysterious conveyance to the sinners of a solitary world,
as to the sinners of half a universe. The extent of the field
upon which this question was decided, has no more influence on
the question itself, than the figure or the dimensions of that field
of combat on which some great political question was fought,
has on the importance or on the moral principles of the contro
versy that gave rise to it. This objection about the narrowness
of the theatre, carries along with it all the grossness of material
ism. To the eye of spiritual and intelligent beings, it is nothing.
In their view, the redemption of a sinful world derives its chief
interest from the display it gives of the mind and purposes of the
Deity — and, should that world be but a single speck in the im
mensity of the works of God, the only way in which this affects
their estimate of Him is to magnify His loving-kindness — who,
rather than lose one solitary world of the myriads He has formed,

VOL. in. B

66 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

would lavish all the riches of His beneficence and of His wisdom
on the recovery of its guilty population.

Now, though it must be admitted that the Bible does not
speak clearly or decisively as to the proper effect of redemption
being extended to other worlds, it speaks most clearly and most
decisively about the knowledge of it being disseminated amongst
other orders of created intelligence than our own. But if the
contemplation of God be their supreme enjoyment, then the very
circumstance of our redemption being known to them, may invest
it, even though it be but the redemption of one solitary world,
with an importan.ce as wide as the universe itself. It may
spread amongst the hosts of immensity a new illustration of the
character of Him who is all their praise ; and in looking towards
whom every energy within them is moved to the exercise of a
deep and delighted admiration. The scene of the transaction
may be narrow in point of material extent ; while in the trans
action itself there may be such a moral dignity, as to blazon
the perfections of the Godhead over the face of creation ; and,
from the manifested glory of the Eternal, to send forth a tide of
ecstasy, and of high gratulation, throughout the whole extent
of His dependent provinces.

We shall not, in proof of the position, that the history of our
redemption is known in other and distant places of creation, and
is matter of deep interest and feeling amongst other orders of
created intelligence — we shall not put down all the quotations
which might be assembled together upon this argument. It is
an impressive circumstance, that when Moses and Elias made a
visit to our Saviour on the mount of transfiguration, and appeared
in glory from heaven, the topic they brought along with them,
and with which they were fraught, was the decease He was
going to accomplish at Jerusalem. And however insipid the
things of our salvation may be to an earthly understanding, we
are made to know, that in the sufferings of Christ, and the glory
which should follow, there is matter to attract the notice of
celestial spirits, for these are the very things, says the Bible,
which angels desire to look into. And however listlessly we,
the dull and grovelling children of an exiled family, may feel
about the perfections of the Godhead, and the display of these
perfections in the economy of the Gospel, it is intimated to us
in the book of God's message, that the creation has its districts
and its provinces: ; and we accordingly read of thrones and domi
nions and principalities and powers — and whether these terms

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 67

denote the separate regions of government, or the beings who,
by a commission granted from the sanctuary of heaven, sit in
delegated authority over them — even in their eyes the mystery
of Christ stands arrayed in all the splendour of unsearchable
riches ; for we are told that this mystery was revealed for the
very intent, that unto the principalities and powers, in heavenly
places, might be made known, by the church, the manifold wis
dom of God. And while we, whose prospect reaches not beyond
the narrow limits of the corner we occupy, look on the dealings
of God in the world, as carrying in them all the insignificancy
of a provincial transaction ; God Himself, whose eye reaches to
places which our eye hath not seen, nor our ear heard of, neither
hath it entered into the imagination of our heart to conceive,
stamps a universality on the whole matter of the Christian sal
vation, by such revelations as the following: — That he is to
gather together in one all things- in Christ, both which are in
heaven, and which are in earth, even in him — and that at the
name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and
things in earth, and things under the earth — and that by him
God reconciled all things unto himself, whether they be things
in earth, or things in heaven.

We will not say in how far some of these passages extend the
proper effect of that redemption which is by Christ Jesus, to
other quarters of the universe of God ; but they at least go to
establish a widely disseminated knowledge of this transaction
amongst the other orders of created intelligence. And they give
us a distant glimpse of something more extended. They present
a faint opening, through which may be seen some few traces of
a wider and a nobler dispensation. They bring before us a dim
transparency, on the other side of which the images of an obscure
magnificence dazzle indistinctly upon the eye ; and tell us, that
in the economy of redemption, there is a grandeur commensurate
to all that is known of the other works and purposes of the
Eternal. They offer us no details ; and man, who ought not to
attempt a wisdom above that which is written, should never put
forth his hand to the drapery of that impenetrable curtain which
God, in His mysterious wisdom, has spread over those ways, 01
which it is but a very small portion that we in reality know-
But certain it is, that we know so much of them from the Bible ;
and the Infidel, with all the pride of his boasted astronomy,
knows so little of them, from any power of observation — that
the baseless argument of his, on which we have dwelt, so long,

68 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

is overborne in the light of all that positive evidence which God
has poured around the record of His own testimony, and even in
the light of its more obscure and casual intimations.

The minute and variegated details of the way in which this
wondrous economy is extended, God has chosen to withhold
from us ; but He has oftener than once made to us a broad and
a general announcement of its dignity. He does not tell us,
whether the fountain opened in the house of Judah, for sin and
for uncleanness, sends forth its healing streams to other worlds
than our own. He does not tell us the extent of the atone
ment. But He tells that the atonement itself, known, as it is,
among the myriads of the celestial, forms the high song of
eternity ; that the Lamb who was slain, is surrounded by the
acclamations of one wide and universal empire ; that the might
of His wondrous achievements spreads a tide of gratulation over
the multitudes who are about His throne ; and that there never
ceases to ascend from the worshippers of Him, who washed us
from our sins in His blood, a voice loud as from numbers with
out number, sweet as from blessed voices uttering joy, when
heaven rings jubilee, and loud hosannas fill the eternal regions.

" And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round
about the throne ; and the number of them was ten thousand
times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands ; saying with a
loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power,
and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory,
and blessing. And every creature which is in heaven, and on
the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and
all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and
glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and
unto the Lamb, for ever and ever."

A king might have the whole of his reign crowded with the
enterprises of glory; and by the might of his arms, and the
wisdom of his counsels, might win the first reputation among
the potentates of the world ; and be idolized throughout all his
provinces, for the wealth and the security that he had spread
around them — and still it is conceivable, that by the act of a
single day in behalf of a single family ; by some soothing visita
tion of tenderness to a poor and solitary cottage ; by some deed
of compassion, which conferred enlargement and relief on one
despairing sufferer ; by some graceful movement of sensibility
at a tale of wretchedness ; by gome noble effort of self-denial,
in virtue of which he subdued his every purpose of revenge, and

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 69

spread the mantle of a generous oblivion over the fault of the
man who had insulted and aggrieved him ; above all, by an
exercise of pardon so skilfully administered, as that, instead of
bringing him down to a state of clefencelessness against the
provocation of future injuries, it threw a deeper sacredness over
him, and stamped a more inviolable dignity than ever on his
person and character : — why, on the strength of one such per
formance, done in a single hour, and reaching no further in its
immediate effects than to one house or to one individual, it is a
most possible thing, that the highest monarch upon earth might
draw such a lustre around him, as would eclipse the renown of
all his public achievements — and that such a display of magna
nimity, or of worth, beaming from the secrecy of his familial-
moments, might waken a more cordial veneration in every
bosom, than all the splendour of his conspicuous history — ay,
and that it might pass down to posterity as a more enduring
monument of greatness, and raise him farther, by its moral
elevation, above the level of ordinary praise ; and when he
passes in review before the men of distant ages, may this deed
of modest, gentle, unobtrusive virtue, be at all times appealed to
as the most sublime and touching memorial of his name.

In like manner did the King eternal, immortal, and invisible,
surrounded as He is with the splendours of a wide and everlast
ing monarchy, turn Him to our humble habitation ; and the
footsteps of God manifest in the flesh, have been on the narrow
spot of ground we occupy ; and small though our mansion be
amid the orbs arid the systems of immensity, hither hath the
King of glory bent His mysterious way, and entered the taber
nacle of men, and in the disguise of a servant did He sojourn
for years under the roof which canopies our obscure and solitary
world. Yes, it is but a twinkling atom in the peopled infinity
of worlds that are around it — but look to the moral grandeur of
the transaction, and not to the material extent of the field upon
which it was executed — and from the retirement of our dwell
ing-place, there may issue forth such a display of the Godhead,
as will circulate the glories of His name amongst all His
worshippers. Here sin entered. Here was the kind and uni
versal beneficence of a Father repaid by the ingratitude of a
whole family. Here the law of God was dishonoured, and that
too in the face of its proclaimed and unalterable sanctions.
Here the mighty contest of the attributes was ended — and when
justice put forth its demands, and truth called for the fulfilment

70 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN*S MORAL HISTORY

of its warnings, and the immutability of God would not recede
by a single iota from any one of its positions, and all the
severities He had ever uttered against the children of iniquity,
seemed to gather into one cloud of threatening vengeance on
the tenement that held us — did the visit of the only-begotten
Son chase away all these obstacles to the triumph of mercy —
and humble as the tenement may be, deeply shaded in the
obscurity of insignificance as it is, among the statelier mansions
which are on every side of it — yet will the recall of its exiled
family never be forgotten, and the illustration that has been
given here of the mingled grace and majesty of God will never
lose its place among the themes and the acclamations of
eternity.

And here it may be remarked, that as the earthly king who
throws a moral aggrandizement around him by the act of a
single day, finds, that after its performance he may have the
space of many years for gathering to, himself the triumphs of an
extended reign — so the King who sits on high, and with whom
one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one
day, will find, that after the period of that special administration
is ended, by which this strayed world is again brought back
within the limits of His favoured creation, there is room enough
along the mighty track of eternity, for accumulating upon Him
self a glory as wide and as universal as is the extent of His
dominions. You will allow the most illustrious of this world's
potentates, to give some hour of his private history to a deed of
cottage or of domestic tenderness ; and every time you think of
the interesting story, you will feel how sweetly and how grace
fully the remembrance of it blends itself with the fame of his
public achievements. But still you think that there would not
have been room enough for these achievements of his, had
much of his time been spent, either amongst the habitations of
the poor, or in the retirement of his own family; and you
conceive, that it is because a single day bears so small a propor
tion to the time of his whole history, that he has been able to
combine an interesting display of private worth, with all that
brilliancy of exhibition, which has brought him down to pos
terity in the character of an august and a mighty sovereign.

Now apply this to the matter before us. Had the history of
our redemption been confined within the limits of a single day,
the argument that Infidelity has drawn from the multitude of
other worlds would never have been offered. It is true, that

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 71

ours is but an insignificant portion of the territory of God — but
if the attentions by which He has signalized it had only taken
up a single day, this would never have occurred to us as forming
any sensible withdrawment of the mind of the Deity from the
concerns of His vast and universal government. It is the time
which the plan of our salvation requires, that startles all those
on whom this argument has any impression. It is the time
taken up about this paltry world, which they feel to be out of
proportion to the number of other worlds, and to the immensity
of the surrounding creation. Now, to meet this impression, we
do not insist at present on what we have already brought for
ward, that God, whose ways are not as our ways, can have His
eye at the same instant on every place, and can divide and
diversify His attention into any number of distinct exercises.
What we have now to remark is, that the Infidel who urges the
astronomical objection to the truth of Christianity, is only look
ing with half an eye to the principle on which it rests. Carry
out the principle, and the objection vanishes. He looks abroad
on the immensity of space, and tells us how impossible it is, that
this narrow corner of it can be so distinguished by the attentions
of the Deity. Why does he not also look abroad on the mag
nificence of eternity ; and perceive how the whole period of
these peculiar attentions, how the whole time which elapses
between the fall of man and the consummation of the scheme of
his recovery, is but the twinkling of a moment to the mighty
roll of innumerable ages 1 The whole interval between the
time of Jesus Christ's leaving His Father's abode to sojourn
amongst us, to that time when He shall have put all His enemies
under His feet, and delivered up the kingdom to God even His
Father, that God may be all in all ; the whole of this interval
bears as small a proportion to the whole of the Almighty's
reign, as this solitary world does to the universe around it ; and
an infinitely smaller proportion than any time, however short,
which an earthly monarch spends on some enterprise of private
benevolence, does to the whole walk of his public and recorded
history.

Why then does not the man, who can shoot his conceptions
so sublimely abroad over the field of an immensity that knows
no limits — why does he not also shoot them forward through
the vista of a succession that ever flows without stop and with
out termination ? He has burst across the confines of this
world's habitation in space, and out of the field which lies on

72 KNOWLEDGE OF MAN'S MORAL HISTORY

the other side of it has he gathered an argument against the
truth of revelation. We feel that we have nothing to do but
to burst across the confines of this world's history in time, and
out of the futurity which lies beyond it can we gather that
which will blow the argument to pieces, or stamp upon it all
the narrowness of a partial and mistaken calculation. The day
is coming when the whole of this wondrous history shall be
looked back upon by the eye of remembrance, and be regarded
as one incident in the extended annals of creation ; and, with
all the illustration and all the glory it has thrown on the
character of the Deity, will it be seen as a single step in the
evolution of His designs ; and long as the time may appear,
from the first act of our redemption to its final accomplishment,
and close and exclusive as we may think the attentions of God
upon it, it will be found that it has left Him room enough for
all His concerns ; and that, on the high scale of eternity, it is
but one of those passing and ephemeral transactions which crowd
the history of a never-ending administration.

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top- of it reached to
heaven ; and behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. — Gen. xxviii. 12.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in
the night.— Psalm xc. 4.

Lift up your eyes to the- heavens, and look upon the earth beneath; for the heavens shall
vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell
therein shall die in like manner : but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness
shall not be abolished.— Isa. li. 6.

For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels ; and then he
shall reward every man according to his works. — Matt. xvi. 27.

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall
he sit upon the throne of his glory.— Matt. xxv. 31.

Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man
also confess before the angels of God : but he that denieth me before men, shall be denied
before the angels of God.— Luke xii. 8, 9.

And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open,
and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. — John i. 51.

We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. — 1 Cor. iv. 9.

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every
name ; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in
earth, and things under the earth ; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. — Phil. ii. 9-11.

When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. — 2 Thess. i. ".

And, without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness : God was manifest in the flesh,

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 73

justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world,
received up into glory. — 1 Tim. iii. 16.

I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou ob
serve these things. — 1 Tim. v. 21.

And again, when he bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the
angels of God worship him. — Heb. i. 6.

But ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jeru
salem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the
first-born, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of
just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant. — Heb. xii. 22-24.

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thou
sand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise,
as some men count slackness ; but is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should
perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a
thief in the night ; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the
elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall
be burnt up.— 2 Pet. iii. 8-10. •

And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to
heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things
that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things
which are therein, that there should be time no longer. — Rev. x. 5, 6.

And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the
beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, the same shall
drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture, into the cup
of his indignation ; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the
holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb. — Rev. xiv. 9, 10.

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and
the heaven fled away ; and there was found no place for them. — Rev. xx. 1 1.

74 THE SYMPATHY FELT FOR MAN

DISCOURSE V.

ON THE SYMPATHY THAT 18 FELT FOR MAN IN THE DISTANT PLACES OF
CREATION.

" I say unto you, That likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more
than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." — LUKE xv. 7.

WE have already attempted at full length to establish the
position, that the infidel argument of astronomers goes to ex
punge a natural perfection from the character of God, even that
wondrous property of His, by which He, at the same instant of
time, can bend a close and a careful attention on a countless
diversity of objects, and diffuse the intimacy of His power and
of His presence, from the greatest to the minutest and most
insignificant of them all. We also adverted shortly to this other
circumstance, that it went to impair a moral attribute of the
Deity. It goes to impair the benevolence of His nature. It is
saying much for the benevolence of God, to say, that a single
world or a single system is not enough for it — that it must have
the spread of a mightier region, on which it may pour forth a
tide of exuberancy throughout all its provinces — that as far as
our vision can carry us, it has strewed immensity with the float
ing receptacles of life, and has stretched over each of them the
garniture of such a sky as mantles our own habitation — and
that even from distances which are far beyond the reach of
human eye, the songs of gratitude and praise may now be
arising to the one God, who sits surrounded by the regards of
His one great and universal family.

Now it is saying much for the benevolence of God, to say,
that it sends forth these wide and distant emanations over the
surface of a territory so ample, that the world we inhabit, lying
imbedded, as it does, amidst so much surrounding greatness,
shrinks into a point that to the universal eye might appear to
be almost imperceptible. But does it not add to the power and
to the perfection of this universal eye, that at the very moment

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 75

it is taking a comprehensive survey of the vast, it can fasten a
steady and undistracted attention on each minute and separate
portion of it ; that at the very moment it is looking at all worlds,
it can look most pointedly and most intelligently to each of
them ; that at the very moment it sweeps the field of immensity,
it can settle all the earnestness of its regards upon every distinct
handbreadth of that field ; that at the very moment at which it
embraces the totality of existence, it can send a most thorough
and penetrating inspection into each of its details, and into
every one of its endless diversities ? We cannot fail to perceive
how much this adds to the power of the all-seeing eye. Tell
iis then, if it do not add as much perfection to the benevolence
of God, that while it is expatiating over the vast field of created
things, there is not one portion of the field overlooked by it ;
that while it scatters blessings over the whole of an infinite
range, it causes them to descend in a shower of plenty on every
separate habitation ; that while His arm is underneath and
round about all worlds, He enters within the precincts of every
one of them, and gives a care and a tenderness to each individual
of their teeming population. Oh I does not the God, who is
said to be love, shed over this attribute of His its finest illus
tration — when, while He sits in the highest heaven, and pours
out His fulness on the whole subordinate domain of nature and
of providence, He bows a pitying regard on the very humblest
of His children, and sends His reviving Spirit into every heart,
and cheers by His presence every home, and provides for the.
wants of every family, and watches every sick-bed, and listens
to the complaints of every sufferer ; and while by His wondrous
mind the weight of universal government is borne, oh, is it not
more wondrous and more excellent still, that He feels for every
sorrow, and has an ear open to every prayer ?

"It doth not yet appear what we shall be," says the apostle
John, " but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be
like him, for we shall see him as he is." It is the present lot
of the angels, that they behold the face of our Father in heaven,
and it would seem as if the effect of this was to form and to
perpetuate in them the moral likeness of Himself, and that they
reflect back upon Him His own image, and that thus a diffused
resemblance to the Godhead is kept up amongst all those
adoring worshippers who live in the near and rejoicing contem
plation of the Godhead. Mark then how that peculiar and
endearing feature in the goodness of the Deity, which we have

76 THE SYMPATHY FELT FOR MAN

just now adverted to — mark how beauteously it is reflected
downwards upon us in ttie revealed attitude of angels. From
the high eminences of heaven, are they bending a wakeful re
gard over the men of this sinful world ; and the repentance of
every one of them spreads a joy and a high gratulation through
out all its dwelling-places. Put this trait of the angelic
character into contrast with the dark and lowering spirit of an
Infidel. He is told of the multitude of other worlds, and he
feels a kindling magnificence in the conception, and he is seduced
by an elevation which he cannot carry, and from this airy sum
mit does he look down on the insignificance of the world we
occupy, and pronounces it to be unworthy of those visits and of
those attentions which we read of in the New Testament. He
is unable to wing his upward way along the scale, either of
moral or of natural perfection ; and when the wonderful extent
of the field is made known to him, over which the wealth of the
Divinity is lavished — there he stops, and wilders, and altogether
misses this essential perception, that the power and perfection
of the Divinity are not more displayed by the mere magnitude
of the field, than they are by that minute and exquisite filling
up, which leaves not its smallest portions neglected ; but which
imprints the fulness of the Godhead upon every one of them ;
and proves, by every flower of the pathless desert, as well as by
every orb of immensity, how this unsearchable Being can care
for all, and provide for all, and, throned in mystery too high for
us, can, throughout every instant of time, keep His attentive
eye on every separate thing that He has formed, and, by an act
of His thoughtful arid presiding intelligence, can constantly
embrace all.

But God, compassed about as He is with light inaccessible,
and full of glory, lies so hidden from the ken and conception of
all our faculties, that the spirit of man sinks exhausted by its
attempts to comprehend Him. Could the image of the Supreme
be placed direct before the eye of the mind, that flood of splen
dour, which is ever issuing from Him on all who have the
privilege of beholding, would not only dazzle, but overpower us.
And therefore it is, that we bid you look to the reflection of
that image, and thus to take a view of its mitigated glories, and
to gather the lineaments of the Godhead in the face of those
righteous angels, who have never thrown away from them the
resemblance in which they were created ; and, unable as you
are to support the grace and the majesty of that countenance,

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 77

before which the seers and the prophets of other days fell, and
became as dead men, let us, before we bring this argument to
a close, borrow one lesson of Him who sitteth on the throne,
from the aspect and the revealed doings of those who are sur
rounding it.

The Infidel, then, as he widens the field of his contemplations,
would suffer its every separate object to die away into forgetful-
ness : these angels, expatiating as they do, over the range of a
loftier universality, are represented as all awake to the history
of each of its distinct and subordinate provinces. The Infidel,
with his mind afloat among suns and among systems, can find
no place in his already occupied regards, for that humble planet
which lodges and accommodates our species : the angels, stand
ing on a loftier summit, and with a mightier prospect of creation
before them, are yet represented as looking down on this single
world, and attentively marking the every feeling and the every
demand of all its families. The Infidel, by sinking us down to
an unnoticeable minuteness, would lose sight of our dwelling-
place altogether, and spread a darkening shroud of oblivion over
all the concerns and all the interests of men : but the angels
will not so abandon us ; and, undazzled by the whole surpassing
grandeur of that scenery which is around them, are they revealed
as directing all the fulness of their regard to this our habitation,
and casting a longing and a benignant eye on ourselves and on
our children. The Infidel will tell us of those worlds which
roll afar, and the number of which outstrips the arithmetic of
the human understanding — and then, with the hardness of an
unfeeling calculation, will he consign the one we occupy, with
all its guilty generations, to despair. But He who counts the
number of the stars is set forth to us as looking at every in
habitant among the millions of our species, and by the word of
the Gospel beckoning to him with the hand of invitation, and
on the very first step of his return, as moving towards him with
all the eagerness of the prodigal's father, to receive him back
again into that presence from which he had wandered. And as
to this world, in favour of which the scowling Infidel will not
permit one solitary movement, all heaven is represented as in
a stir about its restoration ; and there cannot a single son, or a
single daughter, be recalled from sin unto righteousness, without
an acclamation of joy amongst the hosts of Paradise. Ay, and
we can say it of the humblest and the unworthiest of you
all, that the eye of angels is upon him, and that his repent-

78 THE SYMPATHY FELT FOR MAN

ance would, at this moment, send forth a wave of delighted
sensibility throughout the mighty throng of their innumerable
legions.

Now, the single question we have to ask is, On which of the
two sides of this contrast do we see most of the impress of
heaven ? Which of the two would be most glorifying to God ?
Which of them carries upon it most of that evidence which lies
in its having a celestial character? For if it be the side of the
Infidel, then must all our hopes expire with the ratifying of that
fatal sentence, by which the world is doomed, through its insig
nificancy, to perpetual exclusion from the attentions of the God
head. We have long been knocking at the door of your under
standing, and have tried to find an admittance to it for many an
argument. We now make our appeal to the sensibilities of your
heart ; and tell us to whom does the moral feeling within it yield
its readiest testimony — to the Infidel, who would make this
world of ours vanish away into abandonment — or to those
angels, who ring throughout all their mansions the hosannas of
joy, over every one individual of its repentant population ?

And here we cannot omit to take advantage of that opening
with which our Saviour has furnished us, by the parables of
this chapter, and by which He admits us into a familiar view of
that principle on which the inhabitants of the heavens are so
awake to the deliverance and the restoration of our species. To
illustrate the difference in the reach of knowledge and of affec
tion, between a man and an angel, let us think of the difference
of reach between one man and another. You may often wit
ness a man, who feels neither tenderness nor care beyond the
precincts of his own family ; but who, on the strength of those
instinctive fondnesses which nature has implanted in his bosom,
may earn the character of an amiable father, or a kind husband,
or a bright example of all that is soft and endearing in the re
lations of domestic society. Now conceive him, in addition to
all this, to carry his affections abroad, without, at the same time,
a. .7 abatement of their intensity towards the objects which are
at home — that, stepping across the limits of the house he occu
pies, he takes an interest in the families which are near him —
that he lends his services to the town or the district wherein he
is placed, and gives up a portion of his time to the thoughtful
labours of a humane and public-spirited citizen. By this en
largement in the sphere of his attention, he has extended his
reach ; and, provided he has not done so at the expense of that

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 79

regard which is due to his family, a thing which, cramped and
confined as we are, we are very apt, in the exercise of our
humble faculties, to do — I put it to you, whether by extending
the reach of his views and his affections, he has not extended
his worth and his moral respectability along with it ?

But we can conceive a still farther enlargement. We can
figure to ourselves a man, whose wakeful sympathy overflows
the field of his own immediate neighbourhood — to whom the
name of country comes with all the omnipotence of a charm
upon his heart, and with all the urgency of a most righteous and
resistless claim upon his services — who never hears the name of
Britain sounded in his ears, but it stirs up all his enthusiasm in
behalf of the worth and the welfare of his people — who gives
himself up, with all the devotedness of a passion, to the best and
the purest objects of patriotism — and who, spurning away from
him the vulgarities of party ambition, separates his life and his
labours to the fine pursuit of augmenting the science, or the
virtue, or the substantial prosperity of his nation. Oh, could
such a man retain all the tenderness, and fulfil all the duties
which home and which neighbourhood require of him, and at the
same time expatiate in the might of his untired faculties, on so
wide a field of benevolent contemplation — would not this exten
sion of reach place him still higher than before on the scale
both of moral and intellectual gradation, and give him a still
brighter and more enduring name in the records of human ex
cellence ?

And lastly, we can conceive a still loftier flight of humanity
— a man, the aspiring of whose heart for the good of man,
knows no limitations — whose longings and whose conceptions on
this subject, overleap all the barriers of geography — who looking
on himself as a brother of the species, links every spare energy
which belongs to him, with the cause of its amelioration — who
can embrace within the grasp of his ample desires, the whole
family of mankind — and who, in obedience to a heaven-born
movement of principle within him, separates himself to some
big and busy enterprise, which is to tell on the moral destinies
of the world. Oh, could such a man mix up the softenings of
private virtue, with the habit of so sublime a comprehension —
if, amid those magnificent darings of thought and of performance,
the mildness of his benignant eye could still continue to cheer
the retreat of his family, and to spread the charm and the
sacredness of piety among all its members — could he even

80 THE SYMPATHY FELT FOR MAN

mingle himself in all the gentleness of a soothed and a smil
ing heart, with the playfulness of his children — and also find
strength to shed the blessings of his presence and his counsel
over the vicinity around him ; — oh, would not the combination
of so much grace with so much loftiness, only serve the more to
aggrandize him ? Would not the one ingredient of a character
so rare, go to illustrate and to magnify the other ? And would
not you pronounce him to be the fairest specimen of our nature,
who could so call out all your tenderness, while he challenged
and compelled all your veneration ?

Nor can we proceed, at this point of our argument, without
adverting to the way in which this last and this largest style of
benevolence is exemplified in our own country — where the spirit
of the Gospel has given to many of its enlightened disciples the
impulse of such a philanthropy, as carries abroad their wishes
and their endeavours to the very outskirts of human population
— a philanthropy, of which, if you asked the extent or the
boundary of its field, we should answer in the language of in
spiration, that the field is the world — a philanthropy which
overlooks all the distinctions of caste and of colour, and spreads
its ample regards over the whole brotherhood of the species — a
philanthropy which attaches itself to man in the general ; to
man throughout all his varieties ; to man as the partaker of one
common nature, and who, in whatever clime or latitude you may
meet with him, is found to breathe the same sympathies, and to
possess the same high capabilities both of bliss and of improve
ment. It is true, that, upon this subject, there is often a loose
and unsettled magnificence of thought, which is fruitful of no
thing but empty speculation. But the men to whom we allude,
have not imaged the enterprise in the form of a thing unknown.
They have given it a local habitation. They have bodied it
forth in deed and in accomplishment. They have turned the
dream into a reality. In them, the power of a lofty generaliza
tion meets with its happiest attemperment, in the principle and
perseverance, and all the chastening and subduing virtues of the
New Testament. And were we in search of that fine union of
grace and of greatness which we have now been insisting on,
and in virtue of which the enlightened Christian can at once find
room in his bosom for the concerns of universal humanity, and
for the play of kindliness towards every individual he meets with
— we could nowhere more readily expect to find it, than with
the worthies of our own land — the Howard of a former genera-

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 81

tion, who paced it over Europe in quest of the unseen wretched
ness which abounds in it — or in such men of our present gene
ration, as Wilberforce, who lifted his unwearied voice against
the biggest outrage ever practised on our nature, till he wrought
its extermination — and Clarkson, who plied his assiduous task at
rearing the materials of its impressive history, and, at length
carried, for this righteous cause, the mind of Parliament — and
Carey, from whose hand the generations of the East are now
receiving the elements of their moral renovation — and, in fine,
those holy and devoted men, who count not their lives dear unto
them ; but, going forth every year from the island of our habita
tion, carry the message of heaven over the face of the world ;
and, in the front of severest obloquy, are now labouring in re
motest lands ; and are reclaiming another and another portion
from the wastes of dark and fallen humanity ; and are widening
the domains of gospel light and gospel principle amongst them ;
and are spreading a moral beauty around the every spot on
which they pitched their lowly tabernacle ; and are at length
compelling even the eye and the testimony of gainsayers, by the
success of their noble enterprise ; and are forcing the exclama
tion of delighted surprise from the charmed and the arrested tra
veller, as he looks at the softening tints which they are now
spreading over the wilderness, and as he hears the sound of the
chapel bell, and as in those haunts where, at the distance of half
a generation, savages would have scowled upon his path, he re
gales himself with the hum of missionary schools, and the lovely
spectacle of peaceful and Christian villages.

Such, then, is the benevolence, at once so gentle and so lofty,
of those men, who, sanctified by the faith that is in Jesus, have
had their hearts visited from heaven by a beam of warmth and
of sacredness. "What, then, we should like to know, is the bene
volence of the place from whence such an influence cometh ?
How wide is the compass of this virtue there, and how exquisite
is the feeling of its tenderness, and how pure and how fervent
are its aspirings among those unfallen beings who have no dark
ness, and no encumbering weight of corruption to strive against ?
Angels have a mightier reach of contemplation. Angels can
look upon this world and all which it inherits, as the part of a
larger family. Angels were in the full exercise of their powers
even at the first infancy of our species, and shared in the gratu-
lations of that period, when, at the birth of humanity, all intel
ligent nature felt a gladdening impulse, and the morning stars

VOL. in. F

82 THE SYMPATHY FELT FOR MAN

sang together for joy. They loved us even with the love which
a family on earth bears to a younger sister ; and the very child
hood of our tinier faculties did only serve the more to endear us
to them ; and though born at a later hour in the history of crea
tion, did they regard us as heirs of the same destiny with them
selves, to rise along with them in the scale of moral elevation, to
bow at the same footstool, and to partake in those high dispen
sations of a parent's kindness and a parent's care, which are ever
emanating from the throne of the Eternal on all the members of
a duteous and affectionate family. Take the reach of an angel's
mind, but, at the same time, take the seraphic fervour of an
angel's benevolence along with it ; how, from the eminence on
which he stands, he may have an eye upon many worlds, and a
remembrance upon the origin and the successive concerns of
every one of them ; how he may feel the full force of a most
affecting relationship with the inhabitants of each, as the off
spring of one common Father ; and though it be both the effect
and the evidence of our depravity, that we cannot sympathize
with these pure and generous ardours of a celestial spirit ; how
it may consist with the lofty comprehension, and the ever-
breathing love of an angel, that he can both shoot his benevo
lence abroad over a mighty expanse of planets and of systems,
and lavish a flood of tenderness on each individual of their teem
ing population.

Keep all this in view, and you cannot fail to perceive how
the principle, so finely and so copiously illustrated in this chap
ter, may be brought to meet the infidelity we have thus long
been employed in combating. It was nature, and. the experience
of every bosom will affirm it — it was nature in the shepherd to
leave the ninety and nine of his flock forgotten and alone in the
wilderness, and betaking himself to the mountains, to give all
his labour and all his concern to the pursuit of one solitary wan
derer. It was nature — and we are told in the passage before
us, that it is such a portion of nature as belongs not merely to
men but to angels — when the woman, with her mind in a state
of listlessness as to the nine pieces of silver that were in secure
custody, turned the whole force of her anxiety to the one piece
which she had lost, and for which she had to light a candle, and
to sweep the house, and to search diligently until she found it.
It was nature in her to rejoice more over that piece than over
all the rest of them, and to tell it abroad among friends and
neighbours, that they might rejoice along with her — ay, and

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 83

sadly effaced as humanity is, in all her original lineaments, this
is a part of our nature, the very movements of which are experi
enced in heaven, " where there is more joy over one sinner that
repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no
repentance." For anything we know, the very planet that rolls
in the immensity around us may be a land of righteousness ; and
be a member of the household of God; and have her secure
dwelling-place within that ample limit, which embraces His
great and universal family. But we know at least of one wan
derer ; and how wofully she has strayed from peace and from
purity ; and how in dreary alienation from Him who made her,
she has bewildered herself amongst those many devious tracts,
which have carried her afar from the path of immortality ; and
how sadly tarnished all those beauties and felicities are, which
promised, on that morning of her existence when God looked on
her, and saw that all was very good — which promised so richly
to bless and adorn her ; and how, in the eye of the whole un-
fallen creation, she has renounced all this goodliness, and is fast
departing away from them into guilt, and wretchedness, and
shame. Oh ! if there be any truth in this chapter, and any
sweet or touching nature in the principle which runs throughout
all its parables, let us cease to wonder though they who surround
the throne of love should be looking so intently towards us —
or though, in the way by which they have singled us out, all the
other orbs of space should, for one short season, on the scale of
eternity, appear to be forgotten — or though, for every step of
her recovery, and for every individual who is rendered back
again to the fold from which he was separated, another and
another message of triumph should be made to circulate amongst
the hosts of paradise — or though, lost as we are, and sunk in
depravity as we are, all the sympathies of heaven should now
be awake on the enterprise of Him who has travailed in the
greatness of His strength to seek and to save us.

And here we cannot but remark how fine a harmony there is
between the law of sympathetic nature in heaven, and the most
touching exhibitions of it on the face of our world. When one
of a numerous household droops under the power of disease, is
not that the one to whom all the tenderness is turned, and who,
in a manner, monopolizes the inquiries of his neighbourhood,
and the care of his family ? When the sighing of the midnight
storm sends a dismal foreboding into the mother's heart, to
whom of all her offspring, we would ask, are her thoughts and

S4 THE SYMPATHY FELT FOR MAN

anxieties then wandering ? Is it not to her sailor boy whom her
fancy has placed amid the rude and angry surges of the ocean ?
Does not this, the hour of his apprehended danger, concentrate
upon him the whole force of her wakeful meditations ? And does
not he engross, for a season, her every sensibility and her every
prayer ? We sometimes hear of shipwrecked passengers thrown
upon a barbarous shore ; and seized upon by its prowling in
habitants ; and hurried away through the tracks of a dreary and
unknown wilderness ; and sold into captivity ; and loaded with
the fetters of irrecoverable bondage ; and who, stripped of every
other liberty but the liberty of thought, feel even this to be
another ingredient of wretchedness ; for what can they think of
but home ? and as all its kind and tender imagery comes upon
their remembrance, how can they think of it but in the bitter
ness of despair ? Oh tell us, when the fame of all this disaster
reaches his family, who is the member of it to whom is directed
the full tide of its griefs and of its sympathies ? Who is it that,
for weeks and for months, usurps their every feeling, and calls
out their largest sacrifices, and sets them to the busiest expedi
ents for getting him back again ? Who is it that makes them
forgetful of themselves and of all around them ? and tell us if
you can assign a limit to the pains, and the exertions, and the
surrenders which afflicted parents and weeping sisters would
make to seek and to save him ?

Now conceive, as we are warranted to do by the parables of
this chapter, the principle of all these earthly exhibitions to be
in fall operation around the throne of God. Conceive the uni
verse to be one secure and rejoicing family, and that this alienated
world is the only strayed, or only captive member belonging to
it ; and we shall cease to wonder, that, from the first period of
the captivity of our species, down to the consummation of their
history in time, there should be such a movement in heaven ; or
that angels should so often have sped their commissioned way
on the errand of our recovery ; or that the Son of God should
have bowed Himself down to the burden of our mysterious atone
ment ; or that the Spirit of God should now, by the busy variety
of His all-powerful influences, be carrying forward that dispen
sation of grace which is to make us meet for readmittance into
the mansions of the celestial. Only think of love as the reign
ing principle there ; of love, as sending forth its energies and
aspirations to the quarter where its object is most in danger of
being for ever lost to it ; of love, as called forth by this single

IN DISTANT PLACES OF CREATION. 85

circumstance to its uttermost exertion, and the most exquisite
feeling of its tenderness ; and then shall we come to a distinct
and familiar explanation of this whole mystery ; nor shall we
resist, by our incredulity, the gospel message any longer, though
it tells us, that throughout the whole of this world's history,
long in our eyes, but only a little month in the high periods of
immortality, so much of the vigilance, and so much of the ear
nestness of heaven, should have been expended on the recovery
of its guilty population.

There is another touching trait of nature, which goes finely
to heighten this principle, and still more forcibly to demonstrate
its application to our present argument. So long as the dying
child of David was alive, he was kept on the stretch of anxiety
and of suffering with regard to it. When it expired, he arose
and comforted himself. This narrative of king David is in har
mony with all that we experience of our own movements and
our own sensibilities. It is the power of uncertainty which gives
them so active and so interesting a play in our bosoms ; and
which heightens all our regards to a tenfold pitch of feeling and of
exercise ; and which fixes down our watchfulness upon our infant's
dying bed ; and which keeps us so painfully alive to every turn
and to every symptom in the progress of its malady ; and which
draws out all our affections for it to a degree of intensity that is
quite unutterable ; and which urges us on to ply our every effort
and our every expedient, till hope withdraw its lingering beam,
or till death shut the eyes of our beloved in the slumber of its
long and its last repose.

We know not who of you have your names written in the book
of life — nor can we tell if this be known to the angels which are
in heaven. While in the land of living men, you are under the
power and application of a remedy, which, if taken as the gospel
prescribes, will renovate the soul, and altogether prepare it for
the bloom and the vigour of immortality. Wonder not then,
that with this principle of uncertainty in such full operation,
ministers should feel for you ; or angels should feel for you ; or
all the sensibilities of heaven should be awake upon the sym
ptoms of your grace and reformation ; or the eyes of those who
stand upon the high eminences of the celestial world, should be
so earnestly fixed on every footstep and new evolution of your
moral history. Such a consideration as this should do some
thing more than silence the Infidel objection. It should give a
practical effect to the calls of repentance. How will it go to

86 SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

aggravate the whole guilt of our impenitency, should we stand
out against the power and the tenderness of these manifold ap
plications — the voice of a beseeching God upon us — the word of
salvation at our very door — the free offer of strength and of
acceptance sounded in our hearing — the Spirit in readiness with
His agency to meet our every desire and our every inquiry —
angels beckoning us to their company — and the very first move
ments of our awakened conscience drawing upon us all their
regards and all their earnestness !

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

And Nathan departed unto his house : and the Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife
bare unto David, and it was very sick. David therefore besought God for the child ; and
David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth. And the elders of his house
arose, and went to him, to raise him up from the earth : but he would not, neither did he
eat bread with them. And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. And
the servants of David feared to tell him that the child was dead ; for they said, Behold,
while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him, and he would not hearken unto our
voice : how will he then vex himself, if we tell him that the child is dead ? But when David
saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead ; therefore David
said unto his servants, Is the child dead ? And they said, He is dead. Then David arose
from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into
the house of the Lord, and worshipped : then he came to his own house ; and when he re
quired, they set bread before him, and he did eat. Then said his servants unto him, What
thing is this that thou hast done ? Thou didst fast and weep for the child, while it was
alive ; but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread. And he said, While the
child was yet alive. I fasted and wept : for I said, Who can tell whether God will be
gracious to me, that the child may live ? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast ?
can I bring him back again ? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. — 2 Sam.
xii. 15-23.

The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.
—Psalm xxxiv. 7.

For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.— Psalm
xci. 11.

And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather to
gether his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. — Matt. xxiv. 31.

Likewise, I say unto you, There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth. — Luke xv. 10.

Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs cf
salvation ?— Heb. i. 14.

CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN, ETC. 87

DISCOUKSE VI.

ON THE CONTEST FOR AN ASCENDENCY OVER MAN AMONGST THE HIGHER ORDERS
OF INTELLIGENCE.

" And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly,
triumphing over them in it." — COLOSSIANS ii. 15.

THOUGH these Astronomical Discourses be now drawing to a
close, it is not because we feel that much more might not be
said on the subject of them, both in the way of argument and of
illustration. The whole of the Infidel difficulty proceeds upon
the assumption, that the exclusive bearing of Christianity is
upon the people of our earth ; that this solitary planet is in no
way implicated with the concerns of a wider dispensation ; that
the revelation we have of the dealings of God in this district of
His empire, does not suit and subordinate itself to a system of
moral administration, as extended as is the whole of His mon
archy. Or, in other words, because Infidels have not access
to the whole truth, will they refuse a part of it, however well
attested or well accredited it may be ; because a mantle of deep
obscurity rests on the government of God, when taken in all its
eternity and all its entireness, will they shut their eyes against
that allowance of light which has been made to pass downwards
upon our world from time to time through so many partial un-
foldings ; arid till they are made to know the share which other
planets have in these communications of mercy, will they turn
them away from the actual message which has come to their
own door, and will neither examine its credentials, nor be
alarmed by its warnings, nor be won by the tenderness of its
invitations ?

On that day when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed,
there will be found such a wilful duplicity and darkening of the
mind in the whole of this proceeding, as shall bring down upon
it the burden of a righteous condemnation. But even now does
it lie open to the rebuke of philosophy, when the soundness and

88 CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN

the consistency of her principles are brought faithfully to bear
upon it. Were the character of modern science rightly under
stood, it would be seen, that the very thing which gave such
strength and sureness to all her conclusions, was that humility
of spirit which belonged to her. She promulgates all that is
positively known ; but she maintains the strictest silence and
modesty about all that is unknown. She thankfully accepts of
evidence wherever it can be found; nor does she spurn away from
her the very humblest contribution of such doctrine, as can be
witnessed by human observation, or can be attested by human
veracity. But with all this she can hold out most sternly
against that power of eloquence and fancy, which often throws
so bewitching a charm over the plausibilities of ingenious specu
lation. Truth is the alone idol of her reverence ; and did she
at all times keep by her attachments, nor throw them away
when theology submitted to her cognisance its demonstrations
and its claims, we should not despair of witnessing as great a
revolution in those prevailing habitudes of thought which obtain
throughout our literary establishments, on the subject of Chris
tianity, as that which has actually taken place in the views
which obtain on the philosophy of external nature. This is the
first field on which have been successfully practised the experi
mental lessons of Bacon ; and they who are conversant with
these matters, know how great and how general a uniformity of
doctrine now prevails in the science of astronomy, and mechanics,
and chemistry, and almost all the other departments in the his
tory and philosophy of matter. But this uniformity stands
strikingly contrasted with the diversity of our moral systems,
with the restless fluctuations both of language and of sentiment
which are taking place in the philosophy of mind, with the
palpable fact, that every new course of instruction upon this
subject has some new articles, or some new explanations to
peculiarize it : and all this is to be attributed, not to the pro
gress of the science, not to a growing, but to an alternating
movement, not to its perpetual additions, but to its perpetual
vibrations.

We mean not to assert the futility of moral science, or to
deny her importance, or to insist on the utter hopelessness of
her advancement. The Baconian method will not probably
push forward her discoveries with such a rapidity, or to such an
extent, as many of her sanguine disciples have anticipated. But
if the spirit and the maxims of this philosophy were at all times

AMONG THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCES. 89

proceeded upon, it would certainly check that rashness and
variety of excogitation, in virtue of which it may almost be said,
that every new course presents us with a new system, and that
every new teacher has some singularity or other to characterize
him. She may be able to make out an exact transcript of the
phenomena of mind, and in so doing, she yields a most important
contribution to the stock of human acquirements. But, when
she attempts to grope her darkling way through the counsels of
the Deity, and the futurities of His administration ; when, with
out one passing acknowledgment to the embassy which professes
to have come from Him, or to the facts and to the testimonies
by which it has so illustriously been vindicated, she launches
forth her own speculations on the character of God, and the
destiny of man ; when, though this be a subject on which
neither the recollections of history, nor the ephemeral experience
of any single life, can furnish one observation to enlighten her,
she will nevertheless utter her own plausibilities, not merely
with a contemptuous neglect of the Bible, but in direct opposi
tion to it ; then it is high time to remind her of the difference
between the reverie of him who has not seen God, and the well-
accredited declaration of Him who was in the beginning with
God, and was God : and to tell her, that this, so far from being
the argument of an ignoble fanaticism, is in harmony with the
very argument upon which the science of experiment has been
reared, and by which it has been at length delivered from the
influence of theory, and purified of all its vain and visionary
splendours.

In our last Discourses, we have attempted to collect, from
the records of God's actual communication to the world, such
traces of relationship between other orders of being and the
great family of mankind, as serve to prove that Christianity is
not so paltry and provincial a system as Infidelity presumes it
to be. And as we said before, we have not exhausted all that
may legitimately be derived upon this subject from the informa
tions of Scripture. We have adverted, it is true, to the know
ledge of our moral history which obtains throughout other
provinces of the intelligent creation. We have asserted the
universal importance which this may confer on the transactions
even of one planet, inasmuch as it may spread an honourable
display of the Godhead amongst all the mansions of infinity.
We have attempted to expatiate on the argument, that an event
little in itself, may be so pregnant with character, as to furnish

90 CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN

all the worshippers of heaven with a theme of praise for eternity.
We have stated that nothing is of magnitude in their eyes, but
that which serves to endear to them the Father of their spirits,
or to shed a lustre over the glory of His incomprehensible attri
butes — and that thus, from the redemption even of our solitary
species, there may go forth such an exhibition of the Deity, as
shall bear the triumphs of His name to the very outskirts of the
universe.

We have farther adverted to another distinct scriptural inti
mation, that the state of fallen man was not only matter of know
ledge to other orders of creation, but was also matter of deep
regret and affectionate sympathy ; that agreeably to such laws
of sympathy as are most familiar even to human observation,
the very wretchedness of our condition was fitted to concentrate
upon us the feelings, and the attentions, and the services of the
celestial — to single us out for a time to the gaze of their most
earnest and unceasing contemplation — to draw forth all that
was kind and all that was tender within them — and just in pro
portion to the need and to the helplessness of us miserable exiles
from the family of God, to multiply upon us the regards, and
call out in our behalf the fond and eager exertions of those who
had never wandered away from Him. This appears from the
Bible to be the style of that benevolence which glows and which
circulates around the throne of heaven. It is the very benevol
ence which emanates from the throne itself, and the attentions
of which have for so many thousand years signalized the in
habitants of our world. This may look a long period for so
paltry a world. But how have Infidels come to their conception
that our world is so paltry ? By looking abroad over the count
less systems of immensity. But why then have they missed the
conception, that the time of those peculiar visitations, which
they look upon as so disproportionate to the magnitude of this
earth, is just as evanescent as the earth itself is insignificant ?
Why look they not abroad on the countless generations of
eternity ; and thus come back to the conclusion, that after all,
the redemption of our species is but an ephemeral doing in the
history of intelligent nature ; that it leaves the Author of it
room for all the accomplishments of a wise and equal admini
stration ; and not to mention, that even during the progress of
it, it withdraws not a single thought or a single energy of His,
from other fields of creation, that there remains time enough
to Him for carrying round the visitations of as striking and as

AMONG THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCES. 91

peculiar a tenderness, over the whole extent of His great and
universal monarchy ?

It might serve still farther to incorporate the concerns of our
planet with the general history of moral and intelligent beings,
to state, not merely the knowledge which they take of us, and
not merely the compassionate anxiety which they feel for us ;
but to state the importance derived to our world from its being
the actual theatre of a keen and ambitious contest amongst the
upper orders of creation. You know that for the possession of
a very small and insulated territory, the mightiest empires of the
world have put forth all their resources ; and on some field of
mustering competition, have monarchs met, and embarked for
victory, all the pride of a country's talent, and all the flower
and strength of a country's population. The solitary island
around which so many fleets are hovering, and on the shores of
which so many armed men are descending as to an arena of
hostility, may well wonder at its own unlooked-for estimation.
But other principles are animating the battle ; and the glory
of nations is at stake ; and a much higher result is in the con
templation of each party, than the gain of so humble an acquire
ment as the primary object of the war ; and honour, dearer to
many a bosom than existence, is now the interest on which so
much blood and so much treasure is expended ; and the stirring
spirit of emulation has now got hold of the combatants ; and
thus, amid all the insignificancy which attaches to the material
origin of the contest, do both the eagerness and the extent of it,
receive from the constitution of our nature their most full and
adequate explanation.

Now, if this be also the principle of higher natures — if, on
the one hand, God be jealous of His honour ; and, on the other,
there be proud and exalted spirits who scowl defiance at Him
and at His monarchy — if, on the side of heaven, there be an
angelic host rallying around the standard of loyalty, who flee
with alacrity at the bidding of the Almighty, who are devoted
to His glory, and feel a rejoicing interest in the evolution of
His counsels ; and if, on the side of hell, there be a sullen front
of resistance, a hate and malice inextinguishable, an unquelled
daring of revenge to baffle the wisdom of the Eternal, and to
arrest the hand, and to defeat the purposes of Omnipotence —
then let the material prize of victory be insignificant' as it may,
it is the victory in itself which upholds the impulse of this keen
and stimulated rivalry. If, by the sagacity of one infernal

92 CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN

mind, a single planet has been seduced from its allegiance, and
been brought under the ascendency of him who is called in
Scripture, "the god of this world;" and if the errand on which
our Redeemer came was to destroy the works of the devil — then
let this planet have all the littleness which astronomy has
assigned to it — call it what it is, one of the smaller islets which
float on the ocean of vacancy ; it has become the theatre of
such a competition, as may have all the desires and all the
energies of a divided universe embarked upon it. It involves
in it other objects than the single recovery of our species. It
decides higher questions. It stands linked with the supremacy
of God, and will at length demonstrate the way in which He
inflicts chastisement and overthrow upon all His enemies. We
know not if our rebellious world be the only stronghold which
Satan is possessed of, or if it be but the single post of an ex
tended warfare, that is now going on between the powers of
light and of darkness. But be it the one or the other, the
parties are in array, and the spirit of the contest is in full
energy, and the honour of mighty combatants is at stake ; and
let us therefore cease to wonder that our humble residence has
been made the theatre of so busy an operation, or that the
ambition of loftier natures has here put forth all its desire and
all its strenuousness.

This unfolds to us another of those high and extensive bear
ings, which the moral history of our globe may have on the
system of God's universal administration. Were an enemy to
touch the shore of this high-minded country, and to occupy so
much as one of the humblest of its villages, and there to seduce
the natives from their loyalty, and to sit down along with them
in entrenched defiance to all the threats, and to all the prepara
tions of an insulted empire — oh, how would the cry of wounded
pride resound throughout all the ranks and varieties of our
mighty population ; and this very movement of indignancy
would reach the king upon his throne ; and circulate among
those who stood in all the grandeur of chieftainship around
him ; and be heard to thrill in the eloquence of Parliament ;
and spread so resistless an appeal to a nation's honour and a
nation's patriotism, that the trumpet, of war would summon to
its call all the spirit and all the willing energies of our king
dom ; and rather than sit down in patient endurance under the
burning disgrace of such a violation, would the whole of its
strength and resources be embarked upon the contest ; and

AMONG THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCES. 93

never, never would we let down our exertions and our sacrifices,
till either our deluded countrymen were reclaimed, or till the
whole of this offence were, by one righteous act of vengeance,
swept away altogether from the face of the territory it de
formed.

The Bible is always most full and most explanatory on those
points of revelation in which men are personally interested.
But it does at times offer a dim transparency, through which
may be caught a partial view of such designs and of such
enterprises as are now afloat among the upper orders of intelli
gence. It tells us of a mighty struggle that is now going on
for a moral ascendency over the hearts of this world's popula
tion. It tell us that our race were seduced from their alle
giance to God, by the plotting sagacity of one who stands
pre-eminent against Him among the hosts of a very wide and
extended rebellion. It tells us of the Captain of salvation, who
undertook to spoil him of this triumph ; and throughout the
whole of that magnificent train of prophecy which points to Him,
does it describe the work he had to do, as a conflict, in which
strength was to be put forth, and painful suffering to be endured,
and fury to be poured upon enemies, and principalities to be
dethroned, and all those toils, and dangers, and difficulties to be
borne, which strewed the path of perseverance that was to carry
him to victory.

But it is a contest of skill as well as of strength and of
influence. There is the earnest competition of angelic faculties
embarked on this struggle for ascendency. And while in the
Bible there is recorded (faintly and partially, we admit) the
deep and insidious policy that is practised on the one side ;
we are also told, that, on the plan of our world's restoration,
there are lavished all the riches of an unsearchable wisdom
upon the other. It would appear that, for the accomplishment
of his purpose, the great enemy of God and of man plied his
every calculation ; and brought all the devices of his deep and
settled malignity to bear upon our species ; and thought, that
could he involve us in sin, every attribute of the Divinity stood
staked to the banishment of our race from beyond the limits of
the empire of righteousness ; and thus did he practise his inva
sions on the moral territory of the unfallen ; and, glorying in
his success, did he fancy and feel that he had achieved a per
manent separation between the God who sitteth in heaven, and
one at least of the planetary mansions which He had reared.

94 CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN

The errand of the Saviour was to restore this sinful world,
and have its people readmitted within the circle of heaven's
pure and righteous family. But in the government of heaven,
as well as in the government of earth, there are certain prin
ciples which cannot be compromised ; and certain maxims of
administration which must never be departed from ; and a cer
tain character of majesty and of truth, on which the taint even
of the slightest violation can never be permitted ; and a certain
authority which must be upheld by the immutability of all its
sanctions, and the unerring fulfilment of all its wise and right
eous proclamations. All this was in the mind of the archangel,
and a gleam of malignant joy shot athwart him, as he conceived
his project for hemming our unfortunate species within the
bound of an irrecoverable dilemma ; and as surely as sin and
holiness could not enter into fellowship, so surely did he think,
that if man were seduced to disobedience, would the truth, and
the justice, and the immutability of God, lay their insurmount
able barriers on the path of his future acceptance.

It was only in that plan of recovery of which Jesus Christ
was the author and the finisher, that the great adversary of our
species met with a wisdom which overmatched him. It is true,
that he had reared, in the guilt to which he seduced us, a mighty
obstacle in the way of this lofty undertaking. But when the
grand expedient was announced, and the blood of that atone
ment, by which sinners are brought nigh, was willingly offered
to be shed for us ; and the eternal Son, to carry this mystery into
accomplishment, assumed our nature — then was the prince of
that mighty rebellion, in which the fate and the history of our
world are so deeply implicated, in visible alarm for the safety of
all his acquisitions : — nor can the record of this wondrous history
carry forward its narrative without furnishing some transient
glimpses of a sublime and a superior warfare, in which, for the
prize of a spiritual dominion over our species, we may dimly
perceive the contest of loftiest talent, and all the designs of
heaven in behalf of man, met at every point of their evolution,
by the counterworkings of a rival strength and a rival sagacity.

We there read of a struggle which the Captain of our salva
tion had to sustain, when the lustre of the Godhead lay ob
scured, and the strength of its omnipotence was mysteriously
weighed down under the infirmities of our nature — how Satan
singled Him out, and dared Him to the combat of the wilder
ness — how all his wiles and all his influences were resisted —

AMONG THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCES. 95

how he left our Saviour in all the triumphs of unsubdued loyalty
— Low the progress of this mighty achievement is marked by
the every character of a conflict — how many of the gospel
miracles were so many direct infringements on the power and
empire of a great spiritual rebellion — how, in one precious sea
son of gladness among the few which brightened the dark career
of our Saviour's humiliation, He rejoiced in spirit, and gave as
the cause of it to His disciples, that " He saw Satan fall like
lightning from heaven" — how the momentary advantages that
were gotten over Him, are ascribed to the agency of this infernal
being, who entered the heart of Judas, and tempted the dis
ciple to betray his Master and his Friend. We know that we
are treading on the confines of mystery. We cannot tell what
the battle that He fought. We cannot compute the terror or the
strength of His enemies. We cannot say, for we have not been
told, how it was that they stood in marshalled and hideous array
against Him : — nor can we measure how great the firm daring
of His soul when He tasted that cup in all its bitterness which
He prayed might pass away from Him ; when, with the feeling
that He was forsaken by His God, He trode the wine-press
alone ; when He entered single-handed upon that dreary period
of agony, and insult, and death, in which, from the garden to
the cross, He had to bear the burden of a world's atonement.
We cannot speak in our own language, but we can say in the
language of the Bible, of the days and the nights of this great
enterprise, that it was the season of the travail of His soul ;
that it was the hour and the power of darkness ; that the work
of our redemption was a work accompanied by the effort, and the
violence, and the fury of a combat ; by all the arduousness of a
battle in its progress, and all the glories of a victory in its ter
mination : and after He called out that it was finished, after He
was loosed from the prison-house of the grave, after He had
ascended up on high, He is said to have made captivity captive ;
and to have spoiled principalities and powers ; and to have seen
His pleasure upon His enemies ; and to have made a show of
them openly.

We shall not affect a wisdom above that which is written,
by fancying such details of this warfare as the Bible has not
laid before us. But surely it is no more than being wise up to
that which is written, to assert, that in achieving the redemption
of our world, a warfare had to be accomplished ; that upon this
subject there was, among the higher provinces of creation, the

96 CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN

keen and the animated conflict of opposing interests ; that the
result of it involved something grander and more affecting than
even the fate of this world's population ; that it decided a ques
tion of rivalship between the righteous and everlasting Monarch
of universal being, and the prince of a great and widely-extended
rebellion, of which we neither know how vast is the magnitude,
nor how important and diversified are the bearings : and thus
do we gather, from this consideration, another distinct argument,
helping us to explain why, on the salvation of our solitary
species, so much attention appears to have been concentrated,
and so much energy appears to have been expended.

But it would appear from the Records of Inspiration, that the
contest is not yet ended ; that on the one hand the Spirit of
God is employed in making, for the truths of Christianity, a way
into the human heart, with all the power of an effectual demon
stration ; that on the other, there is a spirit now abroad, which
worketh in the children of disobedience : that on the one hand,
the Holy Ghost is calling men out of darkness into the marvel
lous light of the Gospel ; and that on the other hand, he who is
styled the god of this world, is blinding their hearts, lest the
light of the glorious Gospel of Christ should enter into them :
that they who are under the dominion of the one are said to
have overcome, because greater is He that is in them than he
that is in the world ; and that they who are under the dominion
of the other, are said to be the children of the devil, and to be
under his snare, and to be taken captive by him at his will.
How these respective powers do operate, is one question ; the
fact of their operation, is another. We abstain from the former.
We attach ourselves to the latter, and gather from it, that the
prince of darkness still walketh abroad amongst us ; that he is
still working his insidious policy, if not with the vigorous in
spiration of hope, at least with the frantic energies of despair ;
that while the overtures of reconciliation are made to circulate
through the world, he is plying all his devices to deafen and to
extinguish the impression of them ; or, in other words, while a
process of invitation and of argument has emanated from heaven,
for reclaiming men to their loyalty — the process is resisted at
all its points, by one who is putting forth his every expedient,
and wielding a mysterious ascendency, to seduce, and to inthral
them.

To an infidel ear, all this carries the sound of something wild
and visionary along with it. But though only known through

AMONG THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCES. 97

the medium of revelation ; after it is known, who can fail to
recognise its harmony with the great lineaments of human ex
perience ? Who has not felt the workings of a rivalry within
him, between the power of conscience and the power of tempta
tion ? Who does not remember those seasons of retirement,
when the calculations of eternity had gotten a momentary com
mand over the heart ; and time, with all its interests and all its
vexations, had dwindled into insignificancy before them ? And
who does not remember, how, upon his actual engagement with
the objects of time, they resumed a control, as great and as
omnipotent, as if all the importance of eternity adhered to them
— how they emitted from them such an impression upon his
feelings as to fix and to fascinate the whole man into a sub
serviency to their influence — how in spite of every lesson of
their worthlessness, brought home to him at every turn by the
rapidity of the seasons, and the vicissitudes of life, and the ever-
moving progress of his own earthly career, and the visible
ravages of death among his acquaintances around him, and the
desolations of his family, and the constant breaking up of his
system of friendships, and the affecting spectacle of all that
lives and is in motion, withering and hastening to the grave ; —
oh ! how comes it, that, in the face of all this experience, the
whole elevation of purpose, conceived in the hour of his better
understanding, should be dissipated and forgotten ? Whence
the might, and whence the mystery of that spell, which so binds
and so infatuates us to the world ? What prompts us so to em
bark the whole strength of our eagerness and of our desires, in
pursuit of interests which we know a few little years will bring
to utter annihilation? Who is it that imparts to them all the
charm and all the colour of an unfailing durability ? Who is it
that throws such an air of stability over these earthly taber
nacles, as makes them look to the fascinated eye of man, like
resting-places for eternity ? Who is it that so pictures out the
objects of sense, and so magnifies the range of their future en
joyment, and so dazzles the fond and deceived imagination, that,
in looking onward through our earthly career, it appears like
the vista, or the perspective, of innumerable ages ? He who is
called the god of this world. He who can dress the idleness of
its waking dreams in the garb of reality. He who can pour a
seducing brilliancy over the panorama of its fleeting pleasures
and its vain anticipations. He who can turn it into an instru
ment of deceitfulness, and make it wield such an absolute ascen-

VOL. III. G

98 CONTEST FOR ASCENDENCY OVER MAN

clency over all the affections, that man, become the poor slave of
its idolatries and its charms, puts the authority of conscience
and the warnings of the Word of God, and the offered instiga
tions of the Spirit of God, and all the lessons of calculation, and
all the wisdom even of his own sound and sober experience,
away from him.

But this wondrous contest will come to a close. Some will
return to their loyalty, and others will keep by their rebellion ;
and, in the day of the winding up of the drama of this world's
history, there will be made manifest to the myriads of the various
orders of creation, both the mercy and vindicated majesty of the
Eternal. Oh ! on that day how vain will this presumption of
the infidel astronomy appear, when the affairs of men come to
be examined in the presence of an innumerable company ; and
beings of loftiest nature are seen to crowd around the judgment-
seat ; and the Saviour shall appear in our sky, with a celestial
retinue, who have come with Him from afar to witness all His
doings, and to take a deep and solemn interest in all His dis
pensations ; and the destiny of our species whom the infidel
would thus detach in solitary insignificance, from the universe
altogether, shall be found to merge and to mingle with higher
destinies — the good to spend their eternity with angels — the
bad to spend their eternity with angels — the former to be re
admitted into the universal family of God's obedient worshippers
— the latter to share in the everlasting pain and ignominy of
the^ defeated host of the rebellious — the people of this planet to
be implicated, throughout the whole train of their never-ending
history, with the higher ranks and the more extended tribes of
intelligence ; and thus it is, that the special administration we
now live under, shall be seen to harmonize in its bearings, and
to accord in its magnificence, with all that extent of nature and
of her territories, which modern science has unfolded.

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness*, to be tempted of the devil —
Matt. iv. 1.

The enemy that sowed them is the devil ; the harvest is the end of the world ; and the
reapers are the angels. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather
out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity.— Matt. xiii. 39, 41.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into ever
lasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.— Matt. xxv. 41.

AMONG THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCES. 99

And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit of an unclean devil, and cried
out with a loud voice, saying, Let us alone ; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of
Nazareth ? art thou come to destroy us ? I know thee who thou art : the Holy One of God.
— Lukeiv. 33, 34.

Tho.se by the way-side are they that hear ; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the
word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved. — Luke viii. 12.

But he, knowing their thought?, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is
brought to desolation ; and a house divided against a house falleth. If Satan also be divided
against himself, how shall his kingdom stand ? because ye say that I cast out devils through
Beelzebub.— Luke xi. 17, 18.

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do : he was a murderer
from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he
speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own : for he is a liar, and the father of it. — John viii. 44.

And supper being ended, (the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot,
Simon's son, to betray him.) — John xiii. 2.

But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and
to keep back part of the price of the land ?— Acts v. 3.

To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan
unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are
sanctified, by faith that is in me. — Acts xxvi. 18.

And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. — Rom. xvi. 20.

Lest Satan should get an advantage of us : for we are not ignorant of his devices. — 2 Cor.
ii. 11.

In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest
the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
—2 Cor. iv. 4.

Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the
prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.
— Eph. ii. 2.

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the
devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
—Eph. vi. 11, 12.

For some are already turned aside after Satan. — 1 Tim. v. 15.

Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise
took part of the same ; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of
death, that is, the devil.— Heb. ii. 14.

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. — James
iv. 7.

Be sober, be vigilant ; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about,
seeking whom he may devour ; whom resist, stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same
afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world. — 1 Pet. v. 8, 9.

He that committeth sin is of the devil ; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For
this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil,
— In this the children of G od are manifest, and the children of the devil : whosoever doeth
not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. — 1 John iii. 8, 10.

Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them ; because greater is he that is in
you, than he that is in the world. — 1 John iv. 4.

And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath
reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day. — Jude 6.

He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment ; and I will not blot out

100 SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

his name out of the book of life, hut I will confess his name before my Father, and before
his angels.— Rev. iii. 5.

And there was war in heaven : Michael and his angels fought against the dragon ; and the
dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not ; neither was their place found any more in
heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,
which deceiveth the whole world ; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast
out with him. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the in-
habiters of the earth and of the sea ! for the devil is come down unto you, having great
wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a s-hort time. — Rev. xii. 7, 8, 9, 12.

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound
him a thousand years. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed
out of his prison. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brim
stone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for
ever and ever.— Rev. xx. 2, 7, 10.

SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE, ETC. 101

DISCOURSE VII.

•ON THE SLENDER INFLUENCE OF MERE TASTE AND SENSIBILITY IN MATTERS
OF RELIGION.

" And, lo ! thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice,
and can play well on an instrument ; for they hear thy words, but they do them not."—
EZEK. xxxiii. 32.

You easily understand how a taste for music is one thing,
and a real submission to the influence of religion is another —
how the ear may be regaled by the melody of sound, and the
heart may utterly refuse the proper impression of the sense that
is conveyed by it — how the sons arid daughters of the world
may, with their every affection devoted to its perishable vani
ties, inhale all the delights of enthusiasm, as they sit in crowded
assemblage around the deep and solemn oratorio — ay, and
whether it be the humility of penitential feeling, or the rapture
of grateful acknowledgment, or the sublime of a contemplative
piety, or the aspiration of pure and of holy purposes, which
breathes throughout the words of the performance, and gives to
it all the spirit and all the expression by which it is pervaded,
it is a very possible thing, that the moral, and the rational, and
the active man, may have given no entrance into his bosom
for any of these sentiments ; and yet so overpowered may he be
by the charm of the vocal conveyance through which they are
addressed to him, that he may be made to feel with such an
emotion, and to weep with such a tenderness, and to kindle
with such a transport, and to glow with such an elevation, as
may one and all carry upon them the semblance of sacredness.

But might not this semblance deceive him ? Have you
ever heard any tell, and with complacency too, how powerfully
his devotion was awakened by an act of attendance on the
oratorio — how his heart, melted and subdued by the influence
of harmony, did homage to all the religion of which it was the

102 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

vehicle — how he was so moved and overborne, as to shed the
tears of contrition, and to be agitated by the terrors of judg
ment, and to receive an awe upon his spirit of the greatness and
the majesty of God — and that, wrought up to the lofty pitch
of eternity, he could look down upon the world, and by the
glance of one commanding survey, pronounce upon the littleness
and the vanity of all its concerns ? It is indeed very possible
that all this might thrill upon the ears of the man, and cir
culate a succession of solemn and affecting images around his
fancy — and yet that essential principle of his nature, upon
which the practical influence of Christianity turns, might have
met with no reaching and no subduing efficacy whatever to
arouse it. He leaves the exhibition, as dead in trespasses and
sins as he came to it. Conscience has not wakened upon him.
Eepentance has not turned him. Faith has not made any
positive lodgement within him of her great and her constraining
realities. He speeds him back to his business and to his family,
arid there he acts the old man in all the entireness of his
uncrucified temper, and of his obstinate worldliness, and of all
those earthly and unsanctified affections which are found to
cleave to him with as great tenacity as ever. He is really and
experimentally the very same man as before — and all those
sensibilities which seemed to bear upon them so much of the air
and unction of heaven, are found to go into dissipation, and be
forgotten with the loveliness of the song.

Amid all that illusion which such momentary visitations of
seriousness and of sentiment throw around the character of man,
let us never lose sight of the test, that " by their fruits ye shall
know them." It is not coming up to this test, that you hear
and are delighted. It is that you hear and do. This is the
ground upon which the reality of your religion is discriminated
now ; arid on the day of reckoning, this is the ground upon
which your religion will be judged then ; and that award is to
be passed upon you, which will fix and perpetuate your destiny
for ever. You have a taste for music. This no more implies
the hold and the ascendency of religion over you, than that you
have a taste for beautiful scenery, or a taste for painting, or
even a taste for the sensualities of epicurism. But music may
be made to express the glow and the movement of devotional
feeling ; and is it saying nothing to say that the heart of him
who listens with a raptured ear is, through the whole time of
the performance, in harmony with such a movement ? Why, it

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 103

is saying nothing to the purpose. Music may lift the inspiring
note of patriotism ; and the inspiration may be felt ; arid it may
thrill over the recesses of the soul, to the mustering up of all its
energies ; and it may sustain to the last cadence of the song,
the firm nerve and purpose of intrepidity ; and all this may be
realized upon him, who, in the day of battle, and upon actual
collision with the dangers of it, turns out to be a coward. And
music may lull the feelings into unison with piety ; and stir up
the inner man to lofty determinations ; and so engage for a
time his affections, that, as if weaned from the dust, they
promise an immediate entrance on some great and elevated
career, which may carry him through his pilgrimage superior to
all the sordid and grovelling enticements that abound in it.
But he turns him to the world, and all this glow abandons him ;
and the words which he had heard, he doeth them not ; and in
the hour of temptation he turns out to be a deserter from the
law of allegiance ; and the test we have now specified looks
hard upon him ; and discriminates him amid all the parading
insignificance of his fine but fugitive emotions, to be the subject
both of present guilt and of future vengeance.

The faithful application of this test would put to flight a host
of other delusions. It may be carried round amongst all those
phenomena of human character, where there is the exhibition of
something associated with religion, but which is not religion
itself. An exquisite relish for music is no test of the influence of
Christianity ; neither are many other of the exquisite sensibilities
of our nature. When a kind mother closes the eyes of her ex
piring babe, she is thrown into a flood of sensibility, and sooth
ing to her heart are the sympathy and the prayers of an attending
minister. When a gathering neighbourhood assemble to the
funeral of an acquaintance, one pervading sense of regret and
tenderness sits on the faces of the company ; and the deep.silence,
broken only by the solemn utterance of the man of God, carries
a kind of pleasing religiousness along with it. The sacredness
of the hallowed day, and all the decencies of its observation,
may engage the affections of him who loves to walk in the foot
steps of his father ; and every recurring Sabbath may bring to
his bosom the charm of its regularity and its quietness. Keligion
has its accompaniments ; and in these there may be a something
to soothe and to fascinate, even in the absence of the appropriate
influences of religion. The deep and tender impression of a
family bereavement, is not religion. The love of established

104 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

decencies, is not religion. The charm of all that sentiraentalism
which is associated with many of its solemn and affecting ser
vices, is not religion. They may form the distinct folds of its
accustomed drapery ; but they do not, any, or all of them put
together, make up the substance of the thing itself. A mother's
tenderness may flow most gracefully over the tomb of her de
parted little one ; and she may talk the while of that heaven
whither its spirit has ascended. The man whom death had
widowed of his friend, may abandon himself to the movements
of that grief, which for a time will claim an ascendency over
him ; and, amongst the multitude of his other reveries, may love
to hear of the eternity, where sorrow and separation are alike
unknown. He who has been trained from his infant days to
remember the Sabbath, may love the holiness of its aspect, and
associate himself with all its observances, and take a delighted
share in the mechanism of its forms. But let not these think,
because the tastes and the sensibilities which engross them, may
be blended with religion, that they indicate either its strength
or its existence within them. We recur to the test. We press
its imperious exactions upon you. We call for fruit, and demand
the permanency of a religious influence on the habits and the
history. How many who take a flattering unction to their souls,
when they think of their amiable feelings, and their becoming
observations, with whom this severe touchstone would, like the
head of Medusa, put to flight all their complacency ! The afflic
tive dispensation is forgotten — and he on whom 'it was laid, is
practically as indifferent to God and to eternity as before. The
Sabbath services come to a close, and they are followed by the
same routine of week-day worldliness as before. In neither the
one case nor the other, do we see more of the radical influence
of Christianity, than *in the sublime and melting influence of
sacred music upon the soul ; and all this tide of emotion is found
to die away from the bosom, like the pathos or like the loveli
ness of a song.

The instances may be multiplied without number. A man
may have a taste for eloquence, and eloquence, the most touch
ing or sublime, may lift her pleading voice on the side of religion.
A man may love to have his understanding stimulated by the
ingenuities or the resistless urgencies of an argument ; and argu
ment the most profound and the most overbearing may put forth
all the might of a constraining vehemence in behalf of religion.
A man may feel the rejoicings of a conscious elevation, when

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 105

Rome ideal scene of magnificence is laid before him j and where
are these scenes so readily to be met with, as when led to ex
patiate in thought over the track of eternity, or to survey the
wonders of creation, or to look to the magnitude of those great
and universal interests which lie within the compass of religion?
A man may have his attention riveted and regaled by that
power of imitative description, which brings all the recollections
of his own experience before him ; which presents him with a
faithful analysis of his own heart ; which embodies in language
such intimacies of observation and of feeling, as have often
passed before his eyes, or played within his bosom, but had never
been so truly or so ably pictured to the view of his remembrance.
Now, all this may be done in the work of pressing the duties of
religion ; in the work of instancing the applications of religion ;
in the work of pointing those allusions to life and to manners,
which manifest the truth to the conscience, and plant such a
conviction of sin, as forms the very basis of a sinner's religion.
Now, in all these cases, we see other principles brought into
action, and which may be a state of most lively and vigorous
movement, and be yet in a state of entire separation from the
principle of religion. We will venture to say, on the strength
of these illustrations, that as much delight may emanate from
the pulpit on an arrested audience beneath it, as ever emanated
from the boards of a theatre — ay, and with as total a disjunction
of mind too, in the one case as in the other, from the essence or
the habit of religion. We recur to the test. We make our
appeal to experience ; and we put it to you all, whether your
finding upon the subject do not agree with our saying about it,
that a man may weep and admire, and have many of his faculties
put upon the stretch of their most intense gratification — his
judgment established, and his fancy enlivened, and his feelings
overpowered, and his hearing charmed as by the accents of
heavenly persuasion, and all within him feasted by the rich and
varied luxuries of an intellectual banquet ! — Oh I it is cruel to
frown unmannerly in the midst of so much satisfaction. But I
must not forget that truth has her authority as well as her stern
ness ; and she forces me to affirm, that after all this has been felt
and gone through, there might not be one principle which lies
at the turning-point of conversion, that has experienced a single
movement — not one of its purposes be conceived — not one of its
doings be accomplished — not one step of that repentance, which
if we have not we perish, so much as entered upon — not one an-

106 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

nouncement of that faith, by which we are saved, admitted into
a real and actual possession by the inner man. He has had his
hour's entertainment, and willingly does he award this homage
to the performer, that he hath a pleasant voice and can play well
on an instrument — but, in another hour it fleets away from his re
membrance, and goes all to nothing, like the loveliness of a song.

Now, in bringing these Discourses to a close, we feel it our
duty to advert to this exhibition of character in man. The
sublime and interesting topic which has engaged us, however
feebly it may have been handled ; however inadequately it may
have been put in all its worth, and in all its magnitude before
you ; however short the representation of the speaker, or the
conception of the hearers, may have been of that richness, and
that greatness, and that loftiness, which belong to it ; possesses
in itself a charm to fix the attention, and to regale the imagina
tion, and to subdue the whole man into a delighted reverence ;
and, in a word, to beget such a solemnity of thought and of
emotion, as may occupy and enlarge the soul for hours together,
as may waft it away from the grossness of ordinary life, and raise
it to a kind of elevated calm above all its vulgarities and all its
vexations.

Now, tell us whether the whole of this effect upon the feelings
may not be formed without the presence of religion. Tell us
whether there might not be such a constitution of mind, that it
may both want altogether that principle, in virtue of which the
doctrines of Christianity are admitted into the belief, and the
duties of Christianity are admitted into a government over the
practice — and yet at the very same time, it may have the faculty
of looking abroad over some scene of magnificence, and of being
wrought up to ecstasy with the sense of all those glories among
which it is expatiating. We want you to see clearly the dis
tinction between these two attributes of the human character.
They are, in truth, as different the one from the other, as a taste
for the grand and the graceful in scenery differs from the appetite
of hunger ; and the one may both exist and have a most intense
operation within the bosom of that very individual, who entirely
disowns and is entirely disgusted with the other. What ! must
a man be converted, ere, from the most elevated peak of some
Alpine wilderness, he become capable of feeling the force and
the majesty of those great lineaments which the hand of nature
has thrown around him, in the varied forms of precipice, and
mountain, and the wave of mighty forests, and the rush of

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 107

sounding waterfalls, and distant glimpses of human territory,
and pinnacles of everlasting snow, and the sweep of that circling
horizon, which folds in its ample embrace the whole of this noble
amphitheatre ? Tell us whether, without the aid of Christianity,
or without a particle of reverence for the only Name given under
heaven whereby men can be saved, a man may not kindle at
such a perspective as this, into all the raptures, and into all the
movements of a poetic elevation ; and be able to render into the
language of poetry, the whole of that sublime and beauteous
imagery which adorns it? and, as if he were treading on the
confines of a sanctuary which he has not entered, may he not
mix up with the power and the enchantment of his description,
such allusions to the presiding genius of the scene ; or to the
still but animating spirit of the solitude ; or to the speaking
silence of some mysterious character which reigns throughout
the landscape ; or, in fine, to that Eternal Spirit, who sits be
hind the elements He has formed, and combines them into all
the varieties of a wide and a wondrous creation ? might not all
this be said and sung with an emphasis so moving as to spread
the colouring of piety over the pages of him who performs thus
well upon his instrument ; and yet, the performer himself have
a conscience unmoved by a single warning of God's actual com
munication, and the judgment unconvinced, and the fears un-
awakened, and the life unreformed by it ?

Now, what is true of a scene on earth, is also true of that
wider and more elevated scene which stretches over the immen
sity around it, into a dark and a distant unknown. Who does
not feel an aggrandizement of thought and of faculty, when he
looks abroad over the amplitudes of creation — when, placed on
a telescopic eminence, his aided eye can find a pathway to innu
merable worlds — when that wondrous field, over which there
had -hung for many ages the mantle of so deep an obscurity, is
laid open to him, and, instead of a dreary and unpeopled soli
tude, he can see over the whole face of it such an extended
garniture of rich arid goodly habitations? Even the Atheist,
who tells us that the universe is self-existent and indestructible
— even he, who instead of seeing the traces of a manifold wisdom
in its manifold varieties, sees nothing in them all but the ex
quisite structures and the lofty dimensions of materialism — even
he, who would despoil creation of its God, cannot look upon its
golden suns, and their accompanying systems, without the solemn
impression of a magnificence that fixes and overpowers him.

108 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

Now, conceive such a belief of God as you all profess to dawn upon
his understanding. Let him become as one of yourselves — and
so be put into the condition of rising from the sublime of matter
to the sublime of mind. Let him now learn to subordinate the
whole of this mechanism to the design and authority of a great
presiding Intelligence : and re-assembling all the members of
the universe, however distant, into one family, let him mingle
with his former conceptions of the grandeur which belonged to
it, the conception of that Eternal Spirit who sits enthroned on
the immensity of His own wonders, and embraces all that He
has made, within the ample scope of one great administration.
Then will the images and the impressions of sublimity come in
upon him from a new quarter. Then will another avenue be
opened, through which a sense of grandeur may find its way into
his soul, and have a mightier influence than ever to fill, and to
elevate, and to expand it. Then will be established a new and
a noble association, by the aid of which all that he formerly
looked upon as fair, becomes more lovely ; and all that he for
merly looked upon as great, becomes more magnificent. But will
you believe us, that even with this accession to his mind of ideas
gathered from the contemplation of the Divinity; even with
that pleasurable glow which steals over his imagination, when
he now thinks of the majesty of God ; even with as much of
what you would call piety, as we fear is enough to soothe and
to satisfy many of yourselves, and which stirs and kindles within
you when you hear the goings forth of the Supreme set before
you in the terms of a lofty representation ; even with all this,
we say there may be as wide a distance from the habit and the
character of godliness, as if God was still atheistically disowned
by him. Take the conduct of his life and the currency of his
affections ; and you may see as little upon them of the stamp of
loyalty to God, or of reverence for any one of His authenticated
proclamations, as you may see in him who offers his poetic in
cense to the genii, or weeps enraptured over the visions of a
beauteous mythology. The sublime of Deity has wrought up
his soul to a pitch of conscious and pleasing elevation — and yet
this no more argues the will of Deity to have a practical autho
rity over him, than does that tone of elevation which is caught
by looking at the sublime of a naked materialism. The one and
the other'have their little hour of ascendency over him ; and
when he turns him to the rude and ordinary world, both vanish
alike from his sensibilities, as does the loveliness of a song.

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 109

To kindle and be elevated by a sense of the majesty of God,
is one thing. It is totally another thing to feel a movement of
obedience to the will of God, under the impression of His right
ful authority over all the creatures whom He has formed. A
man may have an imagination all alive to the former, while the
latter never prompts him to one act of obedience ; never leads
him to compare his life with the requirements of the Lawgiver ;
never carries him from such a scrutiny as this, to the conviction
of sin ; never whispers such an accusation to the ear of his con
science, as causes him to mourn, and to be in heaviness for the
guilt of his hourly and habitual rebellion ; never shuts him up
to the conclusion of the need of a Saviour ; never humbles him
to acquiescence in the doctrine of that revelation which comes
to his door with such a host of evidence, as even his own philo
sophy cannot bid away ; never extorts a single believing prayer
in the name of Christ, or points a single look, either of trust or
of reverence, to His atonement ; never stirs any effective move
ment of conversion; never sends an aspiring energy into his
bosom after the aids of that Spirit, who alone can waken him
out of his lethargies, and by the anointing which remaineth, can
rivet and substantiate in his practice, those goodly emotions
which have hitherto plied him with the deceitfulness of their
momentary visits, and then capriciously abandoned him.

The mere majesty of God's power and greatness, when offered
to your notice, lays hold of one of the faculties within you. The
holiness of God, with His righteous claim of legislation, lays
hold of another of these faculties. The difference between them
is so great, that the one may be engrossed and interested to the
full, while the other remains untouched, and in a state of entire
dormancy. Now, it is no matter what it be that ministers de
light to the former of these two faculties ; if the latter be not
arrested and put on its proper exercise, you are making no ap
proximation whatever to the right habit and character of religion.
There are a thousand ways in which we may contrive to regale
your taste for that which is beauteous and majestic. It may
find its gratification in the loveliness of a vale, or in the freer
and bolder outlines of an upland situation, or in the terrors of a
storm, or in the sublime contemplations of astronomy, or in the
magnificent idea of a God who sends forth the wakefulness of
His omniscient eye, and the vigour of His upholding hand,
throughout all the realms of nature and of providence. The
mere taste of the human mind may get its ample enjoyment in

110 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

each and in all of these objects, or in a vivid representation
of them ; nor does it make any material difference, whether this
representation be addressed to you from the stanzas of a poem,
or from the recitations of a theatre, or finally from the discourses
and the demonstrations of a pulpit. And thus it is, that still
on the impulse of the one principle only, people may come in
gathering multitudes to the house of God ; and share with eager
ness in all the glow and bustle of a crowded attendance ; and
have their every eye directed to the speaker ; and feel a respond
ing movement in their bosom to his many appeals and his many
arguments; and carry a solemn and overpowering impression
of all the services away with them ; and yet, throughout the
whole of this seemly exhibition, not one effectual knock may
have been given at the door of conscience. The other principle
may be as profoundly asleep, as if hushed into the insensibility
of death. There is a spirit of deep slumber, it would appear,
which the music of no description, even though attuned to a
theme so lofty as the greatness and majesty of the Godhead, can
ever charm away. Oh ! it may have been a piece of parading
insignificance altogether — the minister playing on his favourite
instrument, and the people dissipating away their time on the
charm and idle luxury of a theatrical emotion.

The religion of taste is one thing. The religion of conscience
is another. We recur to the test : What is the plain and prac
tical doing which ought to issue from the whole of our argument?
If one lesson come more clearly or more authoritatively out of
it than another, it is the supremacy of the Bible. If fitted to
impress one movement rather than another ; it is that movement
of docility, in virtue of which, man, with the feeling that he has
all to learn, places himself in the attitude of a little child, before
the book of the unsearchable God, who has deigned to break His
silence, and to transmit even to our age of the world, a faithful
record of His own communication. What progress then are you
making in this movement? Are you, or are you not, like new
born babes, desiring the sincere milk of the word, that you may
grow thereby ? How are you coming on in the work of casting
down your lofty imaginations? With the modesty of true science,
which is here at one with the humblest and most penitentiary
feeling which Christianity can awaken, are you bending an eye
of earnestness on the Bible, and appropriating its informations,
and moulding your every conviction to its doctrines and its testi
monies ? How long, we beseech you, has this been your habitual

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. Ill

exercise ? By this time do you feel the darkness and the insuffi
ciency of nature ? Have you found your way to the need of an
atonement ? Have you learned the might and the efficacy which
are given to the principle of faith? Have you longed with all
your energies to realize it ? Have you broken loose from the
obvious misdoings of your former history ? Are you convinced
of your total deficiency from the spiritual obedience of the affec
tions ? Have you read of the Holy Ghost, by whom renewed in
the whole desire and character of your mind, you are led to run
with alacrity in the way of the commandments? Have you
turned to its practical use, the important truth, that He is given
to the believing prayers of all who really want to be relieved
from the power both of secret and of visible iniquity ? We de
mand something more than the homage you have rendered to
the pleasantness of the voice that has been sounding in your
hearing. What we have now to urge upon you, is the bidding
of the voice, to read and to reform, and to pray, and, in a word,
to make your consistent step from the elevations of philosophy,
to all those exercises, whether of doing or of believing, which
mark the conduct of the earnest, and the devoted, and the sub
dued, and the aspiring Christian.

This brings under our view a most deeply interesting exhibi
tion of human nature, which may often be witnessed among the
cultivated orders of society. When a teacher of Christianity
addresses himself to that principle of justice within us, in virtue
of which we feel the authority of God to be a prerogative which
righteously belongs to Him, he is then speaking the appropriate
language of religion, and is advancing its naked and appropriate
claim over the obedience of mankind. He is then urging that
pertinent and powerful consideration, upon which alone he can
qper hope to obtain the ascendency of a practical influence over
the purposes and the conduct of human beings. It is only by
insisting on the moral claim of God to a right of government
over His creatures, that he can carry their loyal subordination
to the will of God. Let him keep by this single argument, and
urge it upon the conscience, and then, without any of the other
accompaniments of what is called Christian oratory, he may
bring convincingly home upon his hearers all the varieties of
Christian doctrine. He may establish within their minds the
dominion of all that is essential in the faith of the New Testa
ment. He may, by carrying out this principle of God's authority
into all its applications, convince them of sin. He may lead

112 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

them to compare the loftiness and spirituality of His law, with
the habitual obstinacy of their own worldly affections. He may
awaken them to the need of a Saviour. He may urge them to
a faithful and submissive perusal of God's own communication.
He may thence press upon them the truth and the immutability
of their Sovereign. He may work in their hearts an impression
of this emphatic saying, that God is not to be mocked — that His
law must be upheld in all the significancy of its proclamations
— and that either its severities must be discharged upon the
guilty, or in some other way an adequate provision be found for
its outraged dignity, and its violated sanctions. Thus may he
lead them to flee for refuge to the blood of the atonement. And
he may further urge upon his hearers, that such is the enormity
of sin, that it is not enough to have found an expiation for it ;
that its power and its existence must be eradicated from the
hearts of all who are to spend their eternity in the mansions of
the celestial ; that for this purpose, an expedient is made known
to us in the New Testament ; that a process must be described
upon earth, to which there is given the appropriate name of
sanctification ; that, at the very commencement of every true
course of discipleship, this process is entered upon with a pur
pose in the mind of forsaking all ; that nothing short of a single
devotedness to the will of God, will ever carry us forward through
the successive stages of this holy and elevated career ; that to
help the infirmities of our nature, the Spirit is ever in readiness
to be given to those who ask it : and that thus the life of every
Christian becomes a life of entire dedication to Him who died
for us — a life of prayer and vigilance, and close dependence on
the grace of God — and, as the infallible result of the plain but
powerful and peculiar teaching of the Bible, a life of vigorous
unwearied activity in the doing of all the commandments. •
Now, this we should call the essential business of Christianity.
This is the truth as it is in Jesus, in its naked and unassociated
simplicity. In the work of urging it, nothing more might have
been done than to present certain views, which may come with as
great clearness and freshness, and take as full possession of the
mind of a peasant, as of the mind of a philosopher. There is a
sense of God, and of the rightful allegiance that is due to Him.
There are plain and practical appeals to the conscience. There
is a comparison of the state of the heart, with the requirements
of a law which proposes to take the heart under its obedience.
There is the inward discernment of its coldness about God ; of

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 113

its unconcern about the matters of duty and of eternity ; of its
devotion to the forbidden objects of sense ; of its constant ten
dency to nourish within its own receptacles, the very element
and principle of rebellion, and in virtue of this, to send forth the
stream of an hourly and accumulating disobedience over those
doings of the outer man, which make up his visible history in
the world. There is such an earnest and overpowering impres
sion of all this, as will fix a man down to the single object of
deliverance ; as will make him awake only to those realities
which have a significant and substantial bearing on the case that
engrosses him ; as will teach him to nauseate all the impertin
ences of tasteful and ambitious description j as will attach him
to the truth in its simplicity ; as will fasten his every regard
upon the Bible, where, if he persevere in the work of honest in
quiry, he will soon be made to perceive the accordancy between its
statements, and all those movements of fear, or guilt, or deeply felt
necessity, or conscious darkness, stupidity, and unconcern about
the matters of salvation, which pass within his own bosom ; in a
word, as will endear to him that plainness of speech, by which
his own experience is set evidently before him, and that plain
phraseology of Scripture, which is best fitted to bring home to
him the doctrine of redemption, in all the truth and in all the
preciousness of its applications.

Now, the whole of this work may be going on, and that too
in the wisest and most effectual manner, without so much as
one particle of incense being offered to any of the subordinate
principles of the human constitution. There may be no fascina
tions of style. There may be no magnificence of description.
There may be no poignancy of acute and irresistible argument.
There may be a riveted attention on the part of those whom
the Spirit of God hath awakened to seriousness about the plain
and affecting realities of conversion. Their conscience may be
stricken, and their appetite be excited for an actual settlement
of mind on those points about which they feel restless and
unconfirmed. Such as these are vastly too much engrossed
with the exigencies of their condition, to be repelled by the
homeliness of unadorned truth. And thus it is, that while the
loveliness of the song has done so little in helping on the
influences of the gospel, our men of simplicity and prayer have
done so much for it. With a deep and earnest impression of
the truth themselves, they have made manifest that truth to the
consciences of others. Missionaries have gone forth with no

VOL. III. II

114 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

other preparation than the simple word of the Testimony, — and
thousands have owned its power, by being both the hearers of
the word and the doers of it also. They have given us the
experiment in a state of tinmingled simplicity ; and we learn,
from the success of their noble example, that without any one
humfcn expedient to charm the ear, the heart may, by the
naked instrumentality of the Word of God, urged with plain
ness on those who feel its deceit and its worthlessness, be
charmed to an entire acquiescence in the revealed way of God,
and have impressed upon it the genuine stamp and character of
godliness.

Could the sense of what is due to God be effectually stirred
up within the human bosom, it would lead to a practical carry
ing of all the lessons of Christianity. Now, to awaken this
moral sense, there are certain simple relations between the
creature and the Creator, which must be clearly apprehended,
and manifested with power unto the conscience. We believe,
that however much philosophers may talk about the compara
tive ease of forming those conceptions which are simple, they
will, if in good earnest after a right footing with God, soon
discover in their own minds, all that darkness and incapacity
about spiritual things, which are so broadly announced to us in
the New Testament. And oh! it is a deeply interesting spec
tacle, to behold a man, who can take a masterly and com
manding survey over the field of some human speculation, who
can clear his discriminated way through all the turns and in
genuities of some human argument, who, by the march of a
mighty and resistless demonstration, can scale with assured
footstep the sublimities of science, and, from his firm stand on
the eminence he has won, can descry some wondrous range of
natural or intellectual truth spread out in subordination before
him : — and yet this very man may, in reference to the moral
and authoritative claims "of the Godhead, be in a state of utter
apathy and blindness ! All his attempts, either at the ^spiritual
discernment, or the practical impression of this doctrine, may
be arrested and baifled by the weight of some great inexplicable
impotency. A man of homely talents, and still homelier edu
cation, may see what he cannot see, and feel what he cannot
feel ; and wise and prudent as he is, there may lie the barrier
of an obstinate and impenetrable concealment, between his
accomplished mind, and those things which are revealed unto
babes.

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 115

But while his mind is thus utterly devoid of what may be
called the main or elemental principle of theology, he may have
a far quicker apprehension, and have his taste and his feelings
much more powerfully interested, than the simple Christian
who is beside him, by what may be called the circumstantials of
theology. He can throw a wider and more rapid glance over
the magnitudes of creation. He can be more delicately alive to
the beauties and the sublimities which abound in it. He can,
when the idea of a presiding God is suggested to him, have a
more kindling sense of His natural majesty, and be able, both
in imagination and in words, to surround the throne of the
Divinity by the blazonry of more great, and splendid, arid
elevating images. And yet, with all those powers of concep
tion which he does possess, he may not possess that on which
practical Christianity hinges. The moral relation between him
and God may neither be effectively perceived, nor faithfully
proceeded on. Conscience may be in a state of the most entire
dormancy, and the man be regaling himself with the magni
ficence of God, while he neither loves God, nor believes God,
nor obeys God.

And here I cannot but remark, how much effect and sim
plicity go together in the annals of Moravianism. The men of
this truly interesting denomination address themselves exclu
sively to that principle of our nature on which the proper
influence of Christianity turns. Or, in other words, they take
up the subject of the gospel message — that message devised by
Him who knew what was in man, and who, therefore, knew
how to make the right and the suitable application to man.
They urge the plain Word of the Testimony : and they pray
for a blessing from on high ; and that thick impalpable veil,
by which the god of this world blinds the hearts of them who
believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should
enter in — that veil, which no power of philosophy can draw
aside, gives way to the demonstration of the Spirit ; and thus
it is, that a clear perception of scriptural truth, and all the
freshness and permanency of its moral influences, are to be met
with among men who have just emerged from the rudest and
the grossest barbarity. When one looks at the number arid the
greatness of their achievements — when he thinks of the change
they have made on materials so coarse and so unpromising
— when he eyes the villages they have formed — and around
the whole of that engaging perspective by which they have

116 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

chequered and relieved the grim solitude of the desert, he wit
nesses the love, and listens to the piety of reclaimed savages ;—
who would not long to be in possession of the charm by which
they have wrought this wondrous transformation — who would
not willingly exchange for it all the parade of human eloquence,
and all the confidence of human argument — and for the wisdom
of winning souls, who is there that would not rejoice to throw
the loveliness of the song, and all the insignificancy of its pass
ing fascinations away from him ?

And yet it is right that every cavil against Christianity should
be met, and every argument for it be exhibited, and all the graces
and sublimities of its doctrine be held out to their merited ad
miration. And if it be true, as it certainly is, that throughout
the whole of this process a man may be carried rejoicingly along
from the mere indulgence of his taste, and the mere play and
exercise of his understanding; while conscience is untouched,
and the supremacy of moral claims upon the heart and the con
duct is practically disowned by him — it is further right ^that this
should be adverted to ; and that such a melancholy unhingement
in the constitution of man should be fully laid open ; and that
he should be driven out of the seductive complacency which he
is so apt to cherish, merely because he delights in the ^ loveliness
of the song ; and that he should be urged with the imperious-
ness of a demand which still remains unsatisfied, to turn him
from the corrupt indifference of nature, and to become personally
a religious man; and that he should be assured how all the
gratification he felt in listening to the word which respected the
kingdom of Grod, will be of no avail, unless that kingdom come
to himself in power — that it will only go to heighten the per
versity of his character — that it will not extenuate his real and
practical ungodliness, but will serve most fearfully to aggravate
its condemnation.

With a religion so argumentable as ours, it ^may be easy to
gather out of it a feast for the human understanding. With a
religion so magnificent as ours, it may be easy to gather put of
it a feast for the human imagination. But with a religion so
humbling, and so strict, and so spiritual, it is not easy to mortify
the pride, or to quell the strong enmity of nature ; or to arrest
the currency of the affections; or to turn the constitutional
habits ; or to pour a new complexion over the moral history ; or
to stem the domineering influence of things seen and things sen
sible ; or to invest faith with a practical supremacy ; or to give

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 117

its objects such a vivacity of influence as shall overpower the
near and the hourly impressions, that are ever emanating upon
man from a seducing world. It is here that man feels himself
treading upon the limit of his helplessness. It is here that he
sees where the strength of nature ends ; and the power of grace
must either be put forth, or leave him to grope his darkling way
without one inch of progress towards the life and the substance
of Christianity. It is here that a barrier rises on the contem
plation of the inquirer — the barrier of separation between the
carnal and the spiritual, and on which he may idly waste the
every energy which belongs to him in the enterprise of surmount
ing it. It is here, that after having walked the round of nature's
acquisitions, and lavished upon the truth all his ingenuities, and
surveyed it in its every palpable character of grace and majesty,
he will still feel himself on a level with the simplest and most
untutored of the species. He needs the power of a living mani
festation. He needs the anointing which remairieth. He needs
that which fixes and perpetuates a stable revolution upon the
character, and in virtue of which he may be advanced from the
state of one who hears and is delighted, to the state of one who
hears and is a doer. How strikingly is the experience even of
vigorous and accomplished nature at one on this point with the
announcements of revelation, that to work this change, there
must be the putting forth of a peculiar agency ; and that it is
an agency, which, withheld from the exercise of loftiest talent,
is often brought down on an impressed audience, through the
humblest of all instrumentality, with the demonstration of the
Spirit and with power.

Think it not enough, that you carry in your bosom an ex
panding sense of the magnificence of creation. But pray for a
subduing sense of the authority of the Creator. Think it not
enough, that with the justness of a philosophical discernment, you
have traced that boundary which hems in all the possibilities of
human attainment, and have found that all beyond it is a dark
and fathomless unknown. But let this modesty of science be
carried, as in consistency it ought, to the question of revelation,
and let all the antipathies of nature be schooled to acquiescence
in the authentic testimonies of the Bible. Think it not enough,
that you have looked with sensibility and wonder at the repre
sentation of God throned in immensity, yet combining, with the
vastness of His entire superintendence, a most thorough inspec
tion into all the minute and countless diversities of existence.

118 SLENDER INFLUENCE OF TASTE

Think of your own heart as one of these diversities ; and that
He ponders all its tendencies ; and has an eye upon all its move
ments ; and marks all its waywardness ; and, God of judgment
as He is, records its every secret and its every sin in the book
of His remembrance. Think it not enough, that you have been
led to associate a grandeur with the salvation of the New Testa
ment, when made to understand that it draws upon it the regards
of an arrested universe. How is it arresting your own mind ?
What has been the earnestness of your personal regards towards
it ? And tell us, if all its faith, and all its repentance, and all
its holiness, are not disowned by you ? Think it not enough,
that you have felt a sentimental charm when angels were pic
tured to your fancy as beckoning you to their mansions, and
anxiously looking to the every symptom of your grace and re
formation. Oh ! be constrained by the power of all this tender
ness, and yield yourselves up in a practical obedience to the call of
the Lord God, merciful and gracious. Think it not enough, that
you have shared for a moment in the deep and busy interest of
that arduous conflict which is now going on for a moral ascen
dency over the species. Eemember that the conflict is for each
of you individually ; and let this alarm you into a watchfulness
against the power of every temptation, and a cleaving depend
ence upon Him through whom alone you will be more than con
querors. Above all, forget not, that while you only hear and
are delighted, you are still under nature's powerlessness and
nature's condemnation — and that the foundation is not laid, the
mighty and essential change is not accomplished, the transition
from death unto life is not undergone, the saving faith is not
formed, nor the passage taken from darkness to the marvellous
light of the gospel, till you are both hearers of the word and
doers also. " For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer,
he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass : for
he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway for-
getteth what manner of man he was."

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITIES.

Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him
unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock ; and the rain descended, and the floods
came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house ; and it fell not : for it was founded
upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall
be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house uyon the sand ; and the raiu descended,

IN MATTERS OF RELIGION. 110

and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house ; and it fell : and great
was the fall of it.— Matt. vii. 24-27.

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes.— Matt. xi. 25.

Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught
in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are : depart from me,
all ye workers of iniquity. — Luke xiii. 26, 27.

For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justi
fied.— Eom. ii. 13.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech, or of wisdom,
declaring unto you the testimony of God : for I determined not to know any thing among
you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And my speech and my preaching was not with
enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power ; that your
faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Now we have re
ceived not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God ; that we might know the
things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words
which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth ; comparing spiritual
things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God;
for they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know them, because they are spiritually
discerned. — 1 Cor. ii. 1, 2, 4, 5, 12-14.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. — 1 Cor. iii. 19.

For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. — 1 Cor. iv. 20.

Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ, ministered by us,
written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God ; not in tables of stone, but in
fleshy tables of the heart. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of
ourselves ; but our sufficiency is of God ; who also hath made us able ministers of the New
Testament ; not of the letter, but of the spirit ; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giving
life.— 2 Cor. iii. 3, 5, 6.

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the Spirit
of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him ; the eyes of your understanding being
enlightened ; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the
glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to
us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power. — Eph. i. 17-19.

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins. — For we are his work
manship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works. — Eph. ii. 1, 10.

For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost,
and in much assurance. — 1 Thess. i. 5.

Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits
of his creatures. But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own
selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding
his natural face in a glass; for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway
forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty,
and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man
shall be blessed in his deed.— James i. 18, 22-25.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people ; that
ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his mar
vellous light.— 1 Pet. ii. 9.

But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. But the anointing
which ye have received of him abideth in you; and ye need not that any man teach you;
but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as
it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.— 1 John ii. 20, 27.

DISCOURSES

ON THE

APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY

TO THE COMMERCIAL AND ORDINARY
AFFAIRS OF LIFE.

123

PREFACE.

THESE Discourses can be regarded in no other light, than as
the fragment of a subject far too extensive to be overtaken
within a compass so narrow. There has only a partial survey
been taken of the morality of the actions that are current among
people engaged in merchandise ; and with regard to the morality
of the affections which stir in their hearts, and give a feverish
and diseased activity to the pursuits of worldly ambition, this
has scarcely been touched upon, save in a very general way ir
the Discourse on the Love of Money.

And yet, in the estimation of every cultivated Christian, this
second branch of the subject should be by far the most interest
ing — as it relates to that spiritual discipline by which the love
of the world is overcome ; and by which all that oppressive
anxiety is kept in check, which the reverses and uncertainties of
business are so apt to inject into the bosom ; and by which the
appetite that urges him who hasteth to be rich is effectually re
strained — so as to make it possible for a man to give his hand to
the duties of his secular occupation, and, at the same time, to
maintain that sacredness of heart which becomes every fleeting
traveller through a scene, all whose pleasures and whose pro
spects are so soon to pass away.

There are two questions of casuistry connected with this part
of the subject, which would demand no small degree of con
sideration. The first relates to the degree in which an affection
for present things, and present interests, ought to be indulged.
And the second is, whether, on the supposition that a desire after
the good things of the present life were reduced down to the
standard of the gospel, there would remain a sufficient impulse
in the world for upholding its commerce, at the rate which
would secure the greatest amount of comfort and subsistence to
its families.

124 PREFACE.

Without offering any demonstration, at present, upon this
matter, we simply state it as our opinion, that, though the whole
business of the world were in the hands of men thoroughly
Christianized, and who, rating wealth according to its real di
mensions on the high scale of eternity, were chastened out of all
their idolatrous regards to it — yet would trade, in these circum
stances, be carried to the extreme limit of its being really pro
ductive or desirable. An affection for riches, beyond what
Christianity prescribes, is not essential to any extension of com
merce that is at all valuable or legitimate ; and, in opposition to
the maxim, that the spirit of enterprise is the soul of commercial
prosperity, do we hold, that it is the excess of this spirit beyond
the moderation of the New Testament, which, pressing on the
natural boundaries of trade, is sure, at length, to visit every
country where it operates with the recoil of all those calamities
which, in the shape of beggared capitalists, and unemployed
operatives, and dreary intervals of bankruptcy and alarm, are
observed to follow a season of overdone speculation.

We have added seven Discourses to those which originally
appeared. In the selection of these we have been guided by
the consideration, that the duty of citizens, and the duty of
Christian philanthropists, and more especially the duty of those
who belong to the humbler classes of society, are at all times
topics of pressing and peculiar interest, in those places where
commerce has assembled together its masses of large and con
tiguous population. The Christianity which is all things to
all men, can adapt its lessons to all the possible varieties of
human life.

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 125

DISCOUKSE I.

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES WHICH MAY EXIST WITHOUT THE INFLUENCE
OF CHRISTIANITY.

" Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever
things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
these things." — PHIL. iv. 8.

THE Apostle, in these verses, makes use of certain terms,
without ever once proposing to advance any definition of their
meaning. He presumes on a common understanding of this,
between himself and the people whom he is addressing. He
presumes that they know what is signified by Truth, and
Justice, and Loveliness, and the other moral qualities which are
included in the enumeration of our text. They, in fact, Lad
words to express them, for many ages antecedent to the coming
of Christianity into the world. Now, the very existence of the
words proves, that, before the gospel was taught, the realities
which they express must have existed also. These good and
respectable attributes of character must have been occasionally
exemplified by men, prior to the religion of the New Testament.
The virtuous and the praiseworthy must, ere the commence
ment of the new dispensation, have been met with in society —
for the Apostle does not take them up in this passage, as if
they were unknown and unheard-of novelties — but such objects
of general recognition, as could be understood on the bare men
tion of them, without warning and without explanation.

But more than this. These virtues must not only have been
exemplified by men previous to the entrance of the gospel
amongst them — seeing that the terms expressive of the virtues
were perfectly understood — but men must have known how to
love and to admire them. How is it that we apply the epithet
'lovely' to any moral qualification, but only in as far as that
qualification does in fact draw towards it a sentiment of love?
How is it that another qualification is said to be of good report,

126 ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

but in as far as it has received from men an applauding or an
honourable testimony ? The Apostle does not bid his readers
have respect to such things as are lovely, and then, for the
purpose of saving them from error, enumerate what the things
are which he conceives to possess this qualification. He commits
the matter, with perfect confidence, to their own sense and their
own apprehension. He bids them bear a respect to whatsoever
things are lovely — nor does he seem at all suspicious, that, by
so doing, he leaves them in any darkness or uncertainty about
the precise import of the advice which he is delivering. He there
fore recognises the competency of men to estimate the lovely
and the honourable of character. He appeals to a tribunal in
their own breasts, and evidently supposes, that, antecedently
to the light of the Christian revelation, there lay scattered
among the species certain principles of feeling and of action, in
virtue of which, they both occasionally exhibited what was just,
and true, and of good report, and also could render to such an
exhibition the homage of their regard and of their reverence.
At present we shall postpone the direct enforcement of these
virtues upon the observation of Christians, and shall confine our
thoughts of them to the object of estimating their precise import
ance and character, when they are realized by those who are
not Christians.

While we assert with zeal every doctrine of Christianity, let
us not forget that there is a zeal without discrimination ; and
that, to bring such a spirit to the defence of our faith, or of any
one of its peculiarities, is not to vindicate the cause, but to
discredit it. Now, there is a way of maintaining the utter
depravity of our nature, and of doing it in such a style of
sweeping and of vehement asseveration, as to render it not
merely obnoxious to the taste, but obnoxious to the understand
ing. On this subject there is often a roundness and a temerity
of announcement, which any intelligent man, looking at the
phenomena of human character with his own eyes, cannot go
along with ; and thus it is, that there are injudicious defenders
of orthodoxy, who have mustered against it not merely a
positive dislike, but a positive strength of observation and argu
ment. Let the nature of man be a ruin, as it certainly is, it is
obvious to the most common discernment, that it does not offer
one unvaried and unalleviated mass of deformity. There are
certain phases, and certain exhibitions of this nature which are
more lovely than others — certain traits of character, not due to

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 127

the operation of Christianity at all, and yet calling forth our
admiration and our tenderness — certain varieties of moral com
plexion, far more fair and more engaging than certain other
varieties ; and to prove that the gospel may have had no share
in the formation of them, they in fact stood out to the notice
and respect of the world before the gospel was ever heard of.
The classic page of antiquity sparkles with repeated exempli
fications of what is bright and beautiful in the character of
man ; nor do all its descriptions of external nature waken up
such an enthusiasm of pleasure, as when it bears testimony to
some graceful or elevated doing out of the history of the species.
And whether it be the kindliness of maternal affection, or the
unweariedness of filial piety, or the constancy of tried and un
alterable friendship, or the earnestness of devoted patriotism, or
the rigour of unbending fidelity, or any other of the recorded
virtues, which shed a glory over the remembrance of Greece,
and of Rome — we fully concede it to the admiring scholar, that
they one and all of them were sometimes exemplified in those
days of heathenism ; and that, out of the materials of a period,
crowded as it was with moral abominations, there may also be
gathered things which are pure, and lovely, and true, and just,
and honest, and of good report.

What do we mean, then, it may be asked, by the universal
depravity of man ? How shall we reconcile the admission now
made, with the unqualified and authoritative language of the
Bible, when it tells us of the totality and the magnitude of
human corruption ? Wherein lies that desperate wickedness,
which is everywhere ascribed to all the men of all the families
that be on the face of the earth ? And how can such a tribute
of acknowledgment be awarded to the sages and the patriots of
antiquity, who yet, as the partakers of our fallen nature, must
be outcasts from the favour of God, and have the character of
evil stamped upon the imaginations of the thoughts of their
hearts continually.

In reply to these questions, let us speak to your own experi
mental recollections on a subject in which you are aided both
by the consciousness of what passes within you, and by your
observation of the character of others. Might not a sense of
honour elevate that heart which is totally unfurnished with a
sense of God ? Might not an impulse of compassionate feeling
l)e sent into that bosom which is never once visited by a move
ment of duteous loyalty towards the Lawgiver in heaven ?

128 ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

Might not occasions of intercourse with the beings around us,
develop whatever there is in our nature of generosity, and
friendship, and integrity, and patriotism ; and yet the unseen
Being, who placed us in this theatre, be neither loved, nor
obeyed, nor listened to ? Amid the manifold varieties of human
character, and the number of constitutional principles which
enter into its composition, might there not be an individual in
whom the constitutional virtues so blaze forth arid have the
ascendency, as to give a general effect of gracefulness to the
whole of this moral exhibition ; and yet, may not that individual
be as unmindful of his God, as if the principles of his constitu
tion had been mixed up in such a different proportion, as to
make him an odious and a revolting spectacle ? In a word,
might not Sensibility shed forth its tears, and Friendship per
form its services, and Liberality impart of its treasure, and
Patriotism earn the gratitude of its country, and Honour main
tain itself entire and untainted, and all the softenings of what is
amiable, and all the glories of what is chivalrous and manly,
gather into one bright effulgency of moral accomplishment on
the person of him who never, for a single day of his life,
subordinates one habit, or one affection, to the will of the
Almighty ; who is just as careless and as unconcerned about
God, as if the native tendencies of his constitution had com
pounded him into a monster of deformity ; and who just as
effectually realizes this attribute of rebellion against his Maker,
as the most loathsome and profligate of the species, that he
walks in the counsel of his own heart, and after the sight of
his own eyes ?

The same constitutional variety may be seen on the lower
fields of creation. You there witness the gentleness of one
animal, the affectionate fidelity of another, the cruel and unre
lenting ferocity of a third ; and you never question the propriety
of the language, when some of these instinctive tendencies are
better reported of than others ; or when it is said of the former
of them, that they are the more fine, and amiable, and endear
ing. But it does riot once occur to you, that, even in the very
best of these exhibitions, there is any sense of God, or that the
great master-principle of His authority is at all concerned in it.
Transfer this contemplation back again to our species ; and
under the same complexional difference of the more and the less
lovely, or the more and the less hateful, you will perceive the
same utter insensibility to the consideration of a God, or the

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 129

same utter inefficiency on the part of His law to subdue human
habits and human inclinations. It is true, that there is one
distinction between the two cases ; but it all goes to aggravate
the guilt and the ingratitude of man. He has an understanding
which the inferior animals have not — and yet, with this under
standing, does he refuse practically to acknowledge God. He
has a conscience, which they have not — arid yet, though it
whisper in the ear of his inner man the claims of an unseen
Legislator, does he lull away his time in the slumbers of indif
ference, and live without Him in the world.

Or go to the people of another planet, over whom the hold of
allegiance to their Maker is unbroken — in whose hearts the
Supreme sits enthroned, and throughout the whole of whose
history there runs the perpetual and the unfailing habit of sub
ordination to His law. It is conceivable, that with them too,
there may be varieties of temper and of natural inclination, and
yet all of them be under the effective control of one great and
imperious principle ; that, in subjection to the will of God,
every kind and every honourable disposition is cherished to the
uttermost ; and that in subjection to the same will, every ten
dency to anger, and malignity, and revenge, is repressed at the
first moment of its threatened operation ; and that, in this way,
there will be the fostering of a constant encouragement given to
the one set of instincts, and the struggling of a constant opposi
tion made against the other. Now, only conceive this great
bond of allegiance to be dissolved ; the mighty and subordinat
ing principle, which wont to wield an ascendency over every
movement and every affection, to be loosened and done away ;
and then would this loyal, obedient world become what ours is
— independent of Christianity. Every constitutional desire would
run out, in the unchecked spontaneity of its own movements.
The law of heaven would furnish no counteraction to the im
pulses and the tendencies of nature. And tell us, in these
circumstances, when the restraint of religion was thus lifted off,
and all the passions let out to take their own tumultuous and
independent career — tell us, if, though amid the uproar of the
licentious and vindictive propensities, there did gleam forth at
times some of the finer and the lovelier sympathies of nature —
tell us, if this would at all affect the state of that world as a
state of enmity against God ; where His will was reduced to an
element of utter insignificancy ; where the voice of their rightful
Master fell powerless on the consciences of a listless and alienated

VOL. III. I

130 ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

family ; where humour, and interest, and propensity — at one
time selfish, and at another social — took their alternate sway
over those hearts from which there was excluded all effectual
sense of an overruling God ? If He be unheeded and disowned
by the creatures whom He has formed, can it be said to alleviate
the deformity of their rebellion, that they, at times, experience
the impulse of some amiable feeling which He hath implanted,
or at times hold out some beauteousness of aspect which He hath
shed over them ? Shall the value or the multitude of the gifts
release them from their loyalty to the Giver ; and when nature
puts herself into the attitude of indifference or hostility against
Him, how is it that the graces and the accomplishments of nature
can be pleaded in mitigation of her antipathy to Him, who in
vested nature with all her graces, and upholds her in the display
of all her accomplishments ?

The way, then, to assert the depravity of man, is to fasten on
the radical element of depravity, and to show how deeply it lies
incorporated with his moral constitution. It is not by an utter
ance of rash and sweeping totality to refuse him the possession of
what is kind in sympathy, or of what is dignified in principle —
for this were in the face of all observation. It is to charge him
direct with his utter disloyalty to God. It is to convict him of
treason against the Majesty of heaven. It is to press home upon
him the impiety of not caring about God. It is to tell him,
that the hourly and habitual language of his heart is, I will not
have the Being who made me to rule over me. It is to go to
the man of honour, and, while we frankly award it to him that
his pulse beats high in the pride of integrity — it is to tell him,
that He who keeps it in living play, and who sustains the
loftiness of its movements, and who, in one moment of time,
could arrest it for ever, is not in all his thoughts. It is to
go to the man of soft and gentle emotions, and, while we gaze
in tenderness upon him, it is to read to him, out of his
own character, how the exquisite mechanism of feeling may
be in full operation, while He who framed it is forgotten ;
while He who poured into his constitution the milk of human
kindness, may never be adverted to with one single senti
ment of veneration, or one single purpose of obedience ; while
He who gave him his gentler nature, who clothed him in all
its adornments, and in virtue of whose appointment it is, that,
instead of an odious and a revolting monster, he is the much-
loved child of sensibility, may be uttered disowned by him. In

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 131

a word, it is to go round among all that Humanity has to offer
in the shape of fair, and amiable, and engaging, and to prove
how deeply Humanity has revolted against that Being who has
done so much to beautify and exalt her. It is to prove that the
carnal mind, under all its varied complexions of harshness or of
delicacy, is enmity against God. It is to prove that, let nature
be as rich as she may in moral accomplishments, and let the
most favoured of her sons realize upon his own person the finest
and the fullest assemblage of them — should he, at the moment
of leaving this theatre of display, and bursting loose from the
framework of mortality, stand in the presence of his Judge, and
have the question put to him, What hast thou done unto me ?
this man of constitutional virtue, with all the salutations he got
upon earth, and all the reverence that he has left behind him,
may, naked arid defenceless before Him who sitteth on the
throne, be left without a plea and without an argument.

God's controversy with our species is not, that the glow of
honour or of humanity is never felt among them. It is, that
none of them understandeth, and none of them seeketh after
God. It is, that He is deposed from His rightful ascendency.
It is, that He, who in fact inserted in the human bosom every
one principle that can embellish the individual possessor, or
maintain the order of society, is banished altogether from the
circle of his habitual contemplations. It is, that man taketh
his way in life as much at random, as if there was no presid
ing Divinity at all ; and that, whether he at one time grovel
in the depths of sensuality, or at another kindle with some
generous movement of sympathy or of patriotism, he is at both
times alike unmindful of Him to whom he owes his continuance
and his birth. It is, that he moves his every footstep at his own
will ; and has utterly discarded, from its supremacy over him,
the will of that invisible Master who compasses all his goings,
and never ceases to pursue him by the claims of a resistless and
legitimate authority. It is this which is the essential or the
constituting principle of rebellion against God. This it is which
has exiled the planet we live in beyond the limits of His favoured
creation — and whether it be shrouded in the turpitude of licen
tiousness or cruelty, or occasionally brightened with the gleam
of the kindly and the honourable virtues, it is thus that it is
seen as afar off, by Him who sitteth on the throne, and looketh
on our strayed world, as athwart a wide and a dreary gulf of
separation.

132 ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

And when prompted by love towards His alienated children,
He devised a way of recalling them — when willing to pass over
all the ingratitude He had gotten from their hands, He reared
a pathway of return, and proclaimed a pardon and a welcome
to all who should walk upon it — when through the offered
Mediator, who magnified His broken law, and upheld, by His
mysterious sacrifice, the dignity of that government which the
children of Adam had disowned, He invited all to come to Him
and be saved — should this message be brought to the door of
the most honourable man upon earth, and he turn in comtempt
and hostility away from it, has not that man posted himself
more firmly than ever on the ground of rebellion ? Though an
unsullied integrity should rest upon all his transactions, and the
homage of confidence and respect be awarded to him from every
quarter of society, has not this man, by slighting the overtures
of reconciliation, just plunged himself the deeper in the guilt of
wilful and determined ungodliness? Has not the creature ex
alted itself above the Creator ; and in the pride of those accom
plishments, which never would have invested his person had
not they come to him from above, has he not, in the act of
resisting the gospel, aggravated the provocation of his whole
previous defiance to the Author of it ?

Thus much for all that is amiable, and for all that is manly,
in the accomplishments of nature, when disjoined from the
faith of Christianity. They take up a separate residence in the
human character from the principle of godliness. Anterior to
this religion, they go not to alleviate the guilt of our departure
from the living God; and subsequently to this religion, they
may blazon the character of him who stands out against it:
but on the principles of a most clear and intelligent equity,
they never can shield him from the condemnation and the
curse of those who have neglected the great salvation.

The doctrine of the New Testament will bear to be confronted
with all that can be met or noticed on the face of human society.
And we speak most confidently, to the experience of many,
when we say, that often, in the course of their manifold trans
actions, have they met the man, whom the bribery of no advan
tage whatever could seduce into the slightest deviation from the
path of integrity — the man, who felt his nature within him put
into a state of the most painful indignancy, at everything that
bore upon it the character of a sneaking or dishonourable arti
fice — the man, who positively could not be at rest under the

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 133

consciousness that he had ever betrayed, even to his own heart,
the remotest symptom of such an inclination — and whom, there
fore, the unaided law of justice and of truth has placed on a
high and deserved eminence in the walks of honourable mer
chandise.

Let us riot withhold from this character the tribute of its most
rightful admiration ; but let us further ask, if, with all that he
thus possessed of native feeling and constitutional integrity,
there was never observed in any such individual an utter empti
ness of religion ; and that God is not in all his thoughts ; and
that, when he does what happens to be at one with the will of
the Lawgiver, it is not because he is impelled to it by a sense of
its being the will of the Lawgiver, but because he is impelled to
it by the working of his own instinctive sensibilities ; and that,
however fortunate or however estimable these sensibilities are,
they still consist with the habit of a mind that is in a state of
total indifference about God ? Have we never read in our own
character, or in the observed character of others, that the claims
of the Divinity may be entirely forgotten by the very man to
whom society around him yield, and rightly yield, the homage
of an unsullied and honourable reputation ; that this man may
have all his foundations in the world ; that every security on
which he rests, and every enjoyment upon which his heart is set,
lieth on this side of death; that a sense of the coming day on
which God is to enter into judgment with him, is, to every pur
pose of practical ascendency, as good as expunged altogether
from his bosom ; that he is far in desire, and far in enjoyment,
and far in habitual contemplation, away from that God who is
not far from any one of us ; that his extending credit, and his
brightening prosperity, and his magnificent retreat from busi
ness, with all the splendour of its accommodations — that these
are the futurities at which he terminates ; and that he goes not
in thought beyond them to that eternity, which, in the flight of
a few little years, will absorb all, and annihilate all? In a
word, have we never observed the man, who, with all that was
right in mercantile principle, and all that was open and unim
peachable in the habit of his mercantile transactions, lived in a
state of utter estrangement from the concerns of immortality?
who, in reference to God, persisted, from one year to another, in
the spirit of a deep slumber ? who, in reference to the man that
tries to awaken him out of his lethargy, recoils, with the most
sensitive dislike, from the faithfulness of his ministrations ?

134 ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

who, in reference to the Book which tells him of his nakedness
and his guilt, never consults it with one practical aim, arid
never tries to penetrate beyond that aspect of mysteriousness
which it holds out to an undiscerning1 world ? who attends not
church, or attends it with all the lit'elessness of a form ? who
reads not his Bible, or reads it in the discharge of a self-pre
scribed and unfruitful task ? who prays not, or prays with the
mockery of an unmeaning observation ? and, in one word, who,
while surrounded by all those testimonies which give to man a
place of moral distinction among his fellows, is living in utter
carelessness about God, and about all the avenues which lead to
Him?

Now, attend for a moment to what that is which the man has,
and to what that is which he has not. He has an attribute of
character which is in itself pure, and lovely, and honourable,
and of good report. He has a natural principle of integrity ;
and under its impulse he may be carried forward to such fine
exhibitions of himself, as are worthy of all admiration. It is
very noble, when the simple utterance of his word carries as
much security along with it, as if he had accompanied that
utterance by the signatures, arid the securities, and the legal
obligations, which are required of other men. It might tempt
one to be proud of his species when he looks at the faith that is
put in him by a distant correspondent, who, without one other
hold of him than his honour, consigns to him the wealth of a
whole flotilla, and sleeps in the confidence that it is safe. It is
indeed an animating thought, amid the gloom of this world's
depravity, when we behold the credit which one man puts in
another, though separated by oceans and by continents ; when
he fixes the anchor of a sure and steady dependence on the re
ported honesty of one whom he never saw ; when, with all his
tears for the treachery of the varied elements, through which his
property has to pass, he knows, that should it only arrive at the
door of its destined agent, all his fears and all his suspicions
may be at an end. We know nothing finer than such an act of
homage from one human being to another, when perhaps the
diameter of the globe is between them ; nor do we think that
either the renown of her victories, or the wisdom of her coun
sels, so signalizes the country in which we live, as does the
honourable dealing of her merchants ; that all the glories of
British policy, and British valour, are far eclipsed by the moral
splendour which British faith has thrown over the name and the

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 135

character of our nation ; nor has she gathered so proud a dis
tinction from all the tributaries of her power, as she has done
from the awarded confidence of those men of all tribes, and
colours, and languages, who look to our agency for the most
faithful of all management, and to our keeping for the most
inviolable of all custody.

There is no denying, then, the very extended prevalence of a
principle of integrity in the commercial world ; and he who has
such a principle within him, has that to which all the epithets of
our text may rightly be appropriated. But it is just as impos
sible to deny, that, with this thing which he has, there may be
another thing which he has not. He may not have one duteous
feeling of reverence which points upward to God. He may not
have one wish, or one anticipation, which points forward to
eternity. He may not have any sense of dependence on the
Being who sustains him ; and who gave him his very prin
ciple of honour, as part of that interior furniture which He has
put into his bosom ; and who surrounded him with the theatre
on which he has come forward with the finest and most illus
trious displays of it ; and who set the whole machinery of
his sentiment and action agoing ; and can, by a single word
of His power, bid it cease from the variety, and cease from
the gracefulness of its movements. In other words, he is a
man of integrity, and yet he is a man of ungodliness. He is
a man born for the confidence and the admiration of his fellows,
and yet a man whom his Maker can charge with utter defection
from all the principles of a spiritual obedience. He is a man
whose virtues have blazoned his own character in time, and have
upheld the interests of society, and yet a man who has not, by
one movement of principle, brought himself nearer to the king
dom of heaven, than the most profligate of the species. The
condemnation, that he is an alien from God, rests upon him in
all the weight of its unmitigated severity. The threat, that
they who forget God shall be turned into hell, will, on the great
day of its fell and sweeping operation, involve him among the
wretched outcasts of eternity. That God from whom, while in
the world, he withheld every due offering of gratitude, and re
membrance, and universal subordination of habit and of desire,
will show him to his face, how, under the delusive garb of such
sympathies as drew upon him the love of his acquaintances, and
of such integrities as drew upon him their respect and their
confidence, he was in fact a determined rebel against the autho-

136 ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

rity of Heaven ; that not one commandment of the law, in the
true extent of its interpretation, was ever fulfilled by him ; that
the pervading principle of obedience to this law, which is love
to God, never had its ascendency over him ; that the beseech
ing voice of the Lawgiver, so offended and so insulted — but who,
nevertheless, devised in love a way of reconciliation for the
guilty, never had the effect of recalling him ; that, in fact, he
neither had a wish for the friendship of God, nor cherished the
hope of enjoying Him — and that, therefore, as he lived with
out hope, so he lived without God in the world ; finding all his
desire, and all his sufficiency, to be somewhere else than in that
favour which is better than life ; and so, in addition to the
curse of having continued not in all the words of the book of
God's law to do them, entailing upon himself the mighty aggra
vation of having neglected all the offers of His gospel.

We say, then, of this natural virtue, what our Saviour said of
the virtue of the Pharisees, many of whom were not extortioners,
as other men — that verily it hath its reward. When disjoined
from a sense of God, it is of no religious estimation whatever ;
nor will it lead to any religious blessing, either in time or in
eternity. It has, however, its enjoyments annexed to it, just as
a fine taste has its enjoyments annexed to it ; and in these is it
abundantly rewarded. It is exempted from that painfuiness of
inward feeling which nature has annexed to every act of depar
ture from honesty. It is sustained by a conscious sense of recti
tude and elevation. It is gratified by the homage of society ;
the members of which are ever ready to award the tribute of
acknowledgment to those virtues that support the interests of
society. And, finally, it may be said, that prosperity, with some
occasional variations, is the general accompaniment of that credit,
which every man of undeviating justice is sure to draw around
him. But what reward, will you tell us, is due to him on the
great day of the manifestation of God's righteousness, when, in
fact, he has done nothing unto God? What recompence can be
awarded to him out of those books which are then to be opened,
and in which he stands recorded as a man overcharged with the
guilt of spiritual idolatry? How shall God grant unto him the
reward of a servant, when the service of God was not the prin
ciple of his doings in the world ; and when neither the justice he
rendered to others, nor the sensibility that he felt for them, bore
the slightest character of an offering to his Maker?

But wherever the religious principle has taken possession of

ON THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES. 137

the mind, it animates these virtues with a new spirit ; and when
so animated, all such things as are pure, and lovely, and just,
and true, and honest, and of good report, have a religious import
ance and character belonging to them. The text forms part of
an epistle addressed to all the saints in Christ Jesus, which were
at Philippi ; and the lesson of the text is matter of direct and
authoritative enforcement, on all who are saints in Christ Jesus,
at the present day. Christianity, with the weight of its positive
sanctions on the side of what is amiable and honourable in human
virtue, causes such an influence to rest on the character of its
genuine disciples, that, on the ground both of inflexible justice
and ever-breathing charity, they are ever sure to leave the vast
majority of the world behind them. Simplicity and godly sin
cerity form essential ingredients of that peculiarity by which they
stand signalized in the midst of an ungodly generation. The
true friends of the gospel, tremblingly alive to the honour of
their Master's cause, blush for the disgrace that has been brought
on it by men who keep its Sabbaths, and yield an ostentatious
homage to its doctrines and its sacraments. They utterly dis
claim all fellowship with that vile association of cant and of
duplicity, which has sometimes been exemplified, to the triumph
of the enemies of religion ; and they both feel the solemn truth,
arid act on the authority of the saying, that neither thieves, nor
liars, nor extortioners, nor unrighteous persons, have any part
in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

138 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

DISCOUKSE II.

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY IN AIDING AND AUGMENTING
THE MERCANTILE VIRTUES.

*' For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God and approved of men." —
ROM. xir. 18.

WE have already asserted the natural existence of such prin
ciples in the heart of man, as lead him to many graceful and to
many honourable exhibitions of character. We have further
asserted, that this formed no deduction whatever from that article
of orthodoxy, which affirms the utter depravity of our nature ;
that the essence of this depravity lies in man having broken
loose from the authority of God, and delivered himself wholly
up to the guidance of his own inclinations ; that though some of
these inclinations are in themselves amiable features of human
character, and point in their effects to what is most useful to
human society, yet devoid as they all are of any reference to the
will and to the rightful sovereignty of the Supreme Being, they
could not avert, or even so much as alleviate, that charge of
ungodliness, which may be fully carried round amongst all the
sons and daughters of the species ; that they furnish not the
materials of any valid or satisfactory answer to the question,
" What hast thou done unto God?" and that whether they are
the desires of a native rectitude, or the desires of an instinctive
benevolence, they go not to purge away the guilt of having
no love, and no care, for the Being who formed and who sus
tains us.

But what is more. If the virtues and accomplishments of
nature are at all to be admitted into the controversy between
God and man, instead of forming any abatement upon the
enormity of our guilt, they stamp upon it the reproach of a still
deeper and more determined ingratitude. Let us conceive it
possible, for a moment, that the beautiful personifications of
Scripture were all realized ; that the trees of the forest clapped
their hands unto God, and that the isles were glad at His pre-

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 139

sence ; that the little hills shouted on every side, and the valleys
covered over with corn sent forth their notes of rejoicing ; that the
sun and the moon praised Him, and the stars of light joined in
the solemn adoration ; that the voice of glory to God was heard
from every mountain and from every waterfall, and that all na
ture, animated throughout by the consciousness of a pervading
and a presiding Deity, burst into one loud and universal song of
gratnlation. Would not a strain of greater loftiness be heard to
ascend from those regions where the all-working God had left
the traces of His own immensity, than from the tamer and the
humbler scenery of an ordinary landscape ? Should not we look
for a gladder acclamation from the fertile field, than from the
arid waste, where no character of grandeur made up for the
barrenness that was around us? Would not the goodly tree,
compassed about with the glories of its summer foliage, lift up
an anthem of louder gratitude than the lowly shrub that grew
beneath it ? Would not the flower, from whose leaves every hue
of loveliness was reflected, send forth a sweeter rapture than the
russet weed, which never drew the eye of any admiring passen
ger? And, in a word, wherever we saw the towering eminences
of nature, or the garniture of her more rich and beauteous adorn
ments, would it not be there that we looked for the deepest tones
of devotion, or there for the tenderest and most exquisite of its
melodies ?

There is both the sublime of character and the beauteous of
character exemplified upon man. We have the one in that high
sense of honour, which no interest and no terror can seduce from
any of its obligations. We have the other in that kindliness of
feeling, which one look or one sigh of imploring distress can
touch into liveliest sympathy. Only grant, that we have nothing
either in the constitution of our spirits, or in the structure of our
bodies, which we did not receive ; and that mind, with all its
varieties, is as much the product of a creating hand, as matter
in all its modifications ; and then, on the face of human society,
do we witness all the gradations of a moral scenery, which may
be directly referred to the operation of Him who worketh all in
all. It is our belief, that, as to any effectual sense of God, there
is as deep a slumber throughout the whole of this world's living
and rational generations, as there is throughout all the diversities
of its mute and unconscious materialism ; and that to make our
alienated spirits again alive unto the Father of them, calls for
as distinct and as miraculous an exertion of the Divinity, as

140 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

would need to be put forth in the act of turning stones into the
children of Abraham. Conceive this to be done, then — and that
a quickening and a realizing sense of the Deity pervaded all the
men of our species — and that each knew how to refer his own
endowments, with an adequate expression of gratitude to the
unseen author of them — from whom, we ask, of all these various
individuals, should we look for the hallelujahs of devoutest
ecstasy ? Would it not be from him whom God had arrayed in
the splendour of nature's brightest accomplishments ? Would
it not be from him, with whose constitutional feelings the move
ments of honour and benevolence were in fullest harmony ?
Would it not be from him whom his Maker had cast into the
happiest mould, and attempered into sweetest unison with all
that was kind, and generous, and lovely, and ennobled by the
loftiest emotions, arid raised above his fellows into the finest
spectacle of all that was graceful, and all that was manly?
Surely, if the possession of these moralities be just another
theme of acknowledgment to the Lord of the spirits of all flesh,
then, if the acknowledgment be withheld, and these moralities
have taken up their residence in the bosom of him who is utterly
devoid of piety, they go to aggravate the reproach of his ingrati
tude ; and to prove, that, of all the men upon earth who are far
from God, he stands at the widest distance, he remains proof
against the weightiest claims, and he, of the dead in trespasses
and sins, is the most profoundly asleep to the call of religion,
and to the supremacy of its righteous obligations.

It is by argument such as this, that we would attempt to
convince of sin those who have a righteousness that is without
godliness ; and to prove, that, with the possession of such
things as are pure, and lovely, and honest, and of good report,
they in fact can only be admitted to reconciliation with God, on
the same footing with the most worthless and profligate of the
species ; and to demonstrate, that they are in the very same
state of need and of nakedness, and are therefore children of
wrath, even as others ; that it is only through faith in the
preaching of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ that they can
be saved ; arid that, unless brought down from the delusive
eminency of their own conscious attainments, they take their
forgiveness through the blood of the Redeemer, and their sanc-
tification through the Spirit which is at His giving, they shall
obtain no part in that inheritance which is incorruptible, and
undetiled, and which fadeth not away.

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 141

But the gospel of Jesus Christ does something more than
hold out a refuge to the guilty. It takes all those who accept
of its overtures under its supreme and exclusive direction. It
keeps by them in the way of counsel, and exhortation, and
constant superintendence. The grace which it reveals, is a
grace which not merely saves all men, but which teaches all
men. He who is the proposed Saviour, also claims to be the
alone Master of those who put their trust in Him. His cogni
sance extends itself over the whole line of their history ; and
there is not an affection of their heart, or a deed of their visible
conduct, over which He does not assert the right of an authority
that is above all control, and that refuses all rivalship.

Now, we want to point attention to a distinction which
obtains between one set and another set of His requirements.
By the former, we are enjoined to practise certain virtues,
which, separately from His injunction altogether, are in great
demand, and in great reverence, amongst the members of society
— such as compassion, arid generosity, and justice, and truth ;
which, independently of the religious sanction they obtain from
the law of the Saviour, are in themselves so lovely, and so
honourable, and of such good report, that they are ever sure to
carry general applause along with them, and thus to combine
both the characteristics of our text — that he who in these
things serveth Christ, is both acceptable to God, and approved
of men.

But there is another set of requirements, where the will of
God, instead of being seconded by the applause of men, is utterly
at variance with it. There are some who can admire the
generous sacrifices that are made to truth or to friendship, but
who, without one opposing scruple, abandon themselves to all
the excesses of riot and festivity, and are therefore the last to
admire the puritanic sobriety of him whom they cannot tempt
to put his chastity or his temperance away from him ; though
the same God, who bids us lie not one to another, also bids us
keep the body under subjection, and to abstain from fleshly lusts,
which war against the soul. Again, there are some in whose
eyes an unvitiated delicacy looks a beauteous and an interesting
spectacle, and an undeviating self-control looks a manly and
respectable accomplishment ; but who have no taste in them
selves, and no admiration in others, for the more direct exercises
of religion ; and who positively hate the strict and unbending
preciseness of those who join in every ordinance, and on every

142 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

returning night celebrate the praises of God in their family;
and that, though the heavenly Lawgiver, who tells us to live
righteously and soberly, tells us also to live godly in the
present evil world. And lastly, there are some who have not
merely a toleration, but a liking for all the decencies of an
established observation ; but who, with the homage they pay to
sabbaths and to sacraments, nauseate the Christian principle in
the supreme and regenerating vitality of its influences ; who,
under a general religiousness of aspect, are still in fact the
children of the world — and therefore hate the children of light
in all that is peculiar and essentially characteristic of that high
designation ; who understand not what is meant by having our
conversation in heaven : and, utter strangers to the separated
walk, and the spiritual exercises, and the humble devotedness,
and the consecrated affections, of the new creature in Jesus
Christ, shrink from them altogether as from the extravagancies
of a fanaticism in which they have no share, and with which
they can have no sympathy — and all this, though the same
scripture which prescribes the exercises of household and of
public religion, lays claim to an undivided authority over all
the desires and affections of the soul; and will admit of no
compromise between God and the world ; and insists upon an
utter deadness to the one, and a most vehement sensibility to
the other ; and elevates the standard of loyalty to the Father
of our spirits, to the lofty pitch of loving Him with all our
strength, and of doing all things to His glory.

Let these examples serve to impress a real and experimental
distinction which obtains between two sets of virtues ; between
those which possess the single ingredient of being approved by
God, while they want the ingredient of being also acceptable
unto men — and those which possess both these ingredients, and
to the observance of which, therefore, we may be carried by a
regard to the will of God, without any reference to the opinion
of men — or by a regard to the opinion of men, without any
reference to the will of God. Among the first class of virtues
we would assign a foremost place to all those inward and
spiritual graces which enter into the obedience of the affections
— highly approved of God, but not at all acceptable to the
general taste, or carrying along with them the general con
geniality of the world. And then, though they do not possess
the ingredient of God's approbation in a way so separate and
unmixed, we would say, that abstinence from profane language,

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 143

and attendance upon church, and a strict keeping of the
Sabbath, and the exercises of family worship, and the more
rigid degrees of sobriety, and a fearful avoidance of every en
croachment on temperance or chastity, rank more appropriately
with the first than with the second class of virtues j for though
there be many in society who have no religion, and yet to
whom several of these virtues are acceptable, yet we must
allow, that they do not convey such a universal popularity
along with them, as certain other virtues which belong indis
putably to the second class. These are the virtues which have
a more obvious and immediate bearing on the interest of society
— such as the truth which is punctual to all its engagements,
and the honour which never disappoints the confidence it has
inspired, and the compassion which cannot look unmoved at
any of the symptoms of human wretchedness, and the generosity
which scatters unsparingly around it. These are virtues which
God has enjoined, and in behalf of which man lifts the testi
mony of a loud and ready admiration — virtues in which there is
a meeting and a combining of both the properties of our text ;
so that he who in these things serveth Christ, is both approved
of God and acceptable unto men.

Let a steady hold be kept of this distinction, and it will be
found capable of being turned to a very useful application, both
to the object of illustrating principle, and to the important
object of detecting character. For this purpose, let us carry
the distinction along with us, and make it subservient to the
establishment of two or three successive observations.

First. A man may possess, to a considerable extent, the
second class of virtues, and not possess so much as one iota of
the religious principle ; and that, among other reasons, because
a man may feel a value for one of the attributes which belongs
to this class of virtues, and have no value whatever for the
other attribute. If justice be both approved by God, and
acceptable to men, he may, on the latter property alone, be
induced to the strictest maintenance of this virtue — and that
without suffering its former property to have any practical in
fluence whatever on any of his habits, or any of his determina
tions : and the same with every other virtue belonging to this
second class. As residing in his character, there may not be
the ingredient of godliness in any one of them. He may be
well reported on account of them by men ; but with God he
may lie under as fearful a severity of reckoning, as if he wanted

144 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

them altogether. Surely, it does not go to alleviate the with-
drawment of your homage from God, that you have such an
homage to the opinion of men, as influences you to do things,
to the doing of which the law of God is not able to influence
you. It cannot be said to palliate the revolting of your inclina
tions from the Creator, that you have transferred them all to
the creature; and given an ascendency to the voice of human
reputation, which you have refused to the voice and authority
of your Lawgiver in heaven. Your want of subordination to
Him is surely not made up by the respectful subordination that
you render to the taste or the judgment of society. And in
addition to this, we would have you to remember, that though
other constitutional principles, besides a regard to the opinion
of others, helped to form the virtues of the second class upon
your character ; though compassion, and generosity, and truth,
would have broken out into full and flourishing display upon
you, and that just because you had a native sensibility or a
native love of rectitude ; yet, if the first ingredient be wanting,
if a regard to the approbation of God have no share in the
production of the moral accomplishment — then all the morality
you can pretend to, is of as little religious estimation,- and is as
utterly disconnected with the rewards of religion, as all the
elegance of taste you can pretend to, or all the raptured love of
music you can pretend to, or all the vigour and dexterity of bodily
exercises you can pretend to. All these, in reference to the
great question of immortality, profit but little ; and it is godli
ness alone that is profitable unto all things. It is upon this
consideration that we would have you to open your eyes to the
nakedness of your condition in the sight of God ; to look to the
full weight of the charge that He may prefer against you ; to
estimate the fearful extent of the deficiency under which you
labour ; to resist the delusive whispering of peace, when there
is no peace ; and to understand, that the wrath of God abideth
on every child of nature, however rich he may be in the virtues
and accomplishments of nature.

But again. This view of the distinction between the two
sets of virtues, will serve to explain how it is, that, in the act
of turning unto God, the one class of them appears to gather
more copiously, and more conspicuously, upon the front of a
renewed character, than the other class; how it is, that the
former wear a more unequivocal aspect of religiousness than the
latter ; how it is, that an air of gravity, and decency, and

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 145

seriousness, looks to be more in alliance with sanctity, than the
air either of open integrity, or of smiling benevolence ; how it
is, that the most ostensible change in the habit of a converted
profligate, is that change in virtue of which he withdraws him
self from the companions of his licentiousness ; and that to re
nounce the dissipations of his former life, stands far more fre
quently, or at least far more visibly, associated with the act of
putting on Christianity, than to renounce the dishonesties of his
former life. It is true, that by the law of the gospel, he is laid
as strictly under the authority of the commandment to live
righteously, as of the commandment to live soberly. But there
is a compound character in those virtues which are merely
social ; and the presence of the one ingredient serves to throw
into the shade, or to disguise altogether, the presence of the
other ingredient. There is a greater number of irreligious men,
who are at the same time just in their dealings, than there is of
irreligious men, who are at the same time pure and temperate
in their habits ; and therefore it is, that justice, even the most
scrupulous, is not so specifical, and, of course, not so satisfying a
mark of religion, as is a sobriety that is rigid and inviolable.
And all this helps to explain how it is, that when a man comes
under the power of religion, to abandon the levities of his past
conduct is an event which stands far more noticeably out upon
him, at this stage of his history, than to abandon the iniquities
of his past conduct ; that the most characteristic transformation
which takes place at such a time, is a transformation from
thoughtlessness, and from licentious gaiety, and from the festive
indulgences of those with whom he wont to run to all those ex
cesses of riot, of which the Apostle says, that " they which do
these things shall not inherit the kingdom of God :" for even
then, and in the very midst of all his impiety, he may have
been kind-hearted, and there might be no room upon his person
for a visible transformation from inhumanity of character ; even
then, he may have been honourable, and there might be as little
room for a visible transformation from fradulency of character.

Thirdly. Nothing is more obvious than the antipathy that is
felt by a certain class of religionists against the preaching of
good works ; and the antipathy is assuredly well and warrant-
ably grounded, when it is such a preaching as goes to reduce the
importance, or to infringe upon the simplicity, of the great doc
trine of justification by faith. But along with this, may there
not be remarked the toleration with which they will listen to a

VOL. III. K

146 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

discourse upon one set of good works, and the evident coldness
and dislike with which they listen to a discourse on another set
of them ; how a pointed remonstrance against sabbath-breaking
sounds in their ears, as if more in character from the pulpit,
than a pointed remonstrance against the commission of theft, or
the speaking of evil ; how a eulogium on the observance of
family worship feels, in their taste, to be more impregnated with
the spirit of sacredness, than a eulogium on the virtues of the
shop or of the market-place, and that, while the one is approven
of as having about it the solemn and the suitable characteristics
of godliness, the other is stigmatized as a piece of barren, heart
less, heathenish, and philosophic morality ? Now, this antipathy
to the preaching of the latter species of good works has some
thing peculiar in it. It is not enough to say, that it arises from
a sensitive alarm about the stability of the doctrine of justifica
tion ; for let it be observed, that this doctrine stands opposed
to the merit not of one particular class of performances, but to
the merit of all performances whatsoever. It is just as un-
scriptural a detraction from the great truth of salvation by faith,
to rest our acceptance with God on the duties of prayer, or of
rigid Sabbath-keeping, or of strict and untainted sobriety, as to
rest it on the punctual fulfilment of all our bargains, and on the
extent of our manifold liberalities. It is not, then, a mere zeal
about the great article of justification which lies at the bottom
of that peculiar aversion that is felt towards a sermon on some
social or humane accomplishment ; and that is not felt towards
a sermon on sober-mindedness, or a sermon on the observation
of the sacrament, or a sermon on any of those performances which
bear a more direct and exclusive reference to God. We shall find
the explanation of this phenomenon, which often presents itself
in the religious world, in that distinction of which we have just
required that it should be kept in steady hold, and followed into
its various applications. The aversion in question is often, in fact,
a, well-founded aversion to a topic which, though religious in the
matter of it, may, from the way in which it is proposed, be alto
gether secular in the principle of it. It is resistance to what is
deemed, and justly deemed, an act of usurpation on the part of
certain virtues, which, when unanimated by a sentiment of god
liness, are entitled to no place whatever in the ministrations of
the gospel of Christ. It proceeds from a most enlightened fear,
lest that should be held to make up the whole of religion, which
is in fact utterly devoid of the spirit of religion ; and from a true

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 147

and tender apprehension, lest, on the possession of certain accom
plishments, which secure a fleeting credit throughout the little
hour of this world's history, deluded man should look forward to
his eternity with hope, and upward to his God with complacency
— while he carries not on his forehead one vestige of the cha
racter of heaven, one lineament of the aspect of godliness.

And lastly. The first class of virtues bear the character of
religiousness more strongly, just because they bear that charac
ter more singly. The people who are without, might, no doubt,
see in every real Christian the virtues of the second class also ;
but these virtues do not belong to them peculiarly and exclu
sively. For though it be true, that every religious man must
be honest, the converse does not follow, that every honest man
must be religious. And it is because the social accomplishments
do not form the specific, that neither do they form the most
prominent and distinguishing marks of Christianity. They may
also be recognised as features in the character of men who
utterly repudiate the whole style and doctrine of the New Tes
tament ; and hence a very prevalent impression in society, that
the faith of the gospel does not bear so powerfully and so directly
on the relative virtues of human conduct. A few instances of
hypocrisy amongst the more serious professors of our faith, serve
to rivet the impression, and to give it perpetuity in the world.
One single example, indeed, of sanctimonious duplicity, will
suffice, in the judgment of many, to cover the whole of vital and
orthodox Christianity with disgrace. The report of it will be
borne in triumph amongst the companies of the irreligious. The
man who pays no homage to sabbaths or to sacraments, will be
contrasted in the open, liberal, and manly style of all his trans
actions, with the low cunning of this drivelling methodistical
pretender ; and the loud laugh of a multitude of scorners will
give a force and a swell to this public outcry against the whole
character of the sainthood.

Now, this delusion on the part of the unbelieving world is
very natural, and ought not to excite our astonishment. We are
not surprised, from the reasons already adverted to, that the truth,
and the justice, and the humanity, and the moral loveliness, which
do in fact belong to every new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord,
should miss their observation ; or, at least, fail to be recognised
among the other more obvious characteristics into which believers
have been translated by the faith of the gospel. But, on this very
subject, there is a tendency to delusion on the part of the dis-

148 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

ciples of the faith. They need to be reminded of the solemn
and indispensable religiousness of the second class of virtues.
They need to be told, that though these virtues do possess the
one ingredient of being approved by men, and may, on this
single account, be found to reside in the characters of those who
live without God — yet, that they also possess the other ingredi
ent, of being acceptable unto God ; and, on this latter account,
should be made the subject of their most strenuous cultivation.
They must not lose sight of the one ingredient in the other ; or
stigmatize, as so many fruitless and insignificant moralities, those
virtues which enter as component parts into the service of
Christ ; so that he who in these things serveth Christ, is both
acceptable to God, and approved by men. They must not ex
pend all their warmth on the high and peculiar doctrines of the
New Testament, while they offer a cold and reluctant admission
to the practical duties of the New Testament. The Apostle^has
bound the one to the other by a tie of immediate connexion :
" Wherefore, lie not one to another, as ye have put off the old
man with his deeds, and put on the new man, which is formed
after the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness."
Here the very obvious and popular accomplishment of truth is
grafted on the very peculiar doctrine of regeneration : and we
altogether mistake the kind of transforming influence which the
faith of the gospel brings along with it, if we think that up
rightness of character does not emerge at the same time with
godliness of character ; or that the virtues of society do not form
upon the believer into as rich and varied an assemblage, as do
the virtues of the sanctuary, or that, while he puts on those
graces which are singly acceptable to God, he falls behind in any
of those graces which are both acceptable to God, and approved
of men.

Let, therefore, every pretender to Christianity vindicate this as
sertion by his own personal history in the world. Let him not lay
his godliness aside, when he is done with the morning devotion
of his family ; but carry it abroad with him, and make it his
companion and his guide through the whole business of the
day ; always bearing in his heart the sentiment, that Thou God
seest me ! and remembering, that there is not one hour that can
flow, or one occasion that can cast up, where His law is not
present with some imperious exaction or other. It is false, that
the principle of Christian sanctification possesses no influence
over the familiarities of civil and ordinary life. It is altogether

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 149

false, that godliness is a virtue of such a lofty and monastic
order, as to hold its dominion only over the solemnities of wor
ship, or over the solitudes of prayer and spiritual contemplation.
If it be substantially a grace within us at all, it will give a
direction and a colour to the whole of our path in society.
There is not one conceivable transaction, amongst all the mani
fold varieties of human employment, which it is not fitted to
animate by its spirit. There is nothing that meets us too
homely to be beyond the reach of obtaining, from its influence,
the stamp of something celestial. It offers to take the whole
man under its ascendency, and to subordinate all his movements :
nor does it hold the place which rightfully belongs to it, till it
be vested with a presiding authority over the entire system of
human affairs. And therefore it is, that the preacher is not
bringing down Christianity — he is only sending it abroad over
the field of its legitimate operation, when he goes with it to
your counting-houses, and there rebukes every selfish inclina
tion that would carry you ever so little within the limits of
fraudulency ; when he enters into your chambers of agency, and
there detects the character of falsehood, which lurks under all
the plausibility of your multiplied and excessive charges ; when
he repairs to the crowded market-place, and pronounces of every
bargain, over which truth, in all the strictness of quakerism,
has riot presided, that it is tainted with moral evil ; when he
looks into your shops, and, in listening to the contest of argu
ment between him who magnifies his article, and him who
pretends to undervalue it, he calls it the contest of avarice,
broken loose from the restraints of integrity. He is not, by all
this, vulgarizing religion, or giving it the hue and the character
of earthliness. He is only asserting the might and the uni
versality of its sole pre-eminence over man. And therefore it
is, that, if possible to solemnize his hearers to the practice of
simplicity and godly sincerity in their dealings, he would try to
make the odiousness of sin stand visibly out on every shade and
modification of dishonesty ; and to assure them, that if there be
a place in our world, where the subtle evasion, and the dexter
ous imposition, arid the sly but gainful concealment, and the
report which misleads an inquirer, and the gloss which tempts
the unwary purchaser — are not only currently practised in the
walks of merchandise, but, when not carried forward to the glare
and the literality of falsehood, are beheld with general conniv
ance ; if there be a place where the sense of morality has thus

150 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

fallen, and all the nicer delicacies of conscience are overborne in
the keen and ambitious rivalry of men hastening to be rich, arid
wholly given over to the idolatrous service of the God of this
world — then that is the place, the smoke of whose iniquity rises
before Him who sitteth on the throne, in a tide of deepest and
most revolting abomination.

And here we have to complain of the public injustice that is
done to Christianity, when one of its ostentatious professors has
acted the hypocrite, and stands in disgraceful exposure before
the eyes of the world. We advert to the readiness with which
this is turned into a matter of general impeachment, against
every appearance of seriousness ; and how loud the exclamation
is against the religion of all who signalize themselves; and that,
if the aspect of godliness be so very decided as to become an aspect
of peculiarity, then is this peculiarity converted into a ground
of distrust and suspicion against the bearer of it. Xow, it so
happens, that, in the midst of this world lying in wickedness, a
man, to be a Christian at all, must signalize himself. Neither
is he in a way of salvation, unless he be one of a very peculiar
people ; nor would we precipitately consign him to discredit,
even though the peculiarity be so very glaring as to provoke
the charge of methodism. But, instead of making one man's
hypocrisy act as a drawback upon the reputation of a thousand,
we submit, if it would not be a fairer and more philosophical
procedure, just to betake one's-self to the method of induction
— to make a walking survey over the town, and record an in
ventory of all the men in it who are so very far gone as to have
the voice of psalms in their family ; or as to attend the meetings
of fellowship for prayer ; or as scrupulously to abstain from all
that is questionable in the amusements of the world ; or as, by
any other marked and visible symptom whatever, to stand out
to general observation as the members of a saintly and separated
society. We know, that even of such there are a few, who, if
Paul were alive, would move him to weep for the reproach they
bring upon his Master. But we also know, that the blind and
impetuous world exaggerates the few into the many ; inverts the
process of atonement altogether, by laying the sins of one man
upon the multitude ; looks at their general aspect of sanctity,
and is so engrossed with this single expression of character,
as to be insensible to the noble uprightness and the tender
humanity with which this sanctity is associated. And there
fore it is that we offer the assertion, and challenge all to its

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 151

most thorough and searching investigation, that the Christianity
of these people, which many think does nothing but cant, and
profess, and run after ordinances, has augmented their honesties
and their liberalities, and that tenfold beyond the average
character of society ; that these are the men we oftenest meet
with in the mansions of poverty — and who look with the most
wakeful eye over all the sufferings and necessities of our species
— and who open their hand most widely in behalf of the im
ploring and the friendless — and to whom, in spite of all their
mockery, the men of the world are sure, in the negotiations of
business, to award the readiest confidence — and who sustain the
most splendid part in all those great movements of philanthropy
which bear on the general interests of mankind — and who, with
their eye full upon eternity, scatter the most abundant blessings
over the fleeting pilgrimage of time — and who, while they hold
their conversation in heaven, do most enrich the earth we
tread upon, with all those virtues which secure enjoyment to
families, and uphold the order and prosperity of the common
wealth.

152 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

DISCOURSE III.

TUB POWER OF SELFISHNESS IN PROMOTING THE HONESTJE3
OF MERCANTILE INTERCOURSE.

" And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye ? for sinners
also do even the same." — LUKE vi. 33.

IT is to be remarked of many of those duties, tlie performance
of which confers the least distinction upon an individual, that
they are at the same time the very duties, the violation of which
would confer upon him the largest measure of obloquy and dis
grace. Truth and justice do not serve to elevate a man so
highly above the average morality of his species, as would
generosity, or ardent friendship, or devoted and disinterested
patriotism. The former are greatly more common than the
latter ; and, on that account, the presence of them is not so cal
culated to signalize the individual to whom they belong. But
that is one account, also, why the absence of them would make
him a more monstrous exception to the general run of character
in society. And, accordingly, while it is true that there are
more men of integrity in the world than there are men of very
wide and liberal beneficence — it is also true, that one act of
falsehood, or one act of dishonesty, would stamp a far more
burning infamy on the name of a transgressor; than any defect
in those more heroic charities and extraordinary virtues of which
humanity is capable.

So it is far more disgraceful not to be just to another, than not
to be kind to him; and, at the same time, an act of kindness may
be held in higher positive estimation than an act of justice. The
one is my right — nor is there any call for the homage of a parti
cular testimony when it is rendered. The other is additional to
my right — the offering of a spontaneous good-will, which I had
no title to exact ; and which, therefore, when rendered to me,
excites in my bosom the cordiality of a warmer acknowledgment.
And yet our Saviour, who knew what was in man, saw that
much of the apparent kindness of nature was resolvable into

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 153

the real selfishness of nature ; that much of the good done unto
others, was done in the hope that these others would do some
thing again. And, we believe, it would be found by an able
analyst of the human character, that this was the secret but
substantial principle of many of the civilities and hospitalities
of ordinary intercourse — that if there were no expectation either
of a return in kind, or of a return in gratitude, or of a return in
popularity, many of the sweetening and cementing virtues of a
neighbourhood would be practically done away — all serving to
prove, that a multitude of virtues, which, in effect, promoted the
comfort and the interest of others, were tainted in principle by
a latent regard to one's own interest ; and that thus being the
fellowship of those who did good, either as a return for the good
done unto them, or who did good in hope of such a return, it
might be, in fact, what our Saviour characterizes it in the text
— the fellowship of sinners.

But if to do that which is unjust, is still more disgraceful
than not to do that which is kind, it would prove all the more
strikingly how deeply sin had tainted the moral constitution of
our species — could it be shown, that the great practical restraint
on the prevalence of this more disgraceful thing in society, is
the tie of that common selfishness which actuates and character
izes all its members. It were a curious but important question,
were it capable of being resolved — if men did not feel it their
interest to be honest, how much of the actual doings of honesty
would still be kept up in the world ? It is our own opinion of
the nature of man, that it has its honourable feelings, and its
instinctive principles of rectitude, and its constitutional love of
truth and of integrity ; and that, on the basis of these, a- certain
portion of uprightness would remain amongst us, without the
aid of any prudence, or any calculation whatever. All this we
have fully conceded ; and have already attempted to demon
strate, that, in spite of it, the character of man is thoroughly
pervaded by the very essence of sinfulness ; because, with all the
native virtues which adorn it, there adheres to it that foulest of
all spiritual deformities — unconcern about God, and even anti
pathy to God. It has been argued against the orthodox doctrine
of the universality of human corruption, that even without the
sphere of the operation of the gospel, there do occur so many
engaging specimens of worth and benevolence in society. The
reply is, that this may be no deduction from the doctrine what
ever, but be even an aggravation of it — should the very men

154 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

who exemplify so much of what is amiable, carry in their hearts
an indifference to the will of that Being who thus hath formed,
and thus hath embellished them. But it would be a heavy de
duction indeed, not from the doctrine, but from its hostile and
imposing argument, could it be shown, that the vast majority of
all equitable dealing amongst men, is performed, not on the
principle of honour at all, but on the principle of selfishness —
that this is the soil upon which the honesty of the world mainly
flourishes, and is sustained ; that, were the connexion dissolved
between justice to others and our own particular advantage, this
would go very far to banish the observation of justice from the
earth ; that, generally speaking, men are honest, not because they
are lovers of God, and not even because they are lovers of virtue,
but because they are lovers of their ownselves — insomuch, that
if it were possible to disjoin the good of self altogether from the
habit of doing what was fair, as well as from the habit of doing
what was kind to the people around us, this would not merely
isolate the children of men from each other, in respect of the ob
ligations of beneficence, but it would arm them into an undisguised
hostility against each other, in respect of their rights. The
mere disinterested principle would set up a feeble barrier indeed,
against a desolating tide of selfishness, now set loose from the
consideration of its own advantage. The genuine depravity of
the human heart would burst forth and show itself in its true
characters ; and the world in which we live be transformed into
a scene of unblushing fraud, of open and lawless depredation.

And, perhaps, after all, the best way of arriving practically at
the solution of this question would be, not by a formal induction
of particular cases, but by committing the matter to the gross
and general experience of those who are most conversant in the
affairs of business. There is a sort of imdefinable impression that
all have upon this subject, on the justness of which, however,
we are disposed to lay a very considerable stress — an impression
gathered out of the mass of the recollections of a whole life — an
impression founded on what we may have observed in the history
of our own doings — a kind of tact that we have acquired as the
fruit of our repeated intercourse with men, and of the manifold
transactions that we have had with them, and of the number of
times in which we have been personally implicated with the play
of human passions, and human interests. It is our own convic
tion, that a well-exercised merchant could cast a more intelligent
glance at this question, than a well-exercised metaphysician;

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 155

and therefore do we submit its decision to those of them who
have hazarded most largely, and most frequently, on the faith of
agents, and customers, and distant correspondents. We know
the fact of a very secure and well- warranted confidence in the
honesty of others, being widely prevalent amongst men ; and
that, were it not for this, all the interchanges of trade would be
suspended ; and that confidence is the very soul and life of com
mercial activity ; and it is delightful to think, how thus a man
can suffer all the wealth which belongs to him to depart from
under his eye, and to traverse the mightiest oceans and conti
nents of our world, and to pass into the custody of men whom
he never saw. And it is a sublime homage, one should think,
to the honourable and high-minded principles of our nature, that,
under their guardianship, the adverse hemispheres of the globe
should be bound together in safe and profitable merchandise ; and
that thus one should sleep with a bosom undisturbed by jealousy,
in Britain, who has all, and more than all his property treasured
in the warehouses of India — and that, just because there he
knows there is vigilance to defend it, and activity to dispose of
it, and truth to account for it, and all those trusty virtues which
ennoble the character of man to shield it from injury, and send
it back again in an increasing tide of opulence to his door.

There is no question, then, as to the fact of a very extended
practical honesty, between man and man, in their intercourse
with each other. The only question is, as to the reason of the
fact. Why is it, that he whom we have trusted acquits himself
of his trust with such correctness and fidelity ? Whether is his
mind, in so doing, most set upon our interest or upon his own ?
Whether is it because he seeks our advantage in it, or because
he finds in it his own advantage ? Tell us to which of the two
concerns he is most tremblingly alive — to our property, or to his
own character ? and whether, upon the last of these feelings, he
may not be more forcibly impelled to equitable dealing than upon
the first of them ? We well know, that there is room enough in
his bosom for both ; but to determine how powerfully selfishness
is blended with the punctualities and the integrities of business,
let us ask those who can speak most soundly arid experimentally
on the subject, what would be the result, if the element of self
ishness were so detached from the operations of trade, that there
was no such thing as a man suffering in his prosperity, because
he suffered in his good name ; that there was no such thing as a
desertion of custom and employment coming upon the back of a

156 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

blasted credit, and a tainted reputation ; in a word, if the only-
security we had of man was his principles, and that his interest
flourished and augmented just as surely without his principles as
with them ? Tell us, if the hold we have of a man's own per
sonal advantage were thus broken down, in how far the virtues
of the mercantile world would survive it ? Would not the world
of trade sustain as violent a derangement on this mighty hold
being cut asunder, as the world of nature would on the suspend
ing of the law of gravitation ? Would not the whole system, in
fact, fall to pieces, and be dissolved? Would not men, when
thus released from the magical chain of their own interest, which
bound them together into a fair and seeming compact of prin
ciple, like dogs of rapine, let loose upon their prey, overleap the
barrier which formerly restrained them ? Does not this prove
that selfishness, after all, is the grand principle on which the
brotherhood of the human race is made to hang together ; and
that He who can make the wrath of man to praise Him, has also,
upon the selfishness of man, caused a most beauteous order of
wide and useful intercourse to be suspended ?

But let us here stop to observe, that, while there is much in
this contemplation to magnify the wisdom of the Supreme Con
triver, there is also much in it to humble man, and to convict
him of the deceitfulness of that moral complacency with which
he looks to his own character, and his own attainments. There
is much in it to demonstrate, that his righteousness is^ as filthy
rags ; and that the idolatry of self, however hidden in its opera
tion, may be detected in almost every one of them. God may
combine the separate interests of every individual of the human
race, and the strenuous prosecution of these interests by each of
them, into a harmonious system of operation, for the good of
one great and extended family. But if, on estimating the cha
racter of each individual member of that family, we shall find,
that the mainspring of his actions is the urgency of a selfish
inclination; and that to this his very virtues are subordinate;
and that even the honesties which mark his conduct are chiefly,
though perhaps insensibly, due to the selfishness which actuates
and occupies his whole heart ; — then, let the semblance be what
it may, still the reality of the case accords with the most mortify
ing representations of the New Testament. The moralities of
nature are but the moralities of a day, and will cease to be
applauded when this world, the only theatre of their applause,
is burnt up. They are but the blossoms of that rank efHores-

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 157

cence which is nourished on the soil of human corruption, and
can never bring forth fruit unto immortality. The Discerner of all
secrets sees that they emanate from a principle which is at utter
war with the charity that prepares for the enjoyments, and that
glows in the bosoms of the celestial ; and, therefore, though highly
esteemed among men, they may be in His sight an abomination.
Let us, if possible, make this still clearer to the apprehension,
by descending more minutely into particulars. There is not one
member of the great mercantile family, with whom there does
not obtain a reciprocal interest between himself and all those who
compose the circle of his various correspondents. He does them
good ; but his eye is all the while open to the expectation of
their doing him something again. They minister to him all
the profits of his employment ; but not unless he minister to
them of his service, and attention, and fidelity. Insomuch,
that if his credit abandon him, his prosperity will also aban
don him. If he forfeit the confidence of others, he will also
forfeit their custom along with it. So that, in perfect con
sistency with interest being the reigning idol of his soul, he
may still be, in every way, as sensitive of encroachment upon his
reputation, as he would be of encroachment upon his property ;
and be as vigilant, to the full, in guarding his name against the
breath of calumny or suspicion, as in guarding his estate against
the inroads of a depredator. Now, this tie of reciprocity, which
binds him into fellowship and good faith with society at large,
will sometimes, in the mere course of business, and its unlooked-
for fluctuations, draw one or two individuals into a still more
special intimacy with himself. There may be a lucrative part
nership, in which it is the pressing necessity of each individual,
that all of them, for a time at least, stick closely and steadily
together. Or there may be a thriving interchange of commodi
ties struck out, where it is the mutual interest of all who are
concerned, that each take his assigned part and adhere to it. Or
there may be a promising arrangement devised, which it needs
concert and understanding to effectuate ; and, for which purpose,
several may enter into a skilful and well-ordered combination.
We are neither saying that this is very general in the mercantile
world, or that it is in the slightest degree unfair. But all must
be sensible, that, amid the reelings and movements of the great
trading society, the phenomenon somtimes offers itself of a groupe
of individuals who have entered into some compact of mutual
accommodation, and who, therefore, look as if they were isolated

158 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

from the rest by the bond of some more strict and separate alli
ance. All we aim at, is to gather illustration to our principle,
out of the way in which the members of this associated cluster
conduct themselves to each other ; how such a cordiality may
pass between them, as, one could suppose, to be the cordiality of
genuine friendship ; how such an intercourse might be maintained
among their families, as might look like the intercourse of un-
mingled affection ; how such an exuberance of mutual hospitality
might be poured forth, as to recall those poetic days when avarice
was unknown, and men lived in harmony together on the fruits
of one common inheritance ; arid how nobly disdainful each mem
ber of the combination appeared to be of such little savings, as
could be easily surrendered to the general good and adjustment
of the whole concern. And all this, it will be observed, so long
as the concern prospered, and it was for the interest of each to
abide by it ; and the respective accounts-current gladdened the
heart of every individual, by the exhibition of an abundant share
of the common benefit to himself. But then, every such system
of operations comes to an end. And what we ask is, if it be at
all an unlikely evolution of our nature, that the selfishness which
lay in wrapt concealment during the progress of these transac
tions, should now come forward and put out to view its cloven
foot, when they draw to their termination ? And as the tie of
reciprocity gets looser, is it not a very possible thing, that the
murmurs of something like unfair or unhandsome conduct should
get louder ? Arid that a fellowship, hitherto carried forward in
smiles, should break up in reproaches? And that the whole
character of this fellowship should show itself more unequivocally
as it comes nearer to its close ? And that some of its members,
as they are becoming disengaged from the bond of mutual in
terest, should also become disengaged from the bond of those
mutual delicacies and proprieties, and even honesties, which had
heretofore marked the whole of their intercourse? — Insomuch,
that a matter in which all the parties looked so fair, and magna
nimous, and liberal, might at length degenerate into a contest of
keen appropriation, a scramble of downright and undisguised
selfishness ?

But though this may happen sometimes, we are far from say
ing that it will happen generally. It could not, in fact, without
such an exposure of character, as might not merely bring a man
down in the estimation of those from whom he is now with
drawing himself, but also in the estimation of that general

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 159

public with whom he is still linked ; and on whose opinion of
him there still rests the dependence of a strong personal
interest. To estimate precisely the whole influence of this
consideration, or the degree in which honesty of character is
resolvable into selfishness of character, it would be necessary to
suppose, that the tie of reciprocity was dissolved, not merely
between the individual and those with whom he had been more
particularly and more intimately associated — but that the tie of
reciprocity was dissolved between the individual and the whole
of his former acquaintanceship in business. Now, the situation
which comes nearest to this, is that of a man on the eve of
bankruptcy, and with no sure hope of so retrieving his circum
stances as again to emerge into credit, and be restored to some
employment of gain or of confidence. If he have either honour
able or religious feelings, then character, as connected with
principle, may still, in his eyes, be something ; but character, as
connected with prudence, or the calculations of interest, may
now be nothing. In the dark hour of the desperation of his
soul, he may feel, in fact, that he has nothing to lose : and let
us now see how he will conduct himself, when thus released
from that check of reputation which formerly held him. In
these circumstances, if you have ever seen the man abandon
himself to utter regardlessness of all the honesties which at one
time adorned him • and doing such disgraceful things as he
would have spurned at the very suggestion of, in the days of
his prosperity ; and, forgetful of his former name, practising all
possible shifts of duplicity to prolong the credit of a tottering
establishment ; and to keep himself afloat for a few months of
torture and restlessness, weaving such a web of entanglement
around his many friends and companions, as shall most surely im
plicate some of them in his fall ; and, as the crisis approaches, ply
ing his petty wiles how to survive the coming ruin, and to gather
up of its fragments to his family. 0 how much there is here to
deplore ; and who can be so ungenerous as to stalk in unrelenting
triumph over the helplessness of so sad an overthrow ! But if
ever such an exhibition meet your eye, while we ask you not to
withhold your pity from the unfortunate, we ask you also to read iri
it a lesson of worthless and sunken humanity ; how even its very
virtues are tinctured with corruption ; and that the honour, and
the truth, and the equity, with which man proudly thinks his
nature to be embellished, are often reared on the basis of selfish
ness, and lie prostrate in the dust when that basis is cut away.

160 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

But other instances may be quoted, which go still more satis
factorily to prove the very extended influence of selfishness on
the moral judgments of our species; and how readily the esti
mate which a man forms on the question of right and wrong
accommodates itself to his own interest. There is a strong
general reciprocity of advantage between the government of a
country and all its inhabitants. The one party, in this relation,
renders a revenue for the expenses of the state. The other
party renders back again protection from injustice and violence.
Were the means furnished by the former withheld, the benefit
conferred by the latter would cease to be administered. So
that, with the government, and the public at large, nothing can
be more strict, and more indispensable, than the tie of reciprocity
that is between them. But this is not felt, and therefore not
acted upon, by the separate individuals who compose that
public. The reciprocity does not come home with a sufficiently
pointed and personal application to each of them. Every man
may calculate, that though he, on the strength of some dex
terous evasions, were to keep back of the tribute that is due by
him, the mischief that would recoil upon himself is divided with
the rest of his countrymen ; and the portion of it which comes
to his door would be so very small, as to be altogether in
sensible. To all feeling he will just be as effectually sheltered,
by the power and the justice of his country, whether he pay his
taxes in full, or, under the guise of some skilful concealment,
pay them but partially ; and therefore, to every practical effect,
the tie of reciprocity between him and his sovereign is in a
great measure dissolved. Now, what is the actual adjustment
of the moral sense, and moral conduct, of the population, to this
state of matters? It is quite palpable. Subterfuges which, in
private business, would be held to be disgraceful, are not held
to be so disgraceful in this department of a man's personal
transactions. The cry of indignation, which would be lifted up
against the falsehood or dishonesty of a man's dealings in his
own neighbourhood, is mitigated or unheard, though, in his
dealings with the state, there should be the very same relaxation
of principle. On this subject, there is a connivance of popular
feeling, which, if extended to the whole of human traffic, would
banish all its securities from the world — giving reason to
believe, that much of the good done among men, is done on
the expectation of a good that will be rendered back again ;
and that many of the virtues, by which the fellowship of human

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 161

beings is regulated and sustained, still leave the imputation un
redeemed, of its being a fellowship of sinners; and that both
the practice of morality, and the demand for it, are measured
by the operation of a self-love, which, so far from signalizing
any man, or preparing him for eternity, he holds in common
with the fiercest and most degenerate of his species ; and that,
apart from the consideration of his own interest, simplicity and
godly sincerity are, to a great degree, unknown ; insomuch,
that though God has interposed with a law, of giving unto all
their dues, and tribute to whom tribute is due, we may venture
an affirmation of the vast majority of this tribute, that it is
rendered for wrath's sake, arid not for conscience' sake. Of so
little effect is unsupported and solitary conscience to stem the
tide of selfishness. And it is chiefly when honesty and truth go
overbearingly along with this tide, that the voice of man is
lifted up to acknowledge them, and his heart becomes feelingly
alive to a sense of their obligations.

And let us here just ask, in what relation of criminality does
he who uses a contraband article stand to him who deals in it ?
In precisely the same relation that a receiver of stolen goods
stands to a thief or a depredator. There may be some who
revolt at the idea of being so classified. But, if the habit we
have just denounced can be fastened on men of rank and seemly
reputation, let us just humble ourselves into the admission of
how little the righteous practice of the world has the foundation
of righteous .principle to sustain it ; how feeble are the securities
of rectitude, had it nothing to uphold it but its own native
•charms, and native obligations ; how society is held together,
only because the grace of God can turn to account the worthless
propensities of the individuals who compose it ; and how, if the
virtues of fidelity, <md truth, and justice, had not the prop of
selfishness to rest upon, they would, with the exception of a few
scattered remnants, take their departure from the world, and
leave it a prey to the anarchy of human passions — to the wild
misrule of all those depravities which agitate and deform our
ruined nature.

The very same exhibition of our nature may be witnessed in
almost every parish of our sister kingdom, where the people
render a revenue to the minister of religion, and the minister
renders back again a return, it is true — but not such a return,
as, in the estimation of gross and ordinary selfishness, is at all
deemed an equivalent for the sacrifice which has been made. In

VOL. III. L

162 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

this instance, too, that law of reciprocity which reigns through
out the common transactions of merchandise, is altogether sus
pended ; and the consequence is, that the law of right is
trampled into ashes. A tide of public odium runs against the
men who are outraged of their property, and a smile of general
connivance rewards the successful dexterity of the men who
invade it. That portion of the annual produce of our soil,
which, on a foundation of legitimacy as firm as the property of
the soil itself, is allotted to a set of national functionaries — and
which, but for them, would all have gone, in the shape of in
creased revenue, to the indolent proprietor, is altogether thrown
loose from the guardianship of that great principle of reciprocity,
on which we strongly suspect that the honesties of this world are
mainly supported. The national clergy of England may be
considered as standing out of the pale of this guardianship ;
and the consequence is, that what is most rightfully and most
sacredly theirs, is abandoned to the gambol of many thousand
depredators ; and, in addition to a load of most unmerited oblo
quy, have they had to sustain all the heartburnings of known and
felt injustice ; and that intercourse between the teachers and
the taught, which ought surely to be an intercourse of peace
and friendship and righteousness, is turned into a contest be
tween the natural avarice of the one party and the natural re
sentments of the other. It is not that we wish our sister Church
were swept away, for we honestly think, that the overthrow of
that Establishment would be a severe blow to the Christianity
of our land. It is not that we envy that great hierarchy the
splendour of her endowments — for better a dinner of herbs, when
surrounded by the love of parishioners, than a preferment of
stalled dignity, and strife therewith. It is not either that we
look upon her ministers as having at all disgraced themselves by
their rapacity ; for look to the amount of the encroachments that
are made upon them, and we shall see that they have carried
their privileges with the most exemplary forbearance and mode
ration. But, from these very encroachments do we infer how
lawless a human being will become, when emancipated from the
bond of his own interest ; how much such a state of things
must multiply the temptations to injustice over the face of the
country ; and how desirable, therefore, that it were put an end
to — not by the abolition of that venerable Church, but by a fair
and liberal commutation of the revenues which support her —
not by bringing any blight on the property of her ecclesiastics,

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 163

but by the removal of a most devouring blight from the worth
of her population — that every provocative to injustice may be
done away, and the frailty of human principle be no longer left
to such a ruinous and such a withering exposure.

This instance we would not have mentioned, but for the sake
of adding another experimental proof to the lesson of our text ;
and we now hasten onward to the lesson itself, with a few of its
applications.

We trust you are convinced, from what has been said, that
much of the actual honesty of the world is due to the selfishness
of the world. And then you will surely admit, that, in as far
as this is the actuating principle, honesty descends from its place
as a rewardable, or even as an amiable virtue, and sinks down
into the character of a mere prudential virtue — which, so far
from conferring any moral exaltation on him by whom it is ex
emplified, emanates out of a propensity that seems inseparable
from the constitution of every sentient being — and by which
man is, in one point, assimilated either to the most worthless of
his own species, or to those inferior animals among whom worth
is unattainable.

And let it not deafen the humbling impression of this argu
ment, that you are not distinctly conscious of the operation of
selfishness, as presiding at every step over the honesty of your
daily and familiar transactions ; and that the only inward checks
against injustice, of which you are sensible, are the aversion of
a generous indignancy towards it, and the positive discomfort
you would incur by the reproaches of your own conscience.
Selfishness, in fact, may have originated and alimented the whole
of this virtue that belongs to you, and yet the mind incur the
same discomfort by the violation of it, that it would do by the
violation of any other of its established habits. And as to the
generous indignancy of your feelings against all that is fraudu
lently and disgracefully wrong, let us never forget, that this
may be the nurtured fruit of that common selfishness which
links human beings with each other into a relationship of mutual
dependence. This may be seen, in all its perfection, among the
leagued and sworn banditti of the highway ; who, while exe
crated by society at large for the compact of iniquity into which
they have entered, can maintain the most heroic fidelity to the
virtues of their own brotherhood ; and be, in every way, as
lofty and as chivalrous with their points of honour, as we are
with ours ; and elevate as indignant a voice against the worth-

1G4 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

lessness of him who could betray the secret of their association,
or break up any of the securities by which it was held together.
And, in like mariner, may we be the members of a wider com
bination, yet brought together by the tie of reciprocal interest ;
and all the virtues essential to the existence, or to the good of
such a combination, may come to be idolized amongst us ; and
the breath of human applause may fan them into a lustre of
splendid estimation ; and yet the good man of society on earth
be, in common with all his fellows, an utter outcast from the
society of heaven — with his heart altogether bereft of that alle
giance to God which forms the reigning principle of his unfallen
creation — and in a state of entire destitution either as to that
love of the Supreme Being, or as to that disinterested love of
those around us, which form the graces and the virtues of
eternity.

We have not affirmed that there is no such thing as a native
and disinterested principle of honour among men. But we have
affirmed, on a former occasion, that a sense of honour may be in
the heart, and the sense of God be utterly away from it. And
we affirm now, that much of the honest practice of the world is
not due to honesty of principle at all, but takes its origin from a
baser ingredient of our constitution altogether. How wide is
the operation of selfishness on the one hand, and how limited is
the operation of abstract principle on the other, it were difficult
to determine ; and such a labyrinth to man is his own heart,
that he may be utterly unable, from his own consciousness, to
answer this question. But amid all the difficulties of such an
analysis to himself, we ask him to think of another who is
unseen by us, but who is represented to us as seeing all things.
We know not in what characters this heavenly witness can be
more impressively set forth, than as pondering the heart, as
weighing the secrets of the heart, as fastening an attentive and
a judging eye on all the movements of it, as treasuring up the
whole of man's outward and inward history in a book of remem
brance ; and as keeping it in reserve for that day when, it is
said, that the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, and God
Khali bring out every secret thing, whether it be good, or
whether it be evil. Your consciousness may not distinctly in
form you, in how far the integrity of your habits is due to the
latent operation of selfishness, or to the more direct and obvious
operation of honour. But your consciousness may, perhaps, in
form you, distinctly enough, how little a share the will of God

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 165

has in the way of influence on any of your doings. Your own
sense and memory of what passes within you may charge you
with the truth of this monstrous indictment — that you live with
out God in the world ; that however you may be signalized
among your fellows, by that worth of character which is held in
highest value and demand amongst the individuals of a mercan
tile society, it is at least without the influence of a godly prin
ciple that you have reached the maturity of an established repu
tation ; that either the proud emotions of rectitude which glow
within your bosom are totally untinctured by a feeling of homage
to the Deity — or that, without any such emotions, Self is the
divinity you have all along worshipped, and your very virtues
are so many offerings of reverence at her shrine. If such be, in
fact, the nakedness of your spiritual condition, is it not high
time, we ask, that you awaken out of this delusion, and shake
the lying spirit of deep and heavy slumber away from you ? Is
it not high time, when eternity is so fast coming on, that you
examirfe your accounts with God, and seek for a settlement with
that Being who will so soon meet your disembodied spirits with
the question of — what have you done unto me ? And if all the
virtues which adorn you are but the subserviences of time, and
of its accommodations — if either done altogether unto yourselves,
or done without the recognition of God on the spontaneous insti
gation of your own feelings — is it not high time that you lean
no longer to the securities on which you have rested, and that
you seek for acceptance with your Maker on a more firm and
unalterable foundation ?

This, then, is the terminating object of all the experience that
we have tried to set before you. We want it to be a school
master to bring you unto Christ. We want you to open your
eyes to the accordancy which obtains between the theology of
the New Testament, and the actual state and history of man.
Above all, we want you to turn your eyes inwardly upon your
selves, and there to behold a character without one trace or
lineament of godliness — there to behold a heart, set upon totally
other things than those which constitute the portion and the
reward of eternity — there to behold every principle of action
resolvable into the idolatry of self, or, at least, into something
independent of the authority of God — there to behold how
worthless in their substance are those virtues which look so im
posing in their semblance and their display, and draw around them
here a popularity and ail applause which will all be dissipated

166 THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS.

into nothing, when hereafter they are brought up for examina
tion to the judgment-seat. We want you when the revelation
of the gospel charges you with the totality and magnitude of
your corruption, that you acquiesce in that charge ; and that
you may perceive the trueness of it, under the disguise of all
those hollow and unsubstantial accomplishments with which
nature may deck her own fallen and degenerate children. It is
easy to be amused, and interested, and intellectually regaled, by
an analysis of the human character, and a survey of human
society. But it is not so easy to reach the individual conscience
with the lesson — we are undone. It is not so easy to strike the
alarm into your hearts of the present guilt, and the future
damnation. It is not so easy to send the pointed arrow of con
viction into your bosoms, where it may keep by you, and pursue
you like an arrow sticking fast ; or so to humble you into the
conclusion, that, in the sight of God, you are an accursed thing,
as that you may seek unto Him who became a curse for you, and
as that the preaching of His cross might cease to be foolishness.

Be assured, then, if you keep by the ground of being justified
by your present works, you will perish ; and though we may
not have succeeded in convincing you of their worthlessness, be
assured, that a day is coming, when such a flaw of deceitfulness,
in the principle of them all, shall be laid open, as will demon
strate the equity of your entire and everlasting condemnation.
To avert the fearfulness of that day is the message of the great
atonement sounded in your ears ; and the blood of Christ,
cleansing from all sin, is offered to your acceptance ; and if you
turn away from it, you add to the guilt of a broken law the
insult of a neglected gospel. But if you take the pardon of the
gospel on the footing of the gospel, then, such is the efficacy of
this great expedient, that it will reach an application of mercy
farther than the eye of your own conscience ever reached ; that
it will redeem you from the guilt even of your most secret and
unsuspected iniquities ; and thoroughly wash you from a taint
of sinfulness, more inveterate than, in the blindness of nature,
you ever thought of, or ever conceived to belong to you.

But when a man becomes a believer, there are two great
events which take place at this great turning-point in his history.
One of them takes place in heaven — even the expunging of his
name from the book of condemnation. Another of them takes
place on earth — even the application of such a sanctifying
influence to his person, that all old things are done away with

THE POWER OF SELFISHNESS. 167

him, and all things becomes new with him. He is made the
workmanship of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. He is not
merely forgiven the sin of every one evil work of which he had
aforetime been guilty, but he is created anew unto the corre
sponding good work. And, therefore, if a Christian, will his
honesty be purified from that taint of selfishness by which the
general honesty of this world is so deeply and extensively per
vaded. He will not do this good thing, that any good thing
may be done unto him again. He will do it on a simple regard
to its own native and independent rectitude. He will do it
because it is honourable, and because God wills him so to adorn
the doctrine of his Saviour. All his fair dealing, and all his
friendship, will be fair dealing and friendship without interest.
The principle that is in him will stand in no need of aid from
any such auxiliary — but, strong in its own unborrowed re
sources, will it impress a legible stamp of dignity and upright
ness on the whole variety of his transactions in the world. All
men find it their advantage, by the integrity of their dealings,
to prolong the existence of some gainful fellowship into which
they may have entered. But with him, the same unsullied
integrity which kept this fellowship together, and sustained the
progress of it, will abide with him through its last transactions,
and dignify its full and final termination. Most men find, that,
without the reverberation of any mischief on their own heads,
they could reduce, beneath the point of absolute justice, the
charges of taxation. But he has a conscience both towards God,
and towards man, which will not let him ; and there is a rigid
truth in all his returns, a pointed and precise accuracy in all
his payments. When hemmed in with circumstances of difficulty,
and evidently tottering to his fall, the demand of nature is, that
he should ply his every artifice to secrete a provision for his
family. But a Christian mind is incapable of artifice ; and the
voice of conscience within him will ever be louder than the
voice of necessity ; and he will be open as day with his creditors,
nor put forth his hand to that which is rightfully theirs, any
more than he would put forth his hand to the perpetration of a
sacrilege ; and though released altogether from that tie of in
terest which binds a man to equity with his fellows, yet the tie
of principle will remain with him in all its strength. Nor will
it ever be found that he, for the sake of subsistence, will enter
into fraud, seeing that, as one of the children of light, he would
not, to gain the whole world, lose his own soul.

168 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

DISCOUKSE IV.

THE GUILT OF DISHONESTY NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY THE GAIN OF IT.

" He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much ; and he that is unjust
in the least, is unjust also in much."— LUKE xvi. 10.

IT is the fine poetical conception of a late poetical country
man, whose fancy too often grovelled among the despicable of
human character — but who, at the same time, was capable of
exhibiting, either in pleasing or in proud array, botli the tender
and the noble of human character — when he says of the man
who carried a native unborrowed self-sustained rectitude in his
bosom, that " his eye, even turned on empty space, beamed
keen with honour." It was affirmed, in the last discourse, that
much of the honourable practice of the world rested on the
substratum of selfishness ; that society was held together in the
exercise of its relative virtues, mainly, by the tie of reciprocal
advantage ; that a man's own interest bound him to all those
average equities which obtained in the neighbourhood around
him ; and in which, if he proved himself to be glaringly defi
cient, he would be abandoned by the respect, and the confidence,
and the good-will, of the people with whom he had to do. It
is a melancholy thought, how little the semblance of virtue upon
earth betokens the real and substantial presence of virtuous
principle among men. But, on the other hand, though it be a
rare, there cannot be a more dignified attitude of the soul, than
when of itself it kindles with a sense of justice, and the holy
flame is fed, as it were, by its own energies ; than when man
moves onwards in an unchanging course of moral magnanimity,
and disdains the aid of those inferior principles by which gross
and sordid humanity is kept from all the grosser violations ;
than when he rejoices in truth as his kindred and congenial ele
ment; — so that, though unpeopled of all its terrestrial accom
paniments ; though he saw no interest whatever to be associated
with its fulfilment ; though without one prospect either of fame

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 169

or of emolument before him, would his eye, even when turned
on emptiness itself, still retain the living lustre that had been
lighted up in it, by a feeling of inward and independent rever
ence.

It has already been observed, and that fully and frequently
enough, that a great part of the homage which is rendered to
integrity in the world, is due to the operation of selfishness.
And this substantially is the reason, why the principle of the
text has so very slender a hold upon the human conscience.
Man is ever prone to estimate the enormity of injustice, by the
degree in which he suffers from it. He brings this moral ques
tion to the standard of his own interest. A master will bear
with all the lesser liberties of his servants, so long as he feels
them to be harmless ; and it is not till he is awakened to the
apprehension of personal injury from the amount or frequency
of the embezzlements, that his moral indignation is at all sen
sibly awakened. And thus it is, that the maxim of our great.
Teacher of righteousness seems to be very much unfelt, or for
gotten, in society. Unfaithfulness in that which is little, and
unfaithfulness in that which is much, are very far from being
regarded, as they were by Him, under the same aspect of crimin
ality. If there be no great hurt, it is felt that there is no great
harm. The innocence of a dishonest freedom in respect of
morality, is rated by its insignificance in respect of matter. The
margin which separates the right from the wrong is remorse
lessly trodden under foot, so long as each makes only a minute
and gentle encroachment beyond the landmark of his neigh
bour's territory. On this subject there is a loose and popular
estimate, which is not at one with the deliverance of the New
Testament ; a habit of petty invasion on the side of aggressors,
which is scarcely felt by them to be at all iniquitous — and even
on the part of those who are thus made free with there is a habit
of loose and careless toleration. There is, in fact, a negligence
or a dormancy of principle among men, which causes this sort
of injustice to be easily practised on the one side, and as easily
put up with on the other ; and, in a general slackness of ob
servation, is this virtue, in its strictness and in its delicacy,
completely overborne.

It is the taint of selfishness, then, which has so marred and
corrupted the moral sensibility of our world. And the man, if
such a man can be, whose " eye, even turned on empty space,
beams keen with honour;" and whose homage, therefore, to

170 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

the virtue of justice, is altogether freed from the mixture of un
worthy and interested feelings, will alone render to her, in every
instance, a faultless arid a completed offering. Whatever his
forbearance to others, he could not suffer the slightest blot of
corruption upon any doings of his own. He cannot be satisfied
with anything short of the very last jot and tittle of the require
ments of equity being fulfilled. He not merely shares in the
revolt of the general world against such outrageous departures
from the rule of right, as would carry in their train the ruin of
acquaintances or the distress of families. Such is the delicacy
of the principle within him, that he could not have peace under
the consciousness even of the minutest arid least discoverable
violation. He looks fully and fearlessly at the whole account
which justice has against him ; and he cannot rest, so long as
there is a single article unmet, or a single demand unsatisfied.
If, in any transaction of his, there was so much as a farthing of
secret and injurious reservation on his side, this would be to
him like an accursed thing, which marred the character of the
whole proceeding, and spread over it such an aspect of evil, as
to offend and disturb him. He could not bear the whisperings
of his own heart, if it told him, that, in so much as by one iota of
defect, he had balanced the matter unfairly between himself and
the unconscious individual with whom he deals. It would lie a
burden upon his mind to hurt and to make him unhappy, till
the opportunity of explanation had come round, and he had
obtained ease to his conscience, by acquitting himself to the full
of all his obligations. It is justice in the uprightness of her
attitude ; it is justice in the onwardness of her path ; it is justice
disdaining every advantage that would tempt her, by ever so
little, to the right or to the left ; it is justice spurning the little
ness of ea<;h paltry enticement away from her, and maintaining
herself, without deviation, in a track so purely rectilineal, that
even the most jealous and microscopic eye could not find in it
the slightest aberration : this is the justice set forth by our great
moral Teacher in the passage now submitted to you ; and by
which we are told, that this virtue refuses fellowship with every
degree of iniquity that is perceptible ; and that, were the very
least act of unfaithfulness admitted, she would feel as if in her
sanctity she had been violated, as if in her character she had
sustained an overthrow.

In the further prosecution of this discourse, let us first attempt
to elucidate the principle of our text, and then urge it onward to

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 171

its practical consequences — both as it respects our general rela
tion to God, and as it respects the particular lesson of faithful
ness that may be educed from it.

I. The great principle of the text is, that he who has sinned,
though to a small amount in respect of the fruit of his transgres
sion — provided he has done so, by passing over a forbidden limit
which was distinctly known to him, has, in the act of doing so,
incurred a full condemnation in respect of the principle of his
transgression. In one word, that the gain of it may be small,
while the guilt of it may be great ; that the latter ought not to
be measured by the former; but that he who is unfaithful in
the least, shall be dealt with, in respect of the offence he has
given to God, in the same way as if he had been unfaithful in
much.

The first reason which we would assign in vindication of this
is, that, by a small act of injustice, the line which separates the
right from the wrong, is just as effectually broken over as by a
great act of injustice. There is a tendency in gross arid cor
poreal man to rate the criminality of injustice by the amount of
its appropriations — to reduce it to a computation of weight and
of measure — to count the man who has gained a double sum by
his dishonesty, to be doubly more dishonest than his neighbour
— to make it an affair of product rather than of principle ; and
thus to weigh the morality of a character in the same arithme
tical balance with number or with magnitude. Now, this is not
the rule of calculation on which our Saviour has proceeded in the
text. He speaks to the man who is only half an inch within the
limits of forbidden ground, in the very same terms by which he
addresses the man who has made the farthest and the largest
incursions upon it. It is true, that he is only a little way upon
the wrong side of the line of demarcation. But why is he upon
it at all? It was in the act of crossing that line, and not in the
act of going onwards after he had crossed it — it was then that
the contest between right and wrong was entered upon, and then
it was decided. That was the instant of time at which principle
struck her surrender. The great pull which the man had to
make, was in the act of overleaping the fence of separation ; and
after that was done, justice had no other barrier by which to ob
struct his progress over the whole extent of the field which she
had interdicted. There might be barriers of a different descrip
tion. There might be still a revolting of humanity against the
sufferings that would be inflicted by an act of larger fraud or

172 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

depredation. There might be a dread of exposure, if the dis
honesty should so swell, in point of amount, as to become more
noticeable. There might, after the absolute limit between justice
and injustice is broken, be another limit against the extending
of a man's encroachments, in a terror of discovery, or in a sense
of interest, or even in the relentings of a kindly or a compunc
tious feeling towards him who is the victim of injustice. But this
is not the limit with which the question of a man's truth, or a
man's honesty, has to do. These have already been given up.
He may only be a little way within the margin of the unlawful
territory, but still he is upon it ; and the God who finds him
there will reckon with him, and deal with him accordingly.
Other principles, and other considerations, may restrain his pro
gress to the very heart of the territory, but justice is not one of
them. This he deliberately flung away from him, at that mo
ment when he passed the line of circumvallation ; and, though
in the neighbourhood of that line, he may hover all his days at
the petty work of picking and purloining such fragments as he
meets with, though he may never venture himself to a place of
more daring or distinguished atrocity, God sees of him, that, in
respect of the principle of justice, at least, there is an utter un
hingement. And thus it is, that the Saviour, who knew what
was in man, and who, therefore, knew all the springs of that
moral machinery by which he is actuated, pronounces of him
who was unfaithful in the least, that he was unfaithful also in
much.

After the transition is accomplished, the progress will follow
of course, just as opportunity invites, and just as circumstances
make it safe and practicable. For it is not with justice as it is
with generosity, and some of the other virtues. There is not the
same graduation in the former as there is in the latter. The
man who, other circumstances being equal, gives away a double
sum in charity, may, with more propriety, be reckoned doubly
more generous than his neighbour ; than the man who, with the
same equality of circumstances, only ventures on half the extent
of fraudulency, can be reckoned only one-half as unjust as his
neighbour. Each has broken a clear line of demarcation. Each
has transgressed a distinct arid visible limit which he knew to
be forbidden. Each has knowingly forced a passage beyond his
neighbour's landmark — and that is the place where justice has
laid the main force of her interdict. As it respects the materiel
of injustice, the question resolves itself into a mere computation

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 173

of quantity. As it respects the morale of injustice, the computa
tion is upon other principles. It is upon the latter that our
Saviour pronounces himself. And he gives us to understand,
that a very humble degree of the former may indicate the latter
in all its atrocity. He stands on the breach between the lawful
and the unlawful ; and he tells us, that the man who enters by
a single footstep on the forbidden ground, immediately gathers
upon his person the full hue and character of guiltiness. He
admits no extenuation of the lesser acts of dishonesty. He does
not make right pass into wrong, by a gradual melting of the one
into the other. He does not thus obliterate the distinctions of
morality. There is no shading off at the margin of guilt, but a
clear and vigorous delineation. It is not by a gentle transition
that a man steps over from honesty to dishonesty. There is be
tween them a wall rising up unto heaven • and the high authority
of heaven must be stormed, ere one inch of entrance can be made
into the region of iniquity. The morality of the Saviour never
leads him to gloss over beginnings of crime. His object ever is,
as in the text before us, to fortify the limit, to cast a rampart of
exclusion around the whole territory of guilt, and to rear it before
the eye of man in such characters of strength and sacredness as
should make them feel that it is impregnable.

The second reason, why he who is unfaithful in the least has
incurred the condemnation of him who is unfaithful in much, is,
that the littleness of the gain, so far from giving a littleness to
the guilt, is in fact a circumstance of aggravation. There is
just this difference. He who has committed injustice for the
sake of a less advantage, has done it on the impulse of a less
temptation. He has parted with his honesty at an inferior price ;
and this circumstance may go so to equalize the estimate, as to
bring it very much to one with the deliverance, in the text, of
our great Teacher of righteousness. The limitation between
good and evil stood as distinctly before the notice of the small
as of the great depredator ; and he has just made as direct a con
travention to the first reason, when he passed over upon the
wrong side of it. And he may have made little of gain by the
enterprise, but this does not allay the guilt of it. Nay, by the
second reason, this may serve to aggravate the wrath of the
Divinity against him. It proves how small the price is which
he sets upon his eternity, and how cheaply he can bargain the
favour of God away from him, and how low he rates the good of
an inheritance with Him, and for what a trifle he can dispose of

174 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

all interest in His kingdom and in His promises. The very cir
cumstance which gives to his character a milder transgression in
the eyes of the world, makes it more odious in the judgment of
the sanctuary. The more paltry it is in respect of profit, the
more profane it may "be in respect of principle. It likens him
the more to profane Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of
pottage. And thus it is, indeed, most woful to think of such a
senseless and alienated world ; and how heedlessly the men of it
are posting their infatuated way to destruction ; and how, for as
little gain as might serve them a day, they are contracting as
much guilt as will ruin them for ever ; and are profoundly asleep
in the midst of such designs and such doings, as will form the
valid materials of their entire and everlasting condemnation.

It is with argument such as this that we would try to strike
conviction among a very numerous class of offenders in society
— those who, in the various departments of trust, or service, or
agency, are ever practising, in littles, at the work of secret ap
propriation — those whose hands are in a state of constant de
filement, by the putting of them forth to that which they ought
to touch not, and taste not, and handle not — those who silently
number such pilferments as can pass unnoticed among the per
quisites of their office ; and who, by an excess in their charges,
just so slight as to escape detection, or by a habit of purloining,
just so restrained as to elude discovery, have both a conscience
very much at ease in their own bosoms, and a credit very fair,
and very entire, among their acquaintances around them. They
grossly count upon the smallness of their transgression. But
they are just going in a small way to hell. They would recoil
with violent dislike from the act of a midnight depredator. It
is just because terrors, and trials, and executions, have thrown
around it the pomp and the circumstance of guilt. But at
another bar, and on a day of more dreadful solemnity, their
guilt will be made to stand out in its essential characters, and
their condemnation will be pronounced from the lips of Him who
judgeth righteously. They feel that they have incurred no
outrageous forfeiture of character among men, and this instils a
treacherous complacency into their own hearts. But the piercing
eye of Him who looketh down from heaven is upon the reality of
the question; and He who ponders the secrets of every bosom,
can perceive, that the man who recoils only from such a degree
of injustice as is notorious, may have no justice whatever in his
character. He may have a sense of reputation. He may have

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 175

the fear of detection and disgrace. He may feel a revolt in his
constitution against the magnitude of a gross and glaring viola
tion. He may even share in all the feelings and principles of
that conventional kind of morality which obtains in his neigh
bourhood. But, of that principle which is surrendered by the
least act of unfaithfulness, he has no share whatever. He per
ceives no overawing sacredness in that boundary which separ
ates the right from the wrong. If he only keep decently near,
it is a matter of indifference to him whether he be on this or on
that side of it. He can be unfaithful in that which is least.
There may be other principles and other considerations to re
strain him ; but certain it is, that it is not now the principle of
justice which restrains him from being unfaithful in much.
This is given up ; and, through a blindness to the great and
important principle of our text, this virtue may, in its essential
character, be as good as banished from the world. All its pro
tections may be utterly overthrown. The line of defence is
effaced by which it ought to have been firmly and scrupulously
guarded. The sign-posts of intimation, which ought to warn
and to scare away, are planted along the barrier ; and when, in
defiance to them, the barrier is broken, man will not be checked
by any sense of honesty at least, from expatiating over the whole
of the forbidden territory. And thus may we gather from the
countless peccadilloes which are so current in the various de
partments of trade, and service, and agency — from the secret
freedoms in which many do indulge, without one remonstrance
from their own hearts — from the petty inroads that are daily
practised on the confines of justice, by which its line of demar
cation is trodden under foot, and it has lost the moral distinct
ness, and the moral charrn, that should have kept it inviolate
— from the exceeding multitude of such offences as are frivolous
in respect of the matter of them, but most fearfully important in
respect of the principle in which they originate — from the woful
amount of that unseen and unrecorded guilt which escapes the
cognisance of human law, but, on the application of the touch
stone in our text, may be made to stand out in characters of
severest condemnation — from instances too numerous to repeat,
but certainly too obvious to be missed, even by the observation
of charity, may we gather the frailty of human principle, and
the virulence of that moral poison, which is now in such full
circulation to taint and to adulterate the character of our
species.

176 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN".

Before finishing this branch of our subject, we may observe,
that it is with this as with many other phenomena of the human
character, that we are not long in contemplation upon it, with
out coming in sight of that great characteristic of fallen man,
which meets and forces itself upon us in every view that we
take of him — even the great moral disease of ungodliness. It
is at the precise limit between the right and the wrong that the
flaming sword of God's law is placed. It is there that " Thus
saith the Lord" presents itself, in legible characters, to our view.
It is there where the operation of His commandment begins ;
and not at any of those higher gradations, where a man's dis
honesty first appals himself by the chance of its detection, or
appals others by the mischief and insecurity which it brings
upon social life. An extensive fraud upon the revenue, for ex
ample, unpopular as this branch of justice is, would bring a
man down from his place of eminence and credit in mercantile
society. That petty fraud which is associated with so many of
those smaller payments, where a lie in the written acknowledg
ment is both given and accepted, as a way of escape from the
legal imposition, circulates at large among the members of the
great trading community. In theyformer, and in all the greater
cases of injustice, there is a human restraint, and a human terror,
in operation. There is disgrace and civil punishment to scare
away. There are all the sanctions of that conventional morality
which is suspended on the fear of man, and the opinion of man ;
and which, without so much as the recognition of a God, would
naturally point its armour against every outrage that could
sensibly disturb the securities and the rights of human society.
But so long as the disturbance is not sensible — so long as the
injustice keeps within the limits of smallness and secrecy — so
long as it is safe for the individual to practise it, and, borne along
on the tide of general example and connivaxce, he has nothing
to restrain him but that distinct and inflexible word of God,
which proscribes all unfaithfulness, and admits of it in no de
grees, and no modifications — then, let the almost universal
sleep of conscience attest, how little of God there is in the vir
tue of this world ; and how much the peace and the protection
of society are owing to such moralities, as the mere selfishness of
man would lead him to ordain, even in a community of atheists.

II. Let us now attempt to unfold a few of the practical con
sequences that may be drawn from the principle of the text,
both in respect to our general relation with God, and in respect

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 177

to the particular lesson of faithfulness which may be educed
from it.

1. There cannot be a stronger possible illustration of our
argument, than the very first act of retribution that occurred in
the history of our species. " And God said unto Adam, Of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.
For in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. But
the woman took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also
unto her husband with her, and he did eat." What is it that
invests the eating of a solitary apple with a grandeur so moment
ous ? How came an action, in itself so minute, to be the germ
of such mighty consequences ? How are we to understand that
our first parents, by the doing of a single instant, not only
brought death upon themselves, but shed this big and baleful
disaster over all their posterity ? We may not be able to answer
all these questions ; but we may at least learn, what a thing of
danger it is, under the government of a holy and inflexible God,
to tamper with the limits of obedience. By the eating of that
apple a clear requirement was broken, and a distinct transition
was made from loyalty to rebellion, and an entrance was effected
into the region of sin — and thus did this one act serve like the
opening of a gate for a torrent of mighty mischief; and, if the
act itself was a trifle, it just went to aggravate its guilt — that,
for such a trifle, the authority of God could be despised and
trampled on. At all events, His attribute of Truth stood com
mitted to the fulfilment of the threatening • and the very insig
nificancy of the deed, which provoked the execution of it, gives
a sublimer character to the certainty of the fulfilment. We
know how much this trait, in the dealings of God with man, has
been the jeer of infidelity. But in all this ridicule, there is
truly nothing else than the grossness of materialism. Had
Adam, instead of plucking one single apple from the forbidden
tree, been armed with the power of a malignant spirit, and
spread a wanton havoc over the face of paradise, and spoiled
the garden of its loveliness, and been able to mar and to deform
the whole of that terrestrial creation over which God had so
recently rejoiced — the punishment he sustained would have
looked, to these arithmetical moralists, a more adequate return
for the offence of which he had been guilty. They cannot see
how the moral lesson rises in greatness, just in proportion to the
humility of the material accompaniments — and how it wraps
a sublimer glory around the holiness of the Godhead — and how
VOL. in. M

178 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

from the transaction, such as it is, the conclusion cometh forth
more nakedly, and therefore more impressively, that it is an
evil and a bitter thing to sin against the Lawgiver. God said,
"Let there be light, and it was light;" and it has ever been
regarded as a sublime token of the Deity, that, from an utter
ance so simple, an accomplishment so quick and so magnificent
should have followed. God said that he who " eateth of the
tree in the midst of the garden should die." It appears, indeed,
but a little thing, that one should put forth his hand to an apple
and taste of it. But a saying of God was involved in the
matter ; and heaven and earth must pass away, ere a saying of
His can pass away ; and so the apple became decisive of the fate
of a world ; and out of the very scantiness of the occasion, did
there emerge a sublimer display of truth and of holiness. The
beginning of the world was indeed the period of great mani
festations of the Godhead ; and they all seem to accord in style
and character with each other ; and in that very history, which
has called forth the profane and unthinking levity of many a
scorner, may we behold as much of the majesty of principle, as
in the creation of light we behold of the majesty of power.

But this history furnishes the materials of a contemplation
still more practical. If, for this one offence, Adam and his
posterity have been so visited — if so rigorously and so in
flexibly precise be the spirit of God's administration — if, under
the economy of heaven, sin, even in the very humblest of its
exhibitions, be the object of an intolerance so jealous and so
unrelenting — if the Deity be such as this transaction manifests
Him to be, disdainful of fellowship even with the very least
iniquity, and dreadful in the certainty of all His accomplish
ments against it — if, for a single transgression, all the promise
and all the felicity of paradise had to be broken up, and the
wretched offenders had to be turned abroad upon a world, now
changed by the curse into a wilderness, and their secure and
lovely home of innocence behoved to be abandoned, and to keep
them out a flaming sword had to turn every way, and guard
their reaccess to the bowers of immortality — if sin be so very
hateful in the eye of unspotted holiness, that, on its very first
act, and first appearance, the wonted communion between
heaven and earth was interdicted — if that was the time at
which God looked on our species with an altered countenance,
and one deed of disobedience proved so terribly decisive of the
fate and history of a world — what should each individual

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 179

amongst us think of his own danger, whose life has been one
continued habit of disobedience ? If we be still in the hands of
that God who laid so fell a condemnation on this one transgres
sion, let us just think of our many transgressions, and that
every hour we live multiplies the account of them ; and that,
however they may vanish from our own remembrance, they are
still alive in the records of a judge whose eye and whose
memory never fail Him. Let us transfer the lesson we have
gotten of heaven's jurisprudence from the case of our first
parents to our own case. Let us compare our lives with the
law of God, and we shall find that our sins are past reckoning.
Let us take account of the habitual posture of our souls, as a
posture of dislike for the things that are above, and we shall
find that our thoughts and our desires are ever running in one
current of sinfulness. Let us just make the computation how
often we fail in the bidden charity, and the bidden godliness,
and the bidden long-suffering — all as clearly bidden as the duty
that was laid on our first parents — and we shall find, that we
are borne down under a mountain of iniquity ; that, in the
language of the Psalmist, our transgressions have gone over our
heads, and, as a heavy burden, are too heavy for us ; and if we
be indeed under the government of Him who followed up the
offence of the stolen apple by so dreadful a chastisement, then is
wrath gone out unto the uttermost against every one of us.
There is something in the history of that apple which might be
brought specially to bear on the case of those small sinners who
practise in secret at the work of their petty depredations. But
it also carries in it a great and a universal moral. It tells us
that no sin is small. It serves a general purpose of conviction.
It holds out a most alarming disclosure of the charge that is
against us ; and makes it manifest to the conscience of him who
is awakened thereby, that, unless God Himself point out a way
of escape, we are indeed most hopelessly sunk in condemnation.
And, seeing that such wrath went out from the sanctuary of
this unchangeable God, on the one offence of our first parents,
it irresistibly follows, that if we, manifold in guilt, take not
ourselves to His appointed way of reconciliation — if we refuse
the overtures of Him, who then so visited the one offence
through which all are dead, but is now laying before us all
that free gift, which is of many offences unto justification — in
other words, if we will not enter into peace through the offered
Mediator, how much greater must be the wrath that abideth on us ?

180 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

Now, let the sinner have his conscience schooled by such a
contemplation, and there will be no rest whatever for his soul
till he find it in the Saviour. Let him only learn, from the deal
ings of God with the first Adam, what a God of holiness he
himself has to deal with ; and let him further learn, from the
history of the second Adam, that, to manifest Himself as a God
of love, another righteousness had to be brought in, in place of
that from which man had fallen so utterly away. There was a
faultless obedience rendered by Him, of whom it is said, that
He fulfilled all righteousness. There was a magnifying of the
law by one in human form, who, up to the last jot and tittle of
it, acquitted Himself of all its obligations. There was a pure,
and lofty, and undefiled path, trodden by a holy and harmless
Being, who gave not up His work upon earth, till, ere He left
it, He could cry out, that It was finished ; and so had wrought
out for us a perfect righteousness. Now, it forms the most
prominent annunciation of the New Testament, that the reward
of this righteousness is offered unto all — so that there is not one
of us who is not put by the gospel upon the alternative of being
either tried by our own merits, or treated according to the
merits of Him who became sin for us, though He knew no sin,
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Let the
sinner just look unto himself, and look unto the Saviour. Let
him advert not to his one, but to his many offences ; and that,
too, in the sight of a God, who, but for one so slight and so in
significant in respect of the outward description, as the eating of
a forbidden apple, threw off a world into banishment, and en
tailed a sentence of death upon all its generations. Let him
learri from this, that for sin, even in its humblest degrees, there
exists in the bosom of the Godhead no toleration ; and how
shall he dare, with the degree and the frequency of his own sin,
to stand any longer on a ground, where if he remain, the fierce
ness of a consuming fire is so sure to overtake him ? The
righteousness of Christ is without a flaw, and there he is invited
to take shelter. Under the actual regimen, which God has
established in our world, it is indeed his only security — his
refuge from the tempest, and hiding-place from the storm. The
only beloved Son offers to spread His own unspotted garment
as a protection over him ; and, if he be rightly alive to the
utter nakedness of his moral and spiritual condition, he will
indeed make no tarrying till he be found in Christ, and find
that in Him there is no condemnation.

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 181

Now, it is worthy of remark, that those principles, which shut
a man up unto the faith, do not take flight and abandon him,
after they have served this temporary purpose. They abide
with him, and work their appropriate influence on his character,
and serve as the germ of a new moral creation ; and we can
afterwards detect their operation in his heart and life ; so that,
if they were present at the formation of a saving belief, they
are not less unfailingly present with every true Christian,
throughout the whole of his future history, as the elements of
a renovated conduct. If it was sensibility to the evil of sin
which helped to wean the man from himself, and led him to
his Saviour, this sensibility does not fall asleep in the bosom of
an awakened sinner, after Christ has given him light — but it
grows with the growth, and strengthens with the strength of
his Christianity. If, at the interesting period of his transition
from nature to grace, he saw, even in the very least of his
offences, a deadly provocation of the Lawgiver, he does not lose
sight of this consideration in his future progress — nor does it
barely remain with him, like one of the unproductive notions of
an inert and unproductive theory. It gives rise to a fearful
jealousy in his heart of the least appearance of evil ; and, with
every man who has undergone a genuine process of conversion,
do we behold the scrupulous avoidance of sin, in its most slender,
as well as in its more aggravated forms. If it was the perfection
of the character of Christ who felt that it became Him to fulfil
all righteousness, that offered him the first solid foundation on.
which he could lean — then the same character, which first drew
his eye for the purpose of confidence, still continues to draw his
eye for the purpose of imitation. At the outset of faith, all the
essential moralities of thought, and feeling, and conviction, are
in play ; nor is there anything in the progress of a real faith
which is calculated to throw them back again into the dormancy
out of which they had arisen. They break out, in fact, into
more full and flourishing display on every new creature, with
every new step and new evolution in his mental history. All
the principles of the gospel serve, as it were, to fan and to per- '
petuate his hostility against sin ; and all the powers of the
gospel enable him more and more to fulfil the desires of his
heart, and to carry his purposes of hostility into execution. In
the case of every genuine believer, who walks not after the flesh,
but after the Spirit, do we behold a fulfilling of the righteousness
of the law — a strenuous avoidance of sin, in its slightest possible

182 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

taint or modification — a strenuous performance of duty, up to the
last jot and tittle of its exactions — so that, let the untrue profes
sors of the faith do what they will in the way of antinomianism,
and let the enemies of the faith say what they will about our
antinomianism, the real spirit of the dispensation under which we
live is such, that whosoever shall break one of the least of these
commandments, and teach men so, is accounted the least — who
soever shall do and teach them is accounted the greatest.

2. Let us, therefore, urge the spirit and the practice of this
lesson upon your observation. The place for the practice of it
is the familiar and week-day scene. The principle for the spirit
of it descends upon the heart, from the sublimest heights of the
sanctuary of God. It is not vulgarizing Christianity to bring
it clown to the very humblest occupations of human life. It is,
in fact, dignifying human life, by bringing it up to the level of
Christianity. It may look to some a degradation of the pulpit,
when the household servant is told to make her firm stand
against the temptation of open doors, and secret opportunities ;
or when the confidential agent is told to resist the slightest
inclination to any unseen freedom with the property of his em
ployers, or to any undiscoverable excess in the charges of his
management ; or when the receiver of a humble payment is
told, that the tribute which is due on every written acknowledg
ment ought faithfully to be met, and not fictitiously to be
evaded. This is not robbing religion of its sacredness, but
spreading its sacredness over the face of society. It is evan
gelizing human life, by impregnating its minutest transactions
with the spirit of the gospel. It is strengthening the wall of
partition between sin and obedience. It is the teacher of righte
ousness taking his stand at the outpost of that territory which
he is appointed to defend, and warning his hearers of the danger
that lies in a single footstep of encroachment. It is letting
them know, that it is in the act of stepping over the limit, that
the sinner throws the gauntlet of his defiance against the
authority of God. And though he may deceive himself with
the imagination that his soul is safe, because the gain of his
injustice is small, such is the God with whom he has to do, that,
if it be gain to the value of a single apple, then, within the
compass of so small an outward dimension, may as much guilt be
enclosed as that which hath brought death into our world, and
carried it down in a descending ruin upon all its generations.

It may appear a very little thing, when you are told to be

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 183

honest in little matters ; when the servant is told to keep her
hand from every one article about which there is not an express
or understood allowance on the part of her superiors ; when the
dealer is told to lop off the excesses of that minuter fraudulency,
which is so currently practised in the humble walks of merchan
dise ; when the workman is told to abstain from those petty
reservations of the material of his work, for which he is said to
have such snug and ample opportunity ; and when, without
pronouncing on the actual extent of these transgressions, all are
told to be faithful in that which is least, else, if there be truth
in our text, they incur the guilt of being unfaithful in much.
It may be thought, that because such dishonesties as these are
scarcely noticeable, they are therefore not worthy of notice.
But it is just in the proportion of their being unrioticeable by
the human eye, that it is religious to refrain from them. These
are the cases in which it will be seen, whether the control of
the omniscience of God makes up for the control of human ob
servation — in which the sentiment, that Thou, God, seest me !
should carry a preponderance through all the secret places of a
man's history — in which, when every earthly check of an earthly
morality is withdrawn, it should be felt that the eye of God is
upon him, and that the judgment of God is in reserve for him. To
him who is gifted with a true discernment of these matters, will
it appear, that often, in proportion to the smallness of the doings,
is the sacredness of that principle which causes them to be done
with integrity ; that honesty, in little transactions, bears upon
it more of the aspect of holiness than honesty in great ones ;
that the man of deepest sensibility to the obligations of the law,
is he who feels the quickening of moral alarm at its slightest
violations ; that, in the morality of grains and of scruples, there
may be a greater tenderness of conscience, and a more heaven-
born sanctity, than in that larger morality which flashes broadly
and observably upon the world ; — and that thus, in the faithful
ness of the household maid, or of the apprentice boy, there may
be the presence of a truer principle, than there is in the more
conspicuous transactions of human business — what they do,
being done, not with eye-service — what they do, being done
unto the Lord.

And here we remark, that nobleness of condition is not essen
tial as a school for nobleness of character ; nor does man require
to be high in office, ere he can gather around his person the
worth and the lustre of a high-minded integrity. It is delightful

184 GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN.

to think, that humble life may be just as rich in moral grace
and moral grandeur as the loftier places of society ; that as true
a dignity of principle may be earned by him who, in homeliest
drudgery, plies his conscientious task, as by him who stands
intrusted with the fortunes of an empire ; that the poorest menial
in the land, who can lift a hand unsoiled by the pilferments that
are within his reach, may have achieved a victory over tempta
tion, to the full as honourable as the proudest patriot can boast,
who has spurned the bribery of courts away from him. It is
cheering to know, from the heavenly Judge Himself, that he who
is faithful in the least, is faithful also in much ; and that thus,
among the labours of the field and of the work-shop, it is possible
for the peasant to be as bright in honour as the peer, and have
the chivalry of as much truth and virtue to adorn him.

And, as this lesson is not little in respect of principle, so
neither is it little in respect of influence on the order and well-
being of human society. He who is unjust in the least, is, in
respect of guilt, unjust also in much. And to reverse this pro
position, as it is done in the first clause of our text — he who
is faithful in that which is least, is, in respect both of righte
ous principle and of actual observation, faithful also in much.
Who is the man to whom I would most readily confide the
whole of my property? He who would most disdain to put
forth an injurious hand on a single farthing of it. Who is the
man from whom I would have the least dread of any unrigh
teous encroachment? He, all the delicacies of whose principle
are awakened when he comes within sight of the limit which
separates the region of justice from the region of injustice.
Who is the man whom we shall never find among the greater
degrees of iniquity? He who shrinks with sacred abhorrence
from the lesser degfees of it. It is a true, though a homely
maxim of economy, that if we take care of our small sums, our
great sums will take care of themselves. And, to pass from
our own things to the things of others, it is no less true, that if
principle should lead us all to maintain the care of strictest
honesty over our neighbour's pennies, then will his pounds lie
secure from the grasp of injustice, behind the barrier of a moral
impossibility. This lesson, if carried into effect among you, would
so strengthen all the ramparts of security between man and man,
as to make them utterly impassable ; and therefore, while, in the
matter of it, it may look, in one view, as one of the least of the
commandments, it, in regard both of principle and of effect, is

GUILT NOT TO BE ESTIMATED BY GAIN. 185

in another view of it one of the greatest of the commandments.
And we therefore conclude with assuring you, that nothing will
spread the principle of this commandment to any great extent
throughout the mass of society, but the principle of godliness.
Nothing will secure the general observation of justice amongst
us, in its punctuality and in its preciseness, but such a precise
Christianity as many affirm to be puritanical. In other words,
the virtues of society, to be kept in a healthful and prosperous
condition, must be upheld by the virtues of the sanctuary.
Human law may restrain many of the grosser violations. But
without religion among the people, justice will never be in ex
tensive operation as a moral principle. A vast proportion of the
species will be as unjust as the vigilance and the severities of
law allow them to be. A thousand petty dishonesties, which
never will, and never can be brought within the cognisance of
any of our courts of adminstration, will still continue to derange
the business of human life, and to stir up all the heartburnings
of suspicion and resentment among the members of human so
ciety. And it is, indeed, a triumphant reversion awaiting the
Christianity of the New Testament, when it shall become mani
fest as day, that it is her doctrine alone, which, by its searching
and sanctifying influence, can so moralize our world — as that
each may sleep secure in the lap of his neighbour's integrity, and
the charm of confidence between man and man will at length
be felt in the business of every town, and in the bosom of every
family.

186 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF REC1PKOCITY.

DISCOUKSE V.

ON THE GREAT CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY BETWEEN MAN AND MAN.

" Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even
so to them : for this is the law and the prophets." — MATT. vi. 12.

THERE are two great classes in human society, between whom
there lie certain mutual claims and obligations, which are felt by
some to be of very difficult adjustment. There are those who
have requests of some kind or other to make ; and there are those
to whom the requests are made, and with whom there is lodged
the power either to grant or to refuse them. Now, at first sight,
it would appear, that the firm exercise of this power of refusal is
the only barrier by which the latter class can be secured against
the indefinite encroachments of the former ; and that, if this were
removed, all the safeguards of right and property would be re
moved along with it. The power of refusal, on the part of those
who have the right of refusal, may be abolished by an act of
violence, on the part of those who have it not ; and then, when
this happens in individual cases, we have the crimes of assault
and robbery ; and when it happens on a more extended scale,
we have anarchy and insurrection in the land. Or the power of
refusal may be taken away by an authoritative precept of reli
gion ; and then might it still be matter of apprehension, lest our
only defence against the inroads of selfishness and injustice were
as good as given up, and lest the peace and interest of families
should be laid open to a most fearful exposure, by the enact
ments of a romantic and impracticable system. Whenever this
is apprehended, the temptation is strongly felt, either to rid our
selves of the enactments altogether, or at least to bring them
down in nearer accommodation to the feelings and the conveni-
encies of men.

And Christianity, on the very first blush of it, appears to be
precisely such a religion. It seems to take away all lawfulness
of resistance from the possessor, and to invest the demander with
such an extent of privilege, as would make the two classes of
society to which we have just now adverted, speedily change

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 187

places. And this is the true secret of the many laborious devia
tions that have been attempted, in this branch of morality, on
the obvious meaning of the New Testament. This is the secret
of those many qualifying clauses, by which its most luminous
announcements have been beset, to the utter darkening of them.
This it is which explains the many sad invasions that have been
made on the most manifest and undeniable literalities of the law
and of the testimony. And our present text, among others, has
received its full share of mutilation, and of what may be called
" dressing up," from the hands of commentators — it having
wakened the very alarms of which we have just spoken, and
called forth the very attempts to quiet and to subdue them.
Surely, it has been said, we can never be required to do unto
others what they have no right, and no reason, to expect from
us. The demand must not be an extravagant one. It must lie
within the limits of moderation. It must be such as, in the
estimation of every justly thinking person, is counted fair in the
circumstances of the case. The principle on which our Saviour,
in the text, rests the obligation of doing any particular thing to
others, is, that we wish others to do that thing unto us. But
this is too much for an affrighted selfishness ; and, for her own
protection, she would put forth a defensive sophistry upon the
subject ; and in place of that distinctly announced principle, on
which the Bible both directs and specifies what the things are
which we should do unto others, does she substitute another prin
ciple entirely — which is, merely to do unto others such things as
are fair, and right, and reasonable.

Now, there is one clause of this verse which would appear to
lay a positive interdict on all these qualifications. How shall
we dispose of a phrase, so sweeping and universal in its import,
as that of "all things whatsoever"? We cannot think that
such an expression as this was inserted for nothing, by Him who
has told us, that " cursed is every one who taketh away from
the words of this book." There is no distinction laid down
between things fair and things unfair — between things reason
able and things unreasonable. Both are comprehended in the
" all things whatsoever." The signification is plain and abso
lute, that, let the thing be what it may, if you wish others to do
that thing for you, it lies imperatively upon you to do the very
same thing for them also.

But, at this rate, you may think that the whole system of
human intercourse would go into unhingement. You may wish

188 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY.

your next-door neighbour to present you with half his fortune.
In this case, we know not how you are to escape from the con
clusion, that you are bound to present him with the half of
yours. Or you may wish a relative to burden himself with the
expenses of all your family. It is then impossible to save you
from the positive obligation, if you are equally able for it, of
doing the same service to the family of another. Or you may
wish to engross the whole time of an acquaintance in personal
attendance upon yourself. Then, it is just your part to do the
same extent of civility to another who may desire it. These
are only a few specifications, out of the manifold varieties,
whether of service or of donation, which are conceivable be
tween one man and another ; nor are we aware of any artifice of
explanation by which they can possibly be detached from the
" all things whatsoever " of the verse before us. These are
literalities which we are not at liberty to compromise — but are
bound to urge, and that simply, according to the terms in
which they have been conveyed to us by the great Teacher of
righteousness. This may raise a sensitive dread in many a
bosom. It may look like the opening of a floodgate, through
which a torrent of human rapacity would be made to set in on
the fair and measured domains of property, and by which all
the fences of legality would be overthrown. It is some such
fearful anticipation as this which causes casuistry to ply its
wily expedients, and busily to devise its many limits and its
many exceptions to the morality of the New Testament. And
yet we think it possible to demonstrate of our text, that no
such modifying is requisite ; and that, though admitted strictly
and rigorously as the rule of our daily conduct, it would lead to
no practical conclusions which are at all formidable.

For, what is the precise circumstance which lays the obliga
tion of this precept upon you ? There may be other places in
the Bible where you are required to do things for the benefit of
your neighbour, whether you would wish your neighbour to do
these things for your benefit or not. But this is not the re
quirement here. There is none other thing laid upon you in
this place, than that you should do that good action in behalf of
another, which you would like that other to do in behalf of
yourself. If you would not like him to do it for you, then
there is nothing in the compass of this sentence now before you,
that at all obligates you to do it for him. If you would not
like your neighbour to make so romantic a surrender to your

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 189

interest, as to offer you to the extent of half his fortune, then
there is nothing in that part of the gospel code which now
engages us, that renders it imperative upon you to make the
same offer to your neighbour. If you would positively recoil,
in all the reluctance of ingenuous delicacy, from the selfishness
of laying on a relation the burden of the expenses of all your
family, then this is not the good office that you would have him
to do unto you : and this, therefore, is not the good office which
the text prescribes you to do unto him. If you have such con
sideration for another's ease, arid another's convenience, that
you could not take the ungenerous advantage of so much of
his time for your accommodation, there may be other verses
in the Bible which point to a greater sacrifice, on your part, for
the good of others, than you would like these others to make
for yours; but, most assuredly, this is not the verse which
imposes that sacrifice. If you would not that others should do
these things on your account, then these things form no part of
the " all things whatsoever " you would that men should do
unto you ; and therefore they form no part of the " all things
whatsoever" that you are required, by this verse, to do unto
them. The bare circumstance of your positively not wishing
that any such services should be rendered unto you, exempts
you, as far as the single authority of this precept is concerned,
from the obligation of rendering these services to others. This
is the limitation to the extent of those services which are
called for in the text ; and it is surely better, that every limi
tation to a commandment of God's, should be defined by God
himself, than that it should be drawn from the assumptions of
human fancy, or from the fears and the feelings of human con
venience.

Let a man, in fact, give himself up to a strict and literal
observation of the precept in this verse, and it will impress a
twofold direction upon him. It will not only guide him to cer
tain performances of good in behalf of others, but it will guide
him to the regulation of his own desires of good from them.
For his desires of good from others are here set up as the
measure of his performances of good to others. The more
selfish and unbounded his desires are, the larger are those per
formances with the obligation of which he is burdened. What
soever he would that others should do unto him, he. is bound to
do unto them ; and therefore, the more he gives way to un
generous and extravagant wishes of service from those who are

190 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF KECIPKOCITY.

around him, the heavier and more insupportable is the load of
duty which he brings upon himself. The commandment is quite
imperative, and there is no escaping from it ; and if he, by the
excess of his selfishness, should render it impracticable, then the
whole punishment, due to the guilt of casting aside the authority
of this commandment, follows in that train of punishment which
is annexed to selfishness. There is one way of being relieved
from such a burden. There is one way of reducing this verse
to a moderate and practicable requirement ; and that is, just to
give up selfishness — just to stifle all ungenerous desires — just to
moderate every wish of service or liberality from others, down
to the standard of what is right and equitable ; and then there
may be other verses in the Bible, by which we are called to be
kind even to the evil and the unthankful. But most assuredly
this verse lays upon us none other thing than that we should
do such services for others as are right and equitable.

The more extravagant, then, a man's wishes of accommoda
tion from others are, the wider is the distance between him and
the bidden performances of our text. The separation of him from
his duty increases at the rate of two bodies receding from each
other by equal and contrary movements. The more selfish his
desires of service are from others, the more feeble, on that very
account, will be his desires of making any surrender of himself to
them, and yet the greater is the amount of that surrender which
is due. The poor man, in fact, is moving himself away from
the rule ; and the rule is just moving as fast away from the man.
As he sinks, in the scale of selfishness, beneath the point of a fair
and moderate expectation from others, does the rule rise in the
scale of duty, with its demands upon him ; and thus there is
rendered to him double for every unfair and ungenerous imposition
that he would make on the kindness of those who are around him.

Now there is one way, and a very effectual one, of getting
these two ends to meet. Moderate your own desires of service
from others, and you will moderate, in the same degree, all
those duties of service to others which are measured by these
desires. Have the delicacy to abstain from any wish of encroach
ment on the convenience or property of another. Have the
highmindedness to be indebted for your own support to the
exertions of your own honourable industry, rather than to the
dastardly habit of preying on the simplicity of those around you.
Have such a keen sense of equity, arid such a fine tone of inde
pendent feeling, that you could not bear to be the cause of hard-

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 191

ship or distress to a single human creature, if you could help it.
Let the same spirit be in you, which the Apostle wanted to
exemplify before the eye of his disciples, when he coveted no
man's gold, or silver, or apparel ; when he laboured not to be
chargeable to any of them ; but wrought with his own hands,
rather than be burdensome. Let this mind be in you, which
was also in the Apostle of the Gentiles ; and then, the text
before us will not come near you with a single oppressive
or impracticable requirement. There may be other passages,
where you are called to go beyond the strict line of justice, or
common humanity, in behalf of your suffering brethren. But
this passage does not touch you with any such preceptive impo
sition : and you, by moderating your wishes from others down
to what is fair and equitable, do, in fact, reduce the rule which
binds you to act according to the measure of these wishes, down
to a rule of precise and undeviating equity.

The operation is somewhat like that of a governor or fly
in mechanism. This is a very happy contrivance, by which all
that is defective or excessive in the motion, is confined within
the limits of equability ; and every tendency, in particular, to
any mischievous acceleration is restrained. The impulse given
by this verse to the conduct of man among his fellows, would
seem, to a superficial observer, to carry him to all the excesses of
a most ruinous and quixotic benevolence. But let him only look
to the skilful adaptation of the fly. Just suppose the control of
moderation and equity to be laid upon his own wishes, and
there is not a single impulse given to his conduct beyond the rate
of moderation and equity. You are not required here to do all
things whatsoever in behalf of others, but to do all things what
soever for them, that you would should be done unto yourself.
This is the check by which the whole of the bidden movement
is governed, and kept from running out into any hurtful excess.
And such is the beautiful operation of that piece of moral
mechanism that we are now employed in contemplating, that
while it keeps down all the aspirations of selfishness, it does, in
fact, restrain every extravagancy, and impresses on its obedient
subjects no other movement than that of an even and inflexible
justice.

This rule of our Saviour's, then, prescribes moderation to our
desires of good from others, as well as generosity to our doings
in behalf of others ; and makes the first the measure of obliga
tion to the second. It may thus be seen how easily, in a Chris-

192 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY.

tian society, the whole work of benevolence could be adjusted,
so as to render it possible for the givers not only to meet, but
also to overpass, the wishes and expectations of the receivers.
The rich man may have a heavier obligation laid upon him by
other precepts of the New Testament ; but by this precept he is
not bound to do more for the poor man, than what he himself
would wish, in like circumstances, to be done for him. And let
the poor man, on the other hand, wish for no more than what a
Christian ought to wish for ; let him work and endure to the
extent of nature's sufferance, rather than beg — and only beg,
rather than that he should starve ; and in such a state of prin
ciple among men, a tide of beneficence would so go forth upon
all the vacant places in society, as that there should be no room
to receive it. The duty of the rich, as connected with this
administration, is of so direct and positive a character, as to ob
trude itself at once on the notice of the Christian moralist. But
the poor also have a duty in it — to which we feel ourselves
directed by the train of argument which we have now been pro
secuting — and a duty, too, we think, of far greater importance
even than the other, to the best interests of mankind.

For, let us first contrast the rich man who is ungenerous in
his doings, with the poor man who is ungenerous in his desires ;
and see from which of the two it is, that the cause of charity
receives the deadlier infliction. There is, it must be admitted,
an individual to be met with occasionally, who represents the
former of these two characters ; with every affection gravitat
ing to self, and to its sordid gratifications and interests ; bent
on his own pleasure, or his own avarice — and so engrossed with
these, as to have no spare feeling at all for the brethren of his
common nature ; with a heart obstinately shut against that most
powerful of applications, the look of genuine and imploring dis
tress — and whose very countenance speaks a surly and deter
mined exclusion on every call that proceeds from it ; who, in a
tumult of perpetual alarm about new cases, and new tales of
suffering, and new plans of philanthropy, has at length learned
to resist and to resent every one of them ; and, spurning the
whole of this disturbance impatiently away, to maintain a firm
defensive over the close system of his own selfish luxuries, and
his own snug accommodations. Such a man keeps back, it must
be allowed, from the cause of charity, what he ought to have
rendered to it in his own person. There is a diminution of
the philanthropic fund, up to the extent of what benevolence

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 193

would have awarded out of his individual means, and individual
opportunities. The good cause is a sufferer, not by any positive
blow it has sustained, but by the simple negation of one friendly
and fostering hand, that else might have been stretched forth to
aid and patronize it. There is only so much less of direct coun
tenance and support, than would otherwise have been ; for in
this our age we have no conception whatever of such an ex
ample being at all infectious. For a man to wallow in prosperity
himself, and be unmindful of the wretchedness that is around
him, is an exhibition of altogether so ungainly a character, that
it will far oftener provoke an observer to affront it by the con
trast of his own generosity, than to render it the approving tes
timony of his imitation. So that all we have lost by the man
who is ungenerous in his doings, is his own contribution to the
cause of philanthropy. And it is a loss that can be borne.
The cause of this world's beneficence can do abundantly without
him. There is a ground that is yet unbroken, and there are re
sources which are still unexplored, that will yield a far more
substantial produce to the good of humanity, than he, and
thousands as wealthy as he, could render to it, out of all their
capabilities.

But there is a far wider mischief inflicted on the cause of
charity by the poor man who is ungenerous in his desires ; by him,
whom every act of kindness is sure to call out to the reaction
of some new demand, or new expectation ; by him, on whom
the hand of a giver has the effect, not of appeasing his wants,
but of inflaming his rapacity ; by him who, trading among the
sympathies of the credulous, can dexterously appropriate for
himself a portion tenfold greater than what would have blessed
and brightened the aspect of many a deserving family. Him we
denounce as the worst enemy of the poor. It is he whose raven
ous gripe wrests from them a far more abundant benefaction,
than is done by the most lordly and unfeeling proprietor in the
land. He is the arch-oppressor of his brethren ; and the amount
of the robbery which he has practised upon them, is not to be
estimated by the alms which he has monopolized, by the food,
or the raiment, or the money, which he has diverted to himself,
from the more modest sufferers around him. He has done what
is infinitely worse than turning aside the stream of charity. He
has closed its floodgates. He has chilled and alienated the hearts
of the wealthy, by the gall of bitterness which he has infused
into this whole ministration. A few such harpies would suffice

VOL. III. N

191 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY.

to exile a whole neighbourhood from the attentions of the bene
volent, by the distrust and the jealousy wherewith they have
poisoned their bosoms, and laid an arrest on all the sensibilities
that else would have flowed from them. It is he who, ever on
the watch and on the wing about some enterprise of imposture,
makes it his business to work and to prey on the compassionate
principles of our nature ; it is he who, in effect, grinds the faces
of the poor and that, with deadlier severity than even is done
by the great baronial tyrant, the battlements of whose castle
seem to frown, in all the pride of aristocract, on the territory
that is before it. There is, at all times, a kindliness of feeling
ready to stream forth, with a tenfold greater liberality than ever,
on the humble orders of life ; and it is he, and such as he, who
have congealed it. He has raised a jaundiced medium between
the rich and the poor, in virtue of which, the former eye the
latter with suspicion ; and there is not a man who wears the
garb, and prefers the applications of poverty, that has not suf
fered from the worthless impostor who has gone before him.
They are, in fact, the deceit, and the indolence, and the low sor-
didness of a few, who have made outcasts of the many, and
locked against them the feelings of the wealthy in a kind of iron
imprisonment. The rich man who is ungenerous in his doings,
keeps back one labourer from the field of charity. But a poor
man who is ungenerous in his desires, can expel a thousand
labourers in disgust away from it. He sheds a cruel and ex
tended blight over the fair region of philanthropy ; and many
have abandoned it, who, but for him, would fondly have lingered
thereupon ; very many, who, but for the way in which their
simplicity has been tried and trampled upon, would still have
tasted the luxury of doing good unto the poor, and made it their
delight, as well as their duty, to expend and expatiate among
their habitations.

We say not this to exculpate the rich, for it is their part not
to be weary in well-doing, but to prosecute the work and the
labour of love under every discouragement. Neither do we say
this to the disparagement of the poor ; for the picture we have
given is of the few out of the many ; and the closer the acquaint
ance with humble life becomes, will it be the more seen ot what
a high pitch of generosity even the poorest are capable. They,
in truth, though perhaps they are not aware of it, can contribute
more to the cause of charity, by the moderation of their desires,
than the rich can by the generosity of their doings. They,

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 195

without, it may be, one penny to bestow, might obtain a place
in the record of heaven, as the most liberal benefactors of their
species. There is nothing in the humble condition of life they
occupy, which precludes them from all that is great or graceful
in human charity. There is a way in which they may equal,
and even outpeer, the wealthiest of the land, in that very virtue
of which wealth alone has been conceived to have the exclusive
inheritance. There is a pervading character in humanity which
the varieties of rank do not obliterate ; and as, in virtue of the
common corruption, the poor man may be as effectually the
rapacious despoiler of his brethren, as the man of opulence above
him — so, there is a common excellence attainable by both ; and
through which, the poor man may, to the full, be as splendid in
generosity as the rich, and yield a far more important contribu
tion to the peace and comfort of society.

To make this plain — it is in virtue of a generous doing on the
part of a rich man, when a sum of money is offered for the relief
of want ; and it is in virtue of a generous desire on the part of a
poor man, when this money is refused; when, with the feeling,
that his necessities do not just warrant him to be yet a burden
upon others, he declines to touch the offered liberality ; when,
with a delicate recoil from the unlooked-for proposal, he still re
solves to put it for the present away, and to find, if possible, for
himself a little longer ; when, standing on the very margin of
dependence, he would yet like to struggle with the difficulties of
his situation, and to maintain this severe but honourable conflict,
till hard necessity should force him to surrender. Let the money
which he has thus so nobly shifted from himself take some new
direction to another; and who, we ask, is the giver of it? The
first and most obvious reply is, that it is he who owned it ; but,
it is still more emphatically true, that it is he who has declined
it. It came originally out of the rich man's abundance ; but it
was the noble-hearted generosity of the poor man that handed it
onwards to its final destination. He did not emanate the gift ;
but it is just as much that he has not absorbed it, but left it to
find its full conveyance to some neighbour poorer than himself,
to some family still more friendless and destitute than his own.
It was given the first time out of an overflowing fulness. It is
given the second time out of stinted and self-denying penury.
In the world's eye, it is the proprietor who bestowed the charity.
But, in Heaven's eye, the poor man who waived it away from
himself to another is the more illustrious philanthropist of the

196 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY.

two. The one gave it out of his affluence. The other gave it
out of the sweat of his brow. He rose up early, and sat up late,
that he might have it to bestow on a poorer than himself; and
without once stretching forth a giver's hand to the necessities
of his brethren, still is it possible, that by him, and such as him,
may the main burden of this world's benevolence be borne.

It need scarcely be remarked, that, without supposing the
offer of any sum made to a poor man who is generous in his de
sires, he, by simply keeping himself back from the distributions
of charity, fulfils all the high functions which we have now
ascribed to him. He leaves the charitable fund untouched for all
that distress which is more clamorous than his own ; and we,
therefore, look not to the original givers of the money, but to
those who line, as it were, the margin of pauperism, and yet
firmly refuse to enter it — we look upon them as the pre-eminent
benefactors of society, who narrow, as it were, by a wall of de
fence, the ground of human dependence, and are, in fact, the
guides and the guardians of all that opulence can bestow.

Thus it is, that when Christianity becomes universal, the
doings of the one party, arid the desires of the other, will meet
and overpass. The poor will wish for no more than the rich
will be delighted to bestow ; and the rule of our text, which every
real Christian at present finds so practicable, will, when carried
over the face of society, bind all the members of it into one con
senting brotherhood. The duty of doing good to others will then
coalesce with that counterpart duty which regulates our desires
of good from them ; and the work of benevolence will, at length,
be prosecuted without that alloy of rapacity on the one hand,
and distrust on the other, which serve so much to fester and
disturb the whole of this ministration. To complete this adjust
ment, it is in every way as necessary to lay all the incumbent
moralities on those who ask, as on those who confer ; and never
till the whole text, which comprehends the wishes of man as well
as his actions, wield its entire, authority over the species, will the
disgusts and the prejudices, which form such a barrier between
the ranks of human life, be effectually done away. It is not by
the abolition of rank, but by assigning to each rank its duties,
that peace and friendship and order will at length be firmly
established in our world. It is by the force of principle, and not
by the force of some great political overthrow, that a consumma
tion so delightful is to be attained. We have no conception
whatever, that, even in millennial days, the diversities of wealth

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 197

and station will at length be equalized. On looking forward to
the time when kings shall be the nursing-fathers, and queens the
nursing-mothers of our church, we think that we can behold the
perspective of as varied a distribution of place and property as
before. In the pilgrimage of life, there will still be the moving
procession of the few charioted in splendour on the highway,
and the many pacing by their side along the line of the same
journey. There will, perhaps, be a somewhat more elevated
footpath for the crowd ; and there will be an air of greater com
fort and sufficiency amongst them ; and the respectability of
evident worth and goodness will sit upon the countenance of this
general population. But, bating these, we look for no great
change in the external aspect of society. It will only be a moral
and a spiritual change. Kings will retain their sceptres, and
nobles their coronets ; but, as they float in magnificence along,
will they look with benignant feeling on the humble wayfarers ;
and the honest salutations of regard and reverence will arise to
them back again ; and, should any weary passenger be ready to
sink unfriended on his career, will he, at one time, be borne on
wards by his fellows on the pathway, and, at another, will a
shower of beneficence be made to descend from the crested equi
page that overtakes him. It is Utopianism to think, that, in
the ages of our world which are yet to come, the outward dis
tinctions of life will not all be upholden. But it is riot Utopian-
ism, it is Prophecy to aver, that the breath of a new spirit will
go abroad over the great family of mankind — so that while, to
the end of time, there shall be the high and the low in every
passing generation, will the charity of kindred feelings, and of a
common understanding, create a fellowship between them on
their way, till they reach that heaven where human love shall be
perfected, and all human greatness is unknown.

In various places of the New Testament, do we see the checks
of spirit and delicacy laid upon all extravagant desires. Our
text, while it enjoins the performance of good to others, up to
the full measure of your desires of good from them, equally
enjoins the keeping down of these desires to the measure of your
performances. If Christian dispensers had only to do with
Christian recipients, the whole work of benevolence would be
with ease and harmony carried on. All that was unavoidable —
all that came from the hand of Providence — all that was laid upon
our suffering brethren by the unlooked-for visitations of accident
or disease — all that pain or misfortune which necessarily attaches

198 THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY.

to the constitution of the species — all this the text most amply
provides for ; and all this a Christian society would be delighted
to stretch forth their means for the purpose of alleviating or
doing away.

We should not have dwelt so long upon this lesson, were it
not for the essential Christian principle that is involved in it.
The morality of the gospel is not more strenuous on the side of
the duty of giving of this world's goods when it is needed, than
it is against the desire of receiving when it is not needed. It
is more blessed to give than to receive, and therefore less blessed
to receive than to give. For the enforcement of this principle
among the poorer brethren, did Paul give up a vast portion of
his apostolical time and labour ; and that he might be an en-
sample to the flock of working with his own hands, rather than
be burdensome, did he set himself down to the occupation of a
tent-maker. That lesson is surely worthy of engrossing one
sermon of an uninspired teacher, for the sake of which an in
spired Apostle of the Gentiles engrossed as much time as would
have admitted the preparation and the delivery of many sermons.
But there is no more striking indication of the whole spirit and
character of the gospel in this matter, than the example of Him
who is the author of it — and of whom we read these affecting
words, that He came into the world " not to be ministered unto,
but to minister." It is a righteous thing in him who has of this
world's goods, to minister to the necessities of others : but it is
a still higher attainment of righteousness in him who has nothing
but the daily earnings of his daily work to depend upon, so to
manage and to strive that he shall not need to be ministered
unto. Christianity overlooks no part of human conduct ; and
by providing for this in particular, does it, in fact, overtake, and
that with a precept of utmost importance, the habit and con
dition of a very extended class of human society. And never
does the gospel so exhibit its adaptation to our species — and
never does virtue stand in such characters of strength and sacred-
ness before us — as when, impregnated with the evangelical spirit,
arid urged by evangelical motives, it takes its most direct sanc
tion from the life and doings of the Saviour.

And he who feels as he ought, will bear with cheerfulness all
that the Saviour prescribes, when he thinks how much it is for
him that the Saviour has borne. We speak not of His poverty all
the time that He lived upon earth. We speak not of those years
when, a houseless wanderer in an unthankful world, He had not

THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF RECIPROCITY. 199

•where to lay His head. We speak not of the meek and uncom
plaining sufferance with which He met the many ills that op
pressed the tenor of His mortal existence. But we speak of
that awful burden which crushed and overwhelmed its termina
tion. We speak of that season of the hour and the power of
darkness, when it pleased the Lord to bruise Him, and to make
His soul an offering for sin. To estimate aright the endurance
of Him who Himself bore our infirmities, would we ask of any
individual to recollect some deep and awful period of abandon
ment in his own history — when that countenance which at one
time beamed and brightened upon Him from above, was mantled
in thickest darkness — when the iron of remorse entered into his
soul — and, laid on a bed of torture, he was made to behold the
evil of sin, and to taste of its bitterness. Let him look back,
if he can, on this conflict of many agitations, and then figure
the whole of this mental wretchedness to be borne off by the
ministers of vengeance into hell, and stretched out unto eternity.
And if, on the great day of expiation, a full atonement was
rendered, and all that should have fallen upon us was placed
upon the head of the sacrifice — let him hence compute the
weight and the awfulness of those sorrows which were carried
by Him on whom the chastisement of our peace was laid, and
who poured out His soul unto the death for us. If ever a sinner,
under such a visitation, shall again emerge into peace and joy
in believing — if he ever shall again find his way to that foun
tain which is opened in the house of Judah — if he shall recover
once more that suinshine of the soul, which, on the days that
are past, disclosed to him the beauties of holiness here, and the
glories of heaven hereafter — if ever he shall hear with effect, in
this world, that voice from the mercy-seat, which still proclaims
a welcome to the chief of sinners, and beckons him afresh to
reconciliation — Oh ! how gladly then should he bear, throughout
the remainder of his days, the whole authority of the Lord who
bought him ; and bind for ever to his own person that yoke of
the Saviour which is easy, and that burden which is light.

200 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES.

DISCOURSE VI.

ON THE DISSIPATION OP LARGE CITIES.

" Let no man deceive you with vain words : for because of these things comcth the wrath
of flod upon the children of disobedience." — EPHES. v. 6.

THERE is on^ obvious respect in which the standard of moral
ity amongst men, differs from that pure and universal standard
winch God hath set up for the obedience of His subjects. Men
will not demand very urgently of each other, that which does
not very nearly, or very immediately, affect their own personal
and particular interest. To the violations of justice, or truth,
or humanity, they will be abundantly sensitive, because these
offer a most visible and quickly felt encroachment on his in
terest. And thus it is, that the social virtues, even without any-
direct sanction from God at all, will ever draw a certain portion
of respect and reverence around them ; and that a loud testi
mony of abhorrence may often be heard from the mouths of
ungodly men, against all such vices as may be classed under
the general designation of vices of dishonesty.

Now, the same thing does not hold true of another class of
vices, which may be termed the vices of dissipation. These do
not touch, in so visible or direct a manner, on the security of
what man possesses, and of what man has the greatest value for.
But man is a selfish being, and therefore it is, that the ingredient
of selfishness gives a keenness to his estimation of the evil and
Enormity of the former vices, which is scarcely felt at all in any
"estimation he may form of the latter vices. It is very true, at
the same time, that if one were to compute the whole amount
of the mischief they bring upon society, it would be found, that
the profligacies of mere dissipation go very far to break up the
peace and enjoyment, and even the relative virtues of the world ;
and that, if these profligacies were reformed, it would work a
mighty augmentation on the temporal good both of individuals
and families. But the connexion between sobriety of character,
and the happiness of the community, is not so apparent, because
it is more remote than the connexion which obtains between

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 201

integrity of character, and the happiness of the community ; and
man being not only a selfish but a short-sighted being, it follows,
that while the voice of execration may be distinctly heard against
every instance of fraud or of injustice, instances of licentiousness
may occur on every side of us, and be reported on the one hand
with the utmost levity, and be listened to, on the other, with
the most entire and complacent toleration.

Here, then, is a point in which the general morality of the
world is at utter and irreconcilable variance with the law of
God. Here is a case in which the voice that cometh forth from
the tribunal of public opinion pronounces one thing, and the
voice that cometh forth from the sanctuary of God pronounces
another. When there is an agreement between these two voices,
the principle on which obedience is rendered to their joint and
concurring authority, may be altogether equivocal ; and, with
religious and irreligious men, you may observe an equal exhi
bition of all the equities, and all the civilities of life. But when
there is a discrepancy between these two voices — or when the
one attaches a criminality to certain habits of conduct, and is
not at all seconded by the testimony of the other — then do we
escape the confusion of mingled motives, and mingled authori
ties. The character of the two parties emerges out of the
ambiguity which involved it. The law of God points, it must
be allowed, as forcible an anathema against the man of dis
honesty, as against the man of dissipation. But the chief burden
of the world's anathema is laid on the head of the former ; and
therefore it is, that, on the latter ground, we meet with more
discriminative tests of principle, and gather more satisfying
materials for the question of — who is on the side of the Lord of
hosts, and who is against Him ?

The passage we have now submitted to you, looks hard on
the votaries of dissipation. It is like eternal truth, lifting up its
own proclamation, and causing it to be heard amid the errors
and the delusions of a thoughtless world. It is like the Deity
Himself looking forth, as He did, from a cloud, on the Egyptians
of old, and troubling the souls of those who are lovers of plea
sures more than lovers of God. It is like the voice of heaven
crying down the voice of human society, and sending forth a
note of alarm amongst its giddy generations. It is like the
unrolling of a portion of that book of higher jurisprudence, out
of which we shall be judged on the day of our coming account,
and setting before our eyes an enactment, which, if we disregard

202 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES.

it, will turn that day into the day of our coming condemnation.
The words of man are adverted to in this solemn proclamation of
God, against all unlawful and all unhallowed enjoyments, and
they are called words of vanity. He sets aside the authority of
human opinion altogether ; and, on an irrevocable record, has
He stamped such an assertion of the authority that belongeth to
Himself only, as serves to the end of time for an enduring
memorial of His will ; and as commits the truth of the Lawgiver
to the execution of a sentence of wrath against all whose souls
are hardened by the deceitfnlness of sin. There is, in fact, a
peculiar deceitfulness in the matter before us ; and, in this verse,
are we warned against it — " Let no man deceive you with vain
words ; for because of these things the wrath of God cometh
on the children of disobedience."

In the preceding verse, there is such an enumeration as
serves to explain what the things are which are alluded to in
the text ; and it is such an enumeration, you should remark, as
goes to fasten the whole terror, and the whole threat, of the
coming vengeance — not on the man who combines in his own
person all the characters of iniquity which are specified, but
on the man who realizes any one of these characters. It is not,
you will observe, the conjunction and, but the conjunction or,
which is interposed between them. It is not as if we said,
that the man who is dishonest, and licentious, and covetous, and
unfeeling, shall not inherit the kingdom of God — but the man
who is either dishonest, or licentious, or covetous, or unfeeling.
On the single and exclusive possession of any one of these
attributes, will God deal with you as with an enemy. The
plea, that we are a little thoughtless, but we have a good heart,
is conclusively cut asunder by this portion of the law and of the
testimony. And in a corresponding passage, in the ninth verse
of the sixth chapter of Paul s First Epistle to the Corinthians,
the same peculiarity is observed in the enumeration of those
who shall be excluded from God's favour, and have the burden
of God's wrath laid on them through eternity. It is not the
man who combines all the deformities of character which are
there specified, but the man who realizes any one of the separate
deformities. Some of them are the vices of dishonesty, others
of them are the vices of dissipation ; and, as if aware of a
deceitfulness from this cause, he, after telling us that the un
righteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God, bids us not be
deceived — for that neither the licentious, nor the abominable,

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 203

nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extor
tioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

He who keepeth the whole law, but offendeth in one point,
says the Apostle James, is guilty of all. The truth is, that
his disobedience on this one point may be more decisive of the
state of his loyalty to God, than his keeping of all the rest. It
may be the only point on which the character of his loyalty is
really brought to the trial. All his conformities to the law of
God might have been rendered, because they thwarted not his
own inclination ; and therefore, would have been rendered
though there had been no law at all. The single infraction
may have taken place in the only case where there was a real
competition between the will of the creature and the will of the
Creator ; and the event proves to which of the two the right of
superiority is awarded. Allegiance to God, in truth, is but one
principle, and may be described by one short and summary ex
pression ; and one act of disobedience may involve in it such a
total surrender of the principle, as goes to dethrone God alto
gether from the supremacy which belongs to Him. So that the
account between a creature and the Creator is not like an
account made up of many items, where the expunging of one
item would only make one small and fractional deduction from
the whole sum of obedience. If you reserve but a single item
from this account, and another makes a principle of completing
and rendering up the whole of it, then your character varies
from his not by a slight shade of difference, but stands con
trasted with it in direct and diametric opposition. We perceive
that, while with him the will of God has the mastery over all
his inclinations, with you there is, at least, one inclination
which has the mastery over the will of God ; that, while in his
bosom there exists a single and subordinating principle of
allegiance to the law, in yours there exists another principle,
which, on the coming round of a fit opportunity, developes itself
in an act of transgression ; that, while with him God may be
said to walk and to dwell in him, with you there is an evil
visitant, who has taken up his abode in your heart, and lodges
there either in a state of dormancy or of action, according to
circumstances ; that, while with him the purpose is honestly
proceeded on, of doing nothing which God disapproves, with
you there is a purpose not only different, but opposite, of doing
something which He disapproves. On this single difference is
suspended not a question of degree, but a question of kind.

204 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES.

There are presented to us not two hues of the same colour, but
two colours, just as broadly contrasted with each other as light
and darkness. And such is the state of the alternative between
a partial and an unreserved obedience, that while God imper
atively claims the one as His due, He looks on the other as an
expression of defiance against Him, and against His sovereignty.

It is the very same in civil government. A man renders
himself an outcast by one act of disobedience. He does not
need to accumulate upon himself the guilt of all the higher
atrocities in crime, ere he forfeits his life to the injured laws of
his country. By the perpetration of any one of them is the
whole vengeance of the state brought to bear upon his person ;
and sentence of death is pronounced on a single murder, or
forgery, or act of violent depredation.

And let us ask you just to reflect on the tone and spirit of
that man towards his God, who would palliate, for example, the
the vices of dissipation to which he is addicted, by alleging his
utter exemption from the vices of dishonesty, to which he is
not addicted. Just think of the real disposition and character
of his soul, who can say, " I will please God, but only when, in
so doing, I also please myself ; or I will do homage to His law,
but just in those instances by which I honour the rights, and
fulfil the expectations, of society ; or I will be decided by His
opinion of the right and the wrong, but just when the opinion
of my neighbourhood lends its powerful and effective confirma
tion. But in other cases, when the matter is reduced to a bare
question between man and God, when He is the single party
I have to do with, when His will and His wrath are the only
elements which enter into the deliberation, when judgment, and
eternity, and the voice of Him who speaketh from heaven are
the only considerations at issue — then do I feel myself at
greater liberty, and I shall take my own way, and walk in the
counsel of mine own heart, and after the sight of mine own
eyes." Oh ! be assured, that when all this is laid bare on the
day of reckoning, and the discerner of the heart pronounces
upon it, and such a sentence is to be given, as will make it
manifest to the consciences of all assembled, that true and
righteous are the judgments of God — there is many a creditable
man who has passed through the world with the plaudits and
the testimonies of all his fellows, and without one other flaw
upon his reputation but the very slender one of certain harm
less foibles, and certain good-humoured peculiarities, who, when

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 205

brought to the bar of account, will stand convicted there of
having made a divinity of his own will, and spent his days in
practical and habitual atheism.

And this argument is not at all affected by the actual state of
sinfulness and infirmity into which we have fallen. It is true,
even of saints on earth, that they commit sin. But to be over
taken in a fault is one thing ; to commit that fault with the
deliberate consent of the mind is another. There is in the
bosom of every true Christian a strenuous principle of resist
ance to sin, and it belongs to the very essence of the principle
that it is resistance to all sin. It admits of no voluntary in
dulgence to one sin more than to another. Such an indulgence
would not only change the character of what may be called the
elementary principle of regeneration, but would destroy it alto
gether. The man who has entered on a course of Christian dis-
cipleship, carries on an unsparing and universal war with all
iniquity. He has chosen Christ for his alone Master, and he
struggles against the ascendency of every other. It is his sus
tained and habitual exertion in following after Him to forsake all;
so that if his performance were as complete as his endeavour,
you would not merely see a conformity to some of the precepts,
but a conformity to the whole law of God. At all events, the
endeavour is an honest one, and so far successful, that sin has not
the dominion ; and sure we are that, in such a state of things,
the vices of dissipation can have no existence. These vices can
be more effectually shunned, and more effectually surmounted,
for example, than the infirmities of an unhappy temper. So
that, if dissipation still attaches to the character, and appears in
the conduct of any individual, we know not a more decisive evi
dence of the state of that individual as being one of the many
who crowd the broad way that leadeth to destruction. We look
no further to make out our estimate of his present condition as
being that of a rebel, and of his future prospect as being that of
spending an eternity in hell. There is no halting between two
opinions in this matter. The man who enters a career of dis
sipation throws down the gauntlet of defiance to his God. The
man who persists in this career keeps on the ground of hostility
against Him.

Let us now endeavour to trace the origin, the progress, and
the effects, of a life of dissipation.

First. Then it may be said of a very great number of young,
on their entrance into the business of the world, that they have

206 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES.

not been enough fortified against its seducing influences by their
previous education at home. Generally speaking, they come
out from the habitation of their parents unarmed and unprepared
for the contest which awaits them. If the spirit of this world's
morality reign in their own family, then it cannot be, that their
introduction into a more public scene of life will be very strictly
guarded against those vices on which the world placidly smiles,
or at least regards with silent toleration. They may have been
told, in early boybood, of the infamy of a lie. They may have
had the virtues of punctuality, and of economy, and of regular
attention to business, pressed upon their observation. They
may have heard a uniform testimony on the side of good be
haviour, up to the standard of such current moralities as obtain
in their neighbourhood ; and this, we are ready to admit, may
include in it a testimony against all such excesses of dissipation
as would unfit them for the prosecution of this world's interests.
But let us ask, whether there are not parents, who, after they
have carried the work of discipline thus far, forbear to carry it
any farther ; who, while they would mourn over it as a family
trial should any son of theirs fall a victim to excessive dissipa
tion, yet are willing to tolerate the lesser degrees of it ; who,
instead of deciding the question on the alternative of his heaven
or his hell, are satisfied with such a measure of sobriety as will
save him from ruin and disgrace in this life ; who, if they can
only secure this, have no great objection to the moderate share
he may take in this world's conformities ; who feel, that in this
matter there is a necessity and a power of example against
which it is vain to struggle, and which must be acquiesced in ;
who deceive themselves with the fancied impossibility of stopping
the evil in question — and say, that business must be gone
through, and that, in the prosecution of it, exposures must be
made ; and that, for the success of it, a certain degree of accom
modation to others must be observed ; and seeing that it is so
mighty an object for one to widen the extent of his connexions,
he must neither be very retired nor very peculiar — nor must his
hours of companionship be too jealously watched or inquired
into — nor must we take him too strictly to task about engage
ments, and acquaintances, and expenditure — nor must we forget,
that while sobriety has its time and its season in one period of
life, indulgence has its season in another ; and we may fetch from
the recollected follies of our own youth, a lesson of connivance
for the present occasion ; and altogether there is no help for it ;

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 207

and it appears to us, that absolutely and totally to secure him
from ever entering upon scenes of dissipation, you must abso
lutely and totally withdraw him from the world, and surrender
all his prospects of advancement, and give up the object of such
a provision for our families as we feel to be a first and most im
portant concern with us.

" Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,"
says the Bible, " and all other things shall be added unto you."
This is the promise which the faith of a Christian parent will
rest upon ; and in the face of every hazard to the worldly inter
ests of his offspring, will he bring them up in the strict nurture
and admonition of the Lord ; and he will loudly protest against
iniquity, in all its degrees, and in all its modifications ; and
while the power of discipline remains with him, will it ever be
exerted on the side of pure, faultless, undeviating obedience ;
and he will tolerate no exception whatever ; and he will brave
all that looks formidable in singularity, and all that looks menac
ing in separation from the custom and countenance of the world ;
and feeling that his main concern is to secure for himself and
for his family a place in the city which hath foundations, will he
spurn all the maxims, and all the plausibilities, of a contagious
neighbourhood away from him. He knows the price of his
Christianity, and it is that he must break off conformity with
the world — nor for any paltry advantage which it has to offer,
will he compromise the eternity of his children. And let us tell
the parents of another spirit, and another principle, that they
are as good as incurring the guilt of a human sacrifice ; that
they are offering up their children at the shrine of an idol ; that
they are parties in provoking the wrath of God against them
here ; and on the day when that wrath is to be revealed, shall
they hear not only the moanings of their despair, but the out
cries of their bitterest execration. On that day, the glance of
reproach from their own neglected offspring will throw a deeper
shade of wretchedness over the dark and boundless futurity that
lies before them. And if, at the time when prophets rung the
tidings of God's displeasure against the people of Israel, it was
denounced as the foulest of all their abominations that they
caused their children to pass through the fire unto Moloch —
know, ye parents, who, in placing your children on some road to
gainful employment, have placed them without a sigh in the
midst of depravity, so near and so surrounding, that, without a
miracle, they must perish, you have done an act of idolatry to

208 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LAKGE CITIES.

the god of this world ; you have commanded your household
after you to worship him as the great divinity of their lives ;
and you have caused your children to make their approaches
unto his presence — and, in so doing, to pass through the fire of
such temptations as have destroyed them.

We do not wish to offer you an overcharged picture on this
melancholy subject. What we now say is not applicable to all.
Even in the most corrupt and crowded of our cities, parents are
to be found, who nobly dare the surrender of every vain and
flattering illusion rather than surrender the Christianity of their
children. And what is still more affecting, over the face of the
country do we meet with such parents, who look on this world as
a passage to another, and on all the members of their household
ar, fellow-travellers to eternity along with them ; and who, in this
true spirit of believers, feel the salvation of their children to be
indeed the burden of their best and their dearest interest ; and who,
by prayer, and precept, and example, have strenuously laboured
with their souls, from the earliest light of their understanding ;
and have taught them to tremble at the way of evil-doers, and
to have no fellowship with those who keep not the command
ments of God — nor is there a day more sorrowful in the annals
of this pious family, than when the course of time has brought
them onwards to the departure of their eldest boy — and he must
bid adieu to his native home, with all the peace, and all the
simplicity which abound in it — and as he eyes in fancy the dis
tant town whither he is going, does he shrink as from the
thought of an unknown wilderness — and it is his firm purpose to
keep aloof from the dangers and the profligacies which deform it
— and, should sinners offer to entice him, not to consent, and
never, never, to forget the lessons of a father's vigilance, the
tenderness of a mother's prayers.

Let us now, in the next place, pass from that state of things
which obtains among the young at their outset into the world,
and take a look of that state of things which obtains after they
have got fairly introduced into it — when the children of the un
godly, and the children of the religious, meet on one common
arena — when business associates them together in one chamber,
and the omnipotence of custom lays it upon them all to meet
together at periodic intervals, and join in the same parties, and
the same entertainments — when the yearly importation of youths
from the country falls in with that assimilating mass of corrup
tion which has got so firm and so rooted an establishment in

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 209

the town — when the frail and unsheltered delicacies of the timid
boy have to stand a rude and a boisterous contest with the
hardier depravity of those who have gone before him — when
ridicule, and example, and the vain words of a delusive sophis
try, which palliates in his hearing the enormity of vice, are all
brought to bear upon his scruples, and to stifle the remorse he
might feel when he casts his principle and his purity away from
him — when, placed as he is in a land of strangers, he finds that
the tenure of acquaintanceship with nearly all around him, is
that he render himself up in a conformity to their doings —
when a voice, like the voice of protecting friendship, bids him to
the feast ; and a welcome, like the welcome of honest kindness,
hails his accession to the society ; and a spirit, like the spirit of
exhilarating joy, animates the whole scene of hospitality before
him ; and hours of rapture roll successively away on the wings
of merriment and jocularity and song ; and after the homage of
many libations has been rendered to honour and fellowship and
patriotism, impurity is at length proclaimed in full and open cry,
as one presiding divinity, at the board of their social entertain
ment.

And now it remains to compute the general result of a pro
cess, which we assert of the vast majority of our young on their
way to manhood, that they have to undergo. The result is, that
the vast majority are initiated into all the practices, and de
scribe the full career of dissipation. Those who have imbibed
from their fathers the spirit of this world's morality, are not
sensibly arrested in this career, either by the opposition of
their own friends, or by the voice of their own conscience.
Those who have imbibed an opposite spirit, and have brought
it into competition with an evil world, and have at length
yielded, have done so, we may well suppose, with many a sigh
and many a struggle, and many a look of remembrance on those
former years when they were taught to lisp the prayer of in
fancy, and were trained in a mansion of piety to a reverence for
God, and for all His ways ; arid even still will a parent's part
ing advice haunt his memory, and a letter from the good old
man revive the sensibilities which at one time guarded and
adorned him ; and at times will the transient gleam of remorse
lighten up its agony within him ; and when he contrasts the
profaneness and depravity of his present companions with the
sacredness of all he ever heard or saw in his father's dwelling, it
will almost feel as if conscience were again to resume her power,

VOL. in. o

210 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LAKGE CITIES.

and the revisiting Spirit of God to call him back again from the
paths of wickedness ; and on his restless bed will the images of
guilt conspire to disturb him, and the terrors of punishment
offer to scare him away ; and many will be the dreary and dis
satisfied intervals when he shall be forced to acknowledge that,
in bartering his soul for the pleasures of sin, he has bartered the
peace and enjoyment of the world along with it. But, alas !
the entanglements of companionship have got hold of him ; and
the inveteracy of habit tyrannizes over all his purposes ; and the
stated opportunity again comes round ; and the loud laugh of
his partners in guilt chases, for another season, all his despond
ency away from him; and the infatuation gathers upon him
every month ; and a hardening process goes on within his heart ;
and the deceitfulness of sin grows apace ; and he at length be
comes one of the sturdiest and most unrelenting of her votaries ;
and he, in his turn, strengthens the conspiracy that is formed
against the morals of a new generation ; and all the ingenuous
delicacies of other days are obliterated ; and he contracts a
temperament of knowing, hackneyed, unfeeling depravity : and
thus the mischief is transmitted from one year to another,
and keeps up the guilty history of every place of crowded popu
lation.

And let us here speak one word to those seniors in depravity
— those men who give to the corruption of acquaintances, who
are younger than themselves, their countenance and their agency;
who can initiate them without a sigh in the mysteries of guilt,
and care not though a parent's hope should wither and expire
under the contagion of their ruffian example. It is only upon
their own conversion that we can speak to them the pardon of
the gospel. It is only if they themselves are washed, and
sanctified, and justified, that we can warrant their personal
deliverance from the wrath that is to come. But under all the
concealment which rests on the futurities of God's administration,
we know that there are degrees of suffering in hell — and that,
while some are beaten with few stripes, others are beaten with
many. And surely, if they who turn many to righteousness
shall shine as the stars for ever and ever, we may be well
assured, that they who patronize the cause of iniquity — they
who can beckon others to that way which leadeth on to the
chambers of death — they who can aid and witness, without a
sigh, the extinction of youthful modesty — surely it may well be
said of such, that on them a darker frown will fall from the judg-

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 2. Li

ment-seat, and through eternity will they have to bear the pains
of a fiercer indignation.

Having thus looked to the commencement of a course of dis
sipation, and to its progress, let us now, in the third place, look
to its usual termination. We speak not at present of the coming
death and of the coming judgment, but of the change which takes
place on many a votary of licentiousness, when he becomes what
the world calls a reformed man ; and puts on the decencies of a
sober and domestic establishment ; and bids adieu to the pursuits
and the profligacies of youth, not because he has repented of them,
but because he has outlived them. You all perceive how this
may be done without one movement of the heart, or of the under
standing, towards God — that it is done by many, though duty
to Him be not in all their thoughts — that the change, in this
case, is not from the idol of pleasure unto God, but only from
one idol to another — and that, after the whole of this boasted
transformation, we may still behold the same body of sin and of
death, and only a new complexion thrown over it. There may
be the putting on of sobriety, but there is no putting on of godli
ness. It is a common and an easy transition to pass from one
kind of disobedience to another, but it is not so easy to give up
that rebelliousness of the heart which lies at the root of all dis
obedience. It may be easy, after the wonted course of dissipa
tion is ended, to hold out another aspect altogether in the eye
of acquaintances ; but it is not so easy to recover that shock,
and that overthrow, which the religious principle sustains, when
a man first enters the world, and surrenders himself to the
power of its enticements. " Such were some of you," says the
Apostle, "but ye are washed, and sanctified, and justified." Our
reformed man knows not the meaning of such a process ; and,
most assuredly, has not at all realized it in the history of his
own person. We will not say what new object he is running
after. It may be wealth, or ambition, or philosophy ; but it is
nothing connected with the interest of his soul. It bears no
reference whatever to the concerns of that great relationship
which obtains between the creature and the Creator. The man
has withdrawn, and perhaps for ever, from the scenes of dissipa
tion, and has betaken himself to another way — but still it is his
own way. It is not the will or the way of God that he is yet
caring for. Such a man may bid adieu to profligacy in his own
person ; but he lifts up the light of his countenance on the
profligacy of others — he gives it the whole weight and authority

212 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES.

of his connivance. He wields, we will say it, such an instru
mentality of seduction over the young, as, though not so alarm
ing, is far more dangerous than the undisguised attempts of
those who are the immediate agents of corruption. The formal
and deliberate conspiracy of those who club together, at stated
terms of companionship, may be all seen, and watched, and
guarded against. But how shall we pursue this conspiracy into
its other ramifications? How shall we be able to neutralize
that insinuating poison which distils from the lips of grave and
respectable citizens ? How shall we be able to dissipate that
gloss which is thrown by the smile of elders and superiors over
the sins of forbidden indulgence ? How can we disarm the
bewitching sophistry which lies in all these evident tokens of
complacency, on the part of advanced and reputable men? How
is it possible to track the progress of this sore evil, throughout
all the business and intercourse of society? How can we stem
the influence of evil communications, when the friend, and the
patron, and the man who has cheered and signalized us by his
polite invitations, turns his own family-table into a nursery of
licentiousness ? How can we but despair of ever witnessing on
earth a pure and a holy generation, when even parents will
utter their polluting levities in the hearing of their own chil
dren ; and vice and humour and gaiety are all indiscriminately
blended into one conversation ; and a loud laugh, from the
initiated and the uninitiated in profligacy, is ever ready to flatter
and to regale the man who can thus prostitute his powers of
entertainment ? Oh ! for an arm of strength to demolish this
firm and far-spread compact of iniquity ; and for the power of
some such piercing and prophetic voice, as might convince our
reformed men of the baleful influence they cast behind them on
the morals of the succeeding generation !

We, at the same time, have our eye perfectly open to that
great external improvement which has taken place of late years
in the manners of society. There is not the same grossness of
conversation. There is not the same impatience for the with-
drawrneritof him who, asked to grace the outset of an assembled
party, is compelled, at a certain step in the process of con
viviality, by the obligations of professional decency, to retire
from it. There is not so frequent an exaction of this as one of
the established proprieties of social or of fashionable life. And
if such an exaction was ever laid by the omnipotence of custom
on a minister of Christianity, it is such an exaction as ought

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 213

never, never to be complied with. It is not for him to lend the
sanction of his presence to a meeting with which he could not
sit to its final termination. It is not for him to stand associated,
for a single hour, with an assemblage of men who begin with
hypocrisy, and end with downright blackguardism. It is not
for him to watch the progress of the coming ribaldry, and to
hit the well-selected moment when talk and turbulence and
boisterous merriment are on the eve of bursting forth upon the
company, and carrying them forward to the full acme and up
roar of their enjoyment. It is quite in vain to say, that he has
only sanctified one part of such an entertainment. He has as
good as given his connivance to the whole of it, and left behind
him a discharge in full of all its abominations ; and therefore,
be they who they may, whether they rank among the proudest
aristocracy of our land, or are charioted in splendour along, as
the wealthiest of the citizens, it is his part to keep as purely and
indignantly aloof from such society as this, as he would from
the vilest and most debasing associations of profligacy.

And now the important question comes to be put : what is
the likeliest way of setting up a barrier against this desolating
torrent of corruption, into which there enter so many elements
of power and strength, that, to the general eye, it looks alto
gether irresistible ? It is easier to give a negative than an
affirmative answer to this question. And therefore, it shall be
our first remark, that the mischief never will be effectually
combated by any expedient separate from the growth and the
transmission of personal Christianity throughout the land. If
no addition be made to the stock of religious principle in a coun
try, then the profligacy of a country will make its obstinate
stand against all the mechanism of the most skilful, and plausi
ble, and well-looking contrivances. It must not be disguised
from you, that it does not lie within the compass either of prisons
or penitentiaries to work any sensible abatement on the wicked
ness of our existing generation. The operation must be of a
preventive rather than of a corrective tendency. It must be
brought to bear upon boyhood ; and be kept up through that
whole period of random exposures through which it has to run;
on its way to an established condition in society ; and a high
tone of moral purity must be infused into the bosom of many
individuals ; and their agency will effect, through the channels
of family and social connexion, what never can be effected by
any framework of artificial regulations, so long as the spirit and

214 ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES.

character of society remain what they are. In other words, the
progress of reformation will never be sensibly carried forward
beyond the progress of personal Christianity in the world ; and
therefore, the question resolves itself into the likeliest method
of adding to the number of Christian parents who may fortify
the principles of their children at their first outset in life — of
adding to the number of Christian young men, who might nobly
dare to be singular, and to perform the angelic office of guardians
and advisers to those who are younger than themselves — of add
ing to the number of Christians in middle and advanced life,
who might, as far as in them lies, alter the general feeling and
countenance of society ; and blunt the force of that tacit but
most seductive testimony, which has done so" much to throw a
palliative veil over the guilt of a life of dissipation.

Such a question cannot be entered upon at present in all its
bearings, and in all its generality. vAnd we must, therefore,
simply satisfy ourselves with the object, that as we have at
tempted already to reproach the indifference of parents, and to
reproach the unfeeling depravity of those young men who scatter
their pestilential levities around the whole circle of their com
panionship, we may now shortly attempt to lay upon the men
of middle and advanced life, in general society, their share of
responsibility for the morals of the rising generation. For the
promotion gf this great cause, it is not at all necessary to school
them into any nice or exquisite contrivances. Could we only
give them a desire towards it, and a sense of obligation, they
would soon find their own way to the right exercise of their own
influence in forwarding the interests of purity and virtue among
the young. Could we only affect their consciences on this point,
there would be almost no necessity whatever to guide or en
lighten their understanding. Could we only get them to be
Christians, and to carry their Christianity into their business,
they would then feel themselves invested with a guardianship ;
and that time, and pains, and attention, ought to be given to
the fulfilment of its concerns. It is quite in vain to ask, as if
there was any mystery, or any helplessness about it, " What
can they do ?" For, is it not a fact most palpably obvious, that
much can be done even by the mere power of example ? Or
might not the master of any trading establishment send the
pervading influence of his own principles among some, at least,
of the servants and auxiliaries who belong to it ? Or can he, in
no degree whatever, so select those who are admitted, as to ward

ON THE DISSIPATION OF LARGE CITIES. 215

off much contamination from the branches of his employ ? Or
might riot he so deal out his encouragement to the deserving, as
to confirm them in all their purposes of sobriety ? Or might not
he interpose the shield of his countenance and his testimony
between a struggling youth arid the ridicule of his acquaint
ances ? Or, by the friendly conversation of half an hour, might
not he strengthen within him every principle of virtuous resist
ance ? By these, and by a thousand other expedients, which
will readily suggest themselves to him who has the good-will,
might not a healing water be sent forth through the most cor
rupted of all our establishments ; and it be made safe for the
unguarded young to officiate in its chambers; and it be "made
possible to enter upon the business of the world without entering
on such a scene of temptation, as to render almost inevitable the
vice of the world, and its impiety, and its final and everlasting
condemnation ? Would Christians only be open and intrepid,
and carry their religion into their merchandise ; and furnish us
with a single hundred of such houses in this city, where the
care and character of the master formed a guarantee for the
sobriety of all his dependants, it would be like the clearing out
of a piece of cultivated ground in the midst of a frightful wilder
ness ; and parents would know whither they could repair with
confidence for the settlement of their offspring ; and we should
behold, what is mightily to be desired, a line of broad and visi
ble demarcation between the Church and the world ; and an
interest so precious as the immortality of children, would no
longer be left to the play of such fortuitous elements, as operated
at random throughout the confused mass of a mingled and indis
criminate society. And thus, the pieties of a father's house
might bear to be transplanted even into the scenes of ordinary
business ; and instead of withering, as they do at present, under
a contagion which spreads in every direction, and fills up the
whole face of the community, they might flourish in that moral
region which was occupied by a peculiar people, and which they
had reclaimed from a world that lieth in wickedness.

216 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

DISCOURSE VII.

ON THE VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER UPON THE LOWER
ORDERS OF SOCIETY.

" Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come : but wo
unto. him through whom they come ! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little
ones." — LUKE xvii. 1, 2.

To offend another, according to the common acceptation of
the words, is to displease him. Now, this is not its acceptation
in the verse before us, nor in several other verses of the New
Testament. It were coming nearer to the scriptural meaning of
the term, had we, instead of ' offence' and ' offending/ adopted the
terms ' scandal' and ' scandalizing.' But the full signification of
the phrase ' to offend another,' is to cause him to fall from the
faith and obedience of the gospel. It may be such a falling
away as that a man recovers himself — like the disciples, who
were all offended in Christ, and forsook Him ; arid, after a season
of separation, were at length re-established in their discipleship.
Or it may be such a falling away as that there is no recovery —
like those in the Gospel of John, who, offended by the sayings
of our Saviour, went back, and walked no more with Him. If
you put such a stumblingblock in the way of a neighbour, who
is walking on a course of Christian discipleship, as to make him
fall, you offend him. It is in this sense that our Saviour uses
the word, when He speaks of your own right hand, or your own

where Paul says, " If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat
no more flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother
to offend."

The little ones to whom our Saviour alludes, in this passage,
He elsewhere more fully particularizes, by telling us that they
are those who believe in Him. There is no call here for enter
ing into any controversy about the doctrine of perseverance. It

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 217

is not necessary, either for the purpose of explaining, or of giving
force to the practical lesson of the text now submitted to you.
We happen to be as much satisfied with the doctrine, that he
who hath a real faith in the gospel of Christ will never fall away,
as we are satisfied with the truth of any identical proposition.
If a professing disciple do, in fact, fall away, this is a pheno
menon which might be traced to an essential defect of principle
at the first ; which proves, in fact, that he made the mistake of
one principle for another ; and that, while he thought he had
the faith, it was not that very faith of the New Testament which
is unto salvation. There might have been the semblance of a
work of grace, without its reality. Such a work, if genuinely
begun, will be carried onwards even unto perfection. But this
is a point on which it is not at all necessary, at present, for us
to dogmatize. We are led, by the text, to expatiate on the
guilt of that one man who has wrecked the interest of another
man's eternity. Now, it may be very true, that if the second
has actually entered within the strait gate, it is not in the power
of the first, with all his artifices, and all his temptations, to draw
him out again. But instead of having entered the gate, he may
only be on the road that leads to it; and it is enough, amid the
uncertainties which, in this life, hang over the question of — who
are really believers, and who are not ? that it is not known in
which of these two conditions the little one is ; and that, there
fore, to seduce him from obedience to the will of Christ, may, in
fact, be to arrest his progress towards Christ, and to draw him
back unto the perdition of his soul. The whole guilt of the text
may be realized by him who keeps back another from the church,
where he might have heard, and heard with acceptance, the
word of life which he has not yet accepted ; or by him, whose
influence or whose example detains, in the entanglement of any
one sin, the acquaintance who is meditating an outset on the
path of decided Christianity — seeing that every such outset will
land in disappointment those who, in the act of following after
Christ, do not forsake all ; or by him who tampers with the con
science of an apparently zealous and confirmed disciple, so as to
seduce him into some habitual sin, either of neglect or of per
formance — seeing that the individual who, but for this seduction,
might have cleaved fully unto the Lord, and turned out a pros
perous and decided Christian, has been led to put a good con
science away from him — arid so, by making shipwreck of his
faith, has proved to the world, that it was not the faith which

218 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

could obtain the victory. It is true, that it is not possible to
seduce the elect. But even this suggestion, perverse and unjust
as it would be in its application, is not generally present to the
mind of him who is guilty of the attempt to seduce, or of the act
which carries a seducing influence along with it. The guilt with
which he is chargeable, is that of an indifference to the spiri
tual and everlasting fate of others. He is wilfully the occa
sion of causing those who are the little ones, or, for anything
he knows, might have been the little ones of Christ, to fall;
and it is against him that our Saviour, in the text, lifts not
a cool but an impassioned testimony. It is of him that He
utters one of the most severe and solemn denunciations of the
gospel.

If this text were thoroughly pursued into its manifold applica
tions, it would be found to lay a weight of fearful responsibility
upon us all. We are here called upon, not to work out our own
salvation, but to compute the reflex influence of all our works,
and of all our ways, on the principles of others. And when one
thinks of the mischief which this influence might spread around
it, even from Christians of chiefest reputation ; when one thinks
of the readiness of man to take shelter in the example of an
acknowledged superior; when one thinks that some inconsistency
of ours might seduce another into such an imitation as overbears
the reproaches of his own conscience, and as, by vitiating the
singleness of his eye, makes the whole of his body, instead of
being full of light, to be full of darkness ; when one takes the
lesson along with him into the various conditions of life he may
be called by Providence to occupy, and thinks, that if, either as
a parent surrounded by his family, or as a master by the mem
bers of his establishment, or as a citizen by the many observers
of his neighbourhood around him, he shall either speak such
words, or do such actions, or administer his affairs in such a way
as is unworthy of his high and immortal destination, that then a
taint of corruption is sure to descend from such an exhibition,
upon the immortals who are on every side of him ; when one
thinks of himself as the source and the centre of a contagion
which might bring a blight upon the graces and the prospects of
other souls besides his own — surely this is enough to supply him
with a reason why, in working out his own personal salvation,
he should do it with fear, and with watchfulness, and with much
trembling.

But we are now upon the ground of a higher and more deli-

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 219

cate conscientiousness than is generally to be met with j where
as our object at present is to expose certain of the grosser
offences which abound in society, and which spread a most dan
gerous and insnaring influence among the individuals who com
pose it. To this we have been insensibly led, by the topics of
that discourse which we addressed to you on a former occasion ;
and when it fell in our way to animadvert on the magnitude of
that man's guilt, who, either by his example, or his connivance,
or his direct and formal tuition, can speed the entrance of the
yet unpractised young on a career of dissipation. And whether
he be a parent, who, trenched in this world's maxims, can, with
out a struggle, and without a sigh, leave his helpless offspring
to take their random and unprotected way through this world's
conformities ; or whether he be one of those seniors in depravity,
who can cheer on his more youthful companion to a surrender of
all those scruples, and all those delicacies, which have hitherto
adorned him ; or whether he be a more aged citizen, who, hav
ing run the wonted course of intemperance, can cast an approv
ing eye on the corruption throughout all its stages, and give a
tenfold force to all its allurements by setting up the authority of
grave and reformed manhood upon its side ; in each of these
characters do we see an offence that is pregnant with deadliest
mischief to the principles of the rising generation ; and while we
are told by our text, that, for such offences, there exists some
deep and mysterious necessity — insomuch, that it is impossible
but that offences must come — yet, let us not forget to urge on
every one sharer in this work of moral contamination, that never
does the meek and gentle Saviour speak in terms more threaten
ing or more reproachful, than when he speaks of the enormity
of such misconduct. There cannot, in truth, be a grosser out
rage committed on the order of God's administration, than that
which he is in the habit of inflicting. There cannot, surely, be
a directer act of rebellion, than that which multiplies the ad
herents of its own cause, and which swells the hosts of 'the
rebellious. There cannot be made to rest a feller condemnation
on the head of iniquity, than that which is sealed by the blood
of its own victims and its own proselytes. Nor should we wonder
when that is said of such an agent for iniquity which is said of
the betrayer of our Lord : " It were better for him that he had
not been born." It were better for him, now that he is born,
could he be committed back again to deep annihilation. Eather
than that he should offend one of these little ones, it were better

220 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he
were cast into the sea.

This is one case of such offences as are adverted to in the text.
Another and still more specific is beginning, we understand, to
be exemplified in our own city, though it has not attained to the
height or to the frequency at which it occurs in a neighbouring
metropolis. We allude to the doing of week-day business upon
the sabbath. We allude to that violence which is rudely offered
to the feelings and the associations of sacredness, by those ex
actions that an ungodly master lays at times on his youthful
dependants — when those hours which they wont to spend in
church, they are called upon to spend in the counting-house —
when that day, which ought to be a day of piety, is turned into
a day of posting and of penmanship — when the rules of the de
calogue are set aside, and utterly superseded by the rules of the
great trading establishment; and everything is made to give
way to the hurrying emergency of orders, and clearances, and the
demands of instant correspondence. Such is the magnitude of
this stumblingblock, that many is the young man who has here
fallen to rise no more — that, at this point of departure, he has
so widened his distance from God, as never, in fact, to return to
Him — that, in this distressing contest between principle and
necessity, the final blow has been given to his religious prin
ciples — that the master whom he serves, and under whom he
earns his provision for time, has here wrested the whole interest
of his eternity away from him — that, from this moment, there
gathers upon his soul the complexion of a hardier and more de
termined impiety — and conscience once stifled now speaks to him
with a feebler voice — and the world obtains a firmer lodgement
in his heart — and, renouncing all his original tenderness about
Sabbath, and Sabbath employments, he can now, with the
thorough unconcern of a fixed and familiarized proselyte, keep
equal pace by his fellows throughout every scene of profanation
— and he who wont to tremble and recoil from the freedoms of
irreligion with the sensibility of a little one, may soon become
the most daringly rebellious of them all — and that Sabbath
which he has now learned, at one time, to give to business, he,
at another, gives to unhallowed enjoyments, and it is turned
into a day of visits and excursions, given up to pleasure, and
enlivened by all the mirth and extravagance of holiday — and,
when sacrament is proclaimed from the city pulpits, he, the apt,
the well-trained disciple of his corrupt and corrupting superior,

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 221

is the readiest to plan the amusements of the coming opportunity,
and among the very foremost in the ranks of emigration — and
though he may look back, at times, to the Sabbath of his father's
pious house, yet the retrospect is always becoming dimmer, and
at length it ceases to disturb him — and thus the alienation
widens every year, till, wholly given over to impiety, he lives
without God in the world.

And were we asked to state the dimensions of that iniquity
which stalks regardlessly and at large over the ruin of youthful
principles — were we asked to find a place in the catalogue of
guilt for a crime the atrocity of which is only equalled, we under
stand, by its frequency — were we called to characterize the man
who, so far from attempting one counteracting influence against
the profligacy of his dependants, issues, from the chair of autho
rity on which he sits, a commandment, in the direct face of a
commandment from God — the man who has chartered impiety
in articles of agreement, and has vested himself with a property in
that time which only belongs to the Lord of the Sabbath — were
we asked to look to the man who could thus overbear the last
remnants of remorse in a struggling and unpractised bosom, and
glitter in all the ensigns of a prosperity that is reared on the
violated consciences of those who are beneath him — Oh ! were
the question put, To whom shall we liken such a man ? or
what is the likeness to which we can compare him ? we would
say, that the guilt of him who trafficked on the highway, or
trafficked on that outraged coast, from whose weeping fami
lies children were irrecoverably torn, was far outmeasured by
the guilt which could thus frustrate a father's fondest prayers,
and trample under foot the hopes arid the preparations of
eternity.

There is another way whereby, in the employ of a careless
and unprincipled master, it is impossible but that oifences must
come. You know just as well as we do, that there are chi
caneries in business ; and, so long as we forbear stating the
precise extent of them, there is not an individual among you,
who has a title to construe the assertion into an affronting
charge of criminality against himself. But you surely know, as
well as we, that the mercantile profession, conducted, as it
often is, with the purest integrity, and laying no resistless
necessity whatever for the surrender of principle on any of its
members ; and dignified by some of the noblest exhibitions of
untainted honour, and devoted friendship, and magnificent

222 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

generosity, that have ever been recorded of our nature ; — you
know as well as we, that it was utterly extravagant, and in the
face of all observation, to affirm, that each and every one of its
numerous competitors, stood clearly and totally exempted from
the sins of an undue selfishness. And accordingly, there are
certain commodious falsehoods occasionally practised in this de
partment of human affairs. There are, for example, certain
dexterous and gainful evasions, whereby the payers of tribute
are enabled, at times, to make their escape from the eagle eye
of the exactors of tribute. There are even certain contests of
ingenuity between individual traders, where, in the higgling of
a very keen and anxious negotiation, each of them is tempted in
talking of offers and prices, and the reports of fluctuations in
home and foreign markets, to say the things which are not.
You must assuredly know that these, and such as these, have
introduced a certain quantity of what may be called shuffling,
into the communications of the trading world — insomuch that
the simplicity of yea yea, and nay nay, is in some degree ex
ploded ; and there is a kind of understood toleration established
for certain modes of expression, which could not, we are much
afraid, stand the rigid scrutiny of the great day ; and there is
an abatement of confidence between man and man, implying,
we doubt, such a proportionate abatement of truth, as goes to
extend most fearfully the condemnation that is due to all liars,
who shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone. And who can compute the effect of all this on
the young and yet unpractised observer? Who does not see,
that it must go to reduce the tone of his principles; and to
involve him in many a delicate struggle between the morality
he has learned from his catechism, and the morality he sees in
the counting-house ; and to obliterate, in his mind, the distinc
tions between right and wrong ; and at length, to reconcile his
conscience to a sin which, like every other, deserves the wrath
and curse of God ; and to make him tamper with a direct com
mandment, in such a way, as that falsehoods and frauds might
be nothing more in his estimation, than the peccadilloes of an
innocent compliance with the current practices and moralities of
the world? Here, then, is a point at which the way of those
who conform to this world diverges from the way of those
peculiar people who are redeemed from all iniquity, and are
thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Here is a grievous
occasion to fall. Here is a competition between the service of

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 223

God and the service of Mammon. Here is the exhibition of
another offence, and the bringing forward of another temptation,
to those who are entering on the business of the world, little
adverted to, we fear, by those who live in utter carelessness of
their own souls, and never spend a thought or a sigh about the
immortality of others — but most distinctly singled out by the
text as a crime of foremost magnitude in the eye of Him who
judgeth righteously.

And before we quit the subject of such offences as take place
in ordinary trade, let us just advert to one example of it — not so
much for the frequency of its occurrence, as for the way that it
stands connected in principle with a very general, and, we be
lieve, a very mischievous offence, that takes place in domestic
society. It is neither, you will observe, the avarice nor the
selfishness of our nature, which forms the only obstruction in
the way of one man dealing plainly with another. There is
another obstruction, founded on a far more pleasing and amiable
principle — even on that delicacy of feeling in virtue of which
one man cannot bear to wound or to mortify another. It would
require, for instance, a very rare, and certainly not a very envi
able degree of hardihood, to tell another without pain, that you
did not think him worthy of being trusted. And yet, in the doings
of merchandise, this is the very trial of delicacy which some
times offers itself. The man with whom you stand committed
to as great an extent as you count to be advisable, would like
perhaps to try your confidence in him, and his own credit with
you, a little farther ; and he comes back upon you with a fresh
order ; and you secretly have no desire to link any more of your
property with his speculation ; and the difficulty is how to get
the application in question disposed of; and you feel that by far
the pleasantest way, to all the parties concerned, would be to
make him believe that you refuse the application not because
you will not comply, but because you cannot — for that yon have
no more of the article he wants from you upon hand. And it
would only be putting your own soul to hazard, did you per
sonally and by yourself make this communication : but you
select perhaps as the organ of it some agent or underling of your
establishment, who knows it to be false ; and to avoid the sore
ness of a personal encounter with the man whom you are to dis
appoint, you devolve the whole business of this lying apology
upon others ; and thus do you continue to shift this oppressive
burden away from you — or, in other words, to save your own

224 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

delicacy, you count not, and you care not, about another's dam
nation.

Now, what we call upon you to mark is the perfect identity
of principle between this case of making a brother to offend,
and another case which obtains, we have heard, to a very great
extent among the most genteel and opulent of our city families.
In this case, you put a lie into the mouth of a dependant, and
that for the purpose of protecting your substance from such an
application as might expose it to hazard or diminution. In the
second case, you put a lie into the mouth of a dependant, and
that for the purpose of protecting your time from such an en
croachment as you would not feel to be convenient or agreeable.
And in both cases you are led to hold out this offence, by a cer
tain delicacy of temperament, in virtue of which, you can neither
give a man plainly to understand that you are not willing to
trust him, nor can you give him to understand that you count
his company to be an interruption. Bat in both the one and
the other example, look to the little account that is made of
a brother's or of a sister's eternity ; behold the guilty task that
is thus unmercifully laid upon one who is shortly to appeal-
before the judgment-seat of Christ ; think of the entanglement
which is thus made to beset the path of a creature who is im
perishable. That, at the shrine of Mammon, such a bloody
sacrifice should^ be rendered by some of his unrelenting votaries,
is not to be wondered at ; but that the shrine of elegance and
fashion should be bathed in blood— that soft and sentimental
ladyship should put forth her hand to such an enormity — that
she who can sigh so gently, and shed her graceful tear over the
sufferings of others, should thus be accessory to the second and
more awful death of her own domestics — that one who looks the
mildest and the loveliest of human beings, should exact obedience
to a mandate which carries wrath, and tribulation, and anguish,
in its train — Oh ! how it should confirm every Christian in his
defiance to the authority of fashion, and lead him to spurn at
all its folly, and at all its worthlessness.

And it is quite in vain to say, that the servant whom you
thus employ as the deputy of your falsehood, can possibly execute
the commission without the conscience being at all tainted or
defiled by it ; that a simple cottage maid can so sophisticate the
matter, as, without any violence to her original principles, to
utter tlie language of what she assuredly knows to be a down
right lie ; that she, humble and untutored soul, can sustain no

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 225

injury when thus made to tamper with the plain English of these
realms ; that she can at all satisfy herself, how, by the pre
scribed utterance of " not at home," she is not pronouncing
such words as are substantially untrue, but merely using them
in another and perfectly understood meaning — and which, ac
cording to their modern translation, denote that the person of
whom she is thus speaking, instead of being away from home,
is secretly lurking in one of the most secure and intimate of its
receptacles. You may try to darken and transform this piece of
casuistry as you will ; and work up your own minds into the
peaceable conviction that it is all right, and as it should be.
But be very certain, that where the moral sense of your domestic
is not already overthrown, there is at least one bosom within
which you have raised a war of doubts and of difficulties ; and
where, if the victory be on your side, it will be on the side of
him who is the great enemy of righteousness. There is at least
one person along the line of this conveyance of deceit, who con-
demneth herself in that which she alloweth ; who, in the lan
guage of Paul, esteeming the practice to be unclean, to her will
it be unclean ; who will perform her task with the offence of
her own conscience, and to whom, therefore, it will indeed be
evil ; who cannot render obedience in this matter to her earthly
superior, but by an act in which she does not stand clear and
unconscious of guilt before God ; and with whom, therefore, the
sad consequence of what we can call nothing else than a bar
barous combination against the principles and the prospects of
the lower orders is — that as she has not cleaved fully unto the
Lord, and has not kept by the service of the one Master, and has
not forsaken all at His bidding, she cannot be the disciple of
Chrisk

The aphorism, that he who offendeth in one point is guilty of
all, tells us something more than of the way in which God ad
judges condemnation to the disobedient. It also tells us of the
way in which one individual act of sinfulness operates upon our
moral nature. It is altogether an erroneous view of the com
mandments, to look upon them as so many observances to which
we are bound by as many distinct and independent ties of obli
gation — insomuch, that the transgression of one of them may be
brought about by the dissolution of one separate tie, and may
leave all the others with as entire a constraining influence and
authority as before. The truth is, that the commandments
ought rather to be looked upon as branching out from one great

VOL. in. p

226 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

and general tie of obligation ; and that there is no such thing
as loosening the hold of one of them upon the conscience, but
by the unfastening of that tie which binds them all upon the
conscience. So that if one member in the system of practical
righteousness be made to suffer, all the other members suffer
along with it ; and if one decision of the moral sense be thwarted,
the organ of the moral sense is permanently impaired, and a
leaven of iniquity infused into all its other decisions ; and if one
suggestion of this inward monitor be stifled, a general shock is
given to his authority over the whole man ; and if one of the
least commandments of the law is left unfulfilled, the law itself
is brought down from its rightful ascendency ; and thus it is,
that one act of disobedience may be the commencement and the
token of a systematic universal rebelliousness of the heart against
God. It is this which gives such a wide-wasting malignity to
each of the separate offences on which we have now expatiated.
It is this which so multiplies the means and the possibilities of
corruption in the world. It is thus that, at every one point
in the intercourse of human society, there may be struck out a
fountain of poisonous emanation on all who approach it ; and
think not therefore, that under each of the examples we have
given, we were only contending for the preservation of one
single feature in the character of him who stands exposed to
this world's offences. We felt it, in fact, to be a contest for his
eternity ; and that the case involved in it his general condition
with God ; and that he who leads the young into a course of
dissipation — or that he who tampers with their impressions of
Sabbath sacredness — or that he who, either in the walks of
business, or in the services of the family, makes them the agents
of deceitfuluess — or that he, in short, who tempts them toatrans-
gress in any one thing, has, in fact, poured such a pervading
taint into their moral constitution, as to spoil or corrupt them in
all things : and that thus, upon one solitary occasion, or by the
exhibition of one particular offence, a mischief may be done equi
valent to the total destruction of a human soul, or to the blotting
out of its prospects for immortality.

And let us just ask a master or a mistress, who can thus make
free with the moral principle of their servants in one instance,
how they can look for pure or correct principle from them in
other instances ? What right have they to complain of unfaith
fulness against themselves, who have deliberately seduced an
other into a habit of unfaithfulness against God ? Are they so

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 227

utterly unskilled in the mysteries of our nature, as not to per
ceive, that if a man gather hardihood enough to break the
Sabbath in opposition to his own conscience,, this very hardihood
will avail him to the breaking of other obligations ? — that he
whom, for their advantage, they have so exercised, as to fill his
conscience with offence towards his God, will not scruple, for
his own advantage, so to exercise himself, as to fill his conscience
with offence towards his master ? — that the servant whom you
have taught to lie, has gotten such rudiments of education at
your hand, as that, without any further help, he can now teach
himself to purloin ? — and yet nothing more frequent than loud
and angry complainings against the treachery of servants ; as
if, in the general wreck of their other principles, a principle of
consideration for the good and interest of their employer — and
who, at the same time, has been their seducer — was to survive
in all its power, and all its sensibility. It is just such a retri
bution as was to be looked for. It is a recoil upon their own
heads of the mischief which they themselves have originated.
It is the temporal part of the punishment which they have to
bear for the sin of our text, but not the whole of it ; for better
for them that both person and property were cast into the sea,
than that they should stand the reckoning of that day, when
called to give an account of the souls that they have murdered,
and the blood of so mighty a destruction is required at their
hands.

The evil against which we have just protested^ is an outrage
of far greater enormity than tyrant or oppressor can inflict, in
the prosecution of his worst designs against the political rights
and liberties of the commonwealth. The very semblance of
such designs will summon every patriot to his post of observa
tion ; and, from a thousand watchtowers of alarm, will the out
cry of freedom in danger be heard throughout the land. But
there is a conspiracy of a far more malignant influence upon the
destinies of the species that is now going on ; and which seems
to call forth no indignant spirit, and to bring no generous ex
clamation along with it. Throughout all the recesses of private
and domestic history, there is an ascendency of rank and station
against which no stern republican is ever heard to lift his voice
— though it be an ascendency, so exercised, as to be of most
noxious operation to the dearest hopes and best interests of
humanity. There is a cruel combination of the great against
the majesty of the people — we mean the majesty of the people's,

228 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

worth. There is a haughty unconcern about an inheritance,
•which, by an inalienable right, should be theirs — we mean their
future and everlasting inheritance. There is a deadly invasion
made on their rights — we mean their rights of conscience ; and,
in this our land of boasted privileges, are the low trampled upon
by the high — we mean trampled into all the degradation of guilt
and of worthlessness. They are utterly bereft of that homage
which ought to be rendered to the dignity of their immortal
nature ; and to minister to the avarice of an imperious master,
or to spare the sickly delicacy of the fashionables in our land, are
the truth and the piety of our population, and all the virtues of
their eternity, most unfeelingly plucked away from them. It
belongs to others to fight the battle of their privileges in time.
But who that looks with a calculating eye on their duration that
never ends, can repress an alarm of a higher order ? It belongs
to others generously to struggle for the place and the adjustment
of the lower orders in the great vessel of the state. But surely,
the question of their place in eternity is of mightier concern
than how they are to sit and be accommodated in that pathway
vehicle which takes them to their everlasting habitations.

Christianity is, in one sense, the greatest of all levellers. It
looks to the elements, and riot to the circumstantials of humanity ;
and, regarding as altogether superficial and temporary the dis
tinctions of this fleeting pilgrimage, it fastens on those points of
assimilation which liken the king upon the throne to the very
humblest of his subject population. They are alike in the
nakedness of their birth. They are alike in the sureness of
their decay. They are alike in the agonies of their dissolution.
And after the one is tombed in sepulchral magnificence, and the
other is laid in his sod-wrapt grave, are they most fearfully
alike in the corruption to which they moulder. But it is with
the immortal nature of each that Christianity has to do ; and,
in both the one and the other, does it behold a nature alike
forfeited by guilt, and alike capable of being restored by the
grace of an offered salvation. And never do the pomp and the
circumstance of externals appear more humiliating, than when,
looking onwards to the day of resurrection, we behold the
sovereign standing without his crown, and trembling, with the
subject by his side, at the bar of heaven's majesty. There the
master and the servant will be brought to their reckoning
together; and when the one is tried upon the guilt and the
malignant influence of his Sabbath companies — and is charged

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 229

with the profane and careless habit of his household establish
ment — and is reminded how he kept both himself and his domestics
from the solemn ordinance — and is made to perceive the fearful
extent of the moral and spiritual mischief which he has wrought
as the irreligious head of an irreligious family — and how, among
other things, he, under a system of fashionable hypocrisy, so
tampered with another's principles as to defile his conscience,
and to destroy him — Oh ! how tremendously will the little brief
authority in which he now plays his fantastic tricks, turn to his
own condemnation ; for, than thus abuse his authority, it were
better for him that a millstone were hanged about his ntck, and
he were cast into the sea.

And how comes it, we ask, that any master is armed with a
power so destructive over the immortals who are around him ?
God has given him no such power. The state has not given it
to him. There is no law, either human or divine, by which he
can enforce any order upon his servants to an act of falsehood, or
to an act of impiety. Should any such act of authority be at
tempted on the part of the master, it should be followed up on
the part of the servant by an act of disobedience. Should your
master or mistress bid you say Not at home, when you know that
they are at home, it is your duty to refuse compliance with such
an order : and if it be asked, how can this matter be adjusted
after such a violent and alarming innovation on the laws of
fashionable intercourse? we answer, just by the simple substitu
tion of truth for falsehood — just by prescribing the utterance of,
Engaged, which is a fact, instead of the utterance of, Not at home,
which is a lie — just by holding the principles of your servant to
be of higher account than the false delicacies of your acquaint
ance — just by a bold and vigorous recurrence to the simplicity of
nature — just by determinedly doing what is right, though the
example of a whole host were against you ; and by giving im
pulse to the current of example, when it happens to be moving
in a proper direction. And here we are happy to say that fashion
has of late been making a capricious and accidental movement
on the side of principle — and to be blunt, and open, and manly,
is now on the fair way to be fashionable — and a temper of
homelier quality is beginning to infuse itself into the luxurious-
ness, and the effeminacy, and the palling and excessive complais
ance of genteel society — and the staple of cultivated manners is
improving in firmness and frankness and honesty, and may, at
length, by the aid of a principle of Christian rectitude, be so

'230 VITIATING INFLUENCE OF THE HIGHER

interwoven with the cardinal virtues, as to present a different
texture altogether from the soft and the silken degeneracy of
modern days.

And that we may not appear the champions of an insurrection
against the authority of masters, let us further say, that while it
is the duty of clerk or apprentice to refuse the doing of week-day
work on the Sabbath, and while it is the duty of servants to
refuse the utterance of a prescribed falsehood, and while it is the
duty of every dependant, in the service of his master, to serve
him only in the Lord — yet this very principle, tending as it may
to a rare and occasional act of disobedience, is also the principle
which renders every servant who adheres to it a perfect treasure
of fidelity, and attachment, and general obedience. This is the
way in which to obtain a credit for his refusal, and to stamp upon
it a noble consistency. In this way he will, even to the mind
of an ungodly master, make up for all his particularities : and
should he be what, if a Christian, he will be ; should he be, at
all times, the most alert in service, and the most patient of pro
vocation, and the most cordial in affection, arid the most scrupu
lously honest in the charge and custody of all that is committed
to him — then, let the post of drudgery at which he toils be
humble as it may, the contrast between the meanness of his
office and the dignity of his character will only heighten the
reverence that is due to principle, and make it more illustrious.
His scruples may at first be the topics of displeasure, and after
wards the topics of occasional levity ; but, in spite of himself,
will his employer be at length constrained to look upon them
with respectful toleration. The servant will be to the master
a living epistle of Christ, and he may read there what he has not
yet perceived in the letter of the New Testament. He may read,
in the person of his own domestic, the power and the truth of
Christianity. He may positively stand in awe of his own hired
servant — and, regarding his bosom as a sanctuary of worth
which it were monstrous to violate, will he feel, when tempted
to offer one com mad of impiety, that he cannot, that he dare not.

And, before we conclude, let us, if possible, try to rebuke the
wealthy out of their unfeeling indifference to the souls of the
poor, by the example of the Saviour. Let those who look on the
immortality of the poor as beneath their concern, only look unto
Christ — to Him who, for the sake of the poorest of us all, became
poor Himself, that we, through His poverty, might be made rich.
Let them think how the principle of all these offences which we

UPON THE LOWER ORDERS OF SOCIETY. 231

have been attempting to expose, is in the direct face of that prin
ciple which prompted, at first, and which still presides over, the
whole of the gospel dispensation. Let them learn a higher
reverence for the eternity of those beneath them, by thinking of
Him, who, to purchase an inheritance for the poor, and to pro
vide them with the blessings of a preached gospel, unrobed Him
of all His greatness ; and descended Himself to the lot and the
labours of poverty ; and toiled, to the beginning of His public
ministry, at the work of a carpenter ; and submitted to all the
horrors of a death which was aggravated by the burden of a
world's atonement, and made inconceivably severe, by there
being infused into it all the bitterness of the cup of expiation.
Think, 0 think, when some petty design of avarice or vanity
would lead you to forget the imperishable souls of those who are
beneath you, that you are setting yourselves in diametric oppo
sition to that which lieth nearest to the heart of the Saviour ; that
you are countervailing the whole tendency of His redemption ;
that you are thwarting the very object of that enterprise for
which all heaven is represented as in motion — and angels are
with wonder looking on — and God the Father laid an appoint
ment on the Son of His love — and He, the august personage in
whom the magnificent train of prophecy, from the beginning of
the world, has its theme and its fulfilment, at length came
amongst us, in shrouded majesty, and was led to the cross, like
a lamb for the slaughter, and bowed His head in agony, and gave
up the ghost.

And here let us address one word more to the masters and
mistresses of families. By adopting the reformations to which
we have been urging you, you may do good to the cause of
Christianity, and yet not advance, by a single hair-breadth, the
Christianity of your own souls. It is not by this one reforma
tion, or, indeed, by any given number of reformations, that you
are saved. It is by believing in Christ that men are saved.
You may escape, it is sure, a higher degree of punishment, but
you will not escape damnation. You may do good to the souls
of your servants by a rigid observance of the lesson of this day.
But we seek the good of your own souls also, and we pronounce
upon them that they are in a state of death, till one great act be
performed, and one act, too, which does not consist of any number
of particular acts, or particular reformations. What shall I do
to be saved ? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt
be saved. And he who believeth not, the wrath of God abidetb

232

on him. Do this, if you want to make the great and important
transition for yourselves. Do this, if you want your own name
to be blotted out of the book of condemnation. If you seek to
have your own persons justified before God, submit to the righte
ousness of God — even that righteousness which is through the
faith of Christ, and is unto all and upon all who believe. This
is the turning-point of your acceptance with the Lawgiver. And
at this step, also, in the history of your souls, will there be
applied to you a power of motive, and will you be endowed with
an obedient sensibility to the influence of motive, which will
make it the turning-point of a new heart and a new character.
The particular reformation that we have now been urging will
be one of a crowd of other reformations ; and, in the spirit of
Him who pleased not Himself, but gave up His life for others,
will you forego all the desires of selfishness and vanity, and look
not merely to your own things, but also to the things of others.

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 233

DISCOUESE VIII.

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

" If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence ; if I
rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much ; if I be
held the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness ; and my heart hath been
secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand ; this also were an iniquity to be
punished by the judge ; for I should have denied the God that is above." — JOB xxxi. 24-28.

WHAT is worthy of remark in this passage is, that a certain
affection, only known among the votaries of Paganism, should
be classed under the same character and have the same condem
nation with an affection, not only known, but allowed, nay
cherished into habitual supremacy, all over Christendom. How
universal is it among those who are in pursuit of wealth, to make
gold their hope, and, among those who are in possession of wealth,
to make fine gold their confidence ! Yet we are here told that
this is virtually as complete a renunciation of God as to practise
some of the worst charms of idolatry. And it might perhaps
serve to unsettle the vanity of those who, unsuspicious of the
disease that is in their hearts, are wholly given over to this
world, and wholly without alarm in their anticipations of another
— could we convince them that the most reigning and resistless
desire by which they are actuated, stamps the same perversity
on them, in the sight of God, as He sees to be in those who are
worshippers of the sun in the firmament, or are offering incense
to the moon, as the queen of heaven.

We recoil from an idolater, as from one who labours under a
great moral derangement, in suffering his regards to be carried
away from the true God to an idol. But, is it not just the same
derangement, on the part of man, that he should love any created
good, and in the enjoyment of it lose sight of the Creator — that
he should delight himself with the use and the possession of a
gift, and be unaffected by the circumstance of its having been
put into his hands by a giver — that, thoroughly absorbed with
the present and the sensible gratification, there should be no
room left for the movements of duty or regard to the Being who

234 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

furnished him with the materials, and endowed him with the
organs, of every gratification, — that he should thus lavish all his
desires on the surrounding materialism, and fetch from it all his
delights, while the thought of him who formed it is habitually
absent from his heart — that, in the play of those attractions that
subsist between him and the various objects in the neighbour
hood of his person, there should be the same want of reference
to God, as there is in the play of those attractions which subsist
between a piece of unconscious matter arid the other matter that
is around it — that all the influences which operate upon the
human will should emanate from so many various points in the
mechanism of what is formed, but that no practical or ascendant
influence should come down upon it from the presiding and the
preserving Deity ? Why, if such be man, he could not be other
wise, though there were no Deity. The part he sustains in the
world is the very same that it would have been, had the world
sprung into being of itself; or, without an originating mind, had
maintained its being from eternity. He just puts forth the
evolutions of his own nature, as one of the component individuals
in a vast independent system of nature, made up of many parts
and many individuals. In hungering for what is agreeable to
his senses, or recoiling from what is bitter or unsuitable to them,
he does so without thinking of God, or borrowing any impulse to
his own will from anything he knows or believes to be the will
of God. Keligion has just as little to do with those daily move
ments of his which are voluntary, as it has to do with the growth
of his body, which is involuntary ; or as it has to do, in other
words, with the progress and the phenomena of vegetation.
With a mind that ought to know God, and a conscience that
ought to award to him the supreme jurisdiction, he lives as
effectually without Him, as if he had no mind and no conscience ;
and, bating a few transient visitations of thought, and a few regu
larities of outward and mechanical observation, do we behold man
running, and willing, and preparing, and enjoying, just as if
there was no other portion than the creature — just as if the
world, and its visible elements, formed the all with which he
had to do.

I wish to impress upon you the distinction that there is
between the love of money and the love of what money pur
chases. Either of these affections may equally displace God
from the heart. But, there is a malignity and an inveteracy of
atheism in the former which does not belong to the latter, and

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 235

in virtue of which it may be seen that the love of money is,
indeed, the root of all evil.

When we indulge the love of that which is purchased by
money, the materials of gratification, and the organs of gratifica
tion are present with each other — just as in the enjoyments of
the inferior animals, and just as in all the simple and immediate
enjoyments of man ; such as the tasting of food, or the smelling
of a flower. There is an adaptation of the senses to certain ex
ternal objects, and there is a pleasure arising out of that adapta
tion, and it is a pleasure which may be felt by man, along with
a right and a full infusion of godliness. The primitive Chris
tians, for example, ate their meat with gladness and singleness
of heart, praising God. But, in the case of every unconverted
man, the pleasure has no such accompaniment. He carries
in his heart no recognition of that hand, by the opening of
which it is, that the means and the materials of enjoyment are
placed within his reach. The matter of the enjoyment is all
with which he is conversant. The Author of the enjoyment is
unheeded. The avidity with which he rushes onward to any of
the direct gratifications of nature bears a resemblance to the
avidity with which one of the lower creation rushes to its food,
or to its water, or to the open field, where it gambols in all the
wantonness of freedom, and finds a high -breath eel joy in the very
strength and velocity of its movements. And the atheism of the
former, who has a mind for the sense and knowledge of his Cre
ator, is often as entire as the atheism of the latter, who has it not.
Man, who ought to look to the primary cause of all his blessings,
because he is capable of seeing thus far, is often as blind to God,
in the midst of enjoyment, as the animal who is not capable of
seeing Him. He can trace the stream to its fountain ; but still
he drinks of the stream with as much greediness of pleasure, and
as little recognition of its source, as the animal beneath him.
In other words, his atheism, while tasting the bounties of Provi
dence, is just as complete as is the atheism of the inferior
animals. But theirs proceeds from their incapacity of knowing
God. His proceeds from his not liking to retain God in his
knowledge. He may come under the power of godliness, if he
would. But he chooses rather that the power of sensuality
should lord it over him, and his whole man is engrossed with
the objects of sensuality.

But a man differs from an animal in being something more
than a sensitive being. He is also a reflective being. He has

236 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

the power of thought, and inference, and anticipation, to signalize
him above the beasts of the field or of the forest; and yet will
it be found, in the case of every natural man, that the exercise
of those powers, so far from having carried him nearer, has only
widened his departure from God, and given a more deliberate
and wilful character to his atheism than if he had been without
them altogether.

In virtue of the powers of mind which belong to him, he can
carry his thoughts beyond the present desires and the present
gratification. He can calculate on the visitations of future de
sire, and on the means of its gratification. He can not only follow
out the impulse of hunger that is now upon him ; he can look
onwards to the successive and recurring impulses of hunger which
await him, and he can devise expedients for relieving it. Out of
that great stream of supply, which comes direct from heaven to
earth, for the sustenance of all its living generations, he can draw
off and appropriate a separate rill of conveyance, and direct it
into a reservoir for himself. He can enlarge the capacity, or he
can strengthen the embankments of this reservoir. By doing the
one, he augments his proportion of this common tide of wealth
which circulates through the world, and by doing the other, he
augments his security for holding it in perpetual possession. The
animal who drinks out of the stream thinks not whence it issues.
But man thinks of the reservoir which yields to him his portion
of it. And he looks no further. He thinks not that to fill it,
there must be a great and original fountain, out of which there
issueth a mighty flood of abundance for the purpose of distribu
tion among all the tribes and families of the world. He stops
short at the secondary and artificial fabric which he himself hath
formed, and out of which, as from a spring, he draws his own
peculiar enjoyments ; and never thinks either of his own peculiar
supply fluctuating with the variations of the primary spring, or
of connecting these variations with the will of the great but
unseen director of all things. It is true, that if this main and
originating fountain be, at any time, less copious in its emission,
he will have less to draw from it to his own reservoir ; and in
that very proportion will his share of the bounties of Providence
be reduced. But still it is to the well, or receptacle, of his own
striking out that he looks, as his main security for the relief of
nature's wants, and the abundant supply of nature's enjoyments.
It is upon his own work that he depends in this matter, and not
on the work or the will of Him who is the Author of nature ;

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 237

who giveth rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filleth
every heart with food and gladness. And thus it is that the
reason of man, and the retrospective power of man, still fail to
carry him, by an ascending process, to the First Cause. He
stops at the instrumental cause, which, by his own wisdom and
his own power, he has put into operation. In a word, the man's
understanding is overrun with atheism, as well as his desires.
The intellectual as well as the sensitive part of his constitution
seems to be infected with it. When, like the instinctive and
unreflecting animal, he engages in the act of direct enjoyment,
he is like it, too, in its atheism. When he rises above the
animal, and, in the exercise of his higher and larger faculties, be
engages in the act of providing for enjoyment, he still carries his
atheism along with him.

A sum of money is, in all its functions, equivalent to such a
reservoir. Take one year with another, and the annual con
sumption of the world cannot exceed the annual produce which
issues from the storehouse of Him who is the great and the
bountiful Provider of all its families. The money that is in any
man's possession represents the share which he can appropriate
to himself of this produce. If it be a large sum, it is like a
capacious reservoir on the bank of the river of abundance. If it
be laid out on firm and stable securities, still it is like a firmly
embanked reservoir. The man who toils to increase his money
is like a man who toils to enlarge the capacity of his reservoir.
The man who suspects a flaw in his securities, or who appre^
hends, in the report of failures and fluctuations, that his money
is all to flow away from him, is like a man who apprehends a
flaw in the embankments of his reservoir. Meanwhile, in all
the care that is thus expended, either on the money or on the
magazine, the originating source, out of which there is imparted
to the one all its real worth, or there is imparted to the other all
its real fulness, is scarcely ever thought of. Let God turn the
earth into a barren desert, and the money ceases to be con
vertible to any purpose of enjoyment ; or let Him lock up that
magazine of great and general supply, out of which He showers
abundance among our habitations, and all the subordinate maga
zines formed beside the wonted stream of liberality would remain
empty. But all this is forgotten by the vast majority of our
unthoughtful and unreflecting species. The patience of God is
still unexhausted ; and the seasons still roll in kindly succession
over the heads of an ungrateful generation ; and that period

238 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

when the machinery of our present system shall stop and be
taken to pieces has not yet arrived ; and that Spirit, who will
not always strive witli the children of men, is still prolonging
His experiment on the powers and the perversities of our moral
nature ; and still suspending the edict of dissolution, by which
this earth and these heavens are at length to pass away. So
that the sun still shines upon us ; and the clouds still drop upon
us ; and the earth still puts forth the bloom and the beauty of
its luxuriance ; and all the ministers of heaven's liberality still
walk their annual round, and scatter plenty over the face of an
alienated world ; and the whole of nature continues as smiling
in promise, and as sure in fulfilment, as in the days of our fore
fathers ; and out of her large and universal granary is there, in
every returning year, as rich a conveyance of aliment as before,
to the populous family in whose behalf it is opened. But it is
the business of many among that population, each to erect his
own separate granary, and to replenish it out of the general store,
and to feed himself and his dependants out of it. And he is right
in so doing. But he is not right in looking to his own peculiar
receptacle, as if it were the first and the emanating fountain of
all his enjoyments. He is not right in thus idolizing the work
of his own hands — awarding no glory and no confidence to Him
in whose hands is the key of that great storehouse, out of which
every lesser storehouse of man derives its fulness. He is not
right in labouring after the money which purchaseth all things,
to avert the earnestness of his regards from the Being who pro
vides all things. He is not right, in thus building his security
on that which is subordinate, unheeding and unmindful of Him
who is supreme. It is not right that silver and gold, though
unshaped into statuary, should still be doing in this enlightened
land what the images of Paganism once did. It is not right that
they should thus supplant the deference which is owing to the
God and the governor of all things — or that each man amongst
us should, in the secret homage of trust and satisfaction which
he renders to his bills, and his deposits, and his deeds of pro
perty and possession, endow these various articles with the same
moral ascendency over his heart, as the household gods of anti
quity had over the idolaters of antiquity — making them as effec
tually usurp the place of the Divinity, and dethrone the one
Monarch of heaven and earth from that pre-eminence of trust
and of affection that belongs to him.

He who makes a god of his pleasure, renders to this idol the

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 239

homage of his senses. He who makes a god of his wealth,
renders to this idol the homage of his mind ; and he, therefore,
of the two, is the more hopeless and determined idolater. The
former is goaded on to his idolatry by the power of appetite. The
latter cultivates his with wilful and deliberate perseverance ; con
secrates* his very highest powers to its service ; embarks in it,
not with the heat of passion, but with the coolness of steady and
calculating principle ; fully gives up his reason and his time, and
all the faculties of his understanding, as well as all the desires
of his heart, to the great object of a fortune in this world ; makes
the acquirement of gain the settled aim, and the prosecution of
that aim the settled habit of his existence ; sits the whole day
long at the post of his ardent and unremitting devotions ; and, as
he labours at the desk of his counting-house, has his soul just as
effectually seduced from the living God to an object distinct from
Him, and contrary to Him, as if the ledger over which he was
bending was a book of mystical characters, written in honour of
some golden idol placed before him, and with a view to render
this idol propitious to himself and to his family. Baal and
Moloch were not more substantially the gods of rebellious Israel,
than Mammon is the god of all his affections. To the fortune he
has reared, or is rearing, for himself and his descendants, he
ascribes all the power and all the independence of a divinity.
With the wealth he has gotten by his own hands, does he feel
himself as independent of God, as the Pagan does, who, happy in
the fancied protection of an image made with his own hand,
suffers no disturbance to his quiet, from any thought of the real
but the unknown Deity. His confidence is in his treasure, and
not in God. It is there that he places all his safety and all his
sufficiency. It is not on the Supreme Being, conceived in the
light of a real and a personal agent, that he places his depend
ence. It is on a mute and material statue of his own erection.
It is wealth which stands to him in the place of God — to which
he awards the credit of all his enjoyments — which he looks to as
the emanating fountain of all his present sufficiency — from which
he gathers his fondest expectations of all the bright and fancied
blessedness that is yet before him — on which he rests as the
firmest and stablest foundation of all that the heart can wish, or
the eye can long after, both for himself and for his children. It
matters not to him, that all his enjoyment comes from a primary
fountain, and that his wealth is only an intermediate reservoir.
It matters not to him, that, if God were to set a seal upon the

240 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

door of the upper storehouse in heaven, or to blast and to burn up
all the fruitfulness of earth, he would reduce, to the worthless-
ness of dross, all the silver and the gold that abound in it. Still
the gold and the silver are his gods. His own fountain is be
tween him and the fountain of original supply. His wealth is
between him and God. Its various lodging-places, whether in
the bank, or in the place of registration, or in the depository of
wills and title-deeds — these are the sanctuaries of his secret
worship — these are the high-places of his adoration ; and never
did devout Israelite look with more intentness towards Mount
Zion, and with his face towards Jerusalem, than he does to his
wealth, as to the mountain and stronghold of his security. Nor
could the Supreme be more effectually deposed from the homage
of trust and gratitude than He actually is, though this wealth
were recalled from its various investments ; and turned into one
mass of gold ; and cast into a piece of molten statuary ; and
enshrined on a pedestal, around which all his household might
assemble, and make it the object of their family devotions ; and
plied every hour of every day with all the fooleries of a senseless
and degrading Paganism. It is thus, that God may keep up
the charge of idolatry against us, even after all its images have
been overthrown. It is thus that dissuasives from idolatry are
still addressed, in the New Testament, to the pupils of a new
and better dispensation ; that little children are warned against
idols ; and all of us are warned to flee from covetousness, which
is idolatry.

To look no further than to fortune as the dispenser of all the
enjoyments which money can purchase, is to make that fortune
stand in the place of God. It is to make sense shut out faith,
and to rob the King eternal and invisible of that supremacy, to
which all the blessings of human existence, and all the varieties
of human condition, ought, in every instance, and in every parti
cular, to be referred. But, as we have already remarked, the
love of money is one affection, and the love of what is purchased
by money is another. It was, at first, we have no doubt, loved
for the sake of the good things which it enabled its possessor to
acquire. But whether, as the result of associations in the mind
so rapid as to escape the notice of our own consciousness — or as
the fruit of an infection running by sympathy among all men
busily engaged in the prosecution of wealth, as the supreme good
of their being — certain it is, that money, originally pursued for
the sake of other things, comes, at length to be prized for its own

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 241

sake. And, perhaps, there is no one circumstance which serves
more to liken the love of money to the most irrational of the
heathen idolatries, than that it at length passes into the love of
money for itself; and acquires a most enduring power over the
human affections, separately altogether from the power of pur
chase and of command which belongs to it, over the proper and
original objects of human desire. The first thing which set man
agoing in the pursuit of wealth, was that, through it, as an
intervening medium, he found his way to other enjoyments ; and
it proves him, as we have observed, capable of a higher reach of
anticipation than the beasts of the field, or the fowls of the air,
that he is thus able to calculate, and to foresee, and to build up
a provision for the wants of futurity. But mark how soon this
boasted distinction of his faculties is overthrown, and how near to
each other lie the dignity and the debasement of the human
understanding. If it evinced a loftier mind in man than in the
inferior animals, that he invented money, and by the acquisition
of it can both secure abundance for himself, and transmit this
abundance to the future generations of his family — what have
we to offer, in vindication of this intellectual eminence, when
we witness how soon it is that the pursuit of wealth ceases to be
rational ? — How, instead of being prosecuted as an instrument,
either for the purchase of ease, or the purchase of enjoyment,
both the ease and enjoyment of a whole life are rendered up as
sacrifices at its shrine ? — How, from being sought after as a
minister of gratification to the appetites of nature, it at length
brings nature into bondage, and robs her of all her simple de
lights, and pours the infusion of wormwood into the currency of
her feelings ? — making that man sad who ought to be cheerful,
and that man who ought to rejoice in his present abundance,
filling him either with the cares of an ambition which never will
be satisfied, or with the apprehensions of a distress which, in all
its pictured and exaggerated evils, will never be realized. And
it is wonderful, it is passing wonderful, that wealth, which de
rives all that is true and sterling in its worth from its subser
viency to other advantages, should, apart from all thought about
this subserviency, be made the object of such fervent and fatiguing
devotion. Insomuch, that never did Indian devotee inflict upon
himself a severer agony at the footstool of his Paganism, than
those devotees of wealth who, for its acquirement as their ulti
mate object, will forego all the uses for which alone it is valuable
— will give up all that is genuine or tranquil in the pleasures of

VOL. III. Q

242 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

life ; and will pierce themselves through with many sorrows ; and
will undergo all the fiercer tortures of the mind ; and, instead
of employing what they have to smooth their passage through
the world, will, upon the hazardous sea of adventure, turn the
whole of this passage into a storm — thus exalting wealth from
a servant unto a lord, who, in return for the homage that he
obtains from his worshippers, exercises them, like Rehoboam his
subjects of old, not with whips but with scorpions — with consum
ing anxiety, with never-sated desire, with brooding apprehension,
and its frequent and everflitting spectres, and the endless jeal
ousies of competition with men as intently devoted, and as
emulous of a high place in the temple of their common idolatry,
as themselves. And, without going to the higher exhibitions of
this propensity, in all its rage and in all its restlessness, we have
only to mark its workings on the walk of even and every-day
citizenship ; and there see, how, in the hearts even of its most
commonplace votaries, wealth is followed after for its own sake ;
how, unassociated with all for which reason pronounces it to be
of estimation, but, in virtue of some mysterious and (indefinable
charm, operating not on any principle of the judgment, but on
the utter perversity of judgment, money has come to be of higher
account than all that is purchased by money, and has attained a
rank co-ordinate with that which our Saviour assigns to the life
and to the body of man, in being reckoned more than meat and
more than raiment. — Thus making that which is subordinate to
be primary, and that which is primary subordinate ; transferring,
by a kind of fascination, the affections away from wealth in use,
to wealth in idle and unemployed possession — insomuch, that the
most welcome intelligence you could give to the proprietor of
many a snug deposit, in some place of secure and progressive
accumulation, would be, that he should never require any part
either of it or of its accumulation back again for the purpose of
expenditure — and that, to the end of his life, every new year
should witness another unimpaired addition to the bulk or the
aggrandizement of his idol. And it would just heighten his
enjoyment, could he be told, with prophetic certainty, that this pro
cess of undisturbed augmentation would go on with his children's
children, to the last age of the world ; that the economy of each
succeeding race of descendants would leave the sum with its
interest untouched, and the place of its sanctuary un violated ;
and, that through a series of indefinite generations, would the
magnitude ever grow, and the lustre ever brighten, of that house-

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 243

hold god, which he had erected for his own senseless adoration,
and bequeathed as an object of as senseless adoration to his
family.

We have the authority of that word which has been pro
nounced a discern er of the thoughts and intents of the heart, that
it cannot have two masters, or that there is not room in it for
two great and ascendant affections. The engrossing power of
one such affection is expressly affirmed of the love for Mammon,
or the love for money thus named and characterized as an idol.
Or, in other words, if the love of money be in the heart, the love
of God is not there. If a man be trusting in uncertain riches,
he is not trusting in the living God, who giveth us all things
richly to enjoy. If his heart be set upon covetousness, it is set
upon an object of idolatry. The true divinity is moved away
from His place ; and, worse than atheism, which would only leave
it empty, has the love of wealth raised another divinity upon His
throne. So that covetousness offers a more daring and positive
aggression on the right and territory of the Godhead, than even
infidelity. The latter would only desolate the sanctuary of
heaven ; the former would set up an abomination in the midst
of it. It not only strips God of love and of confidence, which
are His prerogatives, but it transfers them to another. And little
does the man who is proud in honour, but, at the same time,
proud and peering in ambition — little does he think, that, though
acquitted in the eye of all his fellows, there still remains an
atrocity of a deeper character than even that of atheism, with
which he is chargeable. Let him just take an account of his
mind, amid the labours of his merchandise, and he will find that
the living God has no ascendency there ; but that wealth, just as
much as if personified into life, and agency, and power, wields
over him all the ascendency of God. Where his treasure is, his
heart is also ; and, linking as he does his main hope with its
increase, and his main fear with its fluctuations and its failures,
he has as effectually dethroned the Supreme from his heart, and
deified an usurper in his room, as if fortune had been embodied
into a goddess, and he were in the habit of repairing, with a
crowd of other worshippers, to her temple. She, in fact, is the
dispenser of that which he chiefly prizes in existence. A smile
from her is worth all the promises of the Eternal, and her
threatening frown more dreadful to the imagination than all His
terrors.

And the disease is as near to universal as it is virulent.

244 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

Wealth is the goddess whom all the world worshippeth. There
is many a city in our empire, of which, with an eye of apostolical
discernment, it may be seen, that it is almost wholly given over
to idolatry. If a man look no higher than to his money for his
enjoyments, then money is his god. It is the god of his de
pendence, and the god upon whom his heart is stayed. Or if,
apart from other enjoyments, it, by some magical power of its
own, has gotten the ascendency, then still it is followed after as
the supreme good ; and there is an actual supplanting of the
living God. He is robbed of the gratitude that we owe Him for
our daily sustenance ; for, instead of receiving it as if it came
direct out of His hand, we receive it as if it came from the hand
of a secondary agent, to whom we ascribe all the stability and
independence of God. This wealth, in fact, obscures to us the
character of God, as the real though unseen Author of our vari
ous blessings ; and as if by a material intervention, does it hide
from the perception of nature, the hand which feeds, and clothes,
and maintains us in life, and in all the comforts and necessaries
of life. It just has the effect of thickening still more that im
palpable veil which lies between God and the eye of the senses.
We lose all discernment of Him as the giver of our comforts ; and
coming, as they appear to do, from that wealth which our fancies
have raised into a living personification, does this idol stand
before us, not as a deputy out as a substitute for that Being, with
whom it is that we really have to do. All this goes both to
widen and to fortify that disruption which has taken place be
tween God and the world. It adds the power of one great
master idol to the seducing influence of all the lesser idolatries.
When the liking and the confidence of men are towards money,
there is no direct intercourse, either by the one or the other of
these affections towards God; and, in proportion as he sends
forth his desires, arid rests his security on the former, in that very
proportion does he renounce God as his hope, and God as his
dependence.

And to advert, for one moment, to the misery of this affection,
as well as to its sinfuliiess. He, over whom it reigns, feels a
worthlessness in his present wealth, after it is gotten ; and when
to this we add the restlessness of a yet unsated appetite, lording
it over all his convictions, and panting for more ; when, to the
dulness of his actual satisfaction in all the riches that he has,
we add his still unquenched, and, indeed, unquenchable desire
for the riches that he has not ; when we reflect that as, in the

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY. 245

pursuit of wealth, he widens the circle of his operation, so he
lengthens out the line of his open and hazardous exposure, and
multiplies, along the extent of it, those vulnerable points from
which another and another dart of anxiety may enter into his
heart ; when he feels himself as if floating on an ocean of con
tingency, on which, perhaps, he is only borne up by the breath
of a credit that is fictitious, and which, liable to burst every mo
ment, may leave him to sink under the weight of his overladen
speculation ; when, suspended on the doubtful result of his bold
and uncertain adventure, he dreads the tidings of disaster in
every arrival, and lives in a continual agony of feeling, kept up
by the crowd and turmoil of his manifold distractions, arid so
overspreading the whole compass of his thoughts, as to leave not
one narrow space for the thought of eternity — will any beholder
just look to the mind of this unhappy man, thus tost and be
wildered, and thrown into a general unceasing frenzy, made out
of many fears and many agitations, and not say, that the bird of
the air which sends forth its unreflecting song, and lives on the
fortuitous bounty of Providence, is not higher in the scale of
enjoyment than he? And how much more, then, the quiet
Christian beside him, who, in possession of food and raiment, has
that godliness with contentment which is great gain — who, with
the peace of heaven in his heart, and the glories of heaven in his
eye, has found out the true philosophy of existence ; has sought
a portion where alone a portion can be found, and, in bidding
away from his mind the love of money, has bidden away all the
cross and all the carefulness along with it.

Death will soon break up every swelling enterprise of ambi
tion, and put upon it a most cruel and degrading mockery. And
it is, indeed, an affecting sight, to behold the workings of this
world's infatuation among so many of our fellow-mortals nearing
and nearing every clay to eternity, and yet, instead of taking
heed to that which is before them, mistaking their temporary
vehicle for their abiding home — and spending all their time and
all their thought upon its accommodations. It is all the doing
of our great adversary, thus to invest the trifles of a day in such
characters of greatness and durability ; and it is, indeed, one of
the most formidable of his wiles. And whatever may be the
instrument of reclaiming men from this delusion, it certainly is
not any argument either about the shortness of life, or the cer
tainty and awfulness of its approaching termination. On this
point man is capable of a stout-hearted resistance, even to ocular

246 ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

demonstration ; nor do we know a more striking evidence of the
derangement which must have passed upon the human faculties,
than to see how, in despite of arithmetic — how, in despite of
manifold experience — how, in despite of all his gathering wrinkles,
and all his growing infirmities — how, in despite of the ever-
lessening distance between him and his sepulchre, and of all the
tokens of preparation for the onset of the last messenger, with
which, in the shape of weakness, and breathlessness, and dimness
of eyes, he is visited ; will the feeble and asthmatic man still
shake his silver locks in all the glee and transport of which he
is capable, when he hears of his gainful adventures, and his new
accumulations. Nor can we tell how near he must get to his
grave, or how far on he must advance in the process of dying,
ere gain cease to delight, and the idol of wealth cease to be dear
to him. But when we see that the topic is trade and its profits,
which lights up his faded eye with the glow of its chiefest ecstacy,
we are as much satisfied that he leaves the world with all his
treasure there, and all the desires of his heart there, as if, acting
what is told of the miser's deathbed, he made his bills and his
parchments of security the companions of his bosom, and the last
movements of his life were a fearful, tenacious, determined grasp,
of what to him formed the all for which life was valuable.

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 247

DISCOUKSE IX.

THE EXPULSIVE POWER OP A NEW AFFECTION.

" Lore not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world,
the love of the Father is not in him." — 1 JOHN ii. 15.

THERE are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt
to displace from the human heart its love of the world — either
by a demonstration of the world's vanity, so as that the heart
shall be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an
object that is not worthy of it ; or, by setting forth another ob
ject, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so as that the
heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old affection, which
shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old affection
for a new one. My purpose is to show, that from the constitu
tion of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent
and ineffectual — and that the latter method will alone suffice for
the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection
that domineers over it. After having accomplished this purpose,
I shall attempt a few practical observations.

Love may be regarded in two different conditions. The first
is, when its object is at a distance, and then it becomes love in
a state of desire. The second is, when its object is in possession,
and then it becomes love in a state of indulgence. Under the
impulse of desire, man feels himself urged onward in some path
or pursuit of activity for its gratification. The faculties of his
mind are put into busy exercise. In the steady direction of one
great and engrossing interest, his attention is recalled from the
many reveries into which it might otherwise have wandered ;
and the powers of his body are forced away from an indolence in
which it else might have languished ; and that time is crowded
with occupation, which but for some object of keen and devoted
ambition, might have drivelled along in successive hours of
weariness and distaste — and though hope does not always enliven,
and success does not always crown this career of exertion, yet in
the midst of this very variety, and with the alternations of occa-

248 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

sional disappointment, is the machinery of the whole man kept
in a sort of congenial play, and upholden in that tone and temper
which are most agreeable to it. Insomuch, that if, through the
extirpation of that desire which forms the originating principle
of all this movement, the machinery were to stop, and to receive
no impulse from another desire substituted in its place, the man
would be left with all his propensities to action in a state of most
painful and unnatural abandonment. A sensitive being suffers,
and is in violence, if, after having thoroughly rested from his
fatigue, or been relieved from his pain, he continue in possession
of powers without any excitement to these powers ; if he possess
a capacity of desire without having an object of desire ; or if he
have a spare energy upon his person, without a counterpart, and
without a stimulus to call it into operation. The misery of such
a condition is often realized by him who is retired from business,
or who is retired from law, or who is even retired from the occu
pations of the chase, and of the gaming table. Such is the
demand of our nature for an object in pursuit, that no accumula
tion of previous success can extinguish it — and thus it is, that
the most prosperous merchant, and the most victorious general,
and the most fortunate gamester, when the labour of their re
spective vocations lias come to a close, are often found to languish
in the midst of all their acquisitions, as if out of their kindred
and rejoicing element. It is quite in vain with such a constitu
tional appetite for employment in man, to attempt cutting away
from him the spring or the principle of one employment, without
providing him with another. The whole heart and habit will
rise in resistance against such an undertaking. The eke unoc
cupied female who spends the hours of every evening at some
play of hazard, knows as well as you, that the pecuniary gain,
or the honourable triumph of a successful contest, are altogether
paltry. It is not such a demonstration of vanity as this that will
force her away from her dear and delightful occupation. The
habit cannot so be displaced, as to leave nothing but a negative
and cheerless vacancy behind it — -though it may so be supplanted
as to be followed up by another habit of employment, to which
the power of some new affection has constrained her. It is
willingly suspended, for example, on any single evening, should
the time that wont to be allotted to gaming, require to be spent
on the preparations of an approaching assembly. The ascendant
power of a second affection will do what no exposition however
forcible, of the folly and worthlessness of the first, ever could

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 249

effectuate. And it is the same in the great world. We shall
never be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits, by a naked
demonstration of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of
stopping one of these pursuits in any way else, but by stimu
lating to another. In attempting to bring a worldly man intent
and busied with the prosecution of his objects to a dead stand,
we have not merely to encounter the charm which he annexes to
these objects — but we have to encounter the pleasure which he
feels in the very prosecution of them. It is not enough, then,
that we dissipate the charm by a moral and eloquent and affect
ing exposure of its illusiveness. We must address to the eye of
his mind another object, with a charm powerful enough to dis
possess the first of its influences, and to engage him in some other
prosecution as full of interest, and hope, and congenial activity,
as the former. It is this which stamps an impotency on all
moral and pathetic declamation about the insignificance of the
world. A man will no more consent to the misery of being
without an object, because that object is a trifle, or of being with
out a pursuit, because that pursuit terminates in some frivolous
or fugitive acquirement, than he will voluntarily submit himself
to the torture, because that torture is to be of short duration. If
to be without desire and without exertion altogether, is a state
of violence and discomfort, then the present desire, with its cor
respondent train of exertion, is not to be got rid of simply by
destroying it. It must be by substituting another desire, and
another line or habit of exertion in its place — and the most
effectual way of withdrawing the mind from one object, is not by
turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy — but by
presenting to its regards another object still more alluring.

These remarks apply not merely to love considered in its state
of desire for an object not yet obtained. They apply also to
love considered in its state of indulgence, or placid gratification,
with an object already in possession. It is seldom that any of
our tastes are made to disappear by a mere process of natural
extinction. At least, it is very seldom, that this is done through
the instrumentality of reasoning. It may be done by excessive
pampering — but it is almost never done by the mere force of
mental determination. But what cannot be thus destroyed, may
be dispossessed — and one taste may be made to give way to an
other, and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of
the mind. It is thus, that the boy ceases, at length, to be the
slave of his appetite, but it is because a manlier taste has now

250 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

brought it into subordination — and that the youth ceases to
idolize pleasure, but it is because the idol of wealth has become
the stronger and gotten the ascendency — and that even the love
of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart of many a
thriving citizen, but it is because, drawn into the whirl of city
politics, another affection has been wrought into his moral system
and he is now lorded over by the love of power. There is not
one of these transformations in which the heart is left without
an object. Its desire for one particular object may be con
quered ; but as to its desire for having some one object or other,
this is unconquerable. Its adhesion to that on which it has
fastened the preference of its regards, cannot willingly be over
come by the rending away of a simple separation. It can be
done only by the application of something else, to which it may
feel the adhesion of a still stronger and more powerful preference.
Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must
have a something to lay hold of — and which, if wrested away
without the substitution of another something in its place, would
leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is
to the natural system. It may be dispossessed of one object, or
of any, but it cannot be desolated of all. Let there be a
breathing and a sensitive heart, but without a liking and with
out affinity to any of the things that are around it ; and, in a
state of cheerless abandonment, it would be alive to nothing but
the burden of its own consciousness, and feel it to be intolerable.
It would make no difference to its owner, whether he dwelt in
the midst of a gay and goodly world ; or, placed afar beyond
the outskirts of creation, he dwelt a solitary unit in dark and
unpeopled nothingness. The heart must have something to
cling to — and never, by its own voluntary consent, will it so
denude itself of all its attachments, that there shall not be one
remaining object that can draw or solicit it.

The misery of a heart thus bereft of all relish for that which
wont to minister enjoyment, is strikingly exemplified in those,
who, satiated with indulgence, have been so belaboured, as it
were, with the variety and the poignancy of the pleasurable
sensations they have experienced, that they are at length fatigued
out of all capacity for sensation whatever. The disease of ennui
is more frequent in the French metropolis, where amusement is
more exclusively the occupation of the higher classes, than it is
in the British metropolis, where the longings of the heart are
more diversified by the resources of business and politics. There

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 251

are the votaries of fashion, who in this way have at length be
come the victims of fashionable excess — in whom the very mul
titude of their enjoyments has at last extinguished their power
of enjoyment — who, with the gratifications of art and nature at
command, now look upon all that is around them with an eye
of tastelessriess — who, plied with the delights of sense and of
splendour even to weariness, and incapable of higher delights,
have come to the end of all their perfection, and like Solomon
of old, found it to be vanity and vexation. The man whose
heart has thus been turned into a desert, can vouch for the in
supportable languor which must ensue when one affection is
thus plucked away from the bosom without another to replace
it. It is not necessary that a man receive pain from anything,
in order to become miserable. It is barely enough that he looks
with distaste to everything ; and in that asylum which is the
repository of minds out of joint, and where the organ of feeling
as well as the organ of intellect has been impaired, it is not in
the cell of loud and frantic outcries where we shall meet with
the acme of mental suffering. But that is the individual who
outpeers in wretchedness all his fellows, who, throughout the
whole expanse of nature and society, meets not an object that
has at all the power to detain or to interest him ; who, neither
in earth beneath nor in heaven above, knows of a single charm
to which his heart can send forth one desirous or responding
movement; to whom the world, in his eye a vast and empty
desolation, has left him nothing but his own consciousness to
feed upon — dead to all that is without him, and alive to nothing
but to the load of his own torpid and useless existence.

It will now be seen, perhaps, why it is that the heart keeps
by its present affections with so much tenacity — when the at
tempt is to do them away by a mere process of extirpation. It
will not consent to be so desolated. The strong man, whose
dwelling-place is there, may be compelled to give way to an
other occupier ; but unless another stronger than he has power
to dispossess and to succeed him, he will keep his present lodg
ment inviolable. The heart would revolt against its own empti
ness. It could not bear to be so left in a state of waste and
cheerless insipidity. The moralist who tries such a process of
dispossession as this upon the heart, is thwarted at every step
by the recoil of its own mechanism. You have all heard that
Nature abhors a vacuum. Such at least is the nature of the
heart, that though the room which is in it may change one in-

252 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

mate for another, it cannot be left void without the pain of most
intolerable suffering. It is not enough, then, to argue the folly
of an existing affection. It is not enough, in the terms of a
forcible or an affecting demonstration, to make good the evan
escence of its object. It may not even be enough to associate
the threats and the terrors of some coming vengeance with the
indulgence of it. The heart may still resist the every applica
tion, by obedience to which it would finally be conducted to a
state so much at war with all its appetites as that of downright
inanition. So to tear away an affection from the heart as to
leave it bare of all its regards and of all its preferences, were a
hard and hopeless undertaking — and it would appear as if the
alone powerful engine of dispossession were to bring the mastery
of another affection to bear upon it.

We know not a more sweeping interdict upon the affections
of Nature, than that which is delivered by the Apostle in the
verse before us. To bid a man into whom there has not yet
entered the great and ascendant influence of the principle of
regeneration, to bid him withdraw his love from all the things
that are in the world, is to bid him give up all the affections
that are in his heart. The world is the all of a natural man.
He has not a taste nor a desire that points not to a something
placed within the confines of its visible horizon. He loves
nothing above it, and he cares for nothing beyond it ; and to bid
him love not the world, is to pass a sentence of expulsion on all
the inmates of his bosom. To estimate the magnitude and the
difficulty of such a surrender, let us only think that it were just
as arduous to prevail on him not to love wealth, which is but
one of the things in the world, as to prevail on him to set wilful
fire to his own property. This he might do with sore and pain
ful reluctance, if he saw that the salvation of his life hung upon
it. But this he would do willingly, if he saw that a new pro
perty of tenfold value was instantly to emerge from the wreck
of the old one. In this case there is something more than the
mere displacement of an affection. There is the overbearing of
one affection by another. But to desolate his heart of all love
for the things of the world, without the substitution of any love
in its place, were to him a process of as unnatural violence as to
destroy all the things that he has in the world, and give him
nothing in their room. So that, if to love not the world be in
dispensable to one's Christianity, then the crucifixion of the old
man is not too strong a term to mark that transition in his his-

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 253

tory, when all old things are done away, and all things become
new.

We hope that by this time you understand the impotency of
a mere demonstration of this world's insignificance. Its sole
practical effect, if it had any, would be to leave the heart in a
state which to every heart is insupportable, and that is a mere
state of nakedness and negation. You may remember the fond
and unbroken tenacity with which your heart has often recurred
to pursuits, over the utter frivolity of which it sighed and wept
but yesterday. The arithmetic of your short-lived days may on
Sabbath make the clearest impression upon your understanding
— and from his fancied bed of death, may the preacher cause a
voice to descend in rebuke and mockery on all the pursuits of
earthliness — and as he pictures before you the fleeting genera
tions of men, with the absorbing grave, whither all the joys and
interests of the world hasten to their sure and speedy oblivion,
may you, touched and solemnized by his argument, feel for a
moment as if on the eve of a practical and permanent emancipa
tion from a scene of so much vanity. But the morrow comes,
and the business of the world, and the objects of the world, and
the moving forces of the world come along with it — and the
machinery of the heart, in virtue of which it must have some
thing to grasp, or something to adhere to, brings it under a kind
of moral necessity to be actuated just as before — and in utter
repulsion towards a state so unkindly as that of being frozen out
both of delight and of desire, does it feel all the warmth and the
urgency of its wonted solicitations — nor in the habit and history
of the whole man, can we detect so much as one symptom of the
new creature — so that the church, instead of being to him a
school of obedience, has been a mere sauntering place for the
luxury of a passing and theatrical emotion ; and the preaching
which is mighty to compel the attendance of multitudes, which
is mighty to still and to solemnize the hearers into a kind of
tragic sensibility, which is mighty in the play of variety and
vigour that it can keep up around the imagination, is not mighty
to the pulling down of strong holds.

The love of the world cannot be expunged by a mere demon
stration of the world's worthlessness. But may it not be sup
planted by the love of that which is more worthy than itself?
The heart cannot be prevailed upon to part with the world by a
simple act of resignation. But may not the heart be prevailed
upon to admit into its preference another, who shall subordinate

254 POWER, OF A NEW AFFECTION.

the world, and bring it down from its wonted ascendency? If
the throne which is placed there must have an occupier, and the
tyrant that now reigns has occupied it wrongfully, he may not
leave a bosom which would rather detain him than be left in
desolation. But may he not give way to the lawful sovereign,
appearing with every charm that can secure His willing admit
tance, and taking unto Himself His great power to subdue the
moral nature of man, and to reign over it ? In a word, if the
way to disengage the heart from the positive love of one great
and ascendant object is to fasten it in positive love to another,
then it is not by exposing the worthlessness of the former, but
by addressing to the mental eye the worth and excellence of the
latter, that all old things are to be done away, and all things
are to become new.

To obliterate all our present affections by simply expunging
them, and so as to leave the seat of them unoccupied, would be
to destroy the old character, and to substitute no new character
in its place. But when they take their departure upon the in
gress of other visitors ; when they resign their sway to the power
and the predominance of new affections ; when, abandoning the
heart to solitude, they merely give place to a successor who
turns it into as busy a residence of desire and interest and ex
pectation as before — there is nothing in all this to thwart or to
overbear any of the laws of our sentient nature — and we see
how, in fullest accordance with the mechanism of the heart, a
great moral revolution may be made to take place upon it.

This, we trust, will explain the operation of that charm which
accompanies the effectual preaching of the gospel. The love of
God and the love of the world are two affections, not merely in
a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity — and that so irre
concilable, that they cannot dwell together in the same bosom.
We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart,
by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from
it, and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so
constituted ; and the only way to dispossess it of an old affec
tion, is by the expulsive power of a new one. Nothing can ex
ceed the magnitude of the required change in a man's character
— when bidden, as he is in the New Testament, to love not the
world ; no, nor any of the things that are in the world — for this
so comprehends all that is dear to him in existence, as to be
equivalent to a command of self-annihilation. But the same re
velation which dictates so mighty an obedience, places within

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 255

our reach as mighty an instrument of obedience. It brings for
admittance to the very door of our heart an affection, which,
once seated upon its throne, will either subordinate every pre
vious inmate, or bid it away. Beside the world, it places before
the eye of the mind Him who made the world, and with this
peculiarity, which is all its own — that in the Gospel do we so
behold God, as that we may love God. It is there, and there
only, where God stands revealed as an object of confidence to
sinners — and where our desire after Him is not chilled into
apathy, by that barrier of human guilt which intercepts every
approach that is not made to Him through the appointed
Mediator. It is the bringing in of this better hope, whereby
we draw nigh unto God — and to live without hope is to live
without God ; and if the heart be without God, the world will
then have all the ascendency. It is God apprehended by the
believer as God in Christ, who alone can dispost it from this
ascendency. It is when He stands dismantled of the terrors
which belong to Him as an offended lawgiver, and when we are
enabled by faith, which is His own gift, to see His glory in the
face of Jesus Christ, and to hear His beseeching voice as it pro
tests good-will to men, and entreats the return of all who will
to a full pardon and a gracious acceptance — it is then that a
love paramount to the love of the world, and at length expulsive
of it, first arises in the regenerated bosom. It is when released
from the spirit of bondage with which love cannot dwell, and
when admitted into the number of God's children through the
faith that is in Christ Jesus, the Spirit of adoption is poured
upon us — it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery
of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the
tyranny of its former desires in the only way in which deliver
ance is possible. And that faith which is revealed to us from
heaven as indispensable to a sinner's justification in the sight of
God, is also the instrument of the greatest of all moral and
spiritual achievements on a nature dead to the influence, and
beyond the reach, of every other application.

Thus may we come to perceive what it is that makes the
most effective kind of preaching. It is not enough to hold out
to the world's eye the mirror of its own imperfections. It is not
enough to come forth with a demonstration, however pathetic,
of the evanescent character of all its enjoyments. It is not
enough to travel the walk of experience along with you, and
speak to your own conscience and your own recollection, of the

256 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

deceitfulness of the heart, and the deceitfulness of all that the
heart is set upon. There is many a bearer of the gospel mes
sage who has not shrewdness of natural discernment enough,
and who has not power of characteristic description enough, and
who has not the talent of moral delineation enough, to present
you with a vivid and faithful sketch of the existing follies of
society. But that very corruption which he has not the faculty
of representing in its visible details, he may practically be the
instrument of eradicating in its principle. Let him be but a
faithful expounder of the gospel testimony — unable as he may
be to apply a descriptive hand to the character of the present
world, let him but report with accuracy the matter which reve
lation has brought to him from a distant world — unskilled as he
is in the work of so anatomizing the heart, as with the power of
a novelist to create a graphical or impressive exhibition of the
worthlessness of its many affections — let him only deal in those
mysteries of peculiar doctrine, on which the best of novelists
have thrown the wantonness of their derision. He may not be
able, with the eye of shrewd and satirical observation, to expose
to the ready recognition of his hearers the desires of worldliness
— but with the tidings of the gospel in commission, he may
wield the only engine that can extirpate them. He cannot do
what some have done, when, as if by the hand of a magician,
they have brought out to view, from the hidden recesses of our
nature, the foibles and lurking appetites which belong to it. —
But he has a truth in his possession which, into whatever heart
it enters, will, like the rod of Aaron, swallow up them all ; and
unqualified as he may be to describe the old man in all the nicer
shading of his natural and constitutional varieties, with him is
deposited that ascendant influence under which the leading
tastes and tendencies of the old man are destroyed, and he be
comes a new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let us not cease, then, to ply the only instrument of powerful
and positive operation to do away from you the love of the
world. Let us try every legitimate method of finding access to
your hearts for the love of Him who is greater than the world.
For this purpose, let us if possible clear away that shroud of un
belief which so hides and darkens the face of the Deity. Let
us insist on His claims to your affection — and whether in the
shape of gratitude or in the shape of esteem, let us never cease
to affirm, that in the whole of that wondrous economy, the pur
pose of which is to reclaim a sinful world unto Himself — he, the

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 257

God of love, so sets Himself forth in characters of endearment,
that nought but faith and nought but understanding are want
ing, on your part, to call forth the love of your hearts back
again.

And here let us advert to the incredulity of a worldly man :
when he brings his own sound and secular experience to bear
upon the high doctrines of Christianity — when he looks on re
generation as a thing impossible — when, feeling as he does, the
obstinacies of his own heart on the side of things present, and
casting an intelligent eye, much exercised perhaps in the obser
vation of human life, on the equal obstinacies of all who are
around him, he pronounces this whole matter about the cruci
fixion of the old man, and the resurrection of a new man in his
place, to be in downright opposition to all that is known and
witnessed of the real nature of humanity. We think that we
have seen such men, who, firmly trenched in their own vigorous
and homebred sagacity, and shrewdly regardful of all that passes
before them through the week, and upon the scenes of ordinary
business, look on that transition of the heart by which it gradu
ally dies unto time, and awakens in all the life of a new-felt an""!
ever-growing desire towards God, as a mere Sabbath specula
tion ; and who thus, with all their attention engrossed upon the
concerns of earthliriess, continue unmoved to the end of their
days, amongst the feelings and the appetites and the pursuits of
earthliness. If the thought of death, and another state of being
after it, comes across them at all, it is not with a change so
radical as that of being born again that they ever connect the
idea of preparation. They have some vague conception of its
being quite enough that they acquit themselves in some decent
and tolerable way of their relative obligations ; and that, upon
the strength of some such social and domestic moralities as are
often realized by him into whose heart the love of God has
never entered, they will be transplanted in safety from this
world, where God is the Being with whom it may almost be
said that they have had nothing to do, to that world where God
is the Being with whom they will have mainly and immediately
to do throughout all eternity. They admit all that is said of
the utter vanity of time, when taken up with as a resting-place.
But they resist every application made upon the heart of man
with the view of so shifting its tendencies, that it shall not
henceforth find in the interests of time all its rest and all its re
freshment. They, in fact, regard such an attempt as an enter-

VOL. III. K

258 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

prise that is altogether aerial — and with a tone of secular wis
dom, caught from the familiarities of every-day experience, do
they see a visionary character in all that is said of setting our
affections on the things that are above ; and of walking by faith ;
and of keeping our hearts in such a love of God as shall shut
out from them the love of the world ; and of having no confidence
in the flesh ; and of so renouncing earthly things as to have our
conversation in heaven.

Now, it is altogether worthy of being remarked of those men
who thus disrelish spiritual Christianity, and in fact deem it an
impracticable acquirement, how much of a piece their incredulity
about the demands of Christianity, and their incredulity about
the doctrines of Christianity, are with one another. No wonder
that they feel the work of the New Testament to be beyond
their strength, so long as they hold the words of the New Tes
tament to be beneath their attention. Neither they nor any
one else can dispossess the heart of an old affection but by the
expulsive power of a new one ; and if that new affection be the
love of God, neither they nor any one else can be made to enter
tain it, but on such a representation of the Deity as shall draw
the heart of the sinner towards Him. Now it is just their un
belief which screens from the discernment of their minds this
representation. They do not see the love of God in sending
His Son unto the world. They do not see the expression of
His tenderness to men in sparing Him not, but giving Him up
unto the death for us all. They do not see the sufficiency of
the atonement, or the sufferings that were endured by Him who
bore the burden that signers should have borne. They do not
see the blended holiness and compassion of the Godhead, in that
He passed by the transgressions of His creatures, yet could not
pass them by without an expiation. It is a mystery to them
how a man should pass to the state of godliness from a state of
nature ; but had they only a believing view of God manifest in
the flesh, this would resolve for them the whole mystery of god
liness. As it is, they cannot get quit of their old affections, be
cause they are out of sight from all those truths which have
influence to raise a new one. They are like the children of
Israel in the land of Egypt, when required to make bricks with
out straw — they cannot love God, while they want the only food
which can aliment this affection in a sinner's bosom — and how
ever great their errors may be both in resisting the demands of
the gospel as impracticable, and in rejecting the doctrines of the

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 259

gospel as inadmissible, yet there is not a spiritual man (and it
is the prerogative of him who is spiritual to judge all men) who
will not perceive that there is a consistency in these errors.

But if there be a consistency in the errors, in like manner is
there a consistency in the truths which are opposite to them.
The man who believes in the peculiar doctrines, will readily bow
to the peculiar demands of Christianity. When he is told to love
God supremely, this may startle another ; but it will not startle
him to whom God has been revealed in peace, and in pardon,
and in all the freeness of an offered reconciliation. When told
to shut out the world from his heart, this may be impossible
with him who has nothing to replace it — but not impossible with
him who has found in God a sure and a satisfying portion. When
told to withdraw his affections from the things that are beneath,
this were laying an order of self-extinction upon the man who
knows not another quarter in the whole sphere of his contem
plation to which he could transfer them — but it were not griev
ous to him whose view has been opened up to the loveliness and
glory of the things that are above, and can there find for every
feeling of his soul, a most ample and delighted occupation.
When told to look not to the things that are seen and temporal,
this were blotting out the light of all that is visible from the
prospect of him in whose eye there is a wall of partition between
guilty nature and the joys of eternity — but he who believes that
Christ hath broken down this wall, finds a gathering radiance
upon his soul, as he looks onwards in faith to the things that are
unseen and eternal. Tell a man to be holy — and how can he
compass such a performance, when his alone fellowship with
holiness is a fellowship of despair ? It is the atonement of the
cross reconciling the holiness of the lawgiver with the safety of
the offender, that hath opened the way for a sanctifying influ
ence into the sinner's heart ; and he can take a kindred impres
sion from the character of God now brought nigh, and now at
peace with him. Separate the demand from the doctrine ; and
you have either a system of righteousness that is impracticable,
or a barren orthodoxy. Bring the demand and the doctrine
together — and the true disciple of Christ is able to do the one,
through the other strengthening him. The motive is adequate
to the movement ; arid the bidden obedience of the gospel is not
beyond the measure of his strength, just because the doctrine of
the gospel is not beyond the measure of his acceptance. The
shield of faith, and the hope of salvation, and the Word of God,

260 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

and the girdle of truth — these are the armour that he has put
on ; and with these the battle is won, and the eminence is
reached, and the man stands on the vantage-ground of a new
field, and a new prospect. The effect is great, but the cause is
equal to it — and stupendous as this moral resurrection to the
precepts of Christianity undoubtedly is, there is an element of
strength enough to give it being and continuance in the prin
ciples of Christianity.

The object of the gospel is both to pacify the sinner's con
science, and to purify his heart ; and it is of importance to
observe, that what mars the one of these objects, mars the other
also. The best way of casting out an impure affection is to
admit a pure one ; and by the love of what is good, to expel the
love of what is evil. Thus it is, that the freer the gospel, the
more sanctifying is the gospel ; and the more it is received as a
doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according
to godliness. This is one of the secrets of the Christian life, that
the more a man holds of God as a pensioner, the greater is the
payment of service that he renders back again. On the tenure
of " Do this and live," a spirit of fearfulness is sure to enter ;
and the jealousies of a legal bargain chase away all confidence
from the intercourse between God and man ; and the creature
striving to be square and even with his Creator, is, in fact, pur
suing all the while his own selfishness, instead of God's glory ;
and with all the conformities which he labours to accomplish,
the soul of obedience is not there, the mind is not subject to the
law of God, nor indeed under such an economy ever can be. It
is only when, as in the gospel, acceptance is bestowed as a pre
sent, without money and without price, that the security which
man feels in God is placed beyond the reach of disturbance — or,
that he can repose in Him, as one friend reposes in another — or,
that any liberal and generous understanding can be established
betwixt them — the one party rejoicing over the other to do him
good — the other finding that the truest gladness of his heart lies
in the impulse of a gratitude, by which it is awakened to the
charms of a new moral existence. Salvation by grace — salva
tion by free grace — salvation not of works, but according to the
mercy of God — salvation on such a footing is not more indis
pensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of
justice, than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill
and the weight of ungodliness. Retain a single shred or frag
ment of legality with the gospel, and we raise a topic of distrust

POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION. 261

between man and God. We take away from the power of the
gospel to melt arid to conciliate. For this purpose, the freer it
is, the better it is. That very peculiarity which so many dread
as the germ of antinornianism, is, in fact, the germ of a new
spirit, and a new inclination against it. Along with the light of
a free gospel, does there enter the love of the gospel, which, in
proportion as we impair the freeness, we are sure to chase away.
And never does the sinner find within himself so mighty a moral
transformation, as when, under the belief that he is saved by
grace, he feels constrained thereby to offer his heart a devoted
thing, and to deny ungodliness.

To do any work in the best manner, we should make use of
the fittest tools for it. And we trust, that what has been said
may serve in some degree, for the practical guidance of those
who would like to reach the great moral achievement of our
text — but feel that the tendencies and desires of nature are too
strong for them. We know of no other way by which to keep
the love of the world out of our heart, than to keep in our hearts
the love of God — and no other way by which to keep our hearts
in the love of God, than building ourselves up on our most holy
faith. That denial of the world which is not possible to him
that dissents from the gospel testimony, is possible even as all
things are possible, to him that believeth. To try this without
faith, is to work without the right tool or the right instrument.
But faith worketh by love ; and the way of expelling from the
heart the love which transgresseth the law, is to admit into its
receptacles the love which fulfilleth the law.

Conceive a man to be standing on the margin of this green
world ; and that, when he looked towards it, he saw abundance
smiling upon every field, and all the blessings which earth can
afford scattered in profusion throughout every family, and the
light of the sun sweetly resting upon all the pleasant habitations,
and the joys of human companionship brightening many a happy
circle of society — conceive this to be the general character of the
scene upon one side of his contemplation ; and that on the other,
beyond the verge of the goodly planet on which he was situated,
he could descry nothing but a dark and fathomless unknown.
Think you that he would bid a voluntary adieu to all the bright
ness and all the beauty that were before him upon earth, and
commit himself to the frightful solitude away from it ? Would
he leave its peopled dwelling-places, and become a solitary
wanderer through the fields of nonentity ? If space offered him

262 POWER OF A NEW AFFECTION.

nothing but a wilderness, would lie for it abandon the homebred
scenes of life and of cheerfulness that lay so near, and exerted
such a power of urgency to detain him ? Would not he cling to
the regions of sense, and of life, and of society ? — and shrinking
away from the desolation that was beyond it, would not he be
glad to keep his firm footing on the territory of this world,
and to take shelter under the silver canopy that was stretched
over it ?

But if, during the time of his contemplation, some happy
island of the blest had floated by ; and there had burst upon his
senses the light of its surpassing glories, and its sounds of sweeter
melody ; and he clearly saw that there a purer beauty rested
upon every field, and a more heartfelt joy spread itself among all
the families ; and he could discern there, a peace, and a piety,
and a benevolence, which put a moral gladness into every bosom,
and united the whole society in one rejoicing sympathy with
each other, and with the beneficent Father of them all. — Could
he further see, that pain and mortality were there unknown ; and
above all, that signals of welcome were hung out, and an avenue
of communication was made for him — perceive you not, that
what was before the wilderness, would become the land of invi
tation ; and that now the world would be the wilderness? What
unpeopled space could not do, can be done by space teeming
with beatific scenes, and beatific society. And let the existing
tendencies of the heart be what they may to the scene that is
near and visibly around us, still if another stood revealed to the
prospect of man, either through the channel of faith, or through
the channel of his senses — then, without violence done to the
constitution of his moral nature, may he die unto the present
world, and live to the lovelier world that stands in the distance
away from it.

RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION. 263

DISCOUKSE X.

THE RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION.

"How say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain ? — 0 that I had the wings of a
dove, that I may fly away and be at rest."— PSALM xi. 1 and Iv. 6.

To all those who are conversant in the scenery of external
nature, it is evident that an object, to be seen to the greatest
advantage, must be placed at a certain distance from the eye of
the observer. The poor man's hut, though all within be rag-
gedness and disorder, and all around it be full of the most
nauseous and disgusting spectacles — yet, if seen at a sufficient
distance, may appear a sweet and interesting cottage. That
field where the thistle grows, and the face of which is deformed
by the wild exuberance of a rank and pernicious vegetation, may
delight the eye of a distant spectator by the loveliness of its ver
dure. That lake, whose waters are corrupted, and whose banks
poison the air by their marshy and putrid exhalations, may
charm the eye of an enthusiast, who views it from an adjoining
eminence, and dwells with rapture on the quietness of its surface,
and on the beauty of its outline — its sweet border fringed with
the gayest colouring of nature, and on which spring lavishes its
finest ornaments. All is the effect of distance. It softens the
harsh and disgusting features of every object. What is gross
and ordinary, it can dress in the most romantic attractions. The
country hamlet it can transform into a paradise of beauty, in
spite of the abominations that are at every door, and the angry
brawlings of the men and the women who occupy it. All that
is loathsome or offensive is softened down by the power of dis
tance. We see the smoke rising in fantastic wreaths through
the pure air, and the village spire peeping from among the thick
verdure of the trees which embosom it. The fancy of our senti
mentalist swells with pleasure, and peace and piety supply their
delightful associations to complete the harmony of the picture.

This principle may serve to explain a feeling which some of
us may have experienced. On a fine day, when the sun threw

264 RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION.

its unclouded splendours over a whole neighbourhood, did we
never form a wish that our place could be transferred to some
distant and more beautiful part of the landscape ? Did the idea
never rise in our fancy, that the people who sport on yon sunny
bank are happier than ourselves — that we should like to be
buried in that distant grove, and forget, for a while, in silence
and in solitude, the distractions of the world — that we should
like to repose by yon beautiful rivulet, and soothe every anxiety
of our heart by the gentleness of its murmurs — that we should
like to transport ourselves to the distance of miles, and there
enjoy the peace which resides in some sweet and sheltered con
cealment ? In a word, was there no secret aspiration of the soul
for another place than what we actually occupied ? Instead of
resting in the quiet enjoyment of our present situation, did not
our wishes wander abroad and around us — and were not we
ready to exclaim, with the Psalmist in the text, " 0 that I had
the wings of a dove ; for I would fly to yonder mountain, and
be at rest"?

But what is of most importance to be observed is, that even
when we have reached the mountain, rest is as far from us as
ever. As we get nearer the wished -for spot, the fairy enchant
ments in which distance had arrayed it, gradually disappear ;
when we at last arrive at our object, the illusion is entirely
dissipated ; and we are grieved to find that we have carried the
same principle of restlessness and discontent along with us.

Now, what is true of a natural landscape, is also true of that
moral landscape, which is presented to the eye of the mind when
it contemplates human life, and casts a wide survey over the face
of human society. The position which I myself occupy is seen
and felt with all its disadvantages. Its vexations come home to
my feelings with all the certainty of experience. I see it before
mine eyes with a vision so near and intimate, as to admit of no
colouring, and to preclude the exercise of fancy. It is only in
those situations which are without me, where the principle of
deception operates, and where the vacancies of an imperfect ex
perience are filled up by the power of imagination, ever ready to
summon the fairest forms of pure and unmingled enjoyment. It
is all resolvable, as before, into the principle of distance. I am
too far removed to see the smaller features of the object which I
contemplate. I overlook the operation of those minuter causes,
which expose every situation of human life to the inroads of
misery and disappointment. Mine eye can only take in the

RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION. 265

broader outlines of the object before me ; and it consigns to fancy
the task of filling them up with its finest colouring.

Am I unlearned ? I feel the disgrace of ignorance, and sigh
for the name and the distinctions of philosophy. Do I stand
upon a literary eminence ? I feel the vexations of rivalship,
and could almost renounce the splendours of my dear-bought
reputation for the peace and shelter which insignificance bestows.
Am I poor ? I riot in fancy upon the gratifications of luxury,
and think how great I would be, if invested with all the conse
quence of wealth and of patronage. Am I rich ? I sicken at
the deceitful splendour which surrounds me ; arid am at times
tempted to think that I would have been happier far if, born to
a humbler station, I had been trained to the peace and innocence
of poverty. Am I immersed in business ? I repine at the
fatigues of employment ; arid envy the lot of those who have
every hour at their disposal, and can spend all their time in the
sweet relaxations of amusement and society. Am I exempted
from the necessity of exertion ? I feel the corroding anxieties
of indolence, and attempt in vain to escape that weariness and
disgust which useful and regular occupation can alone save me
from. Arn I single ? I feel the dreariness of solitude, and my
fancy warms at the conception of a dear and domestic circle. Am
I embroiled in the cares of a family ? I am tormented with the
perverseness or ingratitude of those around me ; and sigh in all
the bitterness of repentance, over the rash and irrecoverable
step by which I have renounced for ever the charms of inde
pendence.

This, in fact, is the grand principle of human ambition ; and
it serves to explain both its restlessness and its vanity. What
is present is seen in all its minuteness ; and we overlook not a
single article in the train of little drawbacks, and difficulties,
and disappointments. What is distant is seen under a broad and
general aspect ; and the illusions of fancy are substituted in those
places which we cannot fill up with the details of actual obser
vation. What is present fills me with disgust. What is distant
allures me to enterprise. I sigh for an office, the business of
which is more congenial to my temper. I fix mine eye on some
lofty eminence in the scale of preferment. I spurn at the con
dition which I now occupy, arid I look around me and above me.
The perpetual tendency is not to enjoy our actual position, but
to get away from it — and not an individual amongst us who does
not every day of his life join in the aspiration of the Psalmist,

266 RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION.

" 0 that I had the wings of a dove, that I may fly to yonder
mountain, and be at rest."

But the truth is, that we never rest. The most regular and
stationary being on the face of the earth has something to look
forward to, and something to aspire after. He must realize that
sum to which he annexes the idea of a competency. He must
add that piece of ground which he thinks necessary to complete
the domain of which he is the proprietor. He must secure that
office which confers so much honour and emolument upon the
holder. Even after every effort of personal ambition is ex
hausted, he has friends and children to provide for. The care
of those who are to come after him, lands him in a never-ending
train of hopes, and wishes, and anxieties. 0 that I could gain
the vote and the patronage of this honourable acquaintance —
or, that I could secure the political influence of that great man
who honours me with an occasional call, and addressed me the
other day with a cordiality which was quite bewitching — or that
my young friend could succeed in his competition for the lucra
tive vacancy to which I have been looking forward for years,
with all the eagerness which distance and uncertainty could
inspire — or that we could fix the purposes of that capricious and
unaccountable wanderer, who, of late indeed has been very
particular in his attentions, and whose connexion we acknow
ledge, in secret, would be an honour and an advantage to our
family — or, at all events, let me heap wealth and aggrandize
ment on that son who is to be the representative of my name,
and is to perpetuate that dynasty which I have had the glory of
establishing.

This restless ambition is not peculiar to any one class of
society. A court only offers to one's notice a more exalted
theatre for the play of rivalship and political enterprise. In the
bosom of a cottage, we may witness the operation of the very
same principle, only directed to objects of greater insignificance
— and though a place for my girl, or an apprenticeship for my
boy, be all that I aspire after, yet an enlightened observer of
the human character will perceive in it the same eagerness of
competition, the same jealousy, the same malicious attempts to
undermine the success of a more likely pretender, the same busy
train of passions and anxieties which animate the exertions of
him who struggles for precedency in the cabinet, and lifts his
ambitious eye to the management of an empire.

This is the universal property of our nature. In the whole

ItESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION. 267

circle of our experience, did we ever see a man sit down to the
full enjoyment of the present, without a hope or a wish unsatis
fied? Did he carry in his mind no reference to futurity — no
longing of the soul after some remote or inaccessible object — no
day-dream which played its enchantments around him, and
which, even when accomplished, left him nothing more than the
delirium of a momentary triumph ? Did we never see him after
the bright illusions of novelty were over — when the present ob
ject had lost its charm, and the distant begun to practise its
allurements — when some gay vision of futurity had hurried him
on to a new enterprise, and in the fatigues of a restless ambition,
he felt a bosom as oppressed with care, and a heart as anxious
arid dissatisfied as ever ?

This is the true, though the curious, and we had almost said,
the farcical picture of human life. Look into the heart which
is the seat of feeling, and we there perceive a perpetual tendency
to enjoyment, but not enjoyment itself — the cheerfulness of hope,
but not the happiness of actual possession. The present is but
an instant of time. The moment that we call it our own, it
abandons us. It is not the actual sensation which occupies the
mind. It is what is to come next. Man lives in futurity. The
pleasurable feeling of the moment forms almost no part of his
happiness. It is not the reality of to-day which interests his
heart. It is the vision of to-morrow. It is the distant object
on which fancy has thrown its deceitful splendour. When to
morrow comes, the animating hope is transformed into the dull
and insipid reality. As the distant object draws near, it becomes
cold, and tasteless, and uninteresting. The only way in which
the mind can support itself, is by recurring to some new antici
pation. This may give buoyancy for a time — but it will share
the fate of all its predecessors, and be the addition of another
folly to the wretched train of disappointments that have gone
before it.

What a curious object of contemplation to a superior being,
who casts an eye over this lower world, and surveys the busy,
restless, and unceasing operations of the people who swarm upon
its surface. Let him select any one individual amongst us, and
confine his attention to him as a specimen of the whole. Let
him pursue him through the intricate variety of his movements,
for he is never stationary ; see him with his eye fixed upon some
distant object, and struggling to arrive at it ; see him pressing
forward to some eminence which perpetually recedes away from

268 RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION.

him ; see the inexplicable being, as he runs in full pursuit of
some glittering bauble, and on the moment he reaches it throws
it behind him, and it is forgotten ; see him unmindful of his past
experience, and hurrying his footsteps to some new object with
the same eagerness and rapidity as ever ; compare the ecstacy of
hope with the lifelessness of possession, and observe the whole
history of his day to be made up of one fatiguing race of vanity,
and restlessness, and disappointment ;

" And, like the glittering of an idiot's toy,
Loth fancy mock his vows."

To complete the unaccountable history, let us look to its ter
mination. Man is irregular in his movements, but this does not
hinder the regularity of Nature. Time will not stand still to
look at us. It moves at its own invariable pace. The winged
moments fly in swift succession over us. The great luminaries
which are suspended on high perform their cycles in the heaven.
The sun describes his circuit in the firmament, and the space of
a few revolutions will bring every man among us to his destiny.
The decree passes abroad against the poor child of infatuation.
It meets him in the full career of hope and of enterprise. He
sees the dark curtain of mortality foiling upon the world, and
upon all its interests. That busy restless heart, so crowded with
its plans, and feelings, and anticipations, forgets to play, and all
its fluttering anxieties are hushed for ever.

Where then is that resting-place which the Psalmist aspired
after? What are we to mean by that mountain, that wilderness,
to which he prayed the wings of a dove may convey him, afar
from the noise and distractions of the world, and hasten his
escape from the windy storm and the tempest? Is there no
object, in the whole round of human enjoyment, which can give
rest to the agitated spirit of man — where he might sit down in
the fulness of contentment, after he has reached it, and bid a
final adieu to the cares and fatigues of ambition ? Is this long
ing of the mind a principle of his nature, which no gratification
can extinguish ? Must it condemn him to perpetual agitation,
and to the wild impulses of an ambition which is never satis
fied ?

We allow that exercise is the health of the mind. It is better
to engage in a trifling pursuit, if innocent, than to watch the
melancholy progress of time, and drag out a weary existence in
all the languor of a consuming indolence. But nobody will
deny, that it is better still if the pursuit in which we are engaged

RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION. 269

be not a trifling one — if it conduct to some lasting gratification
— if it lead to some object, the possession of which confers more
happiness than the mere prospect — if the mere pleasure of the
chase is not the only recompence — but where, in addition to
this, we secure some reward proportioned to the fatigue of the
exercise, and that justifies the eagerness with which we em
barked in it. So long as the exercise is innocent, better do
something than be idle : but better still, when the something we
do leads to a valuable and important termination. Anything
rather than the ignoble condition of that mind which feels the
burden of itself, and which knows not how to dispose of the
weary hours that hang so oppressively upon it. But there is
certainly a ground of preference in the objects which invite us
to exertion ; and better far to fix upon that object which leaves
happiness and satisfaction behind it, than dissipate our vigour in
a pursuit which terminates in nothing, and where the mere plea
sure of occupation is the only circumstance to recommend it.
When we talk of the vanity of ambition, we do not propose to
extinguish the principles of our nature, but to give them a more
useful and exalted direction. A state of hope and of activity is
the element of man ; and all that we propose is, to withdraw his
hope from the deceitful objects of fancy, and to engage his
activity in the pursuit of real and permanent enjoyments.

Man must have an object to look forward to. Without this
incitement the mind languishes. It is thrown out of its element ;
and, in this unnatural suspension of its powers, it feels a dreari
ness and a discomfort far more insufferable than it ever experi
enced from the visitations of a real or positive calamity. If
such an object do not offer, he will create one for himself. The
mere possession of wealth, and of all its enjoyments, will not
satisfy him. Possession carries along with it the dulness of cer
tainty ; and to escape from this dulness, he will transform it into
an uncertainty — he will embark it in a hazardous speculation, or
he will stake it at the gaming-table ; and from no other prin
ciple, than that be may exchange the listlessness of possession
for the animating sensations of hope and of enterprise. It is a
paradox in the moral constitution of man ; but the experience of
every day confirms it — that man follows what he knows to be a
delusion, with as much eagerness as if he were assured of its
reality. Put the question to him, and he will tell us, that if we
were to lay before him all the profits which his fancy anticipates,
he would long as much as ever for some new speculation ; or, in

270 RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION.

other words, be as much dissatisfied as ever with the position
which he actually occupies — and yet, with his eye perfectly
open to this circumstance, will he embark every power of his
mind in the chase of what he knows to be a mockery and a
phantom.

Now, to find fault with man for the pleasure which he derives
from the mere excitement of a distant object, would be to find
fault with the constitution of his nature. It is not the general
principle of his activity which we condemn. It is the direction
of that activity to a useless and unprofitable object. The mere
happiness of the pursuit does not supersede the choice of the
object. Even though we were to keep religion out of sight
altogether, and bring the conduct of man to the test of worldly
principles, we still presuppose a ground of preference in the
object. Why is the part of the sober and industrious tradesman
preferred to that of the dissipated traveller? Both feel the
delights of a mind fully occupied with something to excite and
to animate. But the exertions of the one lead to the safe en
joyment of a competency. The exertions of the other lead to
an object which at best is precarious, and often land us in the
horrors of poverty and disgrace. The mere pleasure of exertion
is not enough to justify every kind of it : we must look forward
to the object and the termination — and it is the judicious choice
of the object which, even in the estimation of worldly wisdom,
forms the great point of distinction betwixt prudence and folly.
Now, all that we ask of you is, to extend the application of the
same principle to a life of religion. Compare the wisdom of the
children of light with the wisdom of a blind and worldly gene
ration — the prudence of the Christian who labours for immor
tality, with the prudence of him who labours for the objects of a
vain and perishable ambition. Contrast the littleness of time
with the greatness of eternity — the restless and unsatisfying
pleasures of the" world with the enjoyments of heaven, so pure,
so substantial, so unfading — and tell us which plays the higher
game — he, all whose anxiety is frittered away on the pursuits of
a scene that is ever shifting and ever transitory ; or he who con
templates the life of man in all its magnitude, who acts upon
the wide and comprehensive survey of its interests, and takes
into his estimate the mighty roll of innumerable ages.

There is no resting-place to be found on this side of death.
It is the doctrine of the Bible, and all experience loudly pro
claims it. We do not ask you to listen to the complaints of the

RESTLESSNESS OF HUMAN AMBITION. 271

poor, or the murmurs of the disappointed. Take your lesson from
the veriest favourite of fortune. See him placed in a prouder
eminence than he ever aspired after. See him arrayed in
brighter colours than ever dazzled his early imagination. See
him surrounded with all the homage that fame and flattery can
bestow — and after you have suffered this parading exterior to
practise its deceitfulness upon you, enter into his solitude — mark
his busy, restless, dissatisfied eye, as it wanders uncertain on
every object — enter into his mind, and tell me if repose or en
joyment be there — see him the poor victim of chagrin and dis
quietude—mark his heart as it nauseates the splendour which
encompasses him — and tell us if you have not learned, in the
truest and most affecting characters, .that even in the full tide of
a triumphant ambition " man labours for the meat which per-
isheth, and for the food which satisfieth not."

What meaneth this restlessness of our nature ? What mean-
eth this unceasing activity which longs for exercise and employ
ment, even after every object is gained which first roused it to
enterprise? What mean those unmeasurable longings, which
no gratification can extinguish, and which still continue to agi
tate the heart of man even in the fulness of plenty and of enjoy
ment. If they mean anything at all, they mean that all which
this world can offer is not enough to fill up his capacity for hap
piness — that time is too small for him, and he is born for some
thing beyond it — that the scene of his earthly existence is too
limited, and he is formed to expatiate in a wider and a grander
theatre — that a nobler destiny is reserved for him — and that to
accomplish the purpose of his being he must soar above the little
ness of the world, and aim at a loftier prize.

It forms the peculiar honour arid excellence of religion, that
it accommodates to this property of our nature — that it holds out
a prize suited to our high calling — that there is a grandeur in
its objects which can fill and surpass the imagination — that it
dignifies the present scene by connecting it with eternity — that
it reveals to the eye of faith the glories of an imperishable world
— and how, from the high eminences of heaven, a cloud of wit
nesses are looking down upon earth, not as a scene for the petty
anxieties of time, but as a splendid theatre for the ambition of
immortal spirits.

272 ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

DISCOUKSE XL

ON THE ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE TO THE LOWER ORDERS OP
SOCIETY.

" Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king, who will no more be
admonished." — ECCLESIASTES iv. 13.

THERE is no one topic on which the Bible, throughout the
variety of its separate compositions, maintains a more lucid and
entire consistency of sentiment, than the superiority of moral
over all physical and all external distinctions. This lesson is
frequently urged in the Old Testament, and as frequently re
iterated in the New. There is a predominance given in both to
worth, and to wisdom, and to principle, which leads us to under
stand, that within the compass of human attainment, there is an
object placed before us of a higher and more estimable character
than all the objects of a commonplace ambition — that wherever
there is mind, there stands associated with it a nobler and more
abiding interest than all the aggrandizements which wealth or
rank can bestow — that within the limits of the moral and intellec
tual department of our nature, there is a commodity which money
cannot purchase, and possesses a more sterling excellence than
all which money can command. This preference of man viewed
in his essential attributes, to man viewed according to the vari
able accessaries by which he is surrounded — this preference of
the subject to all its outward and contingent modifications — this
preference of man viewed as the possessor of a heart, arid of a
spirit, and of capacities for truth and for righteousness, to man
signalized by prosperity, and clothed in the pomp and in the
circumstance of its visible glories — this is quite akin with the
superiority which the Bible everywhere ascribes to the soul over
the body, and to eternity over time, and to the Supreme Author
of Being over all that is subordinate and created. It marks a
discernment, unclouded by all those associations which are so
current and have so fatal an ascendency in our world — the wis
dom of a purer and more ethereal region than the one we occupy

ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 273

— the unpolluted clearness of a light shining in a dark place,
which announces its own coming to be from above, and gives
every spiritual reader of the Bible to perceive the beaming of a
powerful and presiding intelligence in all its pages.

One very animating inference to be drawn from our text, is
how much may be made of humanity. Did a king come to take
up his residence amongst us — did he shed a grandeur over our
city by the presence of his court, and give the impulse of his
expenditure to the trade of its population — it were not easy to
rate the value and the magnitude which such an event would
have on the estimation of a common understanding, or the de
gree of personal importance which would attach to him, who
stood a lofty object in the eye of admiring townsmen. And yet
it is possible, out of the raw and ragged materials of an obscurest
lane, to rear an individual of more inherent worth than him who
thus draws the gaze of the world upon his person. By the act
of training in wisdom's ways the most tattered and neglected
boy who runs upon our pavements, do we present the community
with that which, in wisdom's estimation, is of greater price than
this gorgeous inhabitant of a palace. And when one thinks how
such a process may be multiplied among the crowded families
that are around us — when one thinks of the extent and the
density of that mine of moral worth, which retires and deepens
and accumulates behind each front of the street along which we
are passing — when one tries to compute the quantity of spirit
that is imbedded in the depth and the frequency of these human
habitations, and reflects of this native ore, that more than the
worth of a monarch may be stamped, by instruction, on each
separate portion of it — a field is thus opened for the patriotism
of those who want to give an augmented value to the produce
of our land, which throws into insignificance all the enterprises
of vulgar speculation. Commerce may flourish, or may fail —
and amid the ruin of her many fluctuations, may elevate a few
of the more fortunate of her sons to the affluence of princes. Thy
merchants may be princes, and thy traffickers be the honourable
of the earth. But if there be truth in our text, there may, on
the very basis of human society, and by a silent process of edu
cation, materials be formed, which far outweigh in cost and true
dignity, all the blazing pinnacles that glitter upon its summit —
and it is indeed a cheering thought to the heart of a philan
thropist, that near him lies a territory so ample on which he
may expatiate — where for all his pains, and all his sacrifices,

VOL. III. S

274 ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

he is sure of a repayment more substantial than was ever wafted
by richly laden flotilla to our shores — where the return comes to
him, not in that which superficially decks the man, but in a solid
increment of value fixed and perpetuated on the man himself —
where additions to the worth of the soul form the proceeds of his
productive operation — and where, when he reckons up the pro
fits of his enterprise, he finds them to consist of that which, on
the highest of all authorities, he is assured to be more than
meat, of that which is greatly more than raiment.

Even without looking beyond the confines of our present
world, the virtue of humble life will bear to be advantageously
contrasted with all the pride and glory of an elevated condition.
The man who, though among the poorest of them all, has a
wisdom and a weight of character, which makes him the oracle
of his neighbourhood — the man who, vested with no other
authority than the meek authority of worth, carries in his pre
sence a power to shame and to overawe the profligacy that is
around him — the venerable father, from whose lowly tenement
the voice of psalms is heard to ascend with the offering up of
every evening sacrifice — the Christian sage, who, exercised
among life's severest hardships, looks calmly onward to heaven,
and trains the footsteps of his children in the way that leads to
it — the eldest of a well-ordered family, bearing their duteous
and honourable part in the contest with its difficulties and its
trials — all these offer to our notice such elements of moral re
spectability, as do exist among the lowest orders of human society,
and elements, too, which admit of being multiplied far beyond
the reach of any present calculation. And while we hold
nothing to be more unscriptural than the spirit of a factious dis
content with the rulers of our land — while we feel nothing to be
more untasteful than the insolence of a vulgar disdain towards
men of rank, or men of opulence — yet should the king upon the
throne be taught to understand that there is a dignity of an
intrinsically higher order than the dignity of birth or of power
— a dignity which may be seen to sit with gracefulness on the
meanest of his subjects — and which draws from the heart of the
beholder a truer and profounder reverence.

So that, were it for nothing more than to bless and adorn our
present state, there cannot be an attempt of greater promise,
than that of extending education among the throng of our
peasantry — there cannot be a likelier way of filling the country
with beauteous and exalted spectacles — there cannot be a readier

ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 275

method of pouring a glory over the face of our land, than that
of spreading the wisdom of life, and the wisdom of principle,
throughout the people who live in it — a glory differing in kind,
but greatly higher in degree, than the glories of common pro
sperity. It is well that the progress of knowledge is now looked
to by politicians without alarm — that the ignorance of the poor
is no longer regarded as more essential to the devotion of their
patriotism, than it is to the devotion of their piety — that they have
at length found that the best way of disarming the lower orders
of all that is threatening and tumultuous, is not to enthral, but
to enlighten them — that the progress of truth among them,
instead of being viewed with dismay, is viewed with high anti
cipation — and an impression greatly more just, and greatly more
generous, is now beginning to prevail, that the strongest ram
part which can possibly be thrown around the cause of public
tranquillity, consists of a people raised by information, and graced
by all moral and all Christian accomplishments.

For our own part, we trust that the mighty interval of sepa
ration between the higher and lower orders of our community,
will at length be broken down, not by any inroad of popular
violence — not by the fierce and devouring sweep of any revolu
tionary tempest — not even by any new adjustment, either of the
limits of power, or the limits of property — not, in short, as the
result of any battle, fought either on the arena of war, or on the
arena of politics — but as the fruit of that gradual equalization in
mind and in manners, to which even now a sensible approach is
already making on the part of our artizans and our labourers.
They are drawing towards an equality, and on that field, too, in
which equality is greatly most honourable. And we fondly hope
that the time is coming, when, in frank and frequent intercourse,
we shall behold the ready exchange of confidence on the one side,
and affection on the other — when the rich and the poor shall
love each other more, just because they know each other more
— when each party shall recognise the other to be vastly worthier
of regard and of reverence than is now apprehended — when,
united by the sympathies of a common hope, and a common
nature, and on a perfect level in all that is essential and cha
racteristic of humanity, they shall at length learn to live in love
and peacefulness together, as the expectants of one common
heaven — as the members of one common and rejoicing family.

But, to attain a just estimate of the superiority of the poor
man who has wisdom, over the rich man who has it not, we

276 ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

must enter into the calculation of eternity — we must look to
wisdom in its true essence, as consisting of religion, as having
the fear of God for its beginning, and the rule of God for its
way, and the favour of God for its full and satisfying termina
tion — we must compute how speedily it is, that, on the wings of
time, the season of every paltry distinction between them must
at length pass away ; how soon death will strip the one of his
rags, and the other of his pageantry, and send them in utter
nakedness to the dust ; how soon judgment will summon them
from their graves, and place them in outward equality before the
great disposer of their future lot, and their future place, through
ages which never end ; how in that situation, the accidental dis
tinctions of life will be rendered void, and personal distinctions
will be all that shall avail them ; how, when examined by the
secrets of the inner man, and the deeds done in their body, the
treasure of heaven shall be adjudged only to him whose heart
was set upon it in this world ; find how tremendously the account
between them will be turned, when it shall be found of the one,
that he must perish for lack of knowledge, and of the other, that
he has the wisdom which is unto salvation.

And here it is of importance to remark, that to be wise as a
Christian is wise, it is not essential to have that higher scholar
ship which wealth alone can purchase — that such is the peculiar
adaptation of the gospel to the poor, that it may be felt in the
full force of its most powerful evidence by the simplest of its
hearers — that to be convinced of its truth, all which appears
necessary is, to have a perception of sin through the medium of
the conscience, and a perception of the suitableness of the offered
Saviour through the medium of a revelation, plain in its terms,
and obviously sincere and affectionate in its calls. Philosophy
does not melt the conscience. Philosophy does not make lumin
ous that which in itself is plain. Philosophy does not bring
home, with greater impression upon the heart, the symptoms of
honesty and good-will which abound in the New Testament.
Prayer may do it. Moral earnestness may do it. The Spirit,
given to those who ask Him, may shine with the light of His
demonstration on the docility of those little children, who are
seeking, with their whole hearts, the way of peace, and long to
have their feet established on the paths of righteousness. There
is a learning, the sole fruit of which is a laborious deviation from
the truth as it is in Jesus. And there is a learning which
reaches no farther than to the words in which that truth is an-

ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 277

nounced, and yet reaches far enough to have that truth brought
home with power upon the understanding — a learning, the sole
achievement of which is to read the Bible, and yet by which the
scholar is conducted to that hidden wisdom which is his light in
life, and his passport to immortality — a learning, which hath
simply led the inquirer's way to that place where the Holy
Ghost hath descended upon him in rich effusion, and which, as
he was reading, in his own tongue, the wonderful words of God,
hath given them such a weight and such a clearness in his eyes,
that they have become to him the words whereby he shall be
saved. And thus it is, that in many a cottage of our land, there
is a wisdom which is reviled, or unknown, in many of our halls
of literature — there is the candle of the Lord shining in the
hearts of those who fear Him — there is a secret revealed unto
babes, which is hidden from the wise and the prudent — there is
an eye which discerns, and a mind that is well exercised on the
mysteries of the sure and the well-ordered covenant — there is a
sense and a feeling of the preciousness of that cross, the doctrine
of which is foolishness to those who perish — there is a ready
apprehension of that truth, which is held at nought by many
rich, and many mighty, and many noble, who will not be ad
monished — but which makes these poor to be rich in faith, and
heirs of that kingdom which God hath prepared for those who
love Him.

We know not if any who is now present has ever felt the
charm of an act of intercourse with a Christian among the poor
— with one whose chief attainment is that he knows the Bible
to be true — and that his heart, touched and visited by a con
senting movement to its doctrine, feels it to be precious. We
shall be disappointed if the very exterior of such a man do not
bear the impress of that worth and dignity which have been
stamped upon his character — if, in the very aspect and economy
of his household, the traces of his superiority are not to be found
— if the promise, even of the life that now is, be not conspicu
ously realized on the decent sufficiency of his means, and the
order of his well-conditioned family — if the eye of tasteful bene
volence be not regaled by the symptoms of comfort and cheer
fulness which are to be seen in his lowly habitation. And we
shall be greatly disappointed, if after having survived the scoff
of companions, and run through the ordeal of nature's enmity,
he do not earn, as the fruits of the good confession that he wit
nesses among his neighbours, the tribute of a warm and willing

278 ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

cordiality from them all — if, while he lives, he do not stand the
first in estimation, and when he dies, the tears and acknowledg
ments of acquaintances, as well as of kinsfolk, do not follow him.
to his grave — if, even in the hearts of the most unholy around
him, an unconscious testimony is not borne to the worth of holi
ness, so as to make even this world's honour one of the ingre
dients in the portion of the righteous. But these are the mere
tokens and visible accompaniments of Christian excellence — the
passing efflorescence of a growth that is opening and maturing
for eternity. To behold this excellence in all its depth, and in
all its solidity, you must examine his mind, and there see the
vastly higher elements with which it is conversant, than those
among which the children of this world are grovelling — there
see, how, in the hidden walk of the inner man, he treads a more
elevated path than is trodden either by the daughters of gaiety,
or the sons of ambition — there see, how the whole greatness and
imagery of heaven are present to his thoughts, and what a reach
and nobleness of conception have gathered upon his soul, by his
daily approaches to heaven's sanctuary. He lives in a cottage
— and yet he is a king and priest unto God. He is fixed for life
to the ignoble drudgery of a workman, and yet he is on the full
march to a blissful immortality. He is a child in the mysteries
of science, but familiar with greater mysteries. That preaching
of the cross, which is foolishness to others, he feels to be the
power of God, and the wisdom of God. That faithfulness which
annexes to all the promises of the gospel — that righteousness
which is unto the believer — that fulness in Christ, out of which
the supplies of light and of strength are ever made to descend
on the prayers of all who put their trust in Him — that wisdom
of principle, and wisdom of application, by which, through his
spiritual insight, into his Bible, he is enabled botli to keep his
heart, and to guide the movements of his history — these are his
treasures — these are the elements of that moral wealth, by which
he is far exalted above the monarch who stalks his little hour
of magnificence on earth, and then descends a ghost of departed
greatness into the land of condemnation. He is rich, just be
cause the word of Christ dwells in him richly in all wisdom. He
is great, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon him.
So that the same conclusion comes back upon us with mightier
emphasis than before. If a poor child be capable of being thus
transformed, how it should move the heart of a city philan
thropist, when he thinks of the amazing extent of raw material

ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 279

for this moral and spiritual manufacture that is on every side of
him — when he thinks, that in going forth on some Christian
enterprise among a population, he is in truth walking among
the rudiments of a state that is to be everlasting — that out of
their most loathsome and unseemly abodes, a glory can be ex
tracted which will weather all the storms and all the vicissitudes
of this world's history — that, in the filth and raggedness of a
hovel, that is to be found, on which all the worth of heaven, as
well as all the endurance of heaven can be imprinted — that he
is, in a word, dealing in embryo with the elements of a great
and future empire, which is to rise, indestructible and eternal,
on the ruins of all that is earthly, and every member of which
shall be a king and a priest for evermore.

And before I pass on to the application of these remarks, let
me just state, that the great instrument for thus elevating the
poor, is that gospel of Jesus Christ, which may be preached unto
the poor. It is the doctrine of His cross finding an easier ad
mission into their hearts, than it does through those barriers of
human pride, and human resistance, which are often reared on
the basis of literature. Let the testimony of God be simply
taken in, that on His own Son He has laid the iniquities of us
all — and from this point does the humble scholar of Christianity
pass into light, and enlargement, and progressive holiness. On
the reception of this great truth, there hinges the emancipation
of his heart from a thraldom which represses all the spiritual
energies of those who live without hope, and, therefore, live
without God in the world. It is guilt — it is the sense of his
awakened and unexpiated guilt, which keeps man at so wide a
distance from the God whom he has offended. Could some
method be devised, by which God, jealous of His honour, and
man jealous of his safety, might be brought together on a firm
ground of reconciliation — it would translate the sinner under a
new moral influence, to the power of which, and the charm of
which he before was utterly impracticable. Jesus Christ died,
the just for the unjust, to bring us unto God. This is a truth,
which when all the world shall receive it, all the world will be
renovated. Many do not see how a principle, so mighty in ope
ration, should be enveloped in a proposition so simple of utter
ance. But let a man, by his faith in this utterance, come to
know that God is his friend, and that heaven is the home of his
fondest expectation ; and in contact with such new elements as
these, he will evince the reach, and the habit, and the desire of

280 ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

a new creature. It is this doctrine which is the alone instru
ment of God for the moral transformation of our species. When
every demonstration from the chair of philosophy shall fail, this
will achieve its miracles of light and virtue among the people ;
and however infidelity may now deride — or profaneness may
now lift her appalling voice upon our streets — or licentiousness
may now offer her sickening spectacles — or moral worthlessness
may have now deeply tainted the families of our outcast and
long-neglected population — however unequal may appear the
contest with the powers and the principles of darkness — yet let
not the teachers of righteousness abandon it in despair ; God
will bring forth judgment unto victory, and on the triumphs of
the word of His own testimony, will He usher in the glory of the
latter days.

There is one kind of institution that never has been set up in
a country, without deceiving and degrading its people ; and
another kind of institution that never has been set up in a
country, without raising both the comfort and the character of
its families. We leave it to the policy of our sister kingdom,
by the pomp and the pretension of her charities, to disguise the
wretchedness which she cannot do away. The glory of Scotland
lies in her schools. Out of the abundance of her moral and
literary wealth, that wealth which communication cannot dissi
pate — that wealth which its possessor may spread and multiply
among thousands, and yet be as affluent as ever — that wealth
which grows by competition, instead of being exhausted — this is
what, we trust, she will be ever ready to bestow on all her peo
ple. Silver and gold she may have none — but such as she has
she will give — she will send them to school. She cannot make
pensioners of them — but will, if they like, make scholars of
them. She will give them of that food by which she nurses and
sustains all her offspring — by which she renders wise the very
poorest of her children — by which, if there be truth in our text,
she puts into many a single cottager, a glory surpassing that of
the mightiest potentates in our world. To hold out any other
boon, is to hold out a promise which she and no country in the
universe can ever realize — it is to decoy, and then most wretch
edly to deceive — it is to put on a front of invitation, by which
numbers are allured to hunger, and nakedness, and contempt. It
is to spread a table, and to hang out such signals of hospitality, as
draw around it a multitude expecting to be fed, and who find
that they must famish over a scanty entertainment. A system

ADVANTAGES OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 281

replete with practical mischief, can put on the semblance of
charity, even as Satan, the father of all lying and deceitful pro
mises, can put on the semblance of an angel of light. But we
trust, that the country in which we live will ever be preserved
from the cruelty of its tender mercies — that she will keep by her
schools, and her Scriptures, and her moralizing process ; and
that, instead of vainly attempting so to force the exuberance
of nature, as to meet and satisfy the demands of a population
whom she has led astray, she will make it her constant aim so to
exalt her population, as to establish every interest that belongs to
them, on the foundation of their own worth and their own capa
bilities — that taunted, as she has been, by her contemptuous
neighbour, for the poverty of her soil, she will at least prove, by
deed and by example, that it is fitted to sustain an erect, and
honourable, and high-minded peasantry ; and leaving England
to enjoy the fatness of her own fields, and a complacency with
her own institutions, that we shall make a clean escape from her
error, and never again be entangled therein — that unseduced
by the false lights of a mistaken philanthropy, and mistaken
patriotism, we shall be enabled to hold on in the way of our an
cestors ; to ward off every near and threatening blight from the
character of our beloved people ; arid so to labour with the man
hood of the present, and the boyhood of the coming generation,
as to enrich our land with that wisdom which is more precious
than gold, and that righteousness which exalteth a kingdom.

282 ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANIZING

DISCOURSE XII.

ON THE DUTY AND THE MEANS OF CHRISTIANIZING OUR HOME POPULATION.

" And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel
to every creature. — MARK xvi. 15.

CHRISTIANITY proceeds upon the native indisposition of the
human heart to its truths and its lessons — and all its attempts
for the establishment of itself in the world are made upon this
principle. It never expects that men will, of their own accord,
originate that movement by which they are to come in contact
with the faith of the gospel — and, therefore, instead of waiting
till they shall move towards the gospel, it has been provided,
from the first, that the gospel shall move towards them. The
apostles did not set up their stationary college at Jerusalem, in
the hope of embassies from a distance to inquire after the recent
arid wondrous revelation that had broke upon the world. But
they had to go forth, and to preach among all nations, beginning
at Jerusalem. And, in like manner, it never was looked for,
that men, in the ardour of their curiosity, or desire after the way
of salvation, were to learn the language of the apostles, that they
might come and hear of it at their mouth. But the apostles
were miraculously gifted with the power of addressing all in
their own native language — and when thus furnished, they went
actively and aggressively about among them. It is nowhere
supposed that the demand for Christianity is spontaneously, and
in the first instance, to arise among those who are not Christians ;
but it is laid upon those who are Christians, to go abroad, and,
if possible, to awaken out of their spiritual lethargy, those who
are fast asleep in that worldliness which they love, and from
which, without some external application, there is no rational
prospect of ever arousing them. The dead mass will not quicken
into sensibility of itself — and, therefore, unless some cause of
fermentation be brought to it from without, will it remain in all
the sluggishness of its original nature. For there is an utter
diversity between the article of Christian instruction, and the

OUR HOME POPULATION. 283

articles of ordinary merchandise. For the latter there is a de
mand, to which men are natively and originally urged by hunger
or by thirst, or by the other physical sensations and appetites of
their constitution. For the former there is no natural appetite.
It is just as necessary to create a spiritual hunger, as it is to
afford a spiritual refreshment — and so from the very first do we
find, that for the spread of Christianity in the world, there had
to be not an itinerancy on the part of inquirers, but a busy,
active, and extended itinerancy on the part of its advocates and
its friends.

Now, those very principles which were so obviously acted on
at the beginning, are also the very principles that, in all ages of
the church, have characterized its evangelizing processes. The
Bible Society is now doing, by ordinary means, what was done
by the miracle of tongues in the days of the apostles — enabling
the people of all nations to read each in their own tongue, the
wonderful works of God. And the Missionary Societies are
sending forth, not inspired apostles gifted with tongues, but the
expounders of apostolical doctrine, learned in tongues, over the
face of the globe. They do not presume upon such a taste for
the gospel in heathen lands, as that the people there shall tra
verse seas and continents, or shall set themselves down to the
laborious acquisition of some Christian language, that they might
either have access to Scripture, or the ability of converse with
men that are skilled in the mysteries of the faith. But this taste
which they do not find, they expect to create — and for this pur
pose is there now an incessant application to Pagan countries,
of means and instruments from without — and many are the
lengthened and the hazardous journeys which have been under
taken — and voyages of splendid enterprise have recently been
crowned with splendid moral achievements ; insomuch, that even
the ferocity and licentiousness of the savage character have given
way under the power of the truth ; and lands, that within the
remembrance of many now alive, rankled with the worst abomi
nations of idolatry, have now exchanged them for the arts and
the decencies of civilization ; for village schools, and Christian
sabbaths, and venerable pastors, who first went forth as mission
aries, and, as the fruits of their apostolic labour, among these
outcast wanderers, ca,n now rejoice over holy grandsires, and
duteous children, and all that can gladden the philanthropic eye,
in the peace, and purity, and comfort of pious families.

Now, amid the splendour and the interest of these more con-

284 ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANIZING

spicuous operations, it is often not adverted to, how much work
of a missionary character is indispensable for perpetuating, and
still more for extending Christianity at home — how families,
within the distance of half-a-mile, may lapse, without observa
tion or sympathy on our part, into a state of practical heathen
ism — how, within less than an hour's walk, hundreds may be
found, who morally and spiritually live at as wide a separation
from the Gospel, and all its ordinances, as do the barbarians of
another continent — how, in many of our crowded recesses, the
families, which, out of sight, and out of Christian sympathy,
have accumulated there, might, at length, sink and settle clown
into a listless, and lethargic, and, to all appearance, impracti
cable population — leaving the Christian teacher as much to do
with them, as has the first missionary when he touches on a yet
unbroken shore. It is vain to expect, that by a proper and
primary impulse originating with themselves, those aliens from
Christianity will go forth on the inquiry after it. The messen
gers of Christianity must go forth upon them. Many must go
to and fro amongst the streets, and the lanes, and those deep in
tricacies, that teem with human life, to an extent far beyond the
eye or imagination of the unobservant passenger, if we are to
look for the increase either of a spiritual taste, or of scriptural
knowledge among the families. That mass which is so dense
of mind, and, therefore, so dense of immortality, must be pene
trated in the length and in the breadth of it ; and then many
will be found, who, however small their physical distance from
the sound of the Gospel, stand at as wide a moral distance
therefrom, as do the children of the desert — and to overpass this
barrier, to send out upon this outfield, such ministrations as
might reclaim its occupiers to the habits and the observations of
a Christian land, to urge and obtrude, as it were, upon the notice
of thousands, what, without such an advancement, not one of
them might have moved a footstep in quest of — these are so
many approximations, that, to all intents and purposes, have in
them the character — and might, with the blessing of God, have
also the effect — of a missionary enterprise.

When we are commanded to go into all the world, and preach
the Gospel to every creature, our imagination stretches forth
beyond the limits of Christendom ; and we advert not to the
millions who are within these limits, nay, within the sight of
Christian temples, and the sound of Sabbath bells, yet who never
heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They live to manhood, and

OUIl HOME POPULATION. 285

to old age, deplorably ignorant of the way of salvation ; and in
ignorance, too, not the less deplorable that it is wilful. It is
this which so fearfully aggravates their guilt, that, on the very
confines of light, they remain in darkness ; and thereby prove,
that it is a darkness which they love, and which they choose to
persist in. Thus it will be found more tolerable for the hea
then abroad, than for the heathen at home — and therefore it is,
that for the duty of our text, the wilds of Pagan idolatry, or of
Mahometan delusion, are not the only theatres — that for its
full performance, it is not enough that we equip the missionary
vessel, and go in quest of untaught humanity at a distance, and
hold converse with the men of other climes, and of other tongues,
and rear on some barbarous shore the Christianized village, as
an outpost in that spiritual warfare, by which we hope at length
to banish depravity and guilt, even from the farthest extremities
of our species. These are noble efforts, and altogether worthy
of being extended and multiplied a hundred-fold. But they are
not the only efforts of Christian philanthropy — nor can they be
sustained as a complete discharge from the obligation of preach
ing the Gospel to every creature under heaven. For the ac
complishment of this, there must not only be a going forth on
the vast and untrodden spaces that are without ; there must be
a filling up of the numerous and peopled vacancies that are
within — a busy, internal locomotion, that might circulate, arid
disperse, and branch off to the right and to the left, among the
many thousand families which are at hand : And thoroughly to
pervade these families ; to make good a lodgment in the midst
of them, for the nearer or the more frequent ministrations of
Christianity than before ; to have gained welcome for the G-ospel
testimony into their houses, and, in return, to have drawn any
of them forth to attendance on the place of Sabbath and of
solemn services — this, also, is to act upon our text, this is to do
the part, and to render one of the best achievements of a mis
sionary.

" How can they believe," says Paul, " without a preacher ?
and how can they preach except they be sent?" To make
sure this process, there must be a juxtaposition between him
who declares the word and them who are addressed by it — but
to make good this juxtaposition, the apostle never imagines
that alienated man is, of his own accord, to move towards the
preacher — and, therefore, that the preacher must be sent, or
must move towards him. And, perhaps, it has not been adverted

286 ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANIZING

to, that in the very first steps of this approximation, there is an
encouragement for going onward, and for plying the families of
a city population with still nearer and more besetting urgencies
than before. It is not known how much the very juxtaposition
of an edifice for worship tells upon the church-going habit of
the contiguous householders — how many there are who will not
move at the sound of a distant bell, that with almost mechanical
sureness will go forth, and mingle with the stream of passen
gers, who are crowding the way to a place that is at hand —
how children, lured perhaps at the first by curiosity, are led so
to reiterate their attendance, as to be landed in a most precious
habit for youth and for manhood — how this tendency spreads by
talk, and sympathy, and imitation, through each little vicinity ;
and thus, in groups, or in clusters, might adjoining families be
gained over to the ordinances of religion — how the leaven, when
once set a-going, might spread by the fermentation of converse,
and mutual sentiment, through the whole lump; till over? the
face of a whole city department, the Christian fabric which
stands conspicuously in the midst of it, and whither its people
are rung every Sabbath to the ministrations of the Gospel,
might come to be its place of general repair ; and attendance
there be at length proceeded on as one of the decencies of its
established observation. Some of the influences in this process
may appear slight or fanciful to the superficial eye — and yet
they are known, and familiarly known, to be of powerful opera
tion. You must surely be aware, that it makes all the practical
difference in the world, to the retail and custom even of an
ordinary shop, should it deviate, by a very small hairbreadth
from the minutest convenience of the public — should it retire
by ever so little from the busy pavement, or have to be ascended
by two or three steps, or require the slightest turn and change
of direction from that beaten path which passengers do invete-
rately walk in. And human nature on a week-day, is human
nature on the Sabbath. There is no saying on how slight or
trivial a circumstance it may be made to turn ; and odd as the
illustration may appear, we feel confident that we have not, at
present, either a profound or a pious hearer, who will undervalue
one single stepping-stone by which a hearer more might be
brought to the house of God — who will despise any of the means,
however humble, that bring a human creature within the reach
of that word which is able to sanctify and save him — who will
forget the wonted style of God's administrations, by which, on

OUR HOME POPULATION. 287

these minutest incidents of life, the greatest events of history are
oft suspended — or, who will deny that the same Being, who, by
the flight of a single bird, turned the pursuers of Mahomet
away from him, and so spared the instrument by which a gross
and grievous superstition hath found an ascendency over millions
of immortal spirits, that He can enlist in the cause of His own
Son, even the least and slightest familiarities of human practice ;
and, with links which in themselves are exceeding small, can
fasten and uphold the chain which runs through the earthly
pilgrimage of man, and reaches to his eternity.

But after all, though local conveniency may allure, in the
first instance, to the house of God, local conveniency will not
detain the attendance of multitudes, unless there be a worth
and a power in the services which are rendered there — unless
there be a moral earnestness in the heart of the preacher, which
may pour forth a sympathy with itself through the hearts of a
listening congregation — unless, acquitting himself as an upright
minister of the New Testament, he expound with faithfulness,
and some degree of energy, those truths which are unto sal
vation ; and so distribute among his fellow-sinners, the alone
•substantial and satisfying food of the soul — unless such a de
monstration be given of the awful realities in which we deal, as
to awaken in many bosoms the realizing sense of death, and of
the judgment-seat — and, above all, unless the demands of the
law, with its accompanying severities and terrors, be so urged
on the conviction of guilty man, as to make it fall with welcome
upon his ear, when told that unto him a Saviour has been born.
These are the alone elements of a rightful and well-earned
popularity. Eloquence may dazzle — and argument may compel
the homage of its intellectual admirers — and fashion may even,
when these are wanting, sustain through its little hour of smile
and of sunshine, a complacent attendance on the reigning idol
of the neighbourhood — but it is only if armed with the pan
oply of scriptural truth, that there will gather and adhere to
him a people who hunger for the bread of life, and who make a
business of their eternity. To fill the church well, we must fill
the pulpit well ; and see that the articles of the peace-speaking
blood, and the sanctifying Spirit, are the topics that be dearest
to the audience, and on which the Christian orator who addresses
them most loves to expatiate. These form the only enduring
staple of good and vigorous preaching ; and unless they have a
breadth, and a prominency, and a fond reiteration in the sermons

288 ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANIZING

that shall be delivered from the place where we now stand,*
they either will not, or ought not to be listened to.

Yet grieved and disappointed should we be, did he confine
himself to Sabbath ministrations — did he not go forth, and be
come the friend and the Christian adviser of all who dwell
within the limits of his vineyard — did he riot act the part of an
apostle among you, from house to house, and vary the fatigue
of his preparations for the pulpit, by a daily walk amongst the
ignorant, or the sick, or the sorrowful, or the dying. It is your
part to respect, as you would a sanctuary, that solitude to which,
for hours together, he should commit himself, in the work of
meditating the truths of salvation — and it is his part to return
your delicacy by his labours of love, by the greetings of his
cordial fellowship, by his visits of kindness. It is a wrong ima
gination on the side of a people, when they look on the Sabbath
for a vigorous exposition of duty or doctrine from him whom
they tease, and interrupt, and annoy, through the week — and it
is a wrong imagination on the side of a pastor, when, looking on
the church as the sole arena of his usefulness, he does not relax
the labour of a spirit that has been much exercised on the great
topics of the Christian ministry, by frequent and familiar inter
course among those whom, perhaps, he has touched or arrested
by his Sabbath demonstrations. You ought to intrude not upon
his arrangements and his studies ; but he ought, in these ar
rangements, to provide the opportunities of ample converse with
every spiritual patient, with every honest inquirer. You should
be aware of the distinction that he makes between that season
of the day which is set apart for retirement, and that season of
the day which lies open to the duty of holding courteous fellow
ship with all — and of hiding not himself from his own flesh.
It is the gross insensibility which obtains to the privileges both
of a sacred and literary order — it is the disturbance of a per
petual inroad on that prophet's chamber, which ought at all
times to be a safe retreat of contemplation — it is the incessant
struggle that must be made for a professional existence, with
irksome application, and idle ceremony, and even the urgencies
of friendship — these are sufficient to explain those pulpit imbe
cilities of which many are heard to complain, while themselves
they help to create them. And therefore if you want to foster
the energies of your future clergyman ; if you would co-operate

* This Sermon was preached at the opening of a city chapel, which has a local district
assigned to it, and whose rule of seat-letting is on the territorial principle.

OUR HOME POPULATION. 289

with him in those mental labours, by which he provides through
the week for the repast of your Sabbath festival ; if it is your
desire that an unction and a power shall be felt in all his pulpit
ministrations ; if here you would like to catch a glow of heaven's
sacredriess, and receive that fresh and forcible impulse upon your
spirits, which might send you forth again with a redoubled
ardour of holy affection and zeal on the business of life, and
make you look and long for the coming Sabbath, as another
delightful resting-place on your journey towards Zion — then
suffer him to breathe without molestation, in that pure and lofty
region where he might inhale a seraphic fervency, by which to
kindle among his hearers his own celestial fire, his own noble
enthusiasm. If it be this, and not the glee of companionship,
or the drudgeries of ordinary clerkship that you want from your
minister, then leave, I beseech you, his time in his own hand,
and hold his asylum to be inviolable.

But we trust that from this asylum his excursions will be fre
quent — and sure we are, that nought but an affectionate forth-
going is necessary on his part, that he may have a warm and a
willing reception upon yours. It is utterly a mistake that any
population, whatever be their present habits, will discourage the
approaches of a Christian minister to their families. It is a
particularly wrong imagination, that in cities there is a hard or
an insolent defiance among the labouring classes, which no assi
duities of service or of good-will on the part of their clergyman
can possibly overcome. Let him but try what their tempera
ment is in this matter, and he will find it in every way as cour
teous and inviting as among the most primitive of our Scottish
peasantry. Let him be but alert to every call of threatening
disease among his people, and the ready attendant upon every
deathbed — let him ply not his fatiguing, but his easy and most
practicable rounds of visitation in the midst of them — let him
be zealous for their best interests, and not in the spirit of a
fawning obsequiousness, but in that of a manly, intelligent, and
honest friendship, let him stand forth as the guardian of the
poor, the guide and the counsellor of their children ; it is posi
tively not in human nature to withstand the charm and the
power which lie in such unwearied ministrations — and if visibly
prompted by the affinity that there is in the man's heart for his
fellows of the species, there will, by a law of the human consti
tution, be an affinity in theirs towards him, which they cannot
stifle, though they would ; and they will have no wish to stifle it.

VOL. III. T

290 ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANIZING

It is to this principle, little as it has been recognised, and still
less as it has been proceeded on, it is to this that we confide
the gathering at length of a congregation within these walls,
and that, too, from the vicinities by which we are immediately
surrounded. That the chapel will be filled at the very outset,
from the district which has been assigned to it, we have no ex
pectation. But we do fondly hope, as the fruit of his unwearied
services, that its minister will draw the kind regards of the
people after him ; that an impression will be made by his
powerful and reiterated addresses in the bosom of their families,
which may not stop there ; that the man who prays at every
funeral, and sits by every dying bed, and seizes every opening
for Christian usefulness that is afforded to him by the visitations
of Providence on the houses of the surrounding neighbourhood,
and who, while a fit companion for the great in his vineyard, is
a ready, and ever accessible friend to the poorest of them all —
it is utterly impossible that such a man, after his work of varied
and active benevolence, will have nought to address on the Sab
bath but empty walls. After being the eye-witness of what he
does, there will spring up a most natural desire, and that cannot
be resisted, to hear what he says. It is not yet known how
much such attentions as these, kept up, and made to play in
busy and constant recurrence upon one local neighbourhood — it
is not yet known how much and how powerfully they tell in
drawing the hearts of the people towards him who faithfully,
and with honest friendship, discharges them. They will make
the pulpit which he fills a common centre of attraction to the
whole territory over which he expatiates — and we need not that
we may see exemplified in human society, the worth and im
portance of the pastoral relationship, we need not go alone
among the sequestered vales, or the far and upland retreats of
our country parishes. It is not a local phenomenon dependent
on geography. It is a general one, dependent on the nature of
man ; on those laws of the heart, which no change of place or
of circumstances can obliterate. To gain the moral ascendency
of which we speak, it is enough if the upright and laborious
clergyman have human feelings and human families on every
side of him. It signifies not where. Give him Christian kind
ness, and this will pioneer a way for him amongst all the varie
ties of place and of population. Beside the smoke, and the din,
and the dizzying wheel of crowded manufactories, will he find
as ready an introduction for himself and for his office, as if his

OUR HOME POPULATION. 291

only walk had been among peaceful hamlets, and with nought
but the romance and the rusticity of nature spread out before
him. It is utterly a wrong imagination, and in the face both of
experience and of prophecy, that in towns there is an impracti
cable barrier against the capabilities and the triumphs of the
Gospel — that in towns the cause of human amelioration must be
abandoned in despair — that in towns it is not by the architecture
of chapels, but by the architecture of prisons, and of barracks,
and of bridewells, we are alone to seek for the protection of
society — that elsewhere a moralizing charm may go forth among
the people, from village schools and Sabbath services, but that
there is a hardihood and a ferocity in towns which must be dealt
with in another way, and against which all the artillery of the
pulpit is feeble as infancy — that a foul and a feverish depravity
has settled there, which no spiritual application will ever ex
tinguish : For amid all the devisings for the peace and order of
our community, do we find it to be the shrewd and sturdy ap
prehension of many, that all which can be achieved in our
overgrown cities, is by the strength of the secular arm ; that a
stern and vigorous police will do more for public morals, than
a whole band of ecclesiastics ; that a periodical execution will
strike a more salutary terror into the hearts of the multitude,
than do the dreadest fulminations of the preacher's voice — and
this will explain the derision and the distrust wherewith that
argument is listened to, which goes to set forth the efficacy of
Christian doctrine, or to magnify the office of him who de
livers it.

We can offer no computation that will satisfy such antagonists
as these, of the importance of Christianity even to the civil and
the temporal well-being of our species ; and we shall, therefore,
plead the authority of our text, for extending its lessons to every
creature — for going forth with it to every haunt and every
habitation where immortal beings are to be found — for not
merely carrying it beyond the limits of Christendom, but for
filling up with instruction the many blank, and vacant, and still
unoccupied places, teeming with population, that even within
these limits have not been overtaken. What ! shall we be told,
that if there is a man under heaven, whom the Gospel has not
yet reached, it is but obedience to a last and solemn command
ment, when the missionary travels even to the farthest verge of
our horizon, that he may bear it to his door — and shall we be
told of the thousands who are beside us, that, though their souls

292 ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANIZING

are perishing for lack of knowledge, we might, without one care
or one effort abandon them ? Are we to give up as desperate, the
Christian reformation of our land, when we read of those mighty
achievements, and those heavenly outpourings, by which even
the veriest wilds of heathenism have been fertilized — or, with
such an instrument to work by as that of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, which in the hands of the Spirit of God hath wrought
its miracles on the men of all ages, shall we forbear, as a hope
less enterprise, the evangelizing of our own homes, the eternal
salvation of our own families ? " Be of good cheer," says the
Spirit to the apostle, " I have much people" forthee in this city;
and that, a city, too, the most profligate and abandoned that
ever flourished on the face of our world. And still the Lord's
hand is not shortened, that it cannot save. Neither is His ear
heavy, that it cannot hear. It is open as ever to the cry of your
intercessions — and on these we would devolve our cause. We
entreat the fellowship of your prayers. We know that all
human exertion, and eloquence, and wisdom, are vain without
them — that lacking that influence which is gotten down by
supplications from on high, sermons are but high-sounding cym
bals, and churches but naked architecture — that mere pains are
of no avail, and that it only lies within the compass of pains and
of prayers to do anything.

And we, indeed, have great reason for encouragement, when
we think of the subject of our message. When we are bidden
in the text to preach, it is to preach the Gospel — it is to pro
claim good news in the hearing of the people — it is to sound
forth what surely must be felt welcome by many — it is to sound
forth the glad tidings of great joy — it is to tell even the chief
of sinners, that God is now willing to treat him as a sinner no
longer ; that He invites him to all the honours of righteousness ;
and that in virtue of a blood which cleanseth from all sin, and
of an obedience to the rewards of which he is freely and fully
invited, there is not a guilty creature in the world who may not
draw nigh. Should he who preaches within these walls, turn
out the faithful and the energetic expounder of this word of
salvation — should the blessing of God be upon his ways, and
that demonstration which cometh from on high, accompany his
words — should he, filled with zeal in the high cause of your im
mortality ,. be instant among you in season, and out of season —
and, devoted to the work of his sacred ministry, he make it his
single aim to gather in a harvest of unperishable spirits, that by

OUR HOME POPULATION. 293

him as an instrument of grace, have been rescued from hell, and
raised to a blissful eternity — should this be indeed the high
walk of his unremitting toil, and his unwearied perseverance —
then, such is the power of the divine testimony, when urged out
of the fulness of a believer's heart, and made to fall with the
impression of his undoubted sincerity on those whom he ad
dresses ; that for ourselves we shall have no fear of a good and
a glorious issue to this undertaking — and, therefore, as Paul
often cast the success of his labours on the prayers of them for
whom he laboured, would I again entreat that your supplications
do ascend to the throne of grace for him who is to minister
amongst you in word and in doctrine — that he may, indeed, be
a pastor according to Grod's own heart, who shall feed a people
here with knowledge and with spiritual understanding — that
the travail of his soul may be blest to the conversion of many
sons and daughters unto righteousness — that he may prove
a comfort to all your hearts, and a great public benefit to all
your families.

294 ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.

DISCOUKSE XIII.

ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.
" Honour all men. Honour the king."— 1 PETER ii. 17.

To honour all men is alike the lesson of Philosophy and
Beligion. He who studies Humanity, not according to its ac
cidental distinctions in society, but in its great and general
characteristics — he who looks to its moral nature as a piece of
cnrious and interesting mechanism, all whose processes are as
accurately exemplified in the mind of the poorest individual, as
the laws or the constructions of anatomy are in his body — he
whose office it is to contemplate the fabric of its principles and
powers, and who can recognise even in humble life the goodliest
specimens of both — with him the distinctions of rank are apt
to be lost and forgotten, in the homage which he renders to man,
simply as the possessor of a constitution that has so often exer
cised and regaled his faculties as an object of liberal curiosity.
The homeliest peasant bears within the confines of his inner
man, that very tablet on the lines and characters of which the
highest philosopher may for years perhaps have been most in
tensely gazing. All the secrets of our wondrous economy are
deposited there ; and, in the heart even of the most unlettered
man, the memory and the understanding and the imagination
and the conscience and every other function and property of the
yet inaccessible soul, are all in busy operation. To the owner
of such an unexplored microcosm, we attach somewhat of the
same reverence which we entertain for some profound arid hidden
mystery — and he who has laboured most anxiously to seize upon
the mysteries of our nature, and therefore feels most profoundly
how deep and how inscrutable they are, he perhaps is the
most predisposed by his pursuits and his habits to " honour
all men."

Somewhat of the same sentiment is impressed upon us in the
midst of a crowd — or as we pass along that street which is alive
from morning to night with its endless flow of passengers. We

ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN. 295

are aware of no contemplation that is more fitted to annihilate
in one's own mind the importance of self ; or rather to multiply
this feeling, and make it be transferred by us to each individual
of that restless and eager population by whom we are surrounded.
To think of each having within the precincts of his own bosom
a chamber of thoughts and purposes and fond imaginations as
warm and teeming as our own, and of the busy history that is
going on there ; that every one of the immense multitude is
the centre of his own distinct amphitheatre, which, however un
known to us, is the universe to him ; that each meditative coun
tenance of the vast and interminable number bespeaks a play
of hopes and wishes and interests within, in every way as active,
and felt to be of as great magnitude and urgency, as we experi
ence in ourselves — further, to think that should my own heart
cease its palpitations, and were the light of my own wakeful
spirit to be extinguished for ever, that still there would be a
world as full of life and intelligence as before ; to think of my
self as an unmissed or unnoticed thing among the myriads who
are around me, or rather to think that with each of these myriads
there are desires as vivid, and sensibilities as deep, and cares as
engrossing, and social or family affections as tender, as those
which I carry about with me in that little world to which no
one eye hath access but the eye of my own consciousness — there
is a humility that ought to be impressed by such a contempla
tion ; or, if it do not utterly abase the reckoning that we have
of ourselves, it ought at least to exalt our reckoning of all other
men, and teach us to hold in honour those who, in the workings
of the same nature, and fellowship of the very same interests, so
thoroughly partake with us.

It is true, that, in what may be called the outward magnitude
of these interests, there is a wide distance between a sovereign
and his subject — between the cares of an empire, and the cares
of a small household economy. That is, the empire, externally
speaking, is greater than the household — while inwardly the
cares, the cogitations, the sensibilities of the heart, whether
oppressive or joyful, may be altogether the same. They be a
different set of objects wherewith the monarch is conversant, and
that keep in play the system of his thoughts and emotions, just
as it is upon a different sort of food that his blood circulates or
that his physical system is upholden. But as the peasant is like
to him in respect of anatomy, so, with all the diversity of cir
cumstances, he is substantially like. to him, in the frame and

296 ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.

mechanism of his spirit. The outward causes by which each is
excited are vastly different ; but the inward excitement of both
is the same — and could we explore the little world that is in
each of the two bosoms, we should recognise in each the same
busy rotation of hopes and fears and wishes and anxieties. If
it be indeed a just calculation that there is a superiority, a sur
passing worth in the moral which far outweighs the material,
then, let the cottage be as widely dissimilar from the palace as
it may, there is a similarity between their inhabitants, not in
that which is minute, but in that which is momentous — and our
weightiest arguments for honouring the king bear with efficacy
upon the lesson to honour all men.

And moreover, let us but rate the importance of one thinking
and living spirit, when compared with all the mute and uncon
scious materialism which is in our universe. Without such a
spirit, the whole of visible existence were but an idle waste — a
nothingness — for what is beauty were there no eye to look upon
it, and what is music were there no ear to listen, and what is
matter in all its rich and wondrous varieties without a spectator
mind to be regaled by the contemplation of them ? One might
conceive the very panorama that now surrounds us — the same
earth and sea and skies that we now look upon — the same graces
on the face of terrestrial nature, the same rolling wonders in the
firmament — yet without one spark of thought or animation
throughout the unpeopled amplitude. This in effect were nonen
tity. To put out all the consciousness that is in nature were
tantamount to the annihilation of nature ; and the lighting up
again of but one mind in the midst of this desolation, would of
itself restore significancy to the scene, and be more than equi
valent to the first creation of it. In other words, one living
mind is of more worth than a dead universe — or there is that in
every single peasant to which I owe sublimer homage than, if
untenanted of mind, I should yield to all the wealth of this
lower world, to all those worlds that roll in spaciousness and in
splendour through the vastnesses of astronomy.

Our Saviour Himself hath instituted the comparison between a
world and a soul — and whether both were alike perishable or alike
enduring, His estimate of the soul's superiority would hold. He
founds His computation on our brief tenure of all that is earthly,
and on the magnitude of those abiding interests which wait the
immortal spirit in other scenes of existence. All men are immortal.
There is a grandeur of destination here that far outweighs all the

ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN. 297

pride and pretension of this world's grandeur. Those lordly hon
ours which some men fetch from the antiquity of their race are but
poor indeed, when compared with that more signal honour which
all men have in the eternity of their duration. In respect of
immortality, the great and the small ones of the earth stand on
an equal eminence — and in respect of the death which comes
before it, both have to sink to the same humiliating level. The
prince shares with the peasant in the horror and loathsomeness
of death — the peasant shares with the prince in the high dis
tinction of immortality. It is because, in the poorest man's
bosom, there resides an undying principle — it is because of that
endless futurity which is before him, and in the progress of
which all the splendours and obscurations of our present state
will be speedily forgotten — it is because, though of yesterday,
the bliss and the brightness of coming centuries may be upon his
path ; and, whatever the complexion of his future history shall
be, yet the sublime character of eternity shall rest upon it — it is
because of these that humanity, however it be clothed and con
ditioned in this evanescent world, should be the object of an
awful reverence ; and if, by reason of those perishable glories
which sit on a monarch's brow for but one generation, it be
imperative to honour the king — then, by reason of those glories
which the meanest may attain to, and which are to last for ever,
it is still more imperative to honour all men.

It is in virtue of the natural equality between man and man,
of the like noble prospects and the like high capacities among
all the members of the species — that we have never hesitated on
the question of popular or plebeian education ; and when it is
asked, how far should the illumination of the lower orders in
society be permitted to go ? — we do not scruple to reply, that it
should be to the very uttermost of what their taste and their
time and their convenience will permit. There have been a
dread and a jealousy upon this topic wherewith we cannot at all
sympathize — somewhat of the same alarm for the progress of
scholarship among the working-classes, that is felt for the pro
gress of sedition — just as if the admission of light amongst them
were to throw the whole mass into a state of busy and mis
chievous fermentation — and some great coming disorder were
surely to result from the growing intelligence of those who form
the vast majority of our commonwealth. And, in addition to
what injury it is apprehended the social edifice at large might
sustain from, the elevation of the popular mind, it is further

298 ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.

thought that individually it is fraught with uttermost discom
fort to the people themselves ; that it will induce a restlessness,
a discontent, a wayward ambition, wholly unsuited to their taste
as labourers ; that henceforward they will spurn at the ignoble
drudgeries of their lot ; and that the fruit of making them
scholars will be wholly to unhinge and unsettle them as work
men. And when once this impatience becomes general, a cer
tain fierce and feverish aspiring, it is feared, will run throughout
that class in society who even now by the superiority of their
muscular force are enough formidable — and of whom the terror
is, that when once a mental force is superadded to the muscular,
they will overleap all the barriers of public safety, and be the
fell instruments of a wild and wasteful anarchy over the face of
the land.

This is not altogether the place for exposing what we deem
to be the utter groundlessness of such imaginations ; and there
fore, without touching at all on the political apprehension lest
education should lodge a power that is dangerous in the hands
of the labouring-classes — we shall just say of the personal, or of
that which relates to the habits and character of the individual
labourer, that we believe it to be scarcely ever if at any time
realized. We positively find them to be among the best symptoms
of a trusty and well- conditioned mechanic, if, upon entering his
house, we find the humble library upon his shelves — or if in
taking account of his hours, we find the time which many give
to evening dissipation given by him to the attendance or the
preparations of a mechanic school. There is no such discrepancy
between the powers and the principles of our complex nature, no
such awkward sorting or balancing of parts in the human con
stitution, as that there must be a stifling of some in order to make
room for the right and prosperous operation of the others — as,
for example, that all liberal curiosity, all appetite for the in
formations of science should be kept in check, lest industry be
relaxed, or the cares of a family-provision be altogether forgotten.
The ingredients of our compound being are really in far better
adjustment than that all should be so very apt to go into dis
order, upon any one of them being fostered into activity by the
excitement of its own peculiar gratification — and it will be found
that a taste for literature, and patient assiduity in labour, and a
reflective prudence in every matter of family economics, and a
habit of sound and good workmanship on the one hand, with a
well-exercised intellect even in the subjects of general specula-

ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN. 299

tion upon the other — that all these may be at work, arid in full
est harmony together with one and the same individual. Instead
of spoiling him as an artizan, they would only transform him
into an artizan of a higher caste ; and as there is a general
movement all over the land for a higher education to our people,
let us do nothing to curb the energies of their aspiring intellect,
out rather rejoice in the bright anticipation that must at length
be realized, of a well-taught and a highly lettered peasantry.
On a progress like this we would lay no limitation. Let it go
freely and indefinitely onwards — nor be afraid, as many are, lest
there should be too much of schooling or even too much of science
for the common people. That were a noble achievement in
political economy, did it point out the way by which, through
better wages and less work, the children of handicraft and of
hard labour might be somewhat lightened of their toils. And
that were a still nobler achievement in philanthropy, could their
then wider and more frequent intervals of repose be reclaimed
from loose and loathsome dissipation — could even an infant but
growing taste for philosophy be made to supplant all the coarser
depravities of human vice — and they, admitted to more of com
panionship than they now have with men of a higher walk
in society, give frequent demonstration, that, even amid the
drudgery of their humble condition, there was among them much
of the unquenched fire of genius, and a still vigorous play of
those perceptions and those powers by which our common nature
is ennobled.

Having said thus much for that education which gives the
knowledge of science to the common people — we feel ourselves
placed on still higher vantage ground, when we plead for that
education to them which gives the knowledge of religion. If
we hold the one to be desirable, we hold the other to be indis
pensable. In our estimation there is a certain narrowness of
soul among those who are jealous even of their most daring
ascents into the region of a higher scholarship ; but to lay an
interdict upon all scholarship, is in truth nothing better than the
midnight darkness of Popery. Arid yet, in certain quarters of
our land, there still lurks, in deep and settled inveteracy, that
intolerance which would withhold the very alphabet from our
population ; and though in one respect it is the key to the re
vealed mysteries of heaven, the instrument for unlocking that
gospel which was designed so specially for the ignorant and the
poor ; yet still there be some who, aloft from all sympathy with

300 ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.

the lower orders, can admit of no higher demand for them than
the mere wants of their animal existence. The eternity of the
poor does not enter into their care or computation at all. They
are viewed in scarcely any other light than as the instruments
of labour, as so many pieces of living mechanism that have their
useful application along with those other springs and principles
of action which keep the busy apparatus of our great manufac
tories in play ; their limbs as the levers of a certain kind of
machinery, and the spirit that is within them but as that moving
force by which the human enginery is set agoing. The immor
tality of this spirit is as little regarded, as if it were indeed but
a vapour that passeth away. It is valued only because of the
materialism which it animates, or of the motion which by means
of a curious and complicated framework, it can impress on any
tangible thing that is transformed thereby into some article of
merchandise. It is thus that humanity is apt to be addressed
or treated with, singly for the physical strength which it might
be made to yield in the service of busy artizanship ; and, with
out one ungenerous reflection on the great capitalists of our land,
it is thus that, sometimes at least, there is a certain grossness of
mercantile spirit, in virtue of which, our nature, in despite of all
its noble capacities, and the exceeding grandeur of its ultimate
destination, is very apt to be grossly brutalized.

It is therefore the more refreshing, when, in some densely
peopled territory that is all in a fervour with the smoke and the
din and the unremitting turmoil of its many fabrications, there
is seen an interest to arise in the religion of the assembled host,
and on the side of their immortal well-being — when, for so wide
and plenteous a harvest, there at length appears a band of reso
lute and devoted labourers — when, in the midst of a field so rich
in the materials for a great spiritual manufacture that has its
gains and its proceeds in eternity, men are to be found of com
pass enough and Christianity enough for this highest enterprise
of charity — when a company is formed with a design and on a
speculation so magnificent, as far to surpass the sublimest ad
ventures of commerce ; and, instead of that transformation on
the rude produce of our country, which is effected by the labour
of human hands, it is proposed to go forth on the people of the
country as the subjects of a nobler transformation ; and to im
press upon human souls, now in the darkness and earthliness of
nature, a glory that is imperishable.

It is a reproach to the spirit of merchandise — when in its ex-

ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN. 301

elusive demand for the physical strength and service of human
beings, it gives but little regard to their eternity — yet among
the sons of merchandise, we do meet with many of those zealous
and enlightened philanthropists, who, by their efforts in the
cause both of common and of Christian scholarship, have done
much to redeem the imputation. There is indeed the grossest
injustice in every imputation that leads to the fastening of an
odium or an obloquy, upon a whole order — and we might here
take the opportunity of saying in reference to another order, and
when we hear so much of an alleged conspiracy on the part of
monarchs against the illumination of our species, it is far indeed
from holding universally. There is a growing liberality upon
the subject among all the classes of society — and as surely as
workmasters are now learning that education furnishes them
with their best and most valuable servants — so surely will Kings
also learn, that the firmest basis upon which their authority can
be upholden, is a virtuous and a well-schooled peasantry.

The ancient prejudice upon this question is now on all hands
rapidly subsiding. The cause of popular ignorance is no longer
incorporated, as it wont to be, with the cause of loyalty and
established order. Even they who sit in the highest places,
arid were at all times the most sensitively fearful of any new ele
ment, that, when brought into play, might derange and unsettle
the existing framework of society — even they can now look
without alarm on that heaving of the popular mind towards a
higher scholarship, which now is fermenting and spreading over
the whole face of the British commonwealth. We are aware of
nothing more truly important to the cause of education, than
some recent practical testimonies of our landed aristocracy to
the worth of Scotland's parochial teachers, and their offer of a
helping hand to secure and to speed the ascent of our common
people, though already perhaps the most lettered in Europe or
in the world, even above the level of their present acquirements.
There could not more authentic demonstration have been given,
and from a quarter more thoroughly unsuspicious, to the safety
of a learning for the vulgar — and there is nought more delight
ful than thus to behold the upper classes of society giving wel
come and encouragement to the lower for a nearer assimilation
with themselves in that knowledge which is more honourable
than wealth, in those mental accomplishments which shed its
truest grace and dignity upon our nature.

302 ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.

There are two opposite directions in which we have to witness
what may be called an ultra or extreme politics. One of those
extremes is now getting fast obsolete at least in Scotland — for in
our sister country there is still an inveteracy about it, which
may not give way for perhaps one or two generations. To
picture it forth most effectually, we might seize in imagination
upon some one individual by whom it is realized — who, frank
and generous and kind-hearted in all the relations of private
society, yet on every question of public or parliamentary warfare
shows all the fiercest antipathies of high and antiquated cavalier-
ship— who, merciful and munificent in all his dealings with his
own people, yet eyes a boding mischief in every new and
advancing movement by the people of the land — who deems it
perhaps one of the glories of Old England to have a jovial and
well-fed peasantry, yet would feel the education of them to be a
raising of them out of their places, and so a disturbance on the
sober and settled orthodoxy of other days — who fears a lurking
sectarianism in this active and widely-diffused scholarship — that
might afterwards break forth into outrage on England's vene
rated throne, and her noble hierarchy ; and therefore would
vastly rather than this age of philanthropic restlessness, have
the age brought back again, when pastime and holiday and
withal a veneration for Church had full ascendant over the
hearts and habits of a then unlettered population. Still in
many of England's princely halls, in many a baronial residence,
there exists a feeling that her golden time has passed away —
and that this new device ot a popular education is among the
deadliest of the destroyers. High in loyalty, and devoted by all
the influences of sentiment and ancestry and sworn partisanship
to the prerogatives of monarchy ; they honour the king — but,
overlooking the intellect and the capacity and the immortal
nature that reside even in the meanest of his subjects, and so
regardless as they are of the still higher prerogatives of mind ;
they do not and they know not how to honour all men.

But in counterpart to this, there is another extreme that to
our taste is greatly more offensive than the former — when the
cause of education is vilified by mixing up with it in the mean
time that accursed thing which education at length will utterly
exterminate — when a mechanic school is made the vehicle of an
outrageous disaffection to all authority, and a mechanic publi
cation breathes the fierceness of radicalism throughout all its

ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN. 303

pages — when one cannot in any way devise either for the reli
gion or the science of our lower orders, but this unclean spirit
must insinuate and turn it all to loathsomeness ; and every
honest effort to obtain a more enlightened peasantry is either
paralysed or poisoned, by the obtruded alliance of men, who bear
no other regard to the people than as the instruments of some
great public or political overthrow. Still it vouches nobly for
the good of a people's scholarship, that this abuse is chiefly
exemplified in that land where they are just emerging from
ignorance, and that in our own more lettered country it is com
paratively unknown — that it is there and not here where this
cause has been seized upon by demagogues, who, while they
would flatter the multitude into the belief that they honour all
men, give full manifestation by all their writings and their ways
that they do not honour the king.

It is in such conflicts of human passion and human party,
that Christianity comes forth in the meekness of wisdom, and
points out to us the more excellent way. It unites loyalty to
the King with love, nay reverence, for the very humblest of
his subject population — and can both do homage to the dignity
of office that sits upon the one, and to those exalted capaci
ties both of worth and of intellect which lie in wide and
wealthy diffusion through the other. There is nought of the
pusillanimous in its devotion to the Crown, and nought of
the factious and the turbulent in the descents which it makes
among the common people. We have felt that glow which the
presence of a monarch can awaken, when, instead of the crouch
ing servility of bondsmen, we are conscious of nothing but the
generous and high-minded enthusiasm of gallant chivalry. And
equal to this is the pure and philanthropic triumph which the
spectacle of a beggar's school is fitted to awaken, when instead
of a fiery sedition lighted up in the heart and rankling its mis
chievous fermentations there, the mind indulges in the soothing
perspective of that brighter day, when the whole community of
our empire shall be moulded into a harmonious and well-ordered
family. To call forth the energies of the popular mind by the
power of a high education being made to bear upon it, will most
surely add to the stability of the throne, while it must serve to
lift and to embellish the whole platform of society. It will
speed the progress of the species, but not along a track of re
volutionary violence. The moral perfectibility of the infidel

304 ON THE HONOUR DUE TO ALL MEN.

may call for the demolition both of altars and of thrones — but
the operations of the Christian philanthropist leave the fabric of
our civil polity untouched ; and, in that Millennium after which
he aspires, he sees Kings to be the nursing-fathers arid Queens
the nursing-mothers of our Zion. He has no fellowship either
with those who would revile the monarch, or who would refuse
to enlighten the people — and, though fired with the hopes of
some great and coming enlargement, he founds them on the pro
phecies of a book, whose precepts within the utterance of one
breath and placed together in the same text, are to honour the
King and to honour all men.

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 305

DISCOUKSE XIV.

ON THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

" Not purloining, but showing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God
our Saviour in all things." — TITUS ii. 10.

IT is the duty of the Christian minister to bring forward riot
one part of the divine will, but all the parts of it — and whatever
he sees urged and insisted upon in the Bible, he lies under the
solemn obligation of urging and insisting upon it also. Now it
is remarkable, that, when urging some of the commandments, he
is looked upon as more religiously employed than when urging
some other of the commandments. There are certain subjects
which do not carry to the eye of many, the same aspect of godli
ness with others. A sermon on sabbath-breaking, for example,
would be regarded as a more characteristic exercise, and as more
allied with the solemn and appropriate functions of the pulpit,
than a sermon upon theft ; and, generally speaking, while the
duties of the first table are listened to by the more serious pro
fessors of Christianity with a pious and respectful feeling of their
high importance — it may be observed that the duties of the
second table, when urged in all their minuteness, and brought
forward in all their varieties, arid illustrated by references to
the homely and familiar experience of human life, are looked
upon as having a certain degree of earthliriess about them — to
be as much inferior in point of religiousness to the duties of the
first table, as the employments of a common week-day arc
inferior to the employments of the sabbath — in a word, while
the one bears to many the aspect of sacredness, the other bears
the aspect of secularity — and when a minister gives his strength
and his earnestness for a whole sermon to the latter, there is a
feeling among his hearers that he has descended from that high
ground on which a godly or an orthodox minister loves to
expatiate.

We forbear at present to enter into the explanation of this
very notable peculiarity, though it does admit, we think, of a

VOL. in. U

306 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

most interesting explanation. The thing complained of, forms
a serious obstacle in the way of our attempts to enforce the
whole will of God, and to explain the whole of His counsel. If
there be any part of that will of which the exposition is resisted
as a very odd and uncommon and perhaps ridiculous subject
from the pulpit, how shall we be able to command a reverential
hearing for it? In what way shall we establish the authority of
God over all the concerns of a man's history ? Should not the
solemnity of religious obligation be made to overspread the
whole field and compass of human affairs ? — and if it be not so,
is not this deposing God from the supremacy which belongs to
Him ? Is it not just saying that there are places and occasions
in which we will not have Him to reign over us ? Is it not dis
owning His right of having all things done to His glory ? And
those hearers who love to be told of what they owe to God on
the sabbath and in the holy days of sacrament and prayer — but
who love not to be told of what they owe Him in their shops
and in their market-places and in their every-day employments
— they are just narrowing the limits of His jurisdiction, and
with all their seeming reverence for godliness as the only high
and appropriate theme for the pulpit, they are, in fact, wresting
from God His sovereignty over the great bulk of human exist
ence. With the quit-rent of a few occasional acknowledgments,
they are for securing the mighty remainder of time to themselves,
and are for putting off with fragments that Being who demands
of all His creatures the homage of an entire service — the in
cense of a perpetual offering.

We should like all hearers to feel the religiousness of that
topic which this text leads us to insist upon. We should like
them to annex as serious a feeling of solemnity and obligation
to the eighth of God's commandments, as to the fourth of His
commandments. Both were announced in thunder from Mount
Sinai. Both were heard to issue in the same voice of authority
from the throne of the Lawgiver. The violations of both are
written in the book of God's remembrance ; arid they are ranked
among the bad deeds done in the body, which will bring down
from the judgment-seat the same awful doom upon the children
of iniquity. The place which the commandment possesses in
the decalogue is surely of no great consequence in the matter.
Enough that it be a commandment. Enough for one and for
all of us that thus saith the Lord. He orders one thing, and
He orders another. If the one thing must be observed with

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 307

reverence, because He orders it — there is precisely the same
reason for the other thing being also observed with reverence.
And if " Sanctify the Sabbath-day and keep it holy " be a godly
and religious subject, then do we contend that " Thou shalt not
steal " is a godly and a religious subject also.

In this case the minister has no choice. If the consciences of
any of his hearers are blind upon this subject, this is the very
reason why he should labour to open and to enlighten them.
He stands charged with the office of expounding and urging and
solemnly insisting upon all the requisitions of the Bible. If he
do not warn the sinner from his way, the sinner will die in his
iniquity, but his blood will be required of him. This is per
fectly decisive as to his conduct. It is with him a matter of
self-interest, as well as of duty, to warn his hearers against all
sin — and, knowing as he does that there is an awful day of
reckoning before them, that he must appear in the midst of them
at the bar of God, that he will be called upon to give an account
of them and be examined upon this, whether he has watched
over the souls of his people, and faithfully attempted to guard
them against all error, and to warn them against all unrigh
teousness — wo be to him if he is deterred by any senseless or
ignorant levity whatever, from coming forward with a faithful
and a firm exposition of the truth, or from sounding in their
ears this awful testimony of God's abhorrence of the sin of steal
ing, that thieves shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

In the further prosecution of this discourse, we shall first en
deavour to explain what the precise sin is which the text warns
us against. We shall secondly insist on its exceeding sinfulness,
in spite of all the pleas which are offered to palliate or to excuse
it. And thirdly, we shall press the duty which is opposed to the
sin of the text, that is, good fidelity, by the motive which the
text itself insists upon, that we may adorn the doctrine of God
our Saviour in all things.

The sin of the text receives a particular name, and it must
therefore receive a particular explanation. It is not called steal
ing, though it be certainly a species of it. Stealing is neither
more nor less than taking to one's-self what belongs to another,
and what he does not give. We should apply this term to the
act of a man who entered into another house than that in which
he tarried, and bore away of the movables he found in it — or
to the act of a man who came to another farm than that on
which he laboured, and carried off such produce as he could lift

308 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

away with him — or to the act of a man who made out his access
into a shop or a workhouse belonging to another master, and
abstracted such money or such goods as he could lay his hand
upon. These are so many acts of theft — and to give a clear
idea of what that is which turns an act of theft into an act of
purloining, we have only to conceive, that, instead of another
entering the house, a servant within it were to help himself to
such things as he had access to, without any understood allow
ance from the master or the mistress who employed him — or
that, instead of another coming to a farm, a labourer belonging
to it were to make a daily and a weekly habit of secreting a
part of its produce, for the purpose of feeding his own little
stock, or helping out the maintenance of his young family — or
that, instead of another finding his way into your shop or your
workhouse, the man you employed to keep the one or to work
in the other, were to pocket for his own use what he thinks he
might bear away without too great a hazard of detection. All
these are so many undoubted examples of theft — but such a
theft as would more readily be characterized by the term " pur
loining." To steal is to take that which is not our own. To
purloin is to take that which is not ours also ; but then the
thing so taken must be that which we have in trust, or that to
which our situation as an agent or a servant or an overseer
gives us free and frequent access. When purloining is done
upon a large scale, it sometimes changes its name, though not its
nature. It is then called an embezzlement. To embezzle is
quite equivalent to purloin in the nature of the act, though
greater in the extent of it. Thus we have heard of the em
bezzlement of public stores, of the embezzlement of the royal
treasury. It is an act of theft performed by a confidential agent
of the crown — and we have succeeded in the object of all these
explanations, if we have led our hearers to perceive the reason
why Paul addresses the advice of the text to people in a par
ticular situation. They are in the situation of servants — and,
taking in the 9th verse, the whole advice runs thus, " Exhort
servants to be obedient unto their own masters, arid to please
them well in all things, not answering again ; not purloining,
but showing all good fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine
of God our Saviour in all things."

We now proceed in the second place to insist on the exceed
ing sinfulness of this sin, in spite of all the pleas which are
offered to palliate or to excuse it.

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 309

The first palliation is a kind of tacit one, by which the under
standing is imposed upon, and the conscience quieted, merely
through the change of name which this crime has undergone.
Because it is not commonly called stealing, it is not conceived
to have the disgrace or the odiousness of stealing. There is a
wonderful power of imposition in words ; and how many a pur-
loiner may quiet all that is troublesome within him by the
reflection that what he does is not stealing ; it is only taking.
Thus may he try to escape the imputation of stealing, by merely
giving a different name to his iniquity — but, if the thing thus
taken be not his to take, it is to all intents and purposes, steal
ing — he merits the full disgrace of being called a thief; and,
what is still more awful than all the disgrace with which this
world can cover him, he is guilty of a sin which, if persisted in,
will most infallibly exclude him from the inheritance of the
kingdom of God. To undeceive him, he should be made dis
tinctly to know that there is no difference whatever in the sins ;
that an angry and offended God looks with equal displeasure
upon both, and will assign to each the same awful punishment
in the great day of reckoning. This low work of purloining is
just stealing under another name. It is taking what belongs to
another, and what that other has not given. Every understand
ing will acknowledge, that, however it may be glossed over by
another and a milder designation, it is an act of theft ; and what
every understanding will acknowledge, we want every conscience
to feel. But we go further. We take up a principle contained
in our Shorter Catechism, where it is said, in answer to the
question, "Are all sins equally heinous in the sight of God?"
That " some sins, by reason of several aggravations, are more
heinous in the sight of God than others." Now purloining con
tains in it an aggravation which does not belong to a bare and
simple example of stealing. The stranger who does not know
me, and whom I never trusted, may come to my premises and
steal of my property. But the servant who purloins does know
me, lives under rny roof, is maintained by my wages, and, above
all, has had a confidence placed in him which he has chosen to
abuse and to violate. I left a door open, or I made over a charge,
or I invested him with a particular commission, and why ? be
cause I had faith in his integrity and discretion. The stranger
thief is guilty of one vice — an act of dishonesty. The household
thief is dishonest too ; but he is more than this. He has be
trayed the trust I put in him. He has repaid my good opinion of

310 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

him by an act of ingratitude and an act of unfaithfulness. I was
led away by his fair appearances ; and he has turned out a hypo
crite. He has added, to the guilt of stealing, the guilt of cunning
and falsehood and habitual concealment. These are aggravations
which make the purloining of the servant far more provoking to
him who suffers by it, than the depredations of the nightly
vagabond. But they are not only more provoking to man — they
are more provoking to a just and a holy God. The aggrava
tions which we have just now spoken of will tell on the awful
sentence of the great day. The discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart sees and judges of every one of them ; and
when the time cometh that the secrets of all hearts shall be laid
open, the low pilferments of the farm, of the family, and of the
workshop, will appear to the shame and condemnation of the
guilty.

But there is another plea on which the purloiner tries to find
for himself something like an acquittal from the shame and the
remorse of his secret iniquities. However great at the end of
months or of years his depredations may be in the amount, yet,
to escape detection, he is forced to make them small in the de
tail. The distinct and single theft of every one day is but a
petty affair — and his conscience easily falls into the snare, that,
as what he does take at any one time is so very little, it is not
worth the thinking of. But what right has he, we would ask,
to make any addition to the eighth commandment ? God says,
" Thou shalt not steal," and then He brings the commandment
to a close. He does not say, Thou shalt not steal much, leaving
us at freedom to steal a little, and to judge how little we may
steal with innocence and safety. He says, Thou shalt not steal,
and then He leaves off. If we steal the value of a farthing, it
is a stolen farthing. It is evidence enough to convict of a breach
of the eighth commandment, by which we are enjoined not to
steal at all. Little as we may think of it, it is enough to con
vict us of disobedience to the entire and absolute commandment
of God — and it will turn out the accursed thing, which, if not
repented of and not turned from, will be the death and the con
demnation of our souls. He that is unjust in the least, says our
Saviour, is unjust also in much. It may be so little as to be the
very least — but if stolen, it is an act of injustice — and He who
knew what was in man says, that he who can do the very least
act of injustice can do a great one. 0 how many go to hell with
what they account small sins. Small sin I is sin a small matter ?

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 311

If we have stolen to the value of a single grain, we have broken
the law of God ; and do we call that an affair of small conse
quence? The moment we stretch forth our hand to what is
another's, be it ever so little, we have broken the line which lies
betwixt duty and rebellion. We have got over the wall which
separates lawful from forbidden ground, and however little way
we have got on the forbidden ground, still we are on it ; and,
if apprehended there and brought to the bar of judgment, we
shall be treated as criminals. Go not, ye purloiners and house
hold thieves, to delude your consciences any more upon this sub
ject. Go not to make any distinction which the law of God
does not make. Think not that you will escape condemnation ;
because the thing stolen is so very little. Think not that this
plea will serve you with God, whose law must be fulfilled to the
very last jot and tittle of it — and we tell you that if you ever
pray and lift up your hands unto God — then though you have
stolen only to the amount of a morsel or a fragment which does
not belong to you, God will look upon your hands and see them
to be unclean. The defilement of the thing stolen sticks to
them ; and He beholding it will turn in indignation from your
prayers and your offering.

The next plea we propose to your attention is, that the master
out of whose stock we have purloined is rich — he will not miss
it, and it can do him no harm ; still making additions of their
own, you observe, to the law of God ; still doing as the Phari
sees did before them — making the commandment of God of none
effect by their traditions, and teaching for doctrines the com
mandments and inventions of men. God says, Thou shalt not
steal. He does not say, Thou shalt not steel from the poor, leav
ing us at liberty to steal from the rich whenever we have oppor
tunity. The distinction betwixt rich and poor in this matter is
a distinction of their own. By making this plea they not only
disobey God, but they insult Him by offering to mend His law,
and bringing forward what they think a better one of their own.
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the word of God shall
not pass away. And that word is — Let him that stole steal no
more. There is no allusion to rich or poor in this injunction.
Nay, in the text it is stealing from the rich that is expressly for
bidden. The poor, generally speaking, are the servants ; and
the rich, generally speaking, are the masters — and servants are
ordered not to purloin from their masters, but to show all good
fidelity. No, there is nothing for it, but an entire separation

312 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

from this unclean and accursed practice. It is an express viola
tion of God's law, and admits of no plea, no palliation. It is a
dangerous experiment to trifle with sin, and to venture upon
what we are pleased to think the lesser shades and degrees of it.
The moment that sin is committed, even in the very least de
grees of it, the fence which separates obedience from rebellion is
broken down. After we have got over that fence, there is no
saying how far we may go. After a garden wall is once leaped,
it is not doing much more to enter its most precious depositories,
and spoil it of its fairest and richest productions. And here we
may repeat, by the way, that the first sin ever committed by
man forms a striking refutation of the two pleas which we are
now attempting to expose. The thing stolen was a frait. The
master he stole it from was the Lord of heaven and of earth —
to whom belongs the cattle on a thousand hills, and who sits
surrounded with the wealth of innumerable worlds. What be
comes of the smallness of the sin now ? It was just this sin
which banished Adam from paradise, which broke up the com
munion between earth and heaven — which entailed ruin on a
whole species of moral and intelligent creatures. The infidel
laughs at the story, and with all the parade of an enlightened
wisdom he counts it ridiculous — he thinks how paltry the offence
— and bow big the mischief and the ruin which are stated to
have sprung from it. But he only betrays the grossness of a
mind which cannot rise above the estimates and the calculations
of an ordinary man — which looks no further than to the visible
performance, and is blind to the only principle which gives to
the performance its moral character. It is not in the magnitude
of the thing done, that the chief magnitude of the offence lies.
It is the state of mind implied by the doing of it. Had Adam
rooted out every tree of paradise and dismantled the garden of
all its beauties, we might have thought that his offence lay in
the material extent of the injury that was done by him. But
Adam did no more than steal a forbidden fruit ; and, for any
evil performed by his hand, Eden might have remained in all
its bloom and in all its loveliness. But in proportion as the
material hurt was small, is the grandeur and the entireriess of
the moral lesson conveyed by it. It leads our single eye to the
foulness of that turpitude which lies in disobedience to God. The
thing done was small in itself; but it carried rebellion in its
principle. Thus saith the Lord, was the sanction which lay
upon it — and that sanction was trampled upon. When God said.

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 313

Let there be light, and there was light — we look upon this as a
sublime and wonderful evidence of His power. When God said,
In the day he eateth he shall die, and he did eat, and from that
moment a cloud of malignant darkness gathered upon the head
of the offender, and hangs to this hour over his distant posterity
— we look upon this as an evidence no less sublime of His truth
and of His righteousness. The simplicity of the visible act
enables us to see the spiritual character of this great transaction
in all its majesty — nor can the senseless levities we have heard
on the subject of Adam's fall, keep us from viewing it as one in
dignity with the other events of that wonderful period, when the
Almighty had spread a new creation around him, and displayed
the attributes of His high and unchangeable nature among the
beings whom He had formed.

Take this lesson to yourselves, ye purloiners, who are going
on deceiving your consciences, arid heaping ruin and condemna
tion upon your deluded souls. You think the thing purloined
is so very small, and the master you stole it from is so very rich.
But what right have you to set your thinkings and your excus-
ings against the awful authority of " Thus saith the Lord" ? It
is no matter how small the theft. It is no matter how rich
the man who suffers by it. God's authority is trampled upon
by the act. His holy Bible is despised. His judgment is bid
defiance to — and the saying of the apostle Paul is as much
slighted and undervalued as if no apostle had ever said it, that
" thieves shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Oh ! if any of
you have been hitherto deceived upon this subject, suffer now
the word of exhortation. Go not to trifle any longer with the
precious interest of your souls. Resist not what we say, because
it touches painfully upon your practices or your consciences.
We mean no offence. We want to stir up no anger among you.
We bring forward no railing accusation. It is the general and
unceasing importance of the subject which has led us to fix upon
it ; for we give you our solemn assurance, that we know of no
act of purloining committed by any one of you — nor do we have
in our eye a single guilty individual. For anything we know,
there is not one of you who is not nobly superior to the slightest
taint and degree of this iniquity — and, in this case, the sole use
of this sermon may be that you shall be kept clean through the
word now spoken to you. But lest there should be a purloiner
in this congregation, we think it our high and awfully incumbent
duty to stretch forth our hand that we may arrest and reclaim

314 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

him from that road of perdition on which he is hastening — and
surely you will grant us your indulgence, when we say that in
doing what we have done, we have only lifted our testimony
against what we honestly believe would land him in everlasting
burnings if it be persisted in.

But let us now endeavour, in the third place, to press the
duty which is opposed to the sin of the text, that is, good fidelity
— by the motive which the text itself insists upon, that you may
adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things. Let us
observe, however, that the servants whom Titus was to exhort
were among the people of his own congregation. They formed
a Christian community ; and, whatever kind of people this
designation may be applied to now-a-days, it was applied in
those days to men who, in embracing the profession of the faith,
formally renounced the errors or the idolatries of their former
years — to men who, in making this profession, must generally
speaking have been moved to it by a real belief in the great
and prominent truths of that new religion which was proposed
to them : Or, in other words, the exhortation of the text is re
commended by Paul to be addressed to men who not only
embraced the profession of the faith, but had embraced the faith
— to men who felt the influence of the great doctrines of Chris
tianity — to men who had God revealed to them in their Saviour,
and knew of the grace of God that bringeth salvation, and were
under that process of teaching which the grace of God is em
ployed in carrying on, and the object of which is that we should
deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and live soberly, righteously,
and godly in this present evil world. We know well the use
that has been made of these considerations. Bring, it is said,
these dissuasives against their evil practices to bear upon Chris
tian servants. Exhort those who are already in the faith ; and,
as to those who are not in the faith, including for anything we
know the great mass of servants who are now before us, suspend
all our attacks upon their sins till we have brought them to the
Saviour — furnish them with a Christian motive before we press
them to a Christian reformation — make them the subjects of grace,
by giving them that faith which has the promise of the Spirit,
ere we attempt that teaching which can only be done effectually
by the grace that bringeth salvation. Now it is all very true
that no obedience is pure in its principle but that to which we
are constrained by the love of God reconciled to us in Christ
Jesus — no obedience is successful in its accomplishment but

MOKAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 315

that -which is wrought through the strength of Him who confers
power to become the children of God only on those who believe
— no obedience is acceptable to the Father but such as is offered
up in the name of the Son. All this is most true — and it must
be our incessant object to grow in such obedience, by growing
in the only principle which can actuate and uphold it. But
recollect that there are expedients set agoing by the wisdom of
God for bringing men to Christ — and there are considerations
addressed to sinners for the purpose of convincing them of dan
ger, and forcing them to flee for refuge unto Christ — and there
are certain performances which, in the very act of coming unto
Christ, they are called upon to do — and therefore it is, that,
though at this moment you may be out of Christ and away from
Him, we count it a seasonable topic for each and all of you,
when we tell you of the exceeding sinfulness of every one sin
with which you are chargeable. It is right that every kind of
unrighteousness should be made manifest to your consciences —
for the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness. It
is right that every purloiner should be made to know what
thousands and thousands more of purloiners are not aware of,
that the heavy judgment of God lies upon them for that offence
which they are apt to look on as so light and so common and
so natural and so excusable. It is right they should be made
to understand how great the danger is, and what the place of
security to flee to — and surely the more they are burdened with
a sense of the wrath of God, the more will they feel the weight
and importance of the saying, that unless they believe in Christ
this wrath abideth on them. And surely if Christ said, at the
very outset, Eepent and believe the gospel — if He said, He that
followeth after me must forsake all — if the grace of God, at the
first moment of its appearance, taught men to deny ungodliness
and worldly lusts — we are riot out of place when we tell the
most ignorant and graceless purloiner among you, to turn him to
Christ, that he may obtain the forgiveness of all his misdoings ;
and when we tell him within the compass of the same breathing
to turn him from his iniquities — that the man who keeps by his
sins is in fact keeping away from the Saviour — that he is loving
darkness rather tha,n light, because his deeds are evil — that he
is not coming to the Saviour, for he is not doing what all who
come must and will do — he is not stirring himself up in the
business of forsaking all. The evil and inveterate habits of an
unfaithful servant he will not forsake. He clings to them as

316 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

so many idols that he cannot bring himself to part with. Christ,
who claims the authority of His alone Master, does not prevail
upon him to give up the service of those sins which lord it over
him. And it is therefore that he should know, how every day
that he persists in this forbidden practice, he is treasuring up
wrath against the day of wrath, and putting the grace of an of
fered salvation and the voice of a beseeching God away from him.
Let us therefore urge it most earnestly upon you that you
consider your doings. Christ is willing to receive you ; and if
you are willing to come to Him, to you belongs the whole extent
of His purchased salvation. But you are not willing to come
to Him, if you are more willing to retain your iniquities ; and
in these iniquities you will die. Sell your goods to feed the
poor, says our Saviour to the young man in the Gospel, and
then come and follow me ; but he would not come to Him upon
these terms, and his devotedness to his wealth was the bar that
stood in his way to the kingdom of God. In like manner we
call upon you purloiners to cleanse your hands and come to the
Saviour. If you will not come upon these terms, the rich man
had his bar in the way of salvation, and you have yours. He
would not give up his property, and you will not give up the
produce of your petty pilferments. You are not willing to come
to Christ that you may have life — for, sweet as is the life which
is at His giving, it is not so sweet to your taste, as is the sweet
ness of those stolen waters which have hitherto been your secret
and your habitual enjoyment. Esau sold his birthright for a
mess of pottage, and he is therefore called the profane Esau.
How much more profane are you, who are putting the offer of a
birthright in heaven away from you — and for what ? — for the
crumbs and fragments of your paltry depredations. From this
moment we charge you to touch them no more. Bid your hand
cease from its pilferments ; and compel it to your bidding. If
what we have said tell upon your conscience, this very night
will it tell upon your conduct. To-morrow comes, and it will
find you a reforming man — earnest how to find your salvation,
and busy to frame your doings that you may turn unto the
Lord. You will get up from the bed of reflection, with the
purpose of keeping yourself clear and aloof from your wonted
dishonesties ; and with a prayer that you may be strengthened
in the execution of this purpose. Till we see something of this
kind, we see no evidence of your yet having taken a single step
to the Saviour. Keep by the purloinings against which we

MOKAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 317

have been charging you ; and you are not so much as moving
towards Christ, nor will you ever reach Him. Cease then from
them at this moment — do this in the very act of going to the
Saviour and seeking after Him ; and who knows but this first
and foremost of your visible reformations, humble as it is when
compared with the accomplishments of him who stands perfect
and complete in the whole will of God, who knows but it may
betoken the commencement of a good work in your soul ? — that
awakening of the sinner's eye on which Christ has promised that
He shall give light — the outset of that path which conducts from
one degree of grace unto another, till you reach the stature of
the full-grown Christian — an earlier stage of the journey which
conducts him who cometh unto Christ to all His promised mani
festations, that, made to shine upon your head, will make you
rejoice more and more in the perfections of His righteousness, in
the fulness of His grace and the freeness of His kind invitations,
in the sureness of those never-failing supplies out of which you
are strengthened with all might in the inner man, and enabled
to do all things through the Spirit which is given unto you.

We now proceed to the motive which Paul urged upon the
servants he was addressing — that they might adorn the doctrine
of God their Saviour in all things. We think that two very
distinct, and at the same time very affecting and important
lessons, may be drawn from this single clause of the verse now
before us. The first is, that a man's Christianity might be made
to show itself throughout the whole business of his vocation,
whatever it may be — that it may be made to give a pervading
expression to his whole history — that it might accompany and
be at work with him throughout every doing and every exercise
he can put his hand to — that, in a word, the influence of its
spirit is a perennial influence, ever present in the heart, and
ever sending forth a powerful and a perpetual control over the
conduct. It is not merely in one thing, or in another thing,
that the doctrine of Christ is capable of being adorned. It
admits of being adorned in all things. Doctrine sometimes
signifies the thing taught ; and it sometimes signifies the pro
cess of teaching. We understand it more in the latter sense on
the present occasion. Show how excellent, and how purifying,
and how universal, in point of salutary influence, this teaching
is. Show how completely it goes over the whole round of human
performances. Show with what a comprehensive eye it surveys
the map of human life, and stamps its own colour and gives its

318 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

own outline to its most remote and subordinate provinces. Let
the world see, that wherever a man of Christian doctrine is pre
sent, and whatever the employment be that he is engaged with,
there at all times goes along with him a living exhibition of the
power and the efficacy of Christian doctrine ; that he represents
by every one action the character of the gospel which he pro
fesses ; that the stamp of its morality may be recognised on his
every distinct and separate performance ; and that others may
say of each and of all his doings, that this is done in the style
and manner of a Christian.

When a man becomes Christian, what, we would ask, is the
most visible expression of the change which has taken effect
upon him ? We are not speaking of the change in its essential
character, which is neither more nor less than a thorough and
aspiring devotedness to the will of that God whom he now
sees by the eye of faith to be reconciled to him, through the
blood of an everlasting covenant. The question we are putting
relates to the seen effect of this principle upon the man's out
ward habits and performances ; and we ask, which is the most
notable and conspicuous effect, and such as will most readily
arrest the eye and the observation of acquaintances ? We know
well what the general impression of the world is upon this sub
ject. They think, when a man undergoes that mysterious and
unaccountable thing which is called conversion, the most pal
pable transformation it makes upon him is to turn him into a
psalm-singing, a church-going, an ordinance-keeping, and a
prayer-making Christian. They positively do not look for such
a change on the common and week-day history of this said
convert, as they do on the style and character of his Sabbath
observations. But yet there is a something that they will look
for on week-days too. They will look for a more decided
aspect of sobriety. They will look for a more demure and
melancholy seclusion from his old acquaintances. They will
look for a clear and total renunciation of all that is intemperate,
and of all that is licentious. They will look for a final adieu
from those habits of intoxication, or those habits of profligacy,
or those habits of companionable indulgence, to which the young
of every great city are introduced with a facility and a readiness
so alarming to the heart of every Christian parent ; and in the
prosecution of which they widen by every day of thoughtlessness
their departure from God ; and accumulate upon them the
burden of His righteous indignation ; and lull their consciences

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 319

into such a slumber, as to thousands and thousands more will at
length sink and deepen into the sleep of death ; and bring the
whole power of their example to bear upon the simple and the
uninitiated. And thus does the tide of corruption maintain its
unabated force and fulness from one period to another ; and is
strengthened by yearly contributions out of the wreck of youth
ful integrity ; and did not the cheering light of prophecy assure
us that through the omnipotence of a pure gospel better days of
reformation and of virtue were to come, one would almost sit
down in despair of ever making head against such a torrent of
combination and of example on the side of profligacy. Nor is
this despair much alleviated, though some solitary case of repent
ance out of a hundred should now and then be offering itself to
our contemplations ; and conscience should again lift its com
manding voice within him, and be reinstated in that authority
which she had lost ; and he, breaking off his sins by righteous
ness, should by an act of simple and determined abandonment
brave the mockery of all his associates, and betake himself to
the paths of peace and of prayer and of piety.

Now, the all things of our text should lead an enlightened
disciple to look for more evidence than this ; and should lead a
decided convert to exhibit more evidence than this. The man
who adorns the gospel in all things, will most certainly be and
do all that we have heretofore insisted on. But we regret that
it should be so much the impression of the world, and so much
the impression even of our plausible and well-looking professors,
that these form outward marks of such prominency as to throw
all other outward marks into the shade ; and to draw an almost
exclusive regard towards sobriety of manners, and sobriety of
external observation, as forming the great and leading evidences
of a now acquired Christianity. Now think what prodigious
effect it would give to the gospel, what an impressive testimony
to its worth and excellence it would spread around the walk of
every professor of it — did all that was undeviating in truth, all
that was generous in friendship, all that was manly in principle,
all that was untainted in honour, all that was winning in gentle
ness, all that was endearing in the graces and virtues of domestic
society, all that was beneficent in public life, and all that was
amiable in the unnoticed recesses of private history — did all
these form into one beauteous corona of virtues and accomplish
ments, which might shed the lustre of Christianity over every
field that is traversed by a professor of Christianity. The name

320 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

of a convert is at all times most readily associated with sobriety
and Sabbath-keeping. We should like that the conduct of the
professors were such as to establish a still wider association.
And if it is not, it is because professors have so wofully neg
lected the principle of our text. It is because they have made
their Christianity one thing, and their civil business another.
It is because they have separated religion from humanity, and
missed a truth of most obvious and most commanding evidence
— that there is not so much as a single half hour in the whole
current of a man's history, which the gospel might not cheer by
its comforts, or guide by its rules, or enlighten by its informa
tions and its principles. Had every professing convert proceeded
upon this, the association would have gone much farther than
it has actually done. It would have thrown a kind of universal
emblazonment over the very name of Christianity. A man
under the teaching of Jesus Christ could not be spoken of with
out lighting up in the heart every feeling of confidence and
affection and esteem. And only conceive how it would go to
augment the power of this living and efficient testimony — did
every man who plies his attendance upon church, and runs after
sacraments, and whose element is to be hearing and talking of
sermons, and the whole style of whose family regulation wears
a complexion of sacredness — how it would tell with all the
omnipotence of a charm upon the world, could we only have it
to say of every such man — that the soul of honour and integrity
animated all his doings — that his every word and his every
bargain were immutable — that not so much as a flaw or the
semblance of an impeachment ever rested on any of his trans
actions — that if in business, you might repose upon him — that
if in company, you had nothing to fear from his pride or his
severity or his selfishness — that if in the relations of neighbour
hood, you might look for nothing from his hands but kindness
and civility — that if in the officialises of public employment,
you might see all the faithfulness of a man who felt the weight
of duty and responsibility that were attached to it — that if the
head of a family, you might behold the happiest attempcrament
of wisdom and of gentleness — and finally, that if in service, you
might commit to him the keepership of your all ; you might
give your suspicions and your jealousies to the wind ; arid trust
ing to a fidelity which no opportunity can tempt, and no power
of concealment can make to swerve from the line of honesty,
you might review the whole subject of his guardianship, and

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 321

find how to its minutest particle that all was untouched and all
was un violated.

This conducts us to the second lesson, which we proposed to
draw from the clause of adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour
in all things. And that is, that it is in the power of men and
women, in the most obscure and unnoticed ranks of society, to
do a thing of far greater magnificence and glory, than can be
done by all the resources of a monarch, by all the commanding
influence of wealth, by all the talents and the faculties of genius, by
all the magic of utterance pouring forth its streams of eloquent
and persuasive reasoning, by all grandeur and all nobility and
all official consequence when disjoined from Christian principle.
Humble as ye are, ye servants, there is a something ye can do
which has all the greatness and all the effect of eternity stamped
upon it. There is a something ye can do which the King of
Glory may put down as done unto Him, and by which ye can
both magnify the name and carry forward the interests of the
Sun of Righteousness. There is a something ye can do by
which ye may be admitted into the high honour of being fellow-
workers with God — by which He to whom all power is com
mitted both in heaven and earth, will own you as the auxiliaries
of His cause — by which ye may become the instruments of
adding to the triumphs of the great Redeemer, and holding up
His name to the world with the splendour of an augmented
reputation. 0 think what a distinction the once crucified but
now exalted Saviour has conferred upon you ! He has laid the
burden of His honour and of His cause upon your shoulders.
He has committed to you the task of adorning His doctrine. He
has ennobled your every employment, by telling yon that out of
them all there may arise the moral lustre of such a principle
and such a quality, as will reflect a credit upon Himself. And
He who has done so much to exalt the station of a servant by
taking the form of one on His own person, and by rendering
under it such a service to Him who sitteth on the throne, as to
have purchased for a sinful world all the securities and all the
hopes and all the triumphs of their redemption, comes back upon
you servants, now that He is exalted to the right hand of the
most High, and tells you how much he looks to you for the glories
of His interest and of His name — how much He rests upon you
for the illustration and the honour of His doctrine in the world.
And as it was the work of the Son of God, when veiled in the
humiliation of a servant, which set on foot the great plan of the

VOL. III. X

322 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

world's restoration — so is it still to the work of servants, to yon,
my humbler brethren, the glories of whose immortal nature lie
buried only for a few little years under the meanness and the
drudgeries of your daily employment — it is to you that He con
fides the helping forward of this mighty achievement, and the
maintaining of its influence and of its glory from generation to
generation.

It is in His name that we address you. We tell you, ye
men-servants and ye maid-servants, from the sincerity of a heart
that is most thoroughly penetrated with the truth and the im
portance of what we are now uttering, that you can do more for
Christ in your respective families than we can possibly accom
plish. We know not who your masters and your mistresses are.
But we know that there may be masters who scowl disdainfully
on the business of the priesthood. We know that with the in
solence of wealth, there may be some who despise the preaching
of the cross, and make holiday of our sabbaths and our sacra
ments. We know that there may be some who come not here
to have the doctrine of God our Saviour preached to them j and
therefore it is that we want you to do this business for us. You
may do it in effect without the utterance of a single word on
the subject of Christianity. You may do it by the living power
of your example. You may do it by the impressive exhibition
of a fidelity which no temptation can seduce, and no lure of gain
can cause to swerve from the line of a strict and undeviating
integrity. You may do it by a lesson of greater energy than all
that human argument can press, or the magic of human elo
quence can insinuate. You may let them see in the whole of
your history, that the man among all their dependants who is
most devoted to the service of the sanctuary, is also the most de
voted to the service of his employer ; and the most tender of all
his interests ; and the most observant of all his will. You may
preach them a daily sermon by the daily exhibition of your
faithfulness, and your attachment, and that deep and duteous
spirit of loyalty, which, with all the firm footing of a religious
principle in your heart, leads you to be careful of all the trust
he has committed to you, and mindful of all his orders, and ever
ready to meet his every wish and his every lawful imposition by
the alacrity of your most assiduous and devoted ministrations.
The kingdom of God is not in word but in power. And even though
your master should listen to the every demonstration which issues
from the pulpit, he may retire day after day with a charmed ear

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 323

and an unawakened conscience, and the whole of the preacher's
eloquence may die away from his memory like the sound of a
pleasant song. But you keep by him through the week, and
a grateful sense of your value is ever forcing itself upon his con
victions. And the inference that Christianity has a something
of reality in its nature, may at times intrude itself among the
multitude of his other thoughts and his other avocations. And
his conscience may be arrested by the interesting visitation of
such an idea. And that Spirit whom we call you to pray for on
his behalf, may reward your example and your supplications by
pressing the idea home, and pursuing him with its resistless
influence, and opening through its power such an avenue to his
heart, as may at length carry before it the whole of his desires
and of his purposes. And in like manner as Christianity found
its way into the household of Cesar — so may you, my humbler
brethren, find out a way for it into the houses of the wealthiest
of our citizens ; and be the instruments of spreading it around
among all those villas of magnificence, which skirt and which
adorn the city of our habitation ; and to you, clothed as ye are
in the habiliments of servitude, and weighed down from morn
ing to night by its drudgeries, and veiled as the greatness of
your immortal aspirations is from the eye of the world — even
upon you may this blessing in all its richness be realized, that
as ye have turned men unto righteousness, so shall ye shine as
the stars for ever and ever.

When we think of the lower orders of society, we cannot but
think along with it, how high and how noble is the gospel
estimate of that importance which belongs to them. Each of
them carries in his bosom a principle of deathless energy,
never to be extinguished. Each of them has a career of
ambition opened up, lofty as heaven and splendid as a crown
of immortality. Each of them has an open way to Him who
sitteth on the throne, through the mediation of Him who
sitteth on the right hand of it. To them belongs the memor
able distinction conferred by this utterance of the Eternal Son
— that " unto the poor the gospel is preached." Each of them
possesses a heart that may be regenerated by the influences of
the Spirit ; and may be rilled with all that is pure and all that
is elevated in piety ; and may be turned into a residence for the
finest and the loftiest emotions ; and that, under the power of an
evangelical culture, may be made to exemplify all that is re
spectable in worth, and all that is endearing in the nobler

324 MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY.

graces of Christianity. When worth and greatness meet in one
imposing combination, there is a something in a spectacle so
rare which draws the general eye of admiration along with it.
But to the moral taste of some, and we profess ourselves to be
of that number — there is a something still more touching, still
more attractive, still more fitted to draw the eye of philanthropy
and to fill it with the images of beauty and peacefulness, in what
we should call the virtues and the respectabilities of humble life
— as a pious father, in the midst of a revering family — or the
duteous offspring who rise around him, and are taught by his
example to keep the Sabbaths of the Lord and to love His ordin
ances — or the well-ordered household, the members of which
are trained to all the decencies of Christian conduct — or the frail
arid lowly tenement, where the voice of psalms is heard with
the return of every evening, and the morning of the hallowed
day collects all its inmates around the altar of domestic prayer.
When such pictures as these occur in humble life, and sure we
are that humble life is capable of affording them, who could
think of withholding from them his testimony of readiest admi
ration? The man who, without any superiority of wealth what
ever, has, by the pure force of character, gained a moral
ascendency over the population of his obscure neighbourhood,
causes all earthly distinctions to vanish into insignificance before
him. Now we affirm that in the very poorest and most unnoticed
walks of society, such men are to be found ; that by the powerful
application of Christian motives such men may be multiplied ;
that there exist throughout the wide mass of society all the
imaginable capabilities of worth and excellence and principle
and piety ; that on the spacious field of a mighty harvest which
is on every side of us, there may be raised a whole multitude of
converts in whose hearts the principle of the gospel shall have
taken up its firm possession, and over the visible path of whose
history the power of the gospel may shed the lustre of some of
the best and finest accomplishments by which our nature can be
adorned.

We must not, however, pursue this speculation any farther.
It is in the power of the servants who now hear us, to turn it
into a reality. We look to them for the vindication of all we
have uttered ; and sure we are, that a faithful and an attached
servant; one who would maintain nnseduced integrity, in the
midst of manifold temptations ; on whom the struggling force
of principle would achieve a victory over the lure of every op-

MORAL INFLUENCE OF FIDELITY. 325

portunity, and the certainty of every concealment ; who, nobly
superior to all that is sordid and sneaking and artful, would
protect his master's interest as his own, and disdain to touch a
single farthing of what was committed to him — why, we should
never think of the rank of such a man — we should call him the
champion of his order, and feel how honourably he had repre
sented his own class of society — how he had asserted all their
honours, and shown how elevation of soul and of sentiment be
longed as essentially to them as to the wealthiest and most
distinguished of the land — how he had evinced the wondrous
capabilities of principle and of improvement which had existed
over the wide mass of the population. And, taking him as a
specimen, that the whole face of the community might be turned
into a moral garden ; and that, in point of moral and spiritual
importance, the poor, the despised, the unnoticed, the neglected
poor, are to the full equal with all that was most lofty in the
rank, and all that was most splendid in the literature of society.
We dismiss you, my friends, with the remark — that this is no
speculation of ours. It is the call of the Saviour who died for
you. It is He who, now that He has achieved your redemption,
condescends to ask a favour of you. He commits to you the
adornment of His doctrine in the eyes of the world. And re
member that when you leave this church, and betake yourselves
to the familiarities of your daily employment, though our eye
cannot follow you, the eye of your Master in heaven is never
away from you. He takes an interest in all your doings. He
registers the every hour and performance of your history. If
you suffer not this reflection to tell upon your conduct from this
moment, you are throwing the gauntlet of defiance to a beseech
ing and a commanding Saviour. But if otherwise, He will not
despise the humble offering of your obedience. He will put it
down as done unto Him. He will recognise you as fellow-
helpers to His cause and to His interest in the world. He will
accept of your prayers, because they are the prayers of them
whose hands are clean and whose hearts are purged from their
regard to all iniquity. You will grow in friendly and familiar
intercourse with the great Mediator ; and He will put down the
very smallest items of your obedience as fruits of the love that
you bear Him, and of the faith which worketh by love and
which keepeth the commandments.

326 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

DISCOURSE XV.

THE IMPORTANCE OP CIVIL GOVERNMENT TO SOCIETY.

" What then ? are we better than they ? No, in no wise : for we have before proved both
Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin ; as it is written, There is none righteous,
no, not one : there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable ; there is none
that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre ; with their tongues they
have used deceit ; the poison of asps is under their lips : whose mouth is full of cursing
and bitterness : their feet are swift to shed blood : destruction and misery are in their
ways ; and the way of peace have they not known : there is no fear of God before their
eyes. Now we know, that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are
under the law ; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty
before God."— ROMANS iii. 9-19.

THERE are certain of these charges which can be brought
more simply and speedily home in the way of conviction than
certain others of them. Those which bring man more directly
before the tribunal of God, can be made out more easily than
those which bring him before the tribunal of his fellows. It
were difficult to prove, that, in reference to man, there are not
some of the species who have not something to glory of; but it
should not be so difficult to prove, that we have nothing to glory
of before God. Now, the conclusion of the apostle's argument
in this passage is, that it is before God that all the world is
guilty ; and if we, in the first instance, single out those verses
which place man before us in his simple relationship to the God
who formed him, we ought not to find it a hard matter to carry
the acquiescence of our hearers in the sentence which is here
pronounced upon our guilty species.

One of those verses is, that " there is none righteous, no, not
one." To be held as having righteously kept the law of our
country, we must keep the whole of it. It is not necessary that
we accumulate upon our persons the guilt of treason, and forgery,
and murder, and violent depredation, ere we forfeit our lives to
an outraged government. By one of these acts we incur just as
dreadful and as entire a forfeiture as though guilty of them all.
The hundred deeds of obedience will not efface or expiate the

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 327

one of disobedience ; and we have only to plead for the same
justice to a Divine that we render to a human administration, in
order to convince every individual who now hears us, conscious,
as he must be, of one, and several, and many acts of transgres
sion against the law of God, that there is not one of them who
is righteous before Him.

" There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh
after God," is another of these verses. We will venture to say
of every man, without exception, who has not submitted himself
to the great doctrine of this Epistle, which is justification by
faith, that there is not one principle clearly intelligible even to
his own inirid, on which he rests his acceptance with the God
whom he has offended. He may have some obscure conception
of His mercy, but he has never struck the compromise between
His mercy and His justice. He has never braved the inquiry,
how is it possible that a sinner can be pardoned without a disso
lution of God's moral government? If he has ever taken up
the question, "What shall I do to be saved?" he has never, in
the prosecution of it, looked steadily in the face at the Truth
and Holiness of the Godhead. He has never extricated his con
dition as a sinner, from the dilemma of God's conflicting attri
butes ; or apprehended, to his own satisfaction, how it is that the
dignity of Heaven's throne can be upheld, amid the approaches
of the polluted, who dare the inspection of eternal purity, and
offer to come nigh, on the single presumption of God's conniv
ance at sin, — and a connivance founded, too, on the vague im
pression of God's simple, and easy, and unresisting tenderness.
What becomes of all that which stamps authority upon a law,
and props the majesty of a Lawgiver, is a question that they
have not resolved ; and that just because it is a question which
they do not entertain. They are not seeking to resolve it.
That matter which appertains to the very essence of a sinner's
salvation, is a matter of which they have no understanding ; and
they do not care to understand it. They are otherwise taken
up, and giving themselves no uneasiness upon the subject.
They, all their lives long, are blinking, and evading the ques
tions which lie at the very turning-point of that transition by
which a sinner passes from a state of wrath into a state of ac
ceptance. They hold the whole of this matter in abeyance ;
and the things of the world engross, and interest, and occupy,
their whole hearts, to the utter exclusion of Him who made the
world. They are seeking after many things, but they are not

328 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

seeking after God. If you think that this is bearing- too hard
upon you, tell us what have been the times, and what the occa
sions, on which you have ever made the finding of God the dis
tinct and the business object of your endeavours? When did
you ever seek Him truly ? When did your efforts in this way
ever go beyond the spirit and the character of an empty round
of observations? What are the strenuous attempts you ever
made to push the barrier which intercepts the guilty from the
God whom they have rebelled against? If you are really and
heartily seeking, you will find ; but, without the fear of refuta
tion, do we affirm of all here present who have not reached the
Saviour, and are not in their way to Him, that none of you
uriderstandeth, and none of you seeketh after God.

" They are all gone out of the way, they are together become
unprofitable, there is none that doeth good; no, not one," is
another of these verses. We do not say of the people whom we
are now addressing, that they have gone out of the way of
honour, or out of the way of equity, or out of the way of fair
and pleasant and companionable neighbourhood. But they, one
and all of them, are out of the way of godliness. When the
Prophet complains of our species, he does not affirm of them that
they had turned every one to a way either of injustice or cruelty;
but he counts it condemnation enough, that they had turned
every one to his own way. It is iniquity enough in his eyes
that the way in which we walk is our own way, and not God's ;
that in the prosecution of it we are simply pleasing ourselves,
and not asking or caring whether it be a way that is pleasing to
Him ; that the impelling principle of what we do is our own
will, and not His authority ; that the way in which we walk is
a way of independence upon God, if not of iniquity against our
fellows in society ; that it is the way of one who walks in the
sight of his own eyes, and not of one who walks under the sight
and in the service of another ; that God, in fact, is as good as
cast off from us ; and we say what is tantamount to this, that
we will not have Him to reign over us. This is the universal
habit of Nature ; and if so, Nature is out of the way, and the
world at large offers a monstrous exception to the habit of the
sinless and unfallen, where all, from the highest to the lowest,
walk in that rightful subordination which the thing that is
formed should ever have towards Him who formed it. It is this
which renders all the works of mere natural men so unprofit
able, that is, of no value in the highest count and reckoning of

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 329

eternity. They want the great moral infusion which makes
them valuable. There is nothing of God in them ; having
neither His will for their principle, nor the advancement of any
one cause which His heart is set upon for their object. They
may serve a temporary purpose. They may shed a blessing
over the scenery of our mortal existence. They may minister
to the good, and the peace, and the protection of society. They
may add to the sunshine or the serenity of our little day upon
earth ; and yet be unprofitable, because they yield no fruit unto
immortality. Destitute as they all are of godliness, they are
destitute of goodness. They have not the essential spirit of this
attribute pervading them. And though many there are to
whom the preaching of the cross is foolishness, and who have
reached a lofty estimation in the walks of integrity and honour,
and even of philanthropy and patriotism, yet, with the taint of
earthliness which vitiates all they do, in the estimation of
Heaven's Sanctuary there is none of them that doeth good ; no,
not one.

We now pass onward to another set of charges, which it may
not be so easy to substantiate on the ground of actual observa
tion. They consist of highly atrocious offences against the peace
and the dearest interests of society. It is true that the apostle
here drops the style of universality which he so firmly sustains
in the foregoing part of his arraignment, when he speaks of all
being out of the way ; and of none, no, not one being to be found
on the path of godliness. And it is further true, that, in the
subsequent prosecution of his charges, he quotes several expres
sions which David made use of, not against the whole species,
but against his own enemies. But ye.t it will be found, that
though the picture of atrocity here drawn may not in our day
be so broadly exhibited as in the ruder and more barbarous
periods of this world's history, yet, that the principles of it are
still busily at work ; that though humanity be altered a little in
its guise, it is not, apart from the gospel, at all altered in its
substance ; that though softened down into a somewhat milder
complexion, its fiercer elements are not therefore extinguished,
but only lie for a time in a sort of slumbering concealment ; that
though law and civilisation, and a more enlightened sense of
interest, may have stopped the mouth of many a desolating
volcano, which would else have marred and wasted the face of
society, yet do the fiery materials still exist in the bosom of
society. It is religion alone which will kill the elementary

330 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

principles of banian wickedness, and every expedient short of
religion will do no more than restrain the ebullition of them.
So that, dark as the scriptural representation of our nature is ;
and though here personified by the apostle into a monster, whose
delight is in the most foul and revolting abominations ; with a
throat like an open sepulchre, emitting contempt, and hatred,
arid envy, and everything offensive ; and a tongue practised in
the arts of deceitfulness ; and lips from which the gall of ma
lignity ever drops in unceasing distillation ; and a mouth full of
venomous asperity ; and feet that run to assassination as a game ;
and with the pathway on which she runs marked by the ruin and
distress that attend upon her progress ; and with a disdainful
aversion in her heart to the safety and ingloriousriess of peace ;
and, finally, with an aspect of defiance to the God that called
her into being, and gave all her parts and all her energies —
though this sketch of our nature was originally taken by the
Psalmist from the prowling banditti that hovered on the con
fines of Judea, yet has the apostle, by admitting it into his
argument, stamped a perpetuity upon it, and made it universal
— giving us to understand, that if such was the character of
man, as it stood nakedly out among the rude and resentful hos
tilities of a barbarous people, such also is the real character of
man among the glosses, and the regularities, and the monoton
ous decencies of modern society.

There is one short illustration which may help you to compre
hend this. You know that oaths were more frequent at one
time than they are now in the conversation of the higher classes,
and that at present it is altogether a point of politeness to ab
stain from the utterance of them. It is a point of politeness, we
fear, more than a point of piety. There may be less of profane-
ness in their mouths, while there may be as much as ever in
their hearts ; and when the question is between God and man,
and with a view to rate the godliness of the latter, do you think
that this is at all alleviated by a mere revolution of taste about
the proprieties of fashionable intercourse ? There may be as
little of religion in the discontinuance of swearing, when that is
brought about by a mere fluctuation in the mode or Ion ton of
society, as there is of religion in the adoption of a new dress, or
a new style of entertainment. And, in like manner, murder in
the act may be less frequent now, while, if he who hateth his
brother be a murderer, it may be fully as foul and frequent in
the principle ; and theft, in the shape of violent and open depre-

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 331

dation, be no longer practised by him who gives vent to an equal
degree of dishonesty through the chicaneries of merchandise ;
and that malice which wont in other times to pour itself forth in
resentful outcry, or vulgar execration, may now find its sweet
and secret gratification in the conquests of a refined policy ; and
thus may there lurk under the soft and placid disguises of well-
bred citizenship, just as much of unfeeling deceit, and unfeeling
cruelty, as were ever realized in the fiercer contests of savage
warfare, so as to verify the estimate of our apostle, even when
applied to the character of society in modern days, and to make
it as evident with the duties of the second table as it is with the
first, that in everything man has wandered far from the path of
rectitude, and in everything has fallen short of the glory of
God.

The truth is, there is much in the whole guise of modern
society that is fitted to hide from human eyes the real deformity
of the human character. We think that, apart from Christi
anity, the falsehood and the ferocity of our species are essentially
the same with what they were in the most unsettled periods of
its history — that, however moulded into a different form, they re
tain all the strength and substance that they ever had — and that,
if certain restraints were lifted away, certain regulations which
have their hold not upon the principle, but upon the selfishness
of our nature ; then would the latent propensities of man again
break forth into open exhibition, and betray him to be the same
guileful, and rapacious, and vindictive creature he has ever
shown himself to be, in those places of the earth where govern
ment had not yet introduced its restraints, and civilisation had
not yet introduced its disguises.

And even when society has sat down into the form of a peace
ful and well-ordered commonwealth, will it be seen that the evil
of the human heart, though it come not forth so broadly and so
outrageously as before, is just as active in its workings, and just
as unsubdued in its principle as ever. We apprehend that
man to be mainly ignorant of life, and to be unpractised or un
taught among the collisions of human intercourse, who is not
aware that even among our politest circles, smoothed as they
may be into perfect decorum, and graced by the smile of soft
and sentimental courtesy, there may lurk all the asperities and
heartburnings so honestly set forth by our apostle ; and that
even there the artful malignity of human passion finds, in slan
derous insinuations, and the devices of a keen arid dexterous

332 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

rivalry, its effectual vent for them. And little has he experi
enced of the trick and treachery of business, who thinks that, in
the scramble of its eager competitions, less deceit is now used
with the tongue, than in the days when the Psalmist was com
passed round with the snares of his adversaries. And slightly
has he reflected on the true character that often beams out from
beneath the specious fallacy which lies over it, who does not
perceive that there may, even with law, be as determined a spirit
of injustice, among the frauds and the forms of bankruptcy, as
that which in the olden time, and without law, carried violence
and rapine into a neighbour's habitation. And there is a lack
of insight with him who thinks, that in civilized war, with all
its gallant courtesies, and all its manifestos of humane and righ
teous protestation, there may not be the same kindling for the
fray, and the same appetite for blood, that gives its fell and re
vengeful sweep to the tomahawk of Indians. There is another
dress and another exterior upon society than before ; but be
assured, that in so far as it respects the essentials of human cha
racter the representation of the apostle is still the true one.
Whatever were the deceitful, or whatever were the murderous
propensities of man, three thousand years ago, they have de
scended to our present generation ; and we are not sure but that,
through the regular vents of war, and of bankruptcy, there is as
full scope for their indulgence as ever. There may be a change
in the mode of these iniquities, without any change at all in the
matter of them ; and after all that police, and refinement, and
the kindly operation of long pacific intercourse, have done to
humanize the aspect of these latter days, we are far from sure
whether upon the displacement of certain guards and barriers of
security, the slumbering ferocities of man might not again an
nounce their existence, and break out, as before, into open and
declared violence.

All this, while it gives a most humiliating estimate of our
species, should serve to enhance to our minds the blessings of
regular Government. And it were curious to question the
agents of police upon this subject, the men who are stationed at
the place of combat and of guardianship, with those who have
cast off the fear of God, and cast off also the fear of man to such
a degree, as to be ever venturing across the margin of human
legality. Let the most observant of all these public functionaries
simply depone to the effect it would have, even upon our mild
and modern society, were this guardianship dissolved. Would

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 333

it not be evident to him, and is it not equally evident to you all,
that the artificial gloss which now overspreads the face of it
would speedily be dissipated ; and that, underneath, would the
character of man be sure to stand out in far nearer resemblance
to that sketch, however repulsive, which the inspired writer has
here offered of our species ? Were anarchy the order of our
day, and the lawless propensities of man permitted to stalk
abroad in this the season of their wild emancipation ; were all
the restraints of order driven in, and human strength and human
fierceness were to ride in triumph over the prostrate authorities
of the land ; were the reigning will of our country, at this
moment, the will of a spontaneous multitude, doing every man
of them, in rude and random ebullitions, what was right in his
own eyes, with just a fear of our heavenly superior as now exists
in the world, but with all fear and reverence for earthly superiors
taken away from it ; let us just ask you to conceive the effect
of such a state of things, and then to compute how little there
is of moral, and how much there is of mere animal restraint in
the apparent virtues of human society. There is a twofold
benefit in such a contemplation. It will enhance to every
Christian mind the cause of loyalty, and lead him to regard the
power that is, as the minister of God to him for good. And it
will also guide him through many delusions to appreciate justly
the character of man ; to distinguish aright between the sem
blance of principle and its reality ; and to gather, from the
surveys of experience, a fresh evidence for the truth of those
Scriptures which speak so truly of human sinfulness, and point
out so clearly the way of human salvation.

But it is not necessary, for the purpose of identifying the
character of man, as it now is, with what the character of man
was, in its worst features, in the days of the Koyal Psalmist, to
make out by evidence a positive thirst after blood on the part of
any existing class in society. We are not sure that it was any
native or abstract delight in cruelty which prompted the marau
ders of other days to deeds of violence. Place a man in circum
stances of ease and of self-complacency, and he will revolt from,
the infliction of unnecessary pain, just as the gorged and satiated
animal of prey will suffer the traveller to pass without molesta
tion. It forms no part of our indictment against the species,
that his appetite for blood urges him onwards to barbarity, but
that his appetite for other things will urge him on to it ; and
that if, while he had these things, he would rather abstain from

334 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

the death of his fellow-men, yet, rather than want these things,
he would inflict it. It is not that his love of cruelty is the
originating appetite which carries him forward to deeds of
cruelty, but that his abhorrence of cruelty is not enough to
arrest the force of other appetites, when they find that human
life lies in the way of their gratification. The feet of the bor
derers of Judea made haste to shed blood ; but just because,
like the borderers of our own land, their love of booty could
only be indulged with human resistance among human habita
tions. And were these days of public licentiousness again to
return — were the functions of government suspended, and the
only guarantee of peace and of property were the native rectitude
of the species — did the power of anarchy achieve its own darling
object of a jubilee all over the country for human wilfulness ;
and in this way were, not the past inclinations revived, but just
the present inclinations of man let loose upon society — a single
month would riot elapse, ere scenes of as dread atrocity were
witnessed, as those which the Psalmist has recorded, and those
which the apostle has transmitted, as the exemplars, not of
practical, but of general humanity. The latent iniquities of the
human heart would reappear just as soon as the compression of
human authority was lifted away from them ; and these streets
be made to flow with the blood of the most distinguished of our
citizens ; and the violence at first directed against the summit
of society, would speedily cause the whole frame of it to totter
into dissolution ; and in this our moral and enlightened day it
would be found, that there was enough of crime in the country
to spread terror over all its provinces, and to hold its prostrate
families in bondage ; and with such a dreary interregnum of
tumult, and uproar, and vagrancy, as this, would there be a page
of British history as deeply crimsoned over, as are the darkest
annals of the barbarity of our species — all proving how indis
pensable the ordinance of human government is to the well-
being of society ; but also proving, that if it be the will, and
the inward tendency, and the unfettered principle, which con
stitute the real elements of the character of man, this character
lias only been coloured into another hue, without being trans
formed into another essence, by an ordinance which can only
keep its elements in check, but never can extinguish them.

And on applying the spiritual touchstone of the gospel, may
we perhaps fasten a similar charge on many in society, who
never suspected it possible that they had any part in the apostle's

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 335

dark representation of our foul and fallen nature. Even in the
wildest scenes of anarchy, it may not be the love of cruelty, but
the love of power or of plunder, which leads men to the most
revolting abominations of cruelty. It is not so much a ravenous
desire after human blood, as a regardlessness about it, which
stamps a savage barbarity on the characters of men. It is their
regard for the objects of avarice and ambition, coupled with
their regardlessness about the quantity of human life, that lies
in the way of them ; which is enough to account for deeds of
atrocity as monstrous as ever were committed, either by bloody
tyrants, or ferocious multitudes. Now, may not this regard on
the one hand, and this regardlessness on the other, be fully
exemplified by him who looks with delight on the splendid
reversion that awaits him, and cares not how soon the death of
his aged relative may bring it to his door ? And may it not be
exemplified by him who, all in a tumult with military glee, and
the visions of military glory, longs for some arena crowded with
the fellows of his own sentient nature, on which he might bring
the fell implements of destruction to bear, and so signalize him
self in the proud lists of chivalry or patriotism ? And most
striking of all, perhaps, may it not be exemplified, by the most
gentle and pacific of our citizens, who, engrossed with the single
appetite of fear, and under the movements of no other regard
than a regard to his own security, might listen with secret
satisfaction to the tale of the many hundreds of the rebellious
who had fallen — and how the sweep of fatal artillery, or the
charge of victorious squadrons, told with deadly execution on
the flying multitude ? We are not comparing the merits of the
cause of order, which are all triumphant, with those of anarchy ;
the inscribed ensigns of which are as hateful to every Christian
eye, as ever to the Jews of old was the abomination of desolation
spoken of by Daniel the prophet. We are merely expounding
the generalities of a nature, trenched upon every side of it in
deceitfulness ; and where, under the gloss of many plausibilities,
there lurk, unsuspected and unknown, all the rudiments of de
pravity ; and through the intricacies of which, he who saw with
the eye of inspiration could detect a permanent and universal
taint, both of selfishness and of practical atheism. The picture
that he has drawn will bear to be confronted with the humanity
of modern as well as of ancient days ; and, though taken off at
first from the ruder specimens of our kind, yet, on a narrow
inspection, will it be found to be substantiated among the deli-

336 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

cate phases of our more elegant and artificial society ; so as that
every month should be stopped, and the whole world be brought
in guilty before God.

In looking to the present aspect of society, it is not easy so to
manage our argument as to reach conviction among all, that all
are guilty before God ; and that, unknowing of it themselves,
there may be the lurking principles of what is dire in human
atrocity, even under the blandest exhibitions of our familiar and
every-day acquaintanceship. But as there are degrees of guilt,
and as these are more or less evident to human eyes, it would,
perhaps, decide the identity of our present generation with those
of a rude and savage antiquity, could we run along the scale of
actual wickedness that is before us, and fasten upon an exempli
fication of it so plainly and obviously detestable as to vie with
all that is recorded of the villany of our species in former ages
of the world. And such a one has occurred so recently, that
there is not one here present who, upon the slightest allusion,
will not instantly recognise it. We speak not of those who
have openly spoken, and that beyond the margin of legality,
against the government of our land. We speak not of those
who have clamoured so loudly, and lifted so open a front of
hostility to the laws, as to have brought down upon them the
hand of public vengeance. We speak not even of those who,
steeled to the purposes of blood, went forth to kill and to de
stroy, and, found with the implements of violence in their hands,
are now awaiting the sentence of an earthly tribunal on the
enormity into which they have fallen. But we speak to our
men of deeper contrivance ; to those wary and unseen counsel
lors who have so coolly conducted others to the brunt of a full
exposure, and then retired so cautiously within the shelter of
their own cowardice ; those men of print and of plot, and of
privacy, in whose hands the other agents of rebellion were
nothing better than slaves and simpletons ; those men of skill
enough for themselves, to go thus far and no farther, and of
cruelty enough for others, as to care not how many they impelled
across the verge of desperation j those men who have made
their own harvest of the passions of the multitude, and now
skulk in their hiding-places, till the storm of vengeance that is
to sweep the victims of their treachery from the land of the
living shall have finally blown away ; those men who spoke a
patriotism which they never felt, and shed their serpent tears
over sufferings which never drew from their bosoms one sigh of

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 337

honest tenderness. Tell us, if, out of the men who thus have
trafficked in delusion, and in pursuance of their unfeeling ex
periment have entailed want and widowhood upon families,
there may not as dark a picture of humanity be drawn as the
Psalmist drew out of the rude materials that were around him :
And after all that civilisation has done for our species, and all
that smoothness of external aspect into which government has
moulded the form of society ; is it not evident, that upon the
slightest relaxation of its authority, and the faintest prospect
of its dissolution and overthrow, there is lying in reserve as
much of untamed and ruthless ferocity in our land, as, if per
mitted to come forth, would lift an arm of bloody violence, and
scatter all the cruelties of the Reign of Terror among its habi
tations?*

These are rather lengthened illustrations in which we have
indulged ; but who can resist the temptation that offers itself,
when an opening is given for exhibiting the accordancy that
obtains between the truths of observation, and the averments of
Scripture ; when facts are before us, and such a use of them can
be made, as that of turning them into materials by which to
strengthen the foundations of orthodoxy ; and when, out of
scenes which rise with all the freshness of recency before us, it
can be shown how the sturdy apostolic doctrine will bear to be
confronted with every new display, and every new development
of human experience ? And, ere we have done, we should like
to urge three lessons upon you, from all that has been said ; the
first with a view to set your theology upon its right basis ; and
the second with a view to set your loyalty upon its right basis ;
and the third with a view to impress a right practical movement
on those who hold a natural or political ascendency in our land.

I. — First, then, as to the theology of this question. We trust
you perceive how much it is, arid how little it is, that can be
gathered from the comparative peace and gentleness of modern
society ; how much the protection of families is due to the
physical restraints that are laid on by this world's government,
and how little is due to the moral restraints that are laid on by
the unseen government of Heaven ; how little the existing
safety of our commonwealth, both from crime and turbulence, is
owing to the force of any considerations which are addressed to
the principle of man, and how much of it is owing to the force

* This Sermon was preached in 1820, after the suppression of a rebellious movement in
Scotland.

VOL. III. Y

338 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

of such considerations as are addressed to man's fears and man's
selfishness ; — all proving, that if human nature, in this our age,
do not break forth so frequently and so outrageously into vio
lence as in other ages that have gone by, it is only because it is
shackled, arid not because it is tamed. It is more like the tract-
ableness of an animal led about by a chain, than of an animal
inwardly softened into a docility and a mildness which did not
formerly belong to it. It is due, without doubt, to the influence
of a very strong and very salutary counteraction ; but it is a
counteraction that has been formed out of the interest of man,
arid not out of the fear of God. It is due, not to the working
of that celestial machinery which bears on the spiritual part of
our constitution, but to the working of another machinery most
useful for the temporary purpose which it serves, yet only bear
ing on the material and worldly part of our constitution. On
this point, observation and orthodoxy are at one ; and one of
the most convincing illustrations which the apostle can derive to
his own doctrine, may be taken from the testimony of those who,
in the shape of legal functionaries, are ranged along that line of
defence over which humanity, with its numerous outbreakings
of fraud, and rapacity, and violence, is ever passing. Let them
simply aver, on their own experimental feeling, what the result
would be, if all the earthly safeguards of law and of government
were driven away from the rampart at which they are stationed ;
and they are just preaching orthodoxy to our ears, and lending
us their authority to one of its articles, when they tell us that
upon such an event the whole system of social life would go
into unhingement, and that, in the wild uproar of human pas
sions which would follow, kindness, and confidence, and equity,
would take their rapid flight from human habitations.

II. — But, secondly, the very same train of argument which
goes to enlighten the theology of this subject, serves also to
deepen and to establish within us all the principles of a most de
voted loyalty. That view of the human character, upon which
it is contended, by the divine, that unless it is regenerated there
can be no meetness for heaven, is the very same with that view
of the human character upon which it is contended, by the poli
tician, that unless it is restrained there will be no safety from
crime and violence along the course of the pilgrimage which
leads to it. An enlightened Christian recognises the hand of
God in all the shelter that is thrown over him from the fury of
the natural elements ; and he equally recognises it in all the

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 339

shelter that is thrown over him from the fury of the moral ele
ments by which he is surrounded. Had he a more favourable
view of our nature, he might not look on government as so
indispensable ; but, with the view that he actually has, he can
not miss the conclusion of its being the ordinance of Heaven for
the church's good upon earth ; and that thus a canopy of de
fence is drawn over the heads of Zion's travellers ; and they
rejoice in the authority of human laws as an instrument in the
hand of God for the peace of their Sabbaths, and the peace of
their sacraments ; and they deprecate the anarchy that would
ensue from the suspension of them, with as much honest prin
ciple, as they would deprecate the earthquake that might ingulf,
or the hurricane that might sweep away their habitations ; and,
aware of what humanity is, when left to itself, they accept as a
boon from heaven the mechanism which checks the effervescence
of all those fires that would else go forth to burn up and to
destroy.

This, at all times the feeling of every enlightened Christian,
must have been eminently and peculiarly so at that time when
our recent alarms were at the greatest height. It was the time
of our sacrament ; and to all who love its services must it have
been matter of grateful rejoicing, that by the favour of Him
who sways the elements of Nature, and the as uncontrollable
elements of human society, we were permitted to finish these
services in peace ; that, in that feast of love and good -will, we
were not rudely assailed by the din of warlike preparation ; that,
ere Sabbath came, the tempest of alarm, which had sounded so
fearfully along the streets of our city, was hushed into the quiet
ness of Sabbath ; so that, like as if in the midst of sweetest
landscape, and amongst a congregation gathered out of still and
solitary hamlets, and with nothing to break in upon the deep
repose and tranquillity of the scene, save the voice of united
praise, from an assembly of devout and revering worshippers,
were we, under the protection of an arm stronger than any arm
of flesh, and at the bidding of a voice more powerful than that
of mighty conquerors, suffered to enjoy the pure and peaceful
ordinances of our faith, with all the threats and all the outcries
of human violence kept far away from us.

It was the apprehension of many, that it might have been
otherwise. And, what ought to be their enduring gratitude,
when, instead of the wrath of man let loose upon our families,
arid a devoted city given up to the frenzy and the fierceness of

340 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

a misguided population ; and the maddening outcry of com
batants plying against each other their instruments of destruc
tion ; and the speed of flying multitudes, when the noise of the
footmen and the noise of the horsemen gave dreadful intimation
of the coming slaughter ; and the bursting conflagration, in vari
ous quarters, marking out where the fell emissaries of ruin were
at work ; and the shock, and the volley, and the agonies of
dying men, telling the trembling inmates of every household,
that the work of desperation had now begun upon the streets,
and might speedily force its way into all the dwelling-places : —
this is what that God, who has the elements of the moral world
at command, might have visited on a town which has witnessed
so many a guilty sabbath, and harbours within its limits the
ungodliness of so many profane and alienated families — In what
preciousness, then, ought that sabbath to be held ; and what a
boon from the kindness of long-suffering Heaven should we re
gard its quietness ; when, instead of such deeds of vengeance
between townsmen and their fellows, they walked together in
peaceful society to the house of prayer, and sat in peacefulness
together at its best-loved ordinance.

The men who prize the value of this protection the most, are
the men who feel most the need of human government, and who
most revere it as an ordinance of God. Such is their opinion
of the heart, that they believe, unless it be renewed by Divine
grace, there can be no translation into a blessed eternity ; and
such is their opinion of the heart, that they believe, unless its
native inclinations be repressed by human government, there
can be no calm or protected passage along the track of convey
ance in this world. Their loyalty emerges from their orthodoxy.
With them it has all the tenacity of principle ; and is far too
deeply seated to be laid prostrate among the fierce and guilty
agitations of the tumultuous. They have no part in the rancour
of the disaffected ; and they have no part in the ambitiousness
of the dark and daring revolutionist ; and seeking, as they do,
to lead a quiet and a peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty,
a season of turbulence is to them a season of trial, and would be
a season of difficulty, had they not the politics of the Bible to
guide their way among the threats and the terrors of surround
ing desperadoes. " Honour the king, and meddle not with those
who are given to change," are the indelible duties of a record
that is indelible ; and they stamp a sacredness upon Christian
loyalty. They are not at liberty to cancel what God has enacted,

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 341

and to expunge what God has written. They are loyal because
they are religious ; to suffer in such a cause is persecution, to
die in it is martyrdom.

There is a mischievous delusion on this subject. In the minds
of many, and these too men of the first influence and station in
the country, there is a haunting association which still continues
to mislead them, even in the face of all evidence, and of all
honest and credible protestation ; and in virtue of which they,
to this very hour, conceive that such a religion as they call
Methodism, is the invariable companion of a plotting, artful, and
restless democracy. This is truly unfortunate ; for the thing
called Methodism is neither more nor less than Christianity in
earnest ; and yet they who so call it, have it most honestly at
heart to promote the great object of a peaceful, and virtuous,
and well-conditioned society ; and not therefore their disposition,
which is right, but their apprehension upon this topic, which is
egregiously wrong, has just had the effect of bending the whole
line of their patronage and policy the wrong way. And thus
are they unceasingly employed in attempting to kill, as a noxi
ous plant, the only element which can make head against the
tide of irreligion and blasphemy in our land ; conceiving, but
most wofully wide of the truth in so conceiving, that there is a
certain approving sympathy between the sanctity of the evan
gelical system, and the sedition that so lately has derided and
profaned it. The doctrinal Christianity of this very epistle
would be called methodistical by those to whom we are now
alluding ; but sure we are, that the disciple who goes along with
Paul, while he travels in argument through the deeper mys
teries of faith, will not abandon him when, in the latter chapters of
his work, he breaks forth into that efflorescence of beautiful and
perfect morality with which he winds up the whole of his won
drous demonstration ; but will observe the bidden conduct as a
genuine emanation of the expounded creed — when told, that
every soul should be subject unto the higher powers, and that
there is no power but of God, and that the powers which be are
ordained of God. And whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power,
resisteth the ordinance of God ; and they that resist shall receive
to themselves damnation. Wherefore, ye must needs be subject,
not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

III. — We venture to affirm, that it is just the want of this
Christianity in earnest which has brought our nation to the
brink of an emergency so fearful as that upon which we are

342 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

standing. When Solomon says, that it is righteousness which
exalteth a nation, he means something of a deeper and more
sacred character than the mere righteousness of society. This
last may be learned in the school of classical or of civil virtue ;
and an argument may be gathered in its behalf even from the
views of an enlightened selfishness ; and, all lovely as it is in
exhibition, may it draw from the tasteful admirers of what is
fine in character even something more than a mere nominal
acknowledgment. It may carry a certain extent of practical
conformity over the real and living habits of those who, faultless
in honour, and uprightness, and loyalty, are nevertheless devoid
of the religious principle altogether ; and who, so far from being
tainted with methodism, in the sense of that definition which we
have already given of it, would both repudiate its advances upon
their own family, and regret any visible inroads it might make
on our general population.

That Solomon does mean something more than the virtues to
which we are now alluding, is evident, we think, from this cir
cumstance. The term " righteousness " admits of a social and
relative application, and, in this application, may introduce a
conception into the mind that is exclusive of God. But the same
cannot be said of the term "sin." This generally suggests the
idea of God as the Being sinned against. The one term does
not so essentially express the idea of conformity to the Divine
law, as the other term expresses the idea of transgression against
it. It does not carry up the mind so immediately to God ; be
cause, with the utter absence of Him from our thoughts, may it
still retain a substance and a significancy, as expressive of what
is held to be right in a community of human beings. It is well,
then, that the clause, " Kighteousness exalteth a nation," is
followed up by the clause, " But sin is a reproach to any people ; "
and that thus the latter term, which is equivalent to ungodli
ness, by the contrast in which it stands with the former term,
leads us to the true import of the first of these two clauses, and
gives us to understand Solomon as saying, That it is godliness
that exalteth a nation.

Cut away the substratum of godliness, and how, we ask, will
the secondary and the earth-born righteousness be found to thrive
on the remaining soil which nature supplies for rearing it? It
is an error to think that it will make a total withdrawmont of
itself from the world. It will still be found, in straggling speci
mens, among some sheltered and congenial spots even of this

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 343

world's territory — at times among the haunts of lettered enthu
siasm ; and at times on the elevated stage of a rank which stands
forth to public notice, or of an opulence which is raised above
the attacks of care and of temptation ; and, at times, on the
rarely-occurring mould of a native equity, when, in middle and
comfortable life, the rude urgencies of want and of vulgar ambi
tion do not overbear it. Even there it will grow but sparingly,
without the influences of the gospel ; as it did in those ages, and
as it still does in those countries where the gospel is unknown.
But if you step down from those moral eminences, or if you
come out from those few sweet and kindred retirements, where
the moral verdure has stood, unblighted, even in the absence of
Christianity, and thence go forth among the ample spaces, and
the wide, and open, and general exposures of society ; if, on the
arena of common life, you enter the teeming families of the poor,
and hold converse with the mighty host who scarcely know an
interval between waking hours of drudgery and hours of sleeping
unconsciousness ; if, passing away from the abodes of refinement,
you mingle with the many whose feelings and whose faculties
are alike buffeted in the din and the dizzying of incessant labour
— we mean to affix no stigma on the humbler brethren of our
nature ; but we may at least be suffered to say, that among the
richest of fortune and accomplishment in our land, we know not
the individual whose virtues, if transplanted into the unkindlier
region of poverty, would have withstood the operation of all the
adverse elements to which it is exposed — unless upheld by that
very godliness which he perhaps disowns, that very methodism
on which perhaps he pours the cruelty of his derision.

And here it may be remarked, how much the taste of many
among the higher orders of society, is at war with the best security
that can be devised for the peace and the well-being of society.
There are many among them who admire the blossoms of virtue,
while they dislike that only culture which can spread this lovely
efflorescence over the whole field of humanity. They advert not
to this — that the virtue which is cradled in the lap of abund
ance, and is blown into luxuriance among the complacencies of
a heart at ease, would soon evince its frailty were it carried out
among the exposures of an every-day world ; that there it would
droop and perish under the uncongenial influences which, apart
from religion, would positively wither up all the honesties and
delicacies of humble life ; and, therefore, that if they nauseate
that gospel, which ever meets with its best acceptance, and works

344 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

its most signal effects upon the poor, they abandon the poor to
that very depravity into which they themselves, had they been
placed among the same temptations and besetting urgencies,
would assuredly have fallen. The force of native integrity may
do still what it did in the days of pagan antiquity, when it
reared its occasional specimens of worth and patriotism ; but it
is the power of godliness, and that alone, which will reclaim our
population in the length and breadth of it, and shed a moral
bloom and a moral fragrance over the wide expanse of society.
But with many, and these too the holders of a great and ascen
dant influence in our land, godliness is puritanism, and ortho
doxy is repulsive moroseness, and the pure doctrine of the apostles
is fanatical and disgusting vulgarity ; and thus is it a possible
thing, that in their hands the alone aliment of public virtue may
be withheld, or turned into poison. Little are they aware of the
fearful reaction which may await their natural enmity to the
truth as it is in Jesus ; and grievously have they been misled
from the sound path, even of political wisdom, in the suspicion
and intolerance wherewith they have regarded the dispensers of
the Word of Life among the multitude. The patent way to dis
arm nature of her ferocities, is to Christianize her; and we
should look on all our alarms with thankfulness, as so many
salutary indications, did they lead either to multiply the religious
edifices, or to guide the religious patronage of our land.

But, again, it is not merely the taste of the higher orders
which may be at war with the best interests of our country. It
is also their example ; not their example of dishonesty, not their
example of disloyalty, not their example of fierce and tumultu
ous violence, but an example of that which, however unaccom
panied with any one of these crimes in their own person, multi
plies them all upon the person of the imitators — we mean the
example of their irreligion. A bare example of integrity on the
part of a rich man, who is freed from all temptations to the
opposite, is not an effective example with a poor man, who is
urgently beset at all hands with these temptations. It is thus
that the most pure and honourable example which can shine
upon the poor from the upper walks of society, of what we have
called the secondary and the earth-born righteousness, will never
counterwork the mischief which emanates from the example that
is there held forth of ungodliness. It is the poor man's sabbath
which is the source of his week-day virtues. The rich may
have other sources ; but take away the sabbath from the poor,

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 345

and you inflict a general desecration of character upon them.
Taste, and honour, and a native love of truth, may be sufficient
guarantees for the performance of duties to the breaking of
which there is no temptation. But they are not enough for the
wear and exposure of ordinary life. They make a feeble defence
against such temptations as assail and agitate the men who, on
the rack of their energies, are struggling for subsistence. With
them the relative obligations hold more singly upon the reli
gious ; and if the tie of religion, therefore, be cut asunder, the
whole of their morality will forthwith go into unhingement.
Whatever virtue there is on the humbler levels of society, it
holds direct of the sabbath and of the sanctuary ; and when these
cease to be venerable, the poor cease to be virtuous. You take
away all their worth, when you take away the fear of God from
before their eyes ; and why then should we wonder at the result
of a very general depravation among them, if before their eyes
there should be held forth, on the part of their earthly superiors,
an utter fearlessness of God? The humbler, it ought not to
be expected, will follow the higher classes on the ground of social
virtue ; for they have other and severer difficulties to combat,
and other temptations, over which the victory would be greatly
more arduous. But the humbler will follow the higher on the
ground of irreligion. Only they will do it in their own style,
and, perhaps, with the more daring and lawless spirit of those
who riot in the excesses of a newly felt liberty. Should the
merchant, to lighten the pressure of work in his counting-house,
make over the arrears of his week-day correspondence to the
snug and secret opportunity of the coming sabbath — the hard
wrought labourer just follows up this example in his own way,
when, not to lighten, but to solace the fatigue of the six days
that are past, he spends the seventh in some haunt of low dissi
pation. Should the man of capital make his regular escape
from the dull Sunday, and the still duller sermon, by a rural
excursion with his party of choice spirits, to the villa of weekly
retreat, which by his wealth he has purchased and adorned — let
it not be wondered at, that the man of drudgery is so often seen,
with his band of associates, among the suburb fields and path
ways of our city ; or that the day which God hath commanded
to be set apart for Himself, should be set apart by so vast a
multitude, who pour forth upon our outskirts, to the riot and
extravagance of holiday. Should it be held indispensable for
the accommodation of our higher citizens, that the great central

346 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

lounge of politics, and periodicals, and news, be opened on Sab
bath to receive them ; then, though the door of public entry is
closed, and with the help of screens, and hangings, and partial
shutters, something like an homage is rendered to public decency,
and the private approach is cunningly provided, and all the
symptoms of sneaking and conscious impropriety are spread over
the face of this guilty indulgence — let us not wonder, though
the strength of example has forced its way through the impo-
tency of all these wretched barriers, and that the reading-rooms
of sedition and infidelity are now open every Sabbath for the
behoof of our general population. Should the high-bred city
gentleman hold it foul scorn to have the raillery of the pulpit
thus let loose upon his habits, or that any parson who fills it
should so presume to tread upon his privileges — let us no longer
wonder, if this very language, and uttered, too, in this very
spirit, be re-echoed by the sour and sturdy Kadical, who, equal
to his superior in the principle of ungodliness, only outpeers him
in his expressions of contempt for the priesthood, and of impetu
ous defiance to all that wears the stamp of authority in the land.
It is thus that the impiety of our upper classes now glares upon
us from the people, with a still darker reflection of impiety back
again ; and that, in the general mind of our country, there is a
suppressed but brooding storm, the first elements of which were
injected by the men who now tremble the most under the dread
of its coming violence.

It is the decay of vital godliness amongst us, that has brought
on this great moral distemper. It is irreligion which palpably
lies at the bottom of it. Could it only have confined its in
fluences among the sons of wealth or of lettered infidelity, society
might have been safe. But this was impossible ; and now that
it has broke forth on the wide and populous domain of humanity,
is it seen that, while a slender and sentimental righteousness
might have sufficed, at least, for this present world, and among
those whom fortune has shielded from its adversities, it is only
by that righteousness which is propped on the basis of piety
that the great mass of a nation's virtue can be upholden.

There is something in the history of these London executions
that is truly dismal.* It is like getting a glimpse into Pande
monium • nor do we believe that, in the annals of human de
pravity, did ever stout-hearted sinners betray a more fierce and
unfeeling hardihood. It is not that part of the exhibition which

* Executions of men who bad conspired for the murder of the Ministers of State.

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 347

is merely revolting to sensitive nature that we are now alluding
to. It is not the struggle, and the death, and the shrouded
operator, and the bloody heads that were carried round the
scaffold, and the headless bodies of men who but one hour before
lifted their proud defiance to the God in whose presence the whole
decision of their spirits must by this time have melted away.
It is the moral part of the exhibition that is so appalling. It is
the firm desperado step with which they ascended to the place
of execution. It is the undaunted scowl which they cast on the
dread apparatus before them. It is the frenzied and bacchana
lian levity with which they bore up their courage to the last,
and earned, in return, the applause of thousands as fierce and
as frenzied as themselves. It is the unquelled daring of the man
who laughed, and who sung, and who cheered the multitude,
ere he took his leap into eternity, and was cheered by the multi
tude rending the air with approbation back again. These are
the doings of infidelity. These are the genuine exhibitions of
the popular mind, after that Eeligion has abandoned it. It is
neither a system of unchristian morals, nor the meagre Chris
tianity of those who deride, as methodistical, all the peculiarities
of our Faith, that will recall our neglected population. There
is not one other expedient by which you will recover the olderi
character of England, but by going forth with the gospel of
Jesus Christ among its people. Nothing will subdue them but
that regenerating power which goes along with the faith of the
New Testament. And nothing will charm away the aliena
tion of their spirits, but their belief in the overtures of redeem
ing mercy.

But we may expatiate too long ; and let us therefore hasten
to a close with a few brief and categorical announcements,
which we shall simply leave with you as materials for your own
consideration.

First. Though social virtue, and loyalty, which is one of its
essential ingredients, may exist in the upper walks of life apart
from godliness — yet godliness, in the hearts of those who have
the brunt of all the common and popular temptations to stand
against, is the main and effective hold that we have upon them
for securing the righteousness of their lives.

Secondly. The despisers of godliness are the enemies of the
true interest of our nation ; and it is possible that, under the
name of Methodism, that very instrument may be put away
which can alone recall the departing virtues of our land.

348 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

Thirdly. Where godliness exists, loyalty exists ; and no plau
sible delusion — no fire of their own kindling, lighted at the torch
of false or spurious patriotism, will ever eclipse the light of this
plain authoritative Scripture — " Honour the king, and meddle
not with those who are given to change."

But again. Such is the power of Christianity, that, even
though partially introduced in the whole extent of its saving
and converting influences, it may work a general effect on the
civil and secular virtues of a given neighbourhood. It is thus
that Christianity may only work the salvation of a few, while it
raises the standard of morality among many. The reflex influ
ence of one sacred character upon the vicinity of his residence
may soften, and purify, and overawe many others, even where it
does not spiritualize them. This is encouragement to begin
with. It lets us perceive that, even before a great spiritual
achievement has been finished, a kind of derived and moral
influence may have widely and visibly spread among the popu
lation. It is thus that Christians are the salt of the earth ; and
we know not how few they are that may preserve society at
large from falling into dissolution. It is because there are so
very few among us, that our nation stands on the brink of so
fearful an emergency. Were there fewer, our circumstances
would be still more fearful ; and if, instead of this, there were a
few more, the national virtue may reattain all the lustre it ever
had, even while a small fraction of our people are spiritual men.
It is in this way, that we would defend those who so sanguinely
count on the power of Christianity, from the imputation of being
at all romantic in their hopes or undertakings. It may take
ages ere their ultimate object, which is to generalize the spirit
and character of the millennium in our world, be accomplished.
But if there were just a tendency to go forth among our people
on the errand of Christianizing them, and that tendency were
not thwarted by the enmity and intolerance of those who revile
and discourage and set at nought all the activities of religious
zeal, we should not be surprised though in a few years a resur
rection were witnessed amongst us of all the virtues that esta
blish and that exalt a nation.

But lastly. Alarming as the aspect of the times is, and deeply
tainted and imbued as the minds of many are with infidelity ;
and widely spread as the habit has become of alienation from
all the ordinances of religion ; and sullen as the contempt may
be, wherewith the hardy blasphemer of Christianity would

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 349

hearken to its lessons, and eye its ministers, yet even he could
not so withstand the honest and persevering good-will of one on
whom there stood, visibly announced, the single-hearted bene
volence of the gospel, as either to refuse him a tribute of kind
liness, when he met him on the street, or as to reject, with
incivility and disdain, the advances he made upon his own
family. Even though he should sternly refuse to lend himself
to any of the processes of a moral and spiritual operator, yet it
is a fact experimentally known, that he will not refuse to lend
his children. The very man who, unpitying of himself, danced
and sung on the borders of that abyss which was to ingulf him
in a lake of vengeance for ever, even he had about him a part
of surviving tenderness, and he could positively weep when he
thought of his family. He who, had he met a minister of state
would have murdered him, had he met the Sabbath-school
teacher who ventured across his threshold, and simply requested
the attendance of his children, might have tried to bear a harsh
and repulsive front against him, but would have found it to be
impossible. Here is a feeling which even the irreligion of the
times has not obliterated, and it has left, as it were, an open
door of access, through which we might at length find our way
to the landing-place of a purer and better generation. We
hear much of the olden time, when each parent presided over
the religion of his own family, and acted every Sabbath evening
the patriarch of Christian wisdom among the inmates of his own
dwelling- place. How is it that this beautiful picture is again to
be realized ? Is it by persuasives, however forcible, addressed
to those who never listen to them ? Is it by the well-told re
grets of a mere indolent sentimeritalism ? Is it by lifting up a
voice, that will die in distance away, long ere it reach that
mighty population who lie so remote from all our churches, and
from all our ordinances ? Are we to be interdicted from bending
the twig with a strength which we do have, because others
require of us to bend the impracticable tree, with a strength
which we do not have ? The question is a practical one, and
should be met experimentally ; — how is the olden time to be
brought back again ? Is it by merely looking back upon it
with an eye of tasteful contemplation ; or is it by letting matters
alone ; or is it by breathing indignation and despite against all
the efforts of religious philanthropy ; or is it by disdainful
obloquy against those who do something, on the part of those
that do nothing? Who, in a future generation, will be the like-

350 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

liest parents for setting up the old system ? — the children who
now run neglected through the streets, or those who, snatched
from Sabbath profanation, receive a weekly training among the
decencies and the docilities of a religious school ? It is not the
experimental truth upon this question, that the amount of family
religion is lessened under such an arrangement, in those houses
where it had a previous existence ; but that instead of this it is
often established in houses where it was before unknown. It is
true, that unless a Sabbath -school apparatus be animated by the
Spirit of God, it will not bear with effect on the morals of the
rising generation ; but still it is by the frame-work of some
apparatus or other that the Spirit works : and we deem that the
likeliest and the best devised for the present circumstances of
our country, which can secure, and that immediately, the most
abundant strength of application on tender and susceptible
childhood.*

In conclusion, we may advert to a certain class of society,
now happily on the decline, who are fearful of enlightening the
poor ; and would rather that everything was suffered to remain
in the quiescence of its present condition ; and though the Bible
may be called the key to the kingdom of heaven, yet, associat
ing, as they do, the turbulence of the people with the supposed
ascent that they have made in the scale of information, would
not care so to depress them beneath the level of their present
scanty literature, as virtually to deny them the use and the pos
session of the Oracles of God. Such is the unfeeling policy of

* Had not the sermon been extended to so great a length, its author might have entered
a little more into detail on the operation and advantage of the Sabbath-school system ; an
omission, however, which he less regrets, as, in the work of supplying it, he would
have done little more than repeated what he has published on the subject, in a more
express form.

The same remark applies to the cursory allusion that he has made on that melancholy
topic, the lack of. city churches, and the unwieldy extent of city parishes ; he having, else
where, both delivered the arithmetical statements upon this topic, and also ventured to
suggest the gradual remedy that might be provided for the restoration of church-going habits
among the people of our great towns.

He takes the opportunity which this note affords him, of referring the attention of hia
readers to a truly Christian charge, drawn up by the Methodist body in November 1819. on
the subject of the political discontents which then agitated the country. It was circulated,
he understands, among the members and ministers of that connexion, and ought for ever to
dissolve the imagination of any alliance between the spirit of Methodism and the spirit of
a, factious or disaffected turbulence.

He would further observe, that the mighty influence of a Sabbath on the general moral
and religious character of the people, may serve to vindicate the zeal of a former generation
about this one observance — a zeal which is regarded by many as altogether misplaced and
puritanical. Without entering into the question, whether the law of the country should
interfere to shield this day from outward and visible profanation, it may at least be affirmed,
that the opinion of those who rate the alternations of Christianity in a land, by the fluctuat
ing regards which, from one age to another, are rendered to the Christian Sabbath, is deeply
founded on the true philosophy of our nature.

IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 351

those who would thus smother all the capabilities of humble life,
and lay an interdict on the cultivation of human souls, and bar
ter away the eternity of the lower orders, for the temporal safety
and protection of the higher, and, in the false imagination that
to sow knowledge is to sow sedition in the land, look suspiciously
and hardly on any attempt thus to educate the inferior classes of
society. It is well that these bugbears are rapidly losing their
influence — and we know not how far this is due to our late
venerable monarch, who, acting like a father for the good of his
people, certainly did much to rebuke this cruel and unfeeling
policy away from his empire. His saying, " That he hoped to
see the time when there should not be a poor child in his do
minions who was not taught to read the Bible," deserves to be
enshrined among the best and the wisest of all the memorabilia
of other days. It needs only the Saxon antiquity of Alfred, to
give it a higher place than is given to all that is recorded even
of his wisdom. We trust that it will be embodied in the re
membrance of our nation, and be handed down as a most pre
cious English tradition, for guiding the practice of English
families ; and that, viewed as the memorial of a Patriot King, it
will supplant the old association that obtained between know
ledge and rebellion, and raise a new association in its place, be
tween the cause of education and the cause of loyalty. Be
assured, that it is not because the people know too much, that
they ever become the willing subjects of any factious or unprin
cipled demagogue — it is just because they know too little. It is
just because ignorance is the field on which the quackery of a
political impostor ever reaps its most abundant harvest. It is
this which arms him with all his superiority ; and the way
eventually to protect society from the fermentation of such agi
tators, is to scatter throughout the mass as much of knowledge
and information as will equalize the people to the men who bear
them no other regard, than as the instruments of uproar and
overthrow. No coercion can so keep clown the cause of scholar
ship, as that there shall not be a sufficient number, both of
educated and unprincipled men, to plot the disturbance and
overthrow of all the order that exists in society. You cannot
depress these to the level of popular ignorance, in a country
where schools have not been universally instituted. You cannot
unscholar demagogues down to the level of an untaught multi
tude ; and the only remaining alternative is, to scholar the

352 IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT.

multitude up to the level of demagogues. Let Scotland,* even
in spite of the exhibition that she has recently made, be com
pared with the other two great portions of our British territory,
and it will be seen, historically as well as argumentatively, that
the way to tranquillize a people is not to inthral but to enlighten
them. It is, in short, with general knowledge as it is with the
knowledge of Christianity. There are incidental evils attendant
on the progress of both ; but a most glorious consummation will
be the result of the perfecting of both. Let us go forth, without
restraint, on the work of evangelizing the world, and the world,
under such a process, will become the blissful abode of Christian
and well-ordered families. And let us go forth, with equal
alacrity, to the work of spreading education among our own
people ; and, instead of bringing on an anticipated chaos, will it
serve to grace arid to strengthen all the bulwarks of security in
the midst of us. The growth of intelligence and of moral worth
among the people, will at length stamp upon them all that
majesty of which they will ever be ambitious ; and, instead of a
precarious tranquillity, resting upon the basis of an ignorance
ever open to the influences of delusion, will the elements of
peace, and truth, and righteousness, be seen to multiply along
with the progress of learning in our land.

* What we regret most in our late disturbances, is, that it may serve to foment the pre
judice which still exists against the cause of popular education. It is worthy of remark,
that of late years, both in Glasgow and Paisley, this cause has been most lamentably on the
decline ; insomuch that we will venture to say, there is no town population in Scotland
which has become so closely assimilated, in this respect, to the manufacturing population
of our sister country. Any danger which may be conceived to arise from education, pro
ceeds not from the extent of it in any one class of society, but from the inequality of it
between people either of the same or of different classes ; thus rendering one part of the
population more manageably subservient to any designing villany or artifice that may exist
in another part. The clear and direct way of restoring this inequality, is, not to darken and
degrade all, which is impracticable, but, as much as possible, to enlighten all

SERMONS ON PUBLIC OCCASIONS.

VOL. III.

SEKMON I.

(Preached before the Dundee Missionary Society, Oct. 26, 1812.)

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS APPOINTED FOR THE PROPAGATION OP THE
GOSPEL ; AND THE DUTY OP THE CHRISTIAN PUBLIC TO KEEP THEM BOTH IN
VIGOROUS OPERATION.

" Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing hy the word of God."— ROMANS x. 17.

IN the prosecution of the following discourse, I shall first lay
before you, in a few words, the general lesson which the text
furnishes ; and, in the second place, I shall apply it to explain
the objects of that Society whose claims to the generosity of the
public I am appointed to advocate.

First. As all is suspended upon God, and as He reigns with
as supreme a dominion in the heart of man as in the world around
us, there is no doubt that every affection of this heart — the re
morse which imbitters it, the terror which appals it, the faith which
restores it, the love which inflames it— there can be no doubt, I
say, that all is the work of God. However great the diversity
of operations, it is He that worketh all in all ; and the apostle
Paul expressly ascribes the faith of a human soul to the operation
of His hand, when he prays, in behalf of the Thessaloniaris, that
God would fulfil in them all the good pleasure of His goodness,
and the work of faith with power.

But, on the other hand, it is evident, that throughout the wide
extent of nature and of providence, though it be God alone that
worketh, yet He worketh by instruments ; and that, without any
wish to question or to impair His sovereignty, it is an established
habit of language to ascribe that to the instrument, which is
solely and exclusively due to the Omnipotent Himself. We say
that it is rain which makes the grass to grow : it is God, in fact,
who makes the grass to grow ; and He does it by the instru
mentality of rain. Yet we do not say that there is any impiety
in this mode of expression ; nor does it imply that we in thought
transfer that to the instrument, which is due only to Him in

356 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

whose hand the instrument is. It is a mere habit of language,
and the apostle himself has fallen into the use of it. None were
more impressed than he with the pious sentiment that all de
pends upon God, and cometh from God ; yet he does not over
look the instrumentality of a preacher, and tells the Komans, in
the words of my text, that " faith cometh by hearing, and hear
ing by the word of God."

If, in that extraordinary age, when the Author of nature broke
in upon the constancy of its operations, and asserted by miracles
His own mighty power to subdue and to control it — if, in such
an age, one of His own inspired messengers does not overlook
the use and agency of instruments, surely it would ill become us
to overlook them. It is right that we should carry about with
us, at all times and in all places, a sentiment of piety ; but it
must not be piety of our own forging — it must be the prescribed
piety of revelation. We have no right to sit in indolence, and
wait for the immediate agency of heaven, if God has told us that
it is by the co-operation of human beings that the end is to be
accomplished ; and if He orders that co-operation, we are not
merely to acquiesce in the sentiment that it is God who does the
thing, but we must acquiesce in His manner of doing it ; and if
that be by instruments, nothing remains for us but submissively
to concur and obediently to go along with it.

Now, let it be observed, that the operation of the two instru
ments laid before us in the text is somewhat different at present
from what it was in the days of the apostles. Those were the
days of inspiration ; and the faith which was so widely diffused
through the world in the first ages of Christianity, came by the
hearing of inspired teachers. The two steps of the process were
just what we find them described in the passage before us : Faith
came by hearing — it came by the hearing of the apostles ; and
hearing came by the Word of God — for, in the great matters of
salvation, the apostles spake only as God put the word into their
mouth, and as the Spirit of God gave them utterance.

But whatever is capable of being spoken is capable of being
written also ; and it was not long before the teachers of Chris
tianity committed to writing the doctrine of salvation. It went
over the world, and it has come down to posterity, in the form
of Gospels and Epistles. The collection of these documents is
still called the Word of God : it is in fact that word come down
to us by the instrumentality of written language. If you read
it with the impression on your mind that it is the genuine pro-

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 357

duction of inspired men, yon are in circumstances likely enough
for receiving faith. Now, however, there is a change in one of
the instruments : it makes all the difference betwixt the messen
ger delivering the message in person, arid sending you the sub
stance of it in a written communication. In each of the ways,
faith may result, and faith has resulted from it : there have been
many thousand examples of the efficacy of the latter process as
well as of the former — in which case, we may say that faith
came by reading, and reading by the Word of God.

We are not to suppose, however, when reading was substituted
in the place of hearing, that hearing was entirely laid aside. It
is true, that you can no longer hear the immediate messengers
of Heaven ; but you can hear the descendants of these messen
gers. You can no longer hear men who have the benefit of
inspiration ; but you can hear men, whose office it is to give their
study to the written documents, which the inspiration of a former
age has left behind it. We know that you have access to these
documents yourselves ; and may light and learning grow and
multiply among you. We know, that upon the solitary reading
of the word, Heaven often sends its most precious influences.
But we know that Heaven also gives a salutary and a saving
influence to the living energy of a human voice — that the man
who speaketh from the heart speaketh to it — that the tones of
earnestness, and sincerity, and feeling, carry an emphasis and an
infection along with them — that there is an impression in the
power of example — that there is an authority in superior learn
ing — that there is a charm in fervent piety — that there is a use
fulness in the wisdom which can apply Scripture to the varieties
of individual experience — that there is a force and urgency in
pathetic exhortation — that there is a constraining influence in
the watchful anxiety of Him who entreats you to mind the things
which belong to your peace. These are undoubted facts ; and
the minister who can combine all these in his own person, and
bring them to bear upon the minds of his people, may, under the
blessing of God, convert the hearing of the word into an instru
ment of mighty operation even in these latter days, and may
exemplify my text upon many of those who are sitting and listen
ing around him. Faith may be wrought in them with power ;
and when asked to explain the process by which they arrived at
it, they may truly say, that their faith came by hearing, and
their hearing by the word of God.

In no age of the church, indeed, does it appear that the one

358 THE TWO GEEAT INSTRUMENTS.

instrument ever superseded the other ; or that, upon the mere
existence, of the written word among the people, the hearing of
that word was ever dispensed with as a superfluous exercise.
When Ezra received the written law, there is no doubt that
copies of it would spread and multiply in the country ; yet this
was not enough in the eye of that great Jewish reformer. He
himself opened the book in the sight of the people, and they
stood up. He had priests and Levites along with him ; and we
are told in Nehemiah, that they not only " read in the book of
the law of God distinctly, but they gave the sense, and caused
the people to understand the reading." And we have reason
to believe, that this reading and expounding of the law was not
acted upon on one solitary occasion, but that from the days of
Ezra it formed a permanent institution among the Jews. We
meet with traces of its existence in the New Testament. In the
Acts of the Apostles we have some information respecting the
service of the synagogue. When Paul and his companions came
to Antioch in Pisidia, they went into the synagogue on the sab
bath day, and sat down ; and after the reading of the law and
the prophets — a circumstance introduced without any explana
tion, as if it had been a mere matter of course, and a customary
exercise among them — after this reading of the law and the pro
phets, the rulers of the synagogue sent unto them, saying, "Men
and brethren, if ye have any word of exhortation unto the people,
say on." But, in the Gospel by Luke, we have a piece of his
tory still more decisive; when our Saviour Himself not only
sanctions by His presence, but gives the high authority of His
example, to the reading and exposition of the word. He stood
up, and read a passage out of their Scriptures, and expounded
the passage to them. It is not likely that there was any viola
tion of the established order of the synagogue in this proceeding
of our Saviour's. It was not His practice to fly in the face of
any existing institution ; and from this passage we collect not
merely the high sanction of His example to the practice of read
ing and expounding, but we also collect that it was a practice in
established operation among the Jews. And it has descended,
without interruption, through all the successive ages of Christian
worship. The inspired teachers of Christianity deemed it neces
sary to leave something more than the written volume of inspira-
ation behind them. They left teachers and overseers ; and to
this very day, the readings, and the explanations, and the ser
mons of Christian pastors, are superadded to the silent and soli-

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 359

tary reading of Christian people ; and both are found to be
instruments of mighty operation, for the perfecting of the saints
and for the edifying of the body of Christ.

Neither instrument is to be dispensed with. If you have
hearing without reading, you lay the church open to all the cor
ruptions of Popery. You have priests, but you have no Bibles.
You have a minister, but you have no word of God to confront
him. You take your lesson from the wisdom of man, and throw
away from you all the light and benefit of revelation. The
faith of the people lies at the mercy of every capricious element
in the human character. It fluctuates with the taste and the
understanding of the minister. The precious interest of your
souls is committed to the passions and the prejudices of a fellow
mortal — that interest for which God Himself has made so noble
a provision — for which He sent His eternal Son into the world,
and conferred miracles and revelations on His followers. By
pinning your creed to your minister, you put the whole of this
provision away from you ; you change a heavenly instructor for
an earthly ; you turn from the offered guidance of the Almighty,
and resign the keeping of your conscience to one who, in as far
as he wanders from the word of God, is as blind and ignorant
and helpless as yourself. No, my brethren ! keep fast by your
Bible. Try, if you can, to outstrip us in the wisdom of the
word of Christ ; and bring the salutary control of a zealous,
and enlightened, and reading population, to bear upon the
priesthood. Let not your faith come by hearing alone ; but let
your hearing be tried by the word of God. Let it not be said,
that what you believe is what you have heard ; and that what
you have heard is what prejudice, or fancy, or habit, or un
authorized speculation, may have suggested to your minister.
Let it be said that what you believe is what you have heard —
not because what you have heard cometh from him, and is
supported by his authority ; but because you know it to be the
doctrine of the Bible, and you are satisfied that he has acted the
part of a faithful interpreter — not because you have tried the
word by the hearing ; but because you have tried the hearing
by the word — not because you have brought revelation under
the tribunal of your minister; but because you have brought
your minister under the tribunal of revelation. In the mighty
concern of your faith, we give you every encouragement to
bring your own reading and your own discernment into action.
Have the Bible, that high and ultimate standard of appeal, per-

360 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

petually in your eye. Cultivate a growing acquaintance with
this standard. It will keep all right and steady, and save you
from being agitated by the ever-varying winds of human doc
trine and human speculation. Your faith will come by hearing,
but your hearing by the word of God.

But, I again repeat it, neither instrument is to be dispensed
with. If you have reading without hearing, you throw away
the benefit of a public ministry — an institution sanctioned by the
Bible, and transmitted to us through all the successive ages of
the church, from the very time of the apostles. Let every man,
if possible, be as enlightened as his minister ; and let us make
perpetual approaches to that state of things when " they shall
teach no more every man his brother and every man his neigh
bour, saying, * Know the Lord ; ' for they shall all know me,
from the least of them even to the greatest." It is our delight
and our confidence that scriptural knowledge is every day ex
tending among you ; but we cannot shut our eyes to the obvious
fact, that the degree of illumination foretold by the prophet is
not yet arrived — that though the majority be thinning every
year, yet the unenlightened are still the majority — that priests
have still to do what they did in the days of Ezra ; they have
riot merely to read in the book of the law distinctly, but they
have to give the sense, arid cause you to understand the reading
— that though, after the era of universal light, some may think
that the institution of a public ministry might be dispensed
with ; yet as the era has not yet arrived, but we are only on the
road to it, the institution itself is one of the most powerful ex
pedients for hastening its accomplishment. But what is more,
I would not rashly give up the hearing of the word even after
the light of perfect knowledge has dawned in all its brilliancy
upon the world. " Wherefore, I will not be negligent," says
the apostle Peter, " to put you always in remembrance of these
things, though ye know them, and be established in the present
truth." Though you have no knowledge to receive, you have
memories to be refreshed ; minds which, however pure, need to
be stirred up by way of remembrance. It is true, you have the
Bible within your reach ; but every man knows how different in
point of certainty is the doing of a thing which may be done at
any time, and the doing of a thing which habit and duty have
accustomed you to repeat at stated intervals. You may not be
disposed at all times to bring your minds into contact with your
Bibles ; but upon a simple and mechanical act of obedience to

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 361

the Sabbath-bell, a population is assembled, and a minister is in
his place, whose office it is to bring the Bible into contact with
your minds. I do not speak of his ministrations from house to
house. I speak of his ministrations from the pulpit, whence it
is often the high prerogative of a single man to make the word
of God bear with energy and effect upon the consciences of hun
dreds. And he can do more than this ; he can spread around
him the infection of his own piety. He can kindle the fine
ardours of sentiment and sincerity among his hearers. He can
pour out all his tenderness and all his anxiety upon them. By
the power and urgency of a living voice, he can touch the hearts
of his people ; and, with the blessing of God upon his endea
vours, he can pull down the indolence, and the security, and the
strongholds of corruption within them. The worth of the man
can give a mighty energy to the words of the minister ; and,
what with the example of one, and the stirring eloquence of
another, I hold an active, a pure, and a zealous ministry, spread
over the face of the country, and labouring in its districts and
parishes, to be one great palladium of Christianity in the land.

This brings me, in the second place, to the object of that
Society whose claims upon the generosity of the public I am
appointed to lay before you.

But pardon me, if I put a case to you, taken from ordinary
life, for the sake of familiar and convincing illustration.

Let me suppose, that upon any one individual among you
there has devolved the entire maintenance of a helpless orphan,
and that you lie under a solemn obligation to acquit yourself to
the full of this benevolent undertaking. You know that the
term " maintenance " embraces in it many particulars ; but, for
the present, I shall confine my attention to two — the food to eat,
and the raiment to put on. Both must be provided for the
object of your charity ; and for this purpose you must look for
ward to the payment of separate accounts ; and the thing which
you are bound to do cannot be accomplished without satisfying
the demands of two or more tradesmen. You may feed the
child — but withhold from it raiment, and you leave it to perish
in the inclemency of the weather ; you may clothe the child —
but withhold from it food, and it dies in the agonies of hunger.
You have done something, it is true ; and that something was
very essential : but you have also omitted something ; and that
something was equally essential, so much so, indeed, that by
virtue of the omission the unhappy orphan has perished ; and

362 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

upon you lie the guilt and the cruelty of having abandoned it.
I speak in these strong terms, because I am supposing that the
individual is both bound and able to accomplish the entire
maintenance of the child. Yet, when called to account for the
barbarity of his conduct, I can conceive an explanation by
which he might attempt to palliate his negligence. " It is true,
I was quite equal to the task ; but then I was so teased by the
number of separate accounts and separate applications ! Had
one tradesman undertaken to provide all the articles of main
tenance, my patience would not have been exhausted : but I
had not one, but several, to satisfy ; and I fairly confess that
I got tired and disgusted at the number of them." The answer
to this is quite obvious. It is found, that if one man devotes an
undivided attention to one kind of work, he carries it to far
greater perfection than if his attention were distracted among
several. It is this principle which has given rise to the division
of employment in society. Each individual betakes himself to
his own trade and his own manufacture. The accommodations
of life are poured in far greater abundance upon the country ;
and each article is both better done, and furnished far more
cheaply, than if one individual had undertaken to prepare every
thing which enters into the maintenance of a human being.

When our Saviour left the earth, He left a task behind Him
to His disciples — " Go ye therefore, and teach all nations." A
great part of the task has devolved upon us ; for it is not yet
accomplished. There are nations who never heard of the name
of Jesus; and the cause of sending light and Christianity
amongst them is left an orphan upon the world. There are
thousands, even in this professing country, who would spurn at
the orphan, and pour upon it the cruelty of their derision : but
there are others who feel an emphasis in the last words of their
Saviour, and have taken into their protection the cause which
He has bequeathed to us. On the benevolence of a Christian
public, the maintenance of that cause is devolved. It is their
part not to leave it to perish amongst the garbled and unfinished
operations of a cold, timid, and hesitating selfishness. The pro
pagation of the gospel is the task which your Saviour has con
signed to you. It is a cause, the maintenance of which, consists
of various particulars ; but I confine myself to two — you must
put the mighty instruments of my text into operation ; and you
must keep them agoing till your object be accomplished. That
object is the salvation of the heathen. There is only one name

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 363

given under heaven whereby men can be saved. There is only
one way in which salvation can be brought about, and it is this
— " The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one
that believetb." My text tells you that "faith cometh by hear
ing, and hearing by the word of God." Send Bibles among
them : but there are many countries, where, without mission
aries, a Bible is a sealed book, and a packet of Bibles a mere
spectacle for savages to stare at. Without a human agent in
the business, you keep back one of the instruments entirely —
you keep back the hearing of the word ; and what is more, with
out a human agent, you leave the other instrument unfinished
— you may give the Bible, but you keep back the capacity of
reading it. Both must be done ; and if you withhold human
agents, you starve and you stifle the cause which it is your duty
to support and to stand by through all its necessities.

To make the case before us correspond in all its points to the
imaginary one which I have already brought forward, the first
question I have to answer is, Whether there be ability in the
public to discharge the various claims which are made upon its
benevolence ? My reply is a very short one. Much has been
already done in the way of turning men from darkness to the
light and the knowledge of Christianity ; and what we aim at
is, that this rate of activity be not only kept up, but extended.
Now, to estimate whether there be a fund in the country for
future operations, let us calculate the actual expenses of the
past. I do not confine myself to the expenses of the Missionary
Society ; I add to them the expenses of the Bible Society, and
all the others which exist in the country for religious purposes :
and I am fairly within limits, when I say that the joint expense
of the whole does not exceed a hundred thousand pounds in the
year.* Before you stand appalled at the magnitude of the sum,
divide it among the British population ; and you will find, that
what has been already done for the extension of gospel light
among the nations of the world amounts to a penny a month for
each householder, or twopence a year for each individual within
the limits of the empire. This plain statement sets the question
of ability at rest ; arid any objection on the score of extravagance
in our demands upon the public will not bear a hearing.

The next question we have to answer is, Why are we teased
then with so many separate applications ? Could not one Society
embrace all the various objects connected with religion ; and

* It is now considerably beyond this.

364 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

could not all the various demands be reduced to the simplicity of
one yearly subscription ? — One Society might embrace all the
objects connected with religion ; but, on the principle of the
division of employment, separate Societies, each devoting itself
to one of these objects, are productive of greater good : they do
more business, upon cheaper terms. Instead of one Society,
overpowered with the extent and embarrassed with the multi
plicity of its concerns, we have many, each cultivating one de
partment, and giving the labours of its committee to one assigned
object. It is just another example of the separation of employ
ments. The Societies of England have naturally formed them
selves into that arrangement which they find to be most useful
and efficient : and when I see one with its printing utensils,
multiplying copies of the Word of God — another, with its Mis
sionary College, training adventurous spirits for all the climes
and countries of the world — another, with its Jewish Chapel,
for fighting the battles of the faith with its oldest and most
inveterate enemies — another, with its apparatus of schools and
teachers, for carrying the Lancasterian method among the un
lettered population of all countries — another, singling out Africa
as the sole object of its exertions ; and by the introduction of
knowledge and the arts, contriving some reparation for the
wrongs of that deeply-injured continent. In all these I see a
refreshing spectacle, a warm spirit of religious benevolence ani
mating them all ; but each, by betaking itself to its own object,
and assiduously culturing its own vineyard, rendering the work
and the labour of love far more productive, than any single
Society with the wealth of all at its command could possibly
have accomplished.

The propagation of the gospel is a cause the maintenance of
which consists of various particulars ; but I restrict your atten
tion to two — the providing of Bibles, and the providing of
human agents. The former is the word of God, one of the
instruments of my text. The latter, by teaching them to read,
teaches unlettered people to use that instrument ; and to the
latter belongs the exclusive office of bringing the other instru
ment to bear upon them — the instrument of hearing. The
Society whose office it is to provide the former instrument is
well known by the name of the Bible Society. The Society
whose office it is to provide the latter instrument is also well
known by the name of the Missionary Society. It is the duty
of a Christian public to keep both instruments in vigorous

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 365

operation. Each of these Societies has mighty claims upon you,
I will not venture to pronounce a comparison between them ;
but if the question were put to me, shall any part of the funds
of the one Society be transferred to the other? I would not
hesitate to reply, Not one farthing. You are not to provide food
for the orphan at the expense of its raiment ; nor are you to
provide raiment for it at the expense of its food. You are to
provide both, at the expense of those upon whom its maintenance
has devolved. You are to interest the public in both objects.
You are to state, and you state truly, that neither of them is yet
sufficiently provided for — that every shilling of addition to the
funds of either Society is an addition of good to the Christian
cause — that, though as much has been done as to justify the
most splendid anticipations, yet much more remains to be done
in both departments, before these anticipations can be carried
into effect. Each Society should send its advocates over the
country ; and if one of them were at this moment sounding the
merits of the Bible Society in another church and to another
people, I would not view him as a rival, but hail him as a
brother and as a friend ; and when told of the success of his
efforts and the magnitude of his collection, I would bless God
and rejoice along with him.

They are sister Societies. I have not time to detail the
operations of either ; for these I refer you to their Eeports,
which are published every year, and are accessible to all of you.
But to satisfy you I shall select a few particulars, from a source
which you will deem pure and unexceptionable. I shall give
the testimony of one Society to the usefulness of another ; and
from the Eeports of the Bible Society, I shall present you with
arguments why, whatever extent and efficiency be given to the
one, the other is not to be abandoned.

The very second in the list of donations by the Bible Society
is " To the Mohawk nations, two thousand copies of the Gospel
of St. John." But who prepared the Indians of Upper Canada
for such a present ? — they were Missionaries. There are Mis
sionaries now labouring amongst them employed by our Society;
and had it not been for the previous exertions of human agents,
this field of usefulness would have been withheld from the Bible
Society altogether.

Another donation is " To India, to be applied to the transla
tion of the Scriptures into the Oriental languages, one thousand
pounds ; " and this has been swelled by farther donations to a

366 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

very princely sum. It is in aid of the noble undertaking of
translating the Scriptures into the fifteen languages of India.
But who set it agoing? — a Missionary Society.* Who showed
that it was practicable ? — the human agents sent out by that
Society. Who are accomplished for presiding over the different
translations ? — the same human agents, who have lived for years
among the natives, and have braved resistance and death in the
noble enterprise. Who formed a Christian population eager to
receive these versions the moment they have issued from the
press, and who have already absorbed whole editions of the New
Testament ? — the same answer — Missionaries. Our own Society
can lay claim to part of this population : they have formed na
tive schools, and have added to the number of native Christians.

The next two donations I offer to your attention are, first,
" For circulation in the West India Islands and the Spanish
Main, one hundred Bibles and nine hundred Testaments in
various languages ;" second, " To negro congregations of Chris
tians in Antigua, &c., five hundred Bibles and one thousand
Testaments." Why is there any usefulness in this donation ? —
because Missionaries have gone before it. Do these copies really
circulate ? Yes, they do, among the negroes whom those intre
pid men have Christianized under the scowl of jealousy — whom
they have taught to look up to the Saviour as their friend, arid
to heaven as their asylum — and who, for the home they have
been so cruelly torn from, have held out rest to their oppressed
but believing spirits in the mansions which Christ has gone to
prepare for them.

The next example shall comprise several donations. " First,
To the Hottentot Christians at Bavian's-kloof and Grime-kloof,
in South Africa, so many Bibles and Testaments ; second, To
the Rev. Dr. Van der Kemp, at Bethelsdorp, South Africa, for
the Christian Hottentots, &c., fifty Dutch Testaments and twelve
Dutch Bibles ; third, To the Rev. Mr. Anderson, Orange River,
South Africa, fifty Dutch Testaments and twelve Dutch Bibles ;
fourth, To the Rev. Mr. Albrecht, in the Namacqua country,
South Africa, fifty Dutch Testaments and twelve Dutch Bibles ;
fifth, To the Rev. Mr. Kicherer, Graaf Reinet, South Africa, one
hundred Dutch Testaments and twelve Dutch Bibles." Now,
what names and what countries are these ? — They are the very
countries which the Missionary Society is now cultivating, and
the names of the very labourers sent out and maintained by them.

* The translators in India were sent out by the Baptist Society.

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 367

The Bibles and Testaments are sent out in behalf of the many
hundreds whom our Society had previously reclaimed from hea
thenism. The one Society is enabled to scatter the good seed in
such profusion, because the other Society had prepared the ground
for receiving it. Nor are the labours of these illustrious men
confined to the business of Christianizing. They are at this
moment giving the arts, and industry, and civilisation, to the
natives — they are raising a beautiful spectacle to the moral eye
amid the wilderness around them — they are giving piety, and
virtue, and intelligence, to the prowling savages of Africa ; and
extending among the wildest of Nature's children the comforts
and the decencies of humanized life. Oh, ye orators and philo
sophers who make the civilisation of the species your dream ! look
to Christian Missionaries, if you want to see the men who will
realize it : You may deck the theme with the praises of your
unsubstantial eloquence ; but these are the men who are to ac
complish the business I They are now risking every earthly com
fort of existence in the cause ; while you sit in silken security,
and pour upon their holy undertaking the cruelty of your scorn.

But I must draw to a close ; and shall only offer one donation
more to your notice, as an evidence of the close alliance in point
of effect betwixt the Bible and Missionary Societies — those two
great fellow-labourers in the vineyard of Christian benevolence.
" For the Esquimaux Indians, one thousand copies of St. Mat
thew's Gospel, in their vernacular tongues." Who gave these
Indians a written language ? Who translated a Gospel into their
vernacular tongue ? By what unaccountable process has it been
brought about, that we now meet with readers and Christians
among these furred barbarians of the North ? — The answer is the
same, All done by the exertions of Missionaries : and had it not
been for them, the Bible Society would no more have thought
at present of a translation into the language of Labrador, than
they would have thought of a translation into any of the lan
guages of unexplored Africa.

The two Societies go hand in hand. The one ploughs while
the other sows : and let no opposition be instituted betwixt their
claims on the generosity of the public. Let the advocates of
each strain to the uttermost. The statement I have already
given proves that there is a vast quantity of unbroken ground in
the country for subscriptions to both ; and how, by the accumu
lation of littles which no individual will ever feel or regret, a
vast sum is still in reserve for the operations of these Christian

368 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

philanthropists. They are at this moment shedding a glory over
the land, far beyond what the tumults or the triumphs of victory
can bestow. Their deeds are peaceful, but they are illustrious ;
and they are accomplishing a grander and a more decisive step
in the history of the species, than even he who, in the mighty
career of a sweeping and successful ambition, has scattered its
old establishments into nothing. I have only to look forward a
few years, and I see him in his sepulchre ; and a few years more,
and all the dynasties he has formed give way to some new change
in the vain and restless politics of the world. But the men with
whom I contrast him have a more unperishable object in con
templation : I see the sublime character of eternity stamped upon
their proceedings ! The frailties of earthly politics do not attach
to them; for they are the instruments of God — they are carry
ing on the high administration of Heaven — they are hastening
the fulfilment of prophecies uttered in a far distant antiquity.
" Many are going to and fro, and knowledge is increased." — " For
my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my
ways, saith the Lord ; for as the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down and the snow
from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth,
and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the
sower and bread to the eater — so shall my word be that goeth
forth out of my mouth : it shall not return unto me void ; but it
shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the
thing whereto I sent it."

I stand here as the advocate for the Missionary Society — for
the men who are now going to and fro and increasing know
ledge, and are preparing ground in so many different quarters of
the world for the good seed of the word of God. I have already
urged upon you the plea of their usefulness : I have now to urge
upon you the plea of their necessities. They have exerted them
selves not only according to their power, but beyond their power.
They are in debt to their treasurer. Their embarrassments are
their glory ; and it is your part to save them from these embar
rassments, lest they should become your disgrace. It is not for
me to sit in judgment upon the circumstances of any individual
amongst you. Are you poor ? — I ask you to give no more than
you can spare ; nor will I keep back from you what the Bible
says, " That he who provideth not for his own, and especially for
those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse

THE TWO GKEAT INSTRUMENTS. 369

than an infidel." But the same Bible gives examples of the ex
ercise of charity and alms-giving among the poor : The widow
who threw her mite into the treasury was very poor : The mem
bers of the church in Corinth were in general poor — at least we
are told that there were not many mighty, and not many noble,
not many rich, among them — and yet this does not restrain the
apostle from soliciting, nor does it restrain them from contri
buting to the necessities of the poor saints which were in Jeru
salem. Throw the little you can spare into the treasury of
Christian beneficence. It may be small ; but if you give with
cheerfulness, it will be counted more than many splendid dona
tions. And as we are among scriptural examples and scriptural
authorities, let us offer to your notice another advice of the
apostle : — " Once a week, let every one of you lay by him in
store as God hath prospered him." This brings down the prac
tice of charity to the level of the poor and labouring classes of
society. Let me suppose that God enables you to lay by a single
penny a week to the cause I am pleading for — a small offering,
you will allow ; but mark the power and the productiveness of
littles. If each householder of this town were to come forward
with his penny a week, it would raise for the Missionary Society
upwards of a thousand pounds a year. I know that in point of
fact they will not all come forward — that a few are really not
able, and that more are not willing. Let me suppose, .then, the
trumpet sounded, by which all the destitute, all the faint-hearted,
all the mockers at piety, are warned away from the cause ; and
that the number is reduced to one out of ten : There is nothing
very sanguine, surely, in the calculation that one-tenth "would
stand by this glorious cause — a small proportion, no doubt ; but
if carried in the same proportion over the face of the country, it
would produce for our Society an annual sixty thousand pounds
— a sum exceeding by six times any yearly income which they
have yet realized. I wish to exalt the poor to the consequence
which belongs to them. There is a weight and an influence in
numbers ; and they have it. The individual offering may be
small, but the produce of these weekly associations would give a
mighty energy to the benevolent enterprises that are now afloat
in the country. You have it in your power to form such an
association ; you can hold forth the example of a vigorous and
well-conducted system ; you can lead the way ; you can spread
abroad the statement of your success. Be assured that others
would soon follow • and the combined efforts of our poor men and

VOL. III. 2 A

370 THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS.

our labourers would do more for the cause of the gospel, than all the
splendid offerings which the rich have yet thrown into the treasury.
Let me now turn to the rich, and entreat from them a libe
rality and an aid worthy of the situation in which Providence
has placed them. They have already signalized themselves; and
one of the most animating signs of our day is the opening and
extending sympathy of the great for the spiritual necessities of
their brethren. I call upon them to open their hearts, and pour
out the flood of their benevolence on this purest and worthiest of
causes — a cause on which the civilisation of the globe and the
eternity of millions are suspended. I hope better things of you,
my wealthier hearers, than that you will do anything but spurn
at the paltry calculations which prey upon the fancies of the un
feeling and the sordid. " I give so much already ! — I am so
beset with applications I — I give to the Bible Society ; I give to
the charitable institutions of the town ; I give to the vagrant
who stands at my door ; I give to the subscription-paper that is
unfolded in my parlour ; I am assailed with beggary in all its
forms ; and, from the clamorous beggary of the streets to the no
less clamorous beggary of the pulpit, there is an extorting pro
cess going on, which, I have reason to fear, will in the end
impoverish and exhaust me!" Pardon me, rny brethren; I am
in possession of no ground whatever for imputing this pathetic
lamentation to you ; nor do I know that I am now personifying
a single individual amongst you. I am merely bringing forward
a specimen of that kind of eloquence which is sometimes uttered
upon an occasion like the present ; and I do it for the purpose
of bringing forward the effectual refutation of which it admits.
We do not ask any to impoverish or exhaust themselves. We
assail the rich with no more urgency than the poor ; for we say
to both alike — Give only what you can spare. We hold the
question of alms-giving to depend not on what has been already
given, but on what superfluity of wealth you are still in posses
sion of. We know that to this question very different answers
will be given, according to the principles and views arid temper
of the individual to whom it is applied ; nor are we eager to
pursue the question into all its applications. We do not want
the offerings of an extorted charity ; we barely state the merits of
the case, and leave the impression with your own hearts, my
friends and fellow-Christians. But when I take a view of society,
and see the profusion and the splendour that surround me — when
I see magnificence in every room that I enter, and luxury on

THE TWO GREAT INSTRUMENTS. 371

every table that is set before me — when I see the many thou
sand articles where retrenchment is possible, and any one of
which would purchase for its owner the credit of unexampled
liberality — when I see the sons and the daughters of fortune
swimming down the full tide of enjoyment ; and am told, that
out of all this extravagance there is not a fragment to spare for
sending the light of Christianity into the negro's hut, or pouring
it abroad over the wide and dreary wilderness of Paganism —
Surely, surely, you will agree with me in thinking, that we have
now sunk down into the age of frivolity and of little men. Think
of this, my brethren^ — that upon what a single individual has
withheld out of that which he ought to have given, the sublime
march of a human soul from time to eternity may have been
arrested ! Seize upon this conception in all its magnitude ; and
tell me, if, when put by the side of the sordid plea and the proud
or angry refusal, all the gaieties of wealth and all its painted
insignificance do not wither into nothing.

But I must come to a conclusion. There are hearts which
will resist every power of urgency that is brought to bear upon
them ; but there are others which do not require it — those hearts
which feel the influence of the gospel, and have the experience
of its comforts. Those to whom Christ is precious, will long
that others should taste of that preciousness. Those who have
buried all their anxieties and all their terrors in the sufficiency
of the atonement, will long that the knowledge of a remedy so
effectual should be carried round the globe, and put within the
reach of the myriads who live in guilt and who die in darkness.
Those who know that the only refuge of man is under the cover
ing of the one Mediatorship, will long to stretch forth the curtains
of so secure a habitation — to lengthen the cords and to streng
then the stakes — to break forth on the right hand and on the
left, and to extend a covering so ample over the sinners of all
latitudes and of all countries. In a word, those who love the
honour of the Saviour, will long that His kingdom be extended
till all the nations of the earth be brought under His one grand
and universal monarchy — till the powers of darkness shall be
extinguished — till the mighty Spirit which Christ purchased by
His obedience shall subdue every heart, shall root out the ex
istence of sin, shall restore the degeneracy of our fallen nature,
shall put an end to the restless variations of human folly and
human injustice, and shall establish one wide empire of righte
ousness over a virtuous and a happy world.

372 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

SEEMON II.

(Preached before the Edinburgh Society for Relief of the Destitute SicJc, April 13, 1813v>

THE BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING THE CASE OP THE POOR.

" Blessed is he that considereth the poor ; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble." —
PSALM xli. 1.

THERE is an evident want of congeniality between the wis
dom of this world and the wisdom of the Christian. The term
" wisdom" carries my reverence along with it. It brings before
ine a grave and respectable character, whose rationality predomi
nates over the inferior principles of his constitution ; and to whom
I willingly yield that peculiar homage which the enlightened, and
the judicious, and the manly, are sure to exact from a surround
ing neighbourhood. Now, so long as this wisdom has for its ob
ject some secular advantage, I yield it an unqualified reverence.
It is a reverence which all understand, and all sympathize with.
If in private life a man be wise in the management of his farm,
or his fortune, or his family ; or if in public life he have wisdom
to steer an empire through all its difficulties, and to carry it to
aggrandisement and renown — the respect which I feel for such
wisdom as this is most cordial and entire, and supported by the
universal acknowledgment of all whom I call to attend to it.

Let me now suppose that this wisdom has changed its object
— that the man whom I am representing to exemplify this re
spectable attribute, instead of being wise for time, is wise for
eternity — that he labours by the faith and sanctification of the
gospel for imperishable honours — that, instead of listening to him
with admiration at his sagacity, as he talks of business, or poli
tics, or agriculture, we are compelled to listen to him talking of
the hope within the veil, and of Christ being the power of God,
and the wisdom of God, unto salvation — what becomes of your
respect for him now ? Are there not some of you who are quite
sensible that this respect is greatly impaired, since the wisdom
of the man has taken .so unaccountable a change in its object and

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 373

in its direction ? The truth is, that the greater part of the world
feel no respect at all for a wisdom which they do not comprehend.
They may love the innocence of a decidedly religious character,
but they feel no sublime or commanding sentiment of veneration
for its wisdom. All the truth of the Bible and all the grandeur
of eternity will not redeem it from a certain degree of contempt.
Terms which lower, undervalue, and degrade, suggest themselves
to the mind, and strongly dispose it to throw a mean and dis
agreeable colouring over the man who, sitting loose to the ob
jects of the world, has become altogether a Christian. It is
needless to expatiate ; but what I have seen myself, and what
must have fallen under the observation of many whom I address,
carry in them the testimony of experience to the assertion of the
apostle, " that the things of the Spirit of God are foolishness to
the natural man, neither can he know them, for they are spiritu
ally discerned."

Now, what I have said of the respectable attribute of wisdom,
is applicable, with almost no variation, to another attribute of
the human character, to which I would assign the gentler epithet
of " lovely." The attribute to which I allude is that of benevo
lence. This is the burden of every poet's song, and every elo
quent and interesting enthusiast gives it his testimony. I speak
not of the enthusiasm of methodists and devotees, I speak of that
enthusiasm of fine sentiment which embellishes the pages of ele
gant literature, and is addressed to all her sighing and amiable
votaries, in the various forms of novel, and poetry, and dramatic
entertainment. You would think if anything could bring the
Christian at one with the world around him, it would be this ;
and that, in the ardent benevolence which figures in novels and
sparkles in poetry, there would be an entire congeniality with
the benevolence of the gospel. I venture to say, however, that
there never existed a stronger repulsion between two contending
sentiments, than between the benevolence of the Christian and
the benevolence which is the theme of elegant literature — that
the one, with all its accompaniments of tears, and sensibilities,
and interesting cottages, is neither felt nor understood by the
Christian as such ; and the other, with its work and its labour of
love, its enduring hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, and
its living, not to itself, but to the will of Him who died for us,
and who rose again, is not only not understood, but positively
nauseated, by the poetical amateur.

But the contrast does not stop here. The benevolence of the

;;74 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

gospel is not only at antipodes with that of the visionary sons
and daughters of poetry, but it even varies in some of its most
distinguishing features from the experimental benevolence of real
and familiar life. The fantastic benevolence of poetry is now
indeed pretty well exploded ; and in the more popular works of
the age there is a benevolence of a far truer and more substan
tial kind substituted in its place — the benevolence which you
meet with among men of business and observation — the benevo
lence which bustles and finds employment among the most pub
lic and ordinary scenes ; and which seeks for objects, not where
the flower blows loveliest, and the stream, with its gentle mur
murs, falls sweetest on the ear ; but finds them in its every-day
walks, goes in quest of them through the heart of the great city,
and is not afraid to meet them in its most putrid lanes and loath
some receptacles.

Now, it must be acknowledged that this benevolence is of a
far more respectable kind than that poetic sensibility, which is of
no use because it admits of no application. Yet I am not afraid
to say, that, respectable as it is, it does not come up to the bene
volence of the Christian ; and is at variance, in some of its
most capital ingredients, with the morality of the gospel. It is
well, and very well, as far as it goes ; and that Christian is want
ing to the will of his Master, who refuses to share and go along
with it. The Christian will do all this, but he would like to do
more ; and it is at the precise point where he proposes to do
more, that he finds himself abandoned by the co-operation and
good wishes of those who had hitherto supported him. The
Christian goes as far as the votary of this useful benevolence ;
but then he would like to go further, and this is the point at which
he is mortified to find that his old coadjutors refuse to go along
with him ; and that, instead of being strengthened by their
assistance, he has their contempt arid their ridicule, or at all
events, their total want of sympathy to contend with. The truth
is, that the benevolence I allude to, with all its respectable air
of business and good sense, is altogether a secular benevolence.
Through all the extent of its operations, it carries in it no refer
ence to the eternal duration of its object. Time, and the accom
modations of time, form all its subject, and all its exercise. It
labours, and often with success, to provide for its object a warm
arid a well-sheltered tenement ; but it looks not beyond the few
little years when the earthly house of this tabernacle shall be
dissolved, when the soul shall be driven from its perishable tene-

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 375

ment, and the only benevolence it will acknowledge or care for,
will be the benevolence of those who have directed it to a build
ing not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. This, then,
is the point at which the benevolence of the gospel separates from
that worldly benevolence, to which, as far as it goes, I offer my
cheerful and unmingled testimony. The one minds earthly
things, the other has its conversation in heaven. Even when
the immediate object of both is the same, you will generally per
ceive an evident distinction in the principle. Individuals, for
example, may co-operate, and will often meet in the same room,
be members of the same society, and go hand in hand most cor
dially together for the education of the poor. But the forming
habits of virtuous industry, and good members of society, which
are the sole consideration in the heart of the worldly philan
thropist, are but mere accessaries in the heart of the Christian.
The main impulse of his benevolence lies in furnishing the poor
with the means of enjoying that bread of life which came down
from heaven, and in introducing them to the knowledge of those
Scriptures which are the power of God unto salvation to every
one who believeth. Now, it is so far a blessing to the world,
that there is a co-operation in the immediate object. But what
I contend for is, that there is a total want of congeniality in the
principle ; that the moment you strip the institution of its tem
poral advantages, and make it repose on the naked grandeur of
eternity, it is fallen from, or laughed at as one of the chimeras
of fanaticism ; and left to the despised efforts of those whom they
esteem to be unaccountable people, who subscribe for missions,
and squander their money on Bible Societies. Strange effect,
you would think, of eternity — to degrade the object with which it
is connected ! But so it is. The blaze of glory which is thrown
around the martyrdom of a patriot or a philosopher is refused to
the martyrdom of a Christian. When a statesman dies who
lifted his intrepid voice for the liberty of the species, we hear of
nothing but of the shrines and the monuments of immortality.
Put into his place one of those sturdy reformers, who, unmoved
by councils and inquisitions, stood tip for the religious liberties
of the world ; and it is no sooner done than the full tide of con
genial sympathy and admiration is at once arrested. We have all
heard of the benevolent apostleship of Howard, and what Chris
tian will be behind his fellows with his applauding testimony ?
But will they, on the other hand, share his enthusiasm, when he
tells them of the apostleship of Paul, who, in the sublimer sense

376 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

of the term, accomplished the liberty of the captive, and brought
them that sat in darkness out of the prison-house ? Will they
share in the holy benevolence of the apostle, when he pours out
his ardent effusions in behalf of his countrymen ? They were at
that time on the eve of the cruellest sufferings. The whole ven
geance of the Eoman power was mustering to bear upon them.
The siege and destruction of their city form one of the most
dreadful tragedies in the history of war. Yet Paul seems to
have had another object in his eye. It was their souls and their
eternity which engrossed him. Can you sympathize with him
in this principle ; or join in kindred benevolence with him, when
he says that " my heart's desire and prayer for Israel is, that they
might be saved" ?

But, to bring my list of examples to a close, the most remark
able of them all may be collected from the history of the present
attempts which are now making to carry the knowledge of Divine
revelation into the pagan and uncivilized countries of the world.
Now, it may be my ignorance, but I am certainly not aware of
the fact — that without a book of religious faith ; without religion,
in fact, being the errand and occasion, we have ever been able
in modern times so far to compel the attention and to subdue
the habits of savages, as to throw in among them the use and
the possession of a written language. Certain it is, however, at
all events, that this very greatest step in the process of convert
ing a wild man of the woods into a humanized member of society,
has been accomplished by Christian missionaries. They have
put into the hands of barbarians this mighty instrument of a
written language, and they have taught them how to use it.*
They have formed an orthography for wandering and untutored
savages. They have given a shape and a name to their bar
barous articulations ; and the children of men, who lived on the
prey of the wilderness, are now forming in village schools to the
arts and the decencies of cultivated life. Now, I am not involv
ing you in the controversy, whether civilisation should precede
Christianity, or Christianity should precede civilisation. It is
not to what has been said on the subject, but to what has been
done, that we are pointing your attention. We appeal to the

* As, for instance, Mr. John Elliot, and the Moravian Brethren among the Indians of New
England and Pennsylvania; the Moravians in South America; Mr. Hans Egede, and the
Moravians in Greenland ; the latter in Labrador, among the Esquimaux ; the Missionaries
in Otaheite, and other South Sea islands ; and Mr. Brunton, under the patronage of the
Society for Missions to Africa and the East, who reduced the language of the Susoos, a
nation on the coast of Africa, to writing and grammatical form, and printed in it a spelling-
book, vocabulary, catechism, and some tracts. Other instances besides might be given.

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 377

fact ; and as an illustration of the principle we have been at
tempting to lay before you, we call upon you to mark the feel
ings, and the countenance, and the language, of the mere
academic moralist, when you put into his hand the authentic
and proper document where the fact is recorded — we mean a
missionary report, or a missionary magazine. We know that
there are men who have so much of the firm nerve and hardihood
of philosophy about them, as not to be repelled from truth in
whatever shape, or from whatever quarter, it comes to them.
But there are others of a humbler cast, who have transferred
their homage from the omnipotence of truth to the omnipotence
of a name ; who, because missionaries, while they are accom
plishing the civilisation, are labouring also for the eternity of
savages, have lifted the cry of fanaticism against them ; who,
because missionaries revere the word of G-od, and utter them
selves in the language of the New Testament, nauseate every
word that comes from them as overrun with the flavour and
phraseology of methodism ; who are determined, in short, to
abominate all that is missionary, and suffer the very sound of
the epithet to fill their minds with an overwhelming association
of repugnance, and prejudice, and disgust.

We would not have counted this so remarkable an example,
had it not been that missionaries are aceomplisbing the very
object on which the advocates for civilisation love to expatiate.
They are working for temporal good far more effectually than
any adventurer in the cause ever did before ; but mark the want
of congeniality between the benevolence of this world and the
benevolence of the Christian ; they incur contempt, because they
are working for spiritual and eternal good also : Nor do the
earthly blessings which they scatter so abundantly in their way,
redeem from scorn the purer and the nobler principle which in
spires them.

These observations seem to be an applicable introduction to
the subject before us. I call your attention to the way in which
the Bible enjoins us to take up the care of the poor. It does
not say, in the text before us, Commiserate the poor ; for, if it
said no more than this, it would leave their necessities to be pro
vided for by the random ebullitions of an impetuous and unre
flecting sympathy. It provides them with a better security than
the mere feeling of compassion — a feeling which, however use
ful for the purpose of excitement, must be controlled and regu
lated. Feeling is but a faint and fluctuating; security. Fancy

378 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

may mislead it. The sober realities of life may disgust it.
Disappointment may extinguish it. Ingratitude may imbitter it.
Deceit, with its counterfeit representations, may allure it to the
wrong object. At all events, Time is the little circle within
which it in general expatiates. It needs the impression of sen
sible objects to sustain it; nor can it enter with zeal or with
vivacity into the wants of the abstract and invisible soul. The
Bible, then, instead of leaving the relief of the poor to the mere
instinct of sympathy, makes it a subject for consideration —
Blessed is hg that considereth the poor — a grave and prosaic
exercise I do allow, and which makes no figure in those high-
wrought descriptions, where the exquisite tale of benevolence is
made up of all the sensibilities of tenderness on the one hand,
and of all the ecstacies of gratitude on the other. The Bible
rescues the cause from the mischief to which a heedless or un
thinking sensibility -would expose it. It brings it under the
cognisance of a higher faculty — a faculty of steadier operation
than to be weary in wel1 -doing, and of sturdier endurance than
to give it up in disgust. It calls you to consider the poor. It
makes the virtue of relieving them a matter of computation as
well as of sentiment ; and, in so doing, it puts you beyond the
reach of the various delusions, by which you are at one time led
to prefer the indulgence of pity to the substantial interest of its
object ; at another, are led to retire chagrined and disappointed
from the scene of duty, because you have not met with the grati
tude or the honesty that you laid your account with ; at another,
are led to expend all your anxieties upon the accommodation of
time, and to overlook eternity. It is the office of consideration
to save you from all these fallacies. Under its tutorage, atten
tion to the wants of the poor ripens into principle. I want to
press its advantages upon you, for I can in no other way recom
mend the Society whose claims I am appointed to lay before
you, so effectually to your patronage. My time will only permit
ine to lay before you a few of their advantages, and I shall
therefore confine myself to two leading particulars.

I. — The man who considers the poor, instead of slumbering
over the emotions of a useless sensibility, among those imaginary
beings whom poetry and romance have laid before him in all the
elegance of fictitious history, will bestow the labour and the
attention of actual business among the poor of the real and the
living world. Benevolence is the burden of every romantic tale,

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 379

and of every poet's song. It is dressed out in all the fairy en
chantments of imagery and eloquence. All is beauty to the eye
and music to the ear. Nothing seen but pictures of felicity, and
nothing heard but the soft whispers of gratitude and affection.
The reader is carried along by this soft and delighted represen
tation of virtue. He accompanies his hero through all the
fancied varieties of his history. He goes along with him to the
cottage of poverty and disease, surrounded, as we may suppose,
with all the charms of rural obscurity, and where the murmurs
of an adjoining rivulet accord with the finer and more benevolent
sensibilities of the mind. He enters this enchanting retirement,
and meets with a picture of distress, adorned in all the elegance
of fiction. Perhaps a father laid on a bed of languishing, and
supported by the labours of a pious and affectionate family,
where kindness breathes in every word, and anxiety sits upon
every countenance — where the industry of his children struggles
in vain to supply the cordials which his poverty denies him' —
where nature sinks every hour, and all feel a gloomy foreboding,
which they strive to conceal, and tremble to express. The hero
of romance enters, and the glance of his benevolent eye enlightens
this darkest recess of misery. He turns him to the bed of lan
guishing, tells the sick man that there is still hope, and smiles
comfort on his despairing children. Day after day he repeats
his kindness and his charity. They hail his approach as the
footsteps of an angel of mercy. The father lives to bless his
deliverer. The family reward his benevolence by the homage
of an affectionate gratitude ; and, in the piety of their evening
prayer, offer up thanks to the God of heaven, for opening the
hearts of the rich to kindly and beneficent attentions. The
reader weeps with delight. The visions of paradise play before
his fancy. His tears flow, and his heart dissolves in all the
luxury of tenderness.

Now, we do not deny that the members of the Destitute Sick
Society may at times have met with some such delightful scene,
to soothe and to encourage them. But put the question to any
of their visitors, and he will not fail to tell you, that if they had
never moved but when they had something like this to excite
and to gratify their hearts, they would seldom have moved at
all ; and their usefulness to the poor would have been reduced to
a very humble fraction of what they have actually done for them.
What is this but to say, that it is the business of a religious in
structor to give you, not the elegant, but the true representation

380 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

of benevolence — to represent it not so much as a luxurious in
dulgence to the finer sensibilities of the mind, but according to
the sober declaration of Scripture, as a work and as a labour —
as a business in which you must encounter vexation, opposition,
and fatigue ; where you are not always to meet with that ele
gance which allures the fancy, or with that humble and retired
adversity, which interests the more tender propensities of the
heart ; but as a business where reluctance must often be overcome
by a sense of duty, and where, though oppressed at every step,
by envy, disgust, and disappointment, you are bound to perse
vere, in obedience to the law of God, and the sober instigations
of principle.

The benevolence of the gospel lies in action : the benevolence
of our fictitious writers, in a kind of high- wrought delicacy of
feeling and sentiment. The one dissipates all its fervour in
sighs, and tears, and idle aspirations — the other reserves its
strength for efforts and execution. The one regards it as a
luxurious enjoyment for the heart — the other, as a work and a
business for the hand. The one sits in indolence, and "broods,
in visionary rapture, over its schemes of ideal philanthropy —
the other steps abroad, and enlightens by its presence, the dark
and pestilential hovels of disease. The one wastes away in
empty ejaculation — the other gives time and trouble to the work
of beneficence — gives education to the orphan — provides clothes
for the naked, and lays food on the tables of the hungry. The
one is indolent and capricious, and often does mischief by the
occasional overflowings of a whimsical and ill-directed charity —
the other is vigilant and discerning, and takes care lest its dis
tributions be injudicious, and the efforts of benevolence be mis
applied. The one is soothed with the luxury of feeling, and
reclines in easy and indolent satisfaction — the other shakes off
the deceitful languor of contemplation and solitude, and delights
in a scene of activity. Remember that virtue, in general, is
not to feel, but to do — not merely to conceive a purpose, but to
carry that purpose into execution — not merely to be overpowered
by the impression of a sentiment, but to practise what it loves,
and to imitate what it admires.

To be benevolent in speculation, is often to be selfish in action
and in reality. The vanity and the indolence of man delude
him into a thousand inconsistencies. He professes to love the
name and the semblance of virtue ; but the labour of exertion
and of self-denial terrifies him from attempting it. The emo-

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 381

tions of kindness are delightful to his bosom, but then they are
little better than a selfish indulgence. They terminate in his
own enjoyment. They are a mere refinement of luxury. His
eye melts over the picture of fictitious distress, while not a tear
is left for the actual starvation and misery by which he is sur
rounded. It is easy to indulge the imaginations of a visionary
heart in going* over a scene of fancied affliction, because here
there is no sloth to overcome — no avaricious propensity to con
trol — no offensive or disgusting circumstance to allay the un-
mingled impression of sympathy which a soft and elegant picture
is calculated to awaken. It is not so easy to be benevolent in
action and in reality, because here there is fatigue to undergo —
there is time and money to give — there is the mortifying spec
tacle of vice, and folly, and ingratitude to encounter. We like
to give you the fair picture of love to man ; because to throw
over it false and fictitious embellishments, is injurious to its
cause. They elevate the fancy by romantic visions which can
never be realized. They imbitter the heart by the most severe
and mortifying disappointments, and often force us to retire in
disgust from what Heaven has intended to be the theatre of our
discipline and preparation. Take the representation of the Bible.
Benevolence is a work and a labour. It often calls for the
severest efforts of vigilance and industry — a habit of action not
to be acquired in the schools of fine sentiment, but in the walks
of business ; in the dark and dismal receptacles of misery ; in the
hospitals of disease ; in the putrid lanes of our great cities, where
poverty dwells in lank and ragged wretchedness, agonized with
pain, faint with hunger, and shivering in a frail and unsheltered
tenement.

You are not to conceive yourself a real lover of your species,
and entitled to the praise or the reward of benevolence, because
you weep over a fictitious representation of human misery. A
man may weep in the indolence of a studious and contemplative
retirement ; he may breathe all the tender aspirations of hu
manity ; but what avails all this warm and effusive benevolence,
if it is never exerted — if it never rise to execution — if it never
carry him to the accomplishment of a single benevolent purpose
— if it shrink from activity, and sicken at the pain of fatigue ?
It is easy, indeed, to come forward with the cant and hypocrisy
of fine sentiment — to have a heart trained to the emotions of
benevolence, while the hand refuses the labour of discharging
its offices — to weep for amusement, and have nothing to spare

382 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

for human suffering, but tbe tribute of an indolent and unmean
ing sympathy. Many of you must be acquainted with that
corruption of Christian doctrine which has been termed Anti-
nomianism. It professes the highest reverence for the Supreme
Being ; while it refuses obedience to the lessons of His authority.
It professes the highest gratitude for the sufferings of Christ ;
while it refuses that course of life and action which He demands
of His followers. It professes to adore the tremendous Majesty
of heaven, and to weep in shame and in sorrow over the sinful-
ness of degraded humanity ; while every day it insults heaven
by the enormity of its misdeeds, and evinces the insincerity of
its repentance by its wilful perseverance in the practice of
iniquity. This Antinomianism is generally condemned ; and
none reprobate it more than the votaries of fine sentiment: — your
men of taste and elegant literature — your epicures of feeling,
who riot in all the luxury of theatrical emotion ; and who, in
their admiration of what is tender and beautiful and cultivated,
have always turned with disgust from the doctrines of a sour and
illiberal theology. We may say to such, as Nathan to David,
Thou art the man." Theirs is, to all intents and purposes,
Antinomianism — and an Antinomianism of a far more dangerous
and deceitful kind than the Antinomianism of a spurious and
pretended orthodoxy. In the Antinomianism of religion, there
is nothing to fascinate or deceive you. It wears an air of re
pulsive bigotry, more fitted to awaken disgust than to gain the
admiration of proselytes. There is a glaring deformity in its
aspect, which alarms you at the very outset, and is an outrage to
that natural morality, which, dark and corrupted, as it is, is still
strong enough to lift its loud remonstrances against it. But in
the Antinomianism of high-wrought sentiment, there is a decep
tion far more insinuating. It steals upon you under the sem
blance of virtue. It is supported by the delusive colouring of
imagination and poetry. It has all the graces and embellish
ments of literature to recommend it. Vanity is soothed, and
conscience lulls itself to repose in this dream of feeling and of
indolence.

Let us dismiss these lying vanities, and regulate our lives by
the truth and soberness of the New Testament. Benevolence
is not in word and in tongue, but in deed and in truth. It is a
business with men as they are, and with human life as drawn
by the rough hand of experience. It is a duty which you must
perform at the call of principle ; though there be no voice of

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 383

eloquence to give splendour to your exertions, and no music of
poetry to lead your willing footsteps through the bowers of en
chantment. It is not the impulse of high and ecstatic emotion.
It is an exertion of principle. You must go to the poor man's
cottage, though no verdure flourish around it, and no rivulet be
nigh to delight you by the gentleness of its murmurs. If you
look for the romantic simplicity of fiction, you will be dis
appointed ; but it is your duty to persevere in spite of every
discouragement. Benevolence is not merely a feeling, but a
principle — not a dream of rapture for the fancy to indulge in,
but a business for the hand to execute.

It must now be obvious to all of you, that it is not enough
that you give money, and add your name to the contributions of
charity. You must give it with judgment. You must give
your time and your attention. You must descend to the trouble
of examination. You must rise from the repose of contempla
tion, and make yourself acquainted with the object of your bene
volent exercises. Will he husband your charity with care, or
will he squander it away in idleness and dissipation ? Will he
satisfy himself with the brutal luxury of the moment, and ne
glect the supply of his more substantial necessities, or suffer his
children to be trained in ignorance and depravity ? Will charity
corrupt him into slothfulness ? What is his peculiar necessity ?
Is it the want of health, or the want of employment ? Is it the
pressure of a numerous family ? Does he need medicine to
administer to the diseases of his children ? Does he need fuel or
raiment to protect them from the inclemency of winter ? Does
he need money to satisfy the yearly demands of his landlord ; or
to purchase books, and to pay for the education of his offspring ?

To give money is not to do all the work and labour of bene
volence. You must go to the poor man's sick-bed. You must
lend your hand to the work of assistance. You must examine
his accounts. You must try to recover those debts which are
due to his family. You must try to recover those wages which
are detained by the injustice or the rapacity of his master. You
must employ your mediation with his superiors. You must re
present to them the necessities of his situation. You must solicit
their assistance, and awaken their feelings to the tale of his
calamity. This is benevolence in its plain, and sober, and
substantial reality ; though eloquence may have withheld its
imagery, and poetry may have denied its graces and its em
bellishments. This is true and unsophisticated goodness. It

384 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

may be recorded in no earthly documents ; but, if done under
the influence of Christian principle — in a word, if done unto
Jesus, it is written in the book of heaven, and will give a new
lustre to that crown to which His disciples look forward in time,
and will wear through eternity.

You have all heard of the division of labour, and I wish you
to understand, that the advantage of this principle may be felt
as much in the operations of charity, as in the operations of trade
and of manufactures. The work of beneficence does not lie in
the one act of giving money ; there must be the act of attend
ance ; there must be the act of inquiry ; there must be the act
of judicious application. But I can conceive that an individual
may be so deficient in the varied experience and attention which
a work so extensive demands, that he may retire in disgust and
discouragement from the practice of charity altogether. The
institution of a Society such as this, saves this individual to the
cause. It takes upon itself all the subsequent acts in the
work and labour of love, and restricts his part to the mere act
of giving money. It fills the middle space between the dis
pensers arid the recipients of charity. The habits of many who
now hear me, may disqualify them for the work of examination.
They may have no time for it ; they may live at a distance from
the objects ; they may neither know how to introduce, nor how
to conduct themselves in the management of all the details;
their want of practice and of experience may disable them for
the work of repelling imposition ; they may try to gain the ne
cessary habits ; and it is right that every individual among us
should each, in his own sphere, consider the poor, and qualify
themselves for a judicious and discriminating charity. Bat, in
the meantime, the Society for the Belief of the Destitute Sick,
is an instrument ready-made to our hands. Avail yourselves of
this instrument immediately ; and, by the easiest part of the ex
ercise of charity, which is to give money, you carry home to the
poor all the benefit of its most difficult exercises.* The experi
ence which you want, the members of this laudable Society are
in possession of. By the work and observation of years, a stock
of practical wisdom is now accumulated among them. They
have been long inured to all that is loathsome and discouraging
in this good work ; and they have nerve, and hardihood, and

* A Society for the Destitute Sirk, is not nearly liable to such an extent of objection as
a Society for the Relief of General Indigence. But it were well, if they kept themselves)
rigidly to their assigned object ; and that the cases to which they administered their aid,
were competently certified.

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 385

principle, to front it. They are every way qualified to be the
carriers of your bounty, for it is a path they have long tra
velled in. Give the money, and these conscientious men will
soon bring it into contact with the right objects. They know
the way through all the obscurities of this metropolis ; and they
can bring the offerings of your charity to people whom you will
never see, and into houses which you will never enter. It is not
easy to conceive, far less to compute the extent of human misery ;
but these men can give you experience for it. They can show
you their registers of the sick and of the dying ; they are fami
liar with disease in all its varieties of faintness, and breathless-
ness, and pain. — Sad union ! they are called to witness it in
conjunction with poverty ; and well do they know that there is
an eloquence in the imploring looks of these helpless poor,
which no description can set before you. Oh ! my brethren,
figure to yourselves the calamity in all its soreness, and measure
your bounty by the actual greatness of the claims, and not by
the feebleness of their advocate.

I have trespassed upon your patience ; but, at the hazard of
carrying my address to a length that is unusual, I must still say
more. Nor would I ever forgive myself if I neglected to set the
eternity of the poor in all its importance before you. This is
the second point of consideration to which I wish to direct you.
The man who considers the poor will give his chief anxiety to
the wants of their eternity. It must be evident to all of you
that this anxiety is little felt. I do not appeal for the evidence
of this to the selfish part of mankind — there we are not to expect
it. I go to those who are really benevolent — who have a wish
to make others happy, and who take trouble in so doing ; and it
is a striking observation, how little the salvation of these others
is the object of that benevolence which makes them so amiable.
It will be found that, in by far the greater number of instances,
this principle is all consumed on the accommodations of time and
the necessities of the body. It is the meat which feeds them —
the garment which covers them — the house which shelters them
— the money which purchases all things ; these, I say, are what
form the chief topics of benevolent anxiety. Now, we do not
mean to discourage this principle. We cannot afford it ; there
is too little of it ; and it forms too refreshing an exception to that
general selfishness which runs throughout the haunts of business
and ambition, for us to say anything against it. We are not
cold-blooded enough to refuse our delighted concurrence to an

VOL. in. 2 B

386 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

exercise so amiable in its principle, and so pleasing in the warm
and comfortable spectacle which it lays before us. The poor, it
is true, ought never to forget, that it is to their own industry,
and to the wisdom and economy of their own management, that
they are to look for the elements of subsistence — that if idleness
arid prodigality shall lay hold of the mass of our population, no
benevolence, however unbounded, can ever repair a mischief so
irrecoverable — that if they will not labour for themselves, it is
not in the power of the rich to create a sufficiency for them ; and
that though every heart were opened, and every purse emptied
in the cause, it would absolutely go for nothing towards forming
a well-fed, a well-lodged, or a well-conditioned peasantry. Still,
however, there are cases which no foresight could prevent, and
no industry could provide for — where the blow falls heavy and
unexpected on some devoted son or daughter of misfortune, and
where, though thoughtlessness and folly may have had their
share, benevolence, not very nice in its calculations, will feel the
overpowering claim of actual, helpless, and imploring misery.
Now, I again offer my cheerful testimony to such benevolence as
this ; I count it delightful to see it singling out its object, and
sustaining it against the cruel pressure of age and of indigence ;
and when I enter a cottage where I see a warmer fireside, or a
more substantial provision, than the visible means can account
for, I say that the landscape in all its summer glories, does not
offer an object so gratifying, as when referred to the vicinity of
the great man's house, and the people who live in it, and am
told that I will find my explanation there. Kind and amiable
people ! your benevolence is most lovely in its display, but oh !
it is perishable in its consequences. Does it never occur to you,
that in a few years this favourite will die — that he will go to
the place where neither cold nor hunger will reach him, but
that a mighty interest remains, of which both of us may know
the certainty, though neither you nor I can calculate the extent.
Your benevolence is too short — it does not shoot far enough
ahead — it is like regaling a child with a sweetmeat or a toy, and
then abandoning the happy unreflecting infant to exposure.
You make the poor old man happy with your crumbs and your
fragments, but he is an infant on the mighty range of infinite
duration ; and will you leave the soul, which has this infinity to
go through, to its chance ? How comes it that the grave should
throw so impenetrable a shroud over the realities of eternity ?
How comes it that heaven, and hell, and judgment, should be

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 387

treated as so many nonentities ; and that there should be as little
real and operative sympathy felt for the soul, which lives for
ever, as for the body after it is dead, or for the dust into which
it moulders ? Eternity is longer than time ; the arithmetic, my
brethren, is all on our side upon this question ; and the wisdom
which calculates, and guides itself by calculation, gives its
weighty and respectable support to what may be called the
benevolence of faith.

Now, if there be one "employment more fitted than another to
awaken this benevolence, it is the peculiar employment of that
Society for which I am now pleading. I would have anticipated
such benevolence from the situation they occupy, and the infor
mation before the public bears testimony to the fact. The truth
is, that the diseases of the body may be looked upon as so many
outlets through which the soul finds its way to eternity. Now,
it is at these outlets that the members of this Society have sta
tioned themselves. This is the interesting point of survey at
which they stand, and from which they command a look of both
worlds. They have placed themselves in the avenues which
lead from time to eternity, and they have often to witness the
awful transition of a soul hovering at the entrance — struggling
its way through the valley of the shadow of death, and at last
breaking loose from the confines of all that is visible. Do you
think it likely that men, with such spectacles before them, will
withstand the sense of eternity? No, my brethren, they cannot,
they have not. Eternity, I rejoice to announce to you, is not
forgotten by them ; and with their care for the diseases of the
body, they are neither blind nor indifferent to the fact, that the
soul is diseased also. We know it well. There is an indolent
and superficial theology which turns its eyes from the danger,
and feels no pressing call for the application of the remedy —
which reposes more in its own vague and self-assumed concep
tions of the mercy of God, than in the firm and consistent repre
sentations of the New Testament — which overlooks the existence
of the disease altogether, and therefore feels no alarm, and
exerts no urgency in the business, which, in the face of all the
truths and all the severities that are uttered in the word of God,
leaves the soul to its chance ; or, in other words, by neglecting
to administer anything specific for the salvation of the soul,
leaves it to perish. We do not want to involve you in contro
versies; we only ask you to open the New Testament, and
attend to the obvious meaning of a word which occurs fre-

388 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING

quently in its pages — we mean the word saved. The term
surely implies, that the present state of the thing to be saved,
is a lost and undone state. If a tree be in a healthful state
from its infancy, you never apply the term saved to it, though
you see its beautiful foliage, its flourishing blossoms, its abundant
produce, and its progressive ascent through all the varieties
incidental to a sound and prosperous tree. But if it were
diseased in its infancy, and ready to perish, and if it were re
stored by management and artificial applications, then you would
say of this tree that it was saved ; and the very term implies
some previous state of uselessness and corruption. What, then,
are we to make of the frequent occurrence of this term in the
New Testament, as applied to a human being ? If men come
into this world pure and innocent ; and have nothing more to do
but to put forth the powers with which nature has endowed
them, and so to rise through the progressive stages of virtue and
excellence, to the rewards of immortality, you would not say of
these men that they were saved when they were translated to
these rewards. These rewards of man are the natural effects of
his obedience, and the term saved is not at all applicable to such
a supposition. But the God of the Bible says differently. If a
man obtain heaven at all, it is by being saved. He is in a
diseased state ; and it is by the healing application of the blood
of the Son of God, that he is restored from that state. The
very title applied to Him proves the same thing. He is called
our Saviour. The deliverance which He effects is called our
salvation. The men whom He doth deliver are called the
saved. Doth not this imply some previous state of disease and
helplessness? And from the frequent and incidental occurrence
of this term, may we riot gather an additional testimony to the
truth of what is elsewhere more expressly revealed to us, that
we are lost by nature, and that to obtain recovery, we must be
found in Him who came to seek and to save that which is lost r
He that believeth on the Son of God shall be saved ; but he
that believeth not, the wrath of God abideth on him.

We know that there are some who loathe this representation ;
but this is just another example of the substantial interests of the
poor being sacrificed to mismanagement and delusion. It is to
be hoped that there are many who have looked the disease fairly
in the face, and are ready to reach forward the remedy adapted
to relieve it. We should have no call to attend to the spiritual
interests of men, if they could safely be left to themselves, and

THE CASE OF THE POOR. 389

to the spontaneous operation of those powers with which it is
supposed that nature has endowed them. But this is not the
state of the case. We come into the world with the principles
of sin and condemnation within us ; and, in the congenial atmo
sphere of this world's example, these ripen fast for the execution
of the sentence. During the period of this short but interesting
passage to another world, the remedy is in the gospel held out
to all ; and the freedom and universality of its invitations, while
it opens assured admission to all who will, must aggravate the
weight and severity of the sentence to those who will not ; and
upon them the dreadful energy of that saying will be accom
plished — " How shall they escape if they neglect so great a
salvation ?"

We know part of your labours for the eternity of the poor.
We know that you have brought the Bible into contact with
many a soul. And we are sure that this is suiting the remedy
to the disease ; for the Bible contains those words which are the
power of God through faith unto salvation, to every one who
believes them.

To this established instrument for working faith in the heart,
add the instrument of hearing. When you give the Bible, ac
company the gift with the living energy of a human voice — let
prayer, and advice, and explanation, be brought to act upon
them ; and let the warm and deeply-felt earnestness of your
hearts discharge itself upon theirs in the impressive tones of
sincerity, and friendship, and good-will. This is going substan
tially to work. It is, if I may use the expression, bringing the
right element to bear upon the case before you ; and be assured,
that every treatment of a convinced and guilty mind is super
ficial and ruinous, which does not lead it to the Saviour, and
bring before it His sacrifice and atonement, and the influences
of that Spirit bestowed through His obedience on all who believe
on Him.

While in the full vigour of health, we may count it enough to
take up with something short of this. But— striking testimony
to evangelical truth ! — go to the awful reality of a human soul
on the eve of its departure from the body, and you will find
that all those vapid sentimentalities which partake not of the
substantial doctrine of the New Testament, are good for no
thing. Hold up your face, my brethren, for the truth and sim
plicity of the Bible. Be not ashamed of its phraseology. It is
the right instrument to handle in the great work of calling a

390 BLESSEDNESS OF CONSIDERING THE POOR.

human soul out of darkness into marvellous light. Stand firm
and secure on the impregnable principle, that this is the word of
God, and that all taste, and imagination, and science, must give
way before its overbearing authority. Walk in the footsteps of
your Saviour, in the twofold office of caring for the diseases of the
body, and administering to the wants of the soul ; and though
you may fail in the former — though the patient may never rise
and walk, yet, by the blessing of heaven upon your fervent and
effectual endeavours, the latter object may be gained — the soul
may be lightened of all its anxieties — the whole burden of its
diseases may be swept away — it may be of good cheer, because
its sins are forgiven — and the right direction may be impressed
upon it which will carry it forward in progress to a happy
eternity. Death may not be averted, but death may be dis
armed. It may be stripped of its terrors, and instead of a de
vouring enemy, it may be hailed as a messenger of triumph.

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 391

SEBMON III.

iPreach -d, June, 2, 1814, at Edinburgh, before the Society in Scotland for Propagating
Christian Knowledge.}

THE UTIL1TV OF MISSIONS ASCERTAINED BY EXPERIENCE.

" And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth ? Philip
saith unto him, Come and see." — JOHK i. 46.

THE principle of association, however useful in the main, has
a blinding and misleading effect in many instances. Give it a
wide enough field of induction to work upon, and it will carry
you to a right conclusion upon any one case or question that
comes before you. But the evil is, that it often carries you for
ward with as much confidence upon a limited, as upon an en
larged field of experience ; and the man of narrow views will,
upon a few paltry individual recollections, be as obstinate in the
assertion of his own maxim, and as boldly come forward with his
own sweeping generality, as if the whole range of nature and
observation had been submitted to him.

To aggravate the mischief, the opinion thus formed upon the
specialities of his own limited experience, obtains a holding and
a tenacity in his mind, which dispose him to resist all the future
facts and instances that come before him. Thus it is that the
opinion becomes a prejudice ; and that no statement, however
true, or however impressive, will be able to dislodge it. You
may accumulate facts upon facts ; but the opinion he has already
formed, has acquired a certain right of pre-occupancy over him.
It is a law of the mind which, like the similar law of society,
often carries it over the original principles of justice ; and it is
this which gives so strong a positive influence to error, and
makes its overthrow so very slow and laborious an operation.

I know not the origin of the prejudice respecting the town of
Nazareth ; or what it was that give rise to an aphorism of such
sweeping universality, as that no good thing could come out of it.
Perhaps in two, three, or more instances, individuals may have

392 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

come out of it who threw a discredit over the place of their
nativity, by the profligacy of their actions. Hence an associa
tion between the very name of the town and the villany of its
inhabitants. The association forms into an opinion. The opinion
is embodied into a proverb, and is transmitted in the shape of a
hereditary prejudice to future generations. It is likely enough,
that many instances could have been appealed to, of people from
the town of Nazareth, who gave evidence in their characters and
lives against the prejudice in question. But it is not enough
that evidence be offered by the one party. It must be attended
to by the other. The disposition to resist it must be got over.
The love of truth and justice must prevail over that indolence
which likes to repose, without disturbance, in its present convic
tions ; and over that malignity which, I fear, makes a dark
and hostile impression of others, too congenial to many hearts.
Certain it is, that when the strongest possible demonstration was
oifered in the person of Him who was the finest example of the
good and fair, it was found that the inveteracy of the prejudice
could withstand it ; and it is to be feared that with the question,
"Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" there were
many in that day who shut their eyes and their affections
against Him.

Thus it was that the very name of a town, fastened an asso
ciation of prejudice upon all its inhabitants. But this is only
one example out of the many. A sect may be thrown into dis
credit by a very few of its individual specimens, and the same
association be fastened upon all its members. A society may be
thrown into discredit by the failure of one or two of its under
takings, and this will be enough to entail suspicion and ridicule
upon all its future operations. A system may be thrown into
discredit by the fanaticism and folly of some of its advocates ;
and it may be long before it emerges from the contempt of a
precipitate and unthinking public, ever ready to follow the im
pulse of her former recollections — it may be long before it is
reclaimed from obscurity by the eloquence of future defenders ;
and there may be the struggle and the perseverance of many
years before th coexisting association, with all its train of obloquies
and disgusts and prejudices, shall be overthrown.

A lover of truth is thus placed on the right field for the exer
cise of his principles. It is the field of his faith and of his
patience, and in which he is called to a manly encounter with
the enemies of his cause. He may have much to bear, and littla

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 393

but the mere force of principle to uphold him. But what a noble
exhibition of mind, when this force is enough for it; when,
though unsupported by the sympathy of other minds, it can rest
on the truth and righteousness of its own principle ; when it can
select its objects from among the thousand entanglements of error,
and keep by it amidst all the clamours of hostility and contempt ;
when all the terrors of disgrace cannot alarm it ; when all the
levities of ridicule cannot shame it ; when all the scowl of oppo
sition cannot overwhelm it !

There are some very fine examples of such a contest, and of
such a triumph, in the history of Philosophy, In the progress
of speculation, the doctrine of the occult qualities fell into disre
pute ; and everything that could be associated with such a doc
trine was disgraced and borne down by the authority of the
reigning school. When Sir Isaac Newton's Theory of Gravita
tion was announced to the world, if it had not the persecution of
violence, it had at least the persecution of contempt to struggle
with. It had the sound of an occult principle, and it was
charged with all the bigotry and mysticism of the schoolmen.
This kept it out for a time from the chairs and universities of
Europe, and for years a kind of obscure and ignoble sectarianism
was annexed to that name which has been carried down on such
a tide of glory to distant ages. Let us think of this, when philo
sophers bring their name and their authority to bear upon us,
when they pour contempt on the truth which we love and on the
system which we defend ; and as they fasten their epithets upon
us, let us take comfort in thinking, that we are under the very
ordeal through which philosophy herself had to pass, before she
achieved the most splendid of her victories.

Sure I am, that the philosophers of that age could not have
a more impetuous contempt for the occult principle which they
conceived to lie in the doctrine of gravitation, than many of our
present philosophers have for the equally occult principle which
they conceive to lie in the all-subduing efficacy of the Christian
faith over every mind which embraces it. Each of these two
doctrines is mighty in its pretensions. The one asserts a prin
ciple to be now in operation ; and which, reigning over the
material world, gives harmony to all its movements. The other
asserts a principle which it wants to put into operation, to apply
to all minds, to carry round the globe, and to visit with its in
fluence all the accessible dominions of the moral world. Mighty
anticipation ! It promises to rectify all disorder ; to extirpate

394 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

all vice ; to dry up the source of all those sins and sufferings and
sorrows which have spread such dismal and unseemly ravages
over the face of society ; to turn every soul from Satan unto
God ; or, in other words, to annihilate that disturbing force which
has jarred the harmony of the moral world, and make all its
parts tend obediently to the Deity as its centre and its origin.

But how can this principle be put into operation ? How shall
it be brought into contact with a soul at the distance of a thou
sand miles from the place in which we are now standing? I
know no other conceivable way than sending a messenger in
possession of the principle himself, and able to convey it into the
mind of another by his powers of communication. The precept
of u Go and preach the gospel unto every creature," would ob
tain a very partial obedience indeed, if there was no actual
moving of the preacher from one place or neighbourhood to an
other. Were he to stand still, he might preach to some creatures ;
he might get a smaller or a larger number to assemble around
him : and it is to be hoped, that, from the stationary pulpits of
a Christian country, the preaching of the word has been made
to bear with efficacy on the souls of multitudes. But in refer
ence to the vast majority of the world, that may still be said
which was said by an apostle in the infant state of our religion,
" How shall they hear without a preacher, anJ how shall they
preach except they be sent?" It is the single circumstance of
being sent, which forms the peculiarity so much contended for
by one part of the British public, and so much resisted by the
other. The preacher who is so sent is, in good Latin, termed a
Missionary; and such is the magical power which lies in the
very sound of this hateful and obnoxious term, that it is no sooner
uttered than a thousand associations of dislike and prejudice start
into existence. And yet you would think it very strange : The
term itself is perfectly correct, in point of etymology. Many of
those who are so clamorous in their hostility against it", feel no
contempt for the mere act of preaching, sit with all decency and
apparent seriousness under it, and have a becoming respect for
the character of a preacher. Convert the preacher into a Mis
sionary, and all you have done is merely to graft upon the man's
preaching the circumstance of locomotion. How comes it that
the talent, and the eloquence, and the principle, which appeared
so respectable in your eyes, so long as they stood still, lose all
their respectability so soon as they begin to move ? It is cer
tainly conceivable, that the personal qualities which bear with

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 395

salutary influence upon the human beings of one place, may pass
unimpaired and have the same salutary influence upon the human
beings of another. But this is a missionary process ; and though
unable to bring forward any substantial exception against the
thing, they cannot get the better of the disgust excited by the
term. They cannot release their understanding from the influ
ence of its old associations ; and these philosophers are repelled
from truth, and frightened out of the way which leads to it, by
the bugbear of a name.

The precept is, " Go and preach the gospel to every creature
under heaven." The people I allude to have no particular
quarrel with the preach ; but they have a mortal antipathy to
the go : — and should even their own admired preacher offer to
go himself, or help to send others, he becomes a missionary, or
the advocate of a mission ; and the question of my text is set up
in resistance to the whole scheme, " Can any good thing come
out of it?"

I never felt myself in more favourable circumstances for giving
an answer to the question than I do at this moment, surrounded
as I am by the members of a Society which has been labouring
for upwards of a century in the field of missionary exertion. It
need no longer be taken up or treated as a speculative question.
The question of the text may, in reference to the subject now
before us, be met immediately by the answer of the text, "Come
and see." We call upon you to look to a set of actual perform
ances, to examine the record of past doings ; and, like good philo
sophers as you are, to make the sober depositions of history carry
it over the reveries of imagination and prejudice. We deal in
proofs, not in promises ; in practice, not in profession ; in experi
ence, and not in experiment. The Society whose cause I am now
appointed to plead in your hearing, is to all intents and purposes
a Missionary Society. It has a claim to all the honour, and must
just submit to all the disgrace which such a title carries along
with it. It has been in the habit for many years of hiring
preachers and teachers ; and may be convicted, times without
number, of the act of sending them to a distance. What the
precise distance is I do not understand to be any of signification
to the argument ; but even though it should, I fear that in the
article of distance, our Society has at times been as extravagant
as many of her neighbours. Her labourers have been met with
in other quarters of the world. They have been found among
the haunts of savages. They have dealt with men in the very

396 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

infancy of social improvement ; and their zeal for proselytism has
far outstripped that sober preparatory management, which is so
much contended for. Why, they have carried the gospel message
into climes on which Europe had never impressed a single trace
of her boasted civilisation. They have tried the species in the
first stages of its rudeness and ferocity ; nor did they keep back
the offer of the Saviour from their souls, till art and industry had
performed a sufficient part, and were made to administer in fuller
abundance to the wants of their bodies. This process which has
been so much insisted upon, they did not wait for. They preached
and they prayed at the very outset, and they put into exercise
all the weapons of their spiritual ministry. In a word, they have
done all the fanatical and offensive things, which have been
charged upon other missionaries. If there be folly in such enter
prises as these, our Society has the accumulated follies of a whole
century upon her forehead. She is among the vilest of the vile ;
and the same overwhelming ridicule which has thrown the mantle
of ignominy over other societies, will lay all her honours and
pretensions in the dust.

We are not afraid of linking the claims of our Society with
the general merits of the Missionary cause. With this cause she
stands or falls. When the spirit of missionary enterprise is afloat
in the country, she will not be neglected among the multiplicity
of other objects. She will not suffer from the number or the
activity of kindred societies. They who conceive alarm upon
this ground, have not calculated upon the productive powers of
benevolence. They have not meditated deeply upon the opera
tion of this principle, nor do they conceive how a general impulse
given to the missionary spirit, may work the twofold effect of
multiplying the number of societies, and of providing for each of
them more abundantly than ever.

The fact is undeniable. In this corner of the empire, there is
an impetuous and overbearing contempt for everything connected
with the name of Missionary. The cause has been outraged by
a thousand indecencies. Everything like the coolness of the
philosophical spirit has been banished from one side of the con
troversy ; and all the epithets of disgrace, which a perverted
ingenuity could devise, have been unsparingly lavished on the
noblest benefactors of the species. We have reason to believe
that this opposition is not so extensive, nor so virulent, in Eng
land. It is due to certain provincial associations, and may be
accounted for. It is more a Scottish peculiarity; and while,

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 397

with our neighbours in the south, it is looked upon as a liberal
and enlightened cause — as a branch of that very principle which
abolished the Slave-trade of Africa — as one of the wisest and
likeliest experiments which, in this age of benevolent enter
prise, is now making for the interests of the world — as a scheme
ennobled by the patronage of royalty, supported by the contribu
tions of opulence ; sanctified by the prayers and the wishes of
philanthropy ; assisted by men of the first science, and the first
scholarship ; carrying into execution by as hardy adventurers as
ever trode the desert in quest of novelty ; and enriching gram
mar, geography, and natural knowledge, by the discoveries they
are making every year, as to the statistics of all countries, and
the peculiarities of all languages — While, I say, such are the
dignified associations thrown around the Missionary cause in
England ; in this country I am sorry to tell a very different set
of collaterals is annexed to it. A great proportion of our nobility,
gentry, and clergy, look upon it as a very low and drivelling
concern ; as a visionary enterprise, and that no good thing can
come out of it ; as a mere dreg of sectarianism, and which none
but sectarians, or men who should have been sectarians, have
any relish or respect for. The torrent of prejudice runs strongly
against it ; — and the very name of Missionary excites the most
nauseous antipathy in the hearts of many, who, in other depart
ments, approve themselves to be able and candid and reflecting
inquirers.

We have no doubt that in the course of years all this will
pass away. But reason and experience are slow in their opera
tion ; and in the meantime, we count it fair to neutralize, if
possible, one prejudice by another; to school down a Scottish
antipathy by a Scottish predilection ; and to take shelter from
the contempt, that is now so blindly and so wantonly pouring
on the best of causes, under the respected name of a society
which has earned, by the services of a hundred years, the fairest
claims on the gratitude and veneration of all our countrymen.
Come and see the effect of her Missionary exertions. It is pal
pable, and near at hand. It lies within the compass of many a
summer tour ; and tell me, ye children of fancy, who expatiate
with a delighted eye over the wilds of our mountain scenery, if
it be not a clearer and a worthier exercise still, to comtemplate
the habits of her once rugged and wandering population. What
would they have been at this moment, had Schools, and Bibles,
and Ministers, been kept back from them ? and had the men of

398 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

a century ago been deterred by the flippancies of the present
age, from the work of planting chapels and seminaries in that
neglected land? The ferocity of their ancestors would have
come down, unsoftened and unsubdued, to the existing genera
tion. The darkening spirit of hostility would still have lowered
upon us from the North ; and these plains, now so peaceful and
so happy, would have lain open to the fury of merciless invaders.

0 ye soft and sentimental travellers who wander so securely over
this romantic land, you are right to choose the season when the
angry elements of nature are asleep ! But what is it that has
charmed to their long repose the more dreadful elements of
human passion and human injustice ? What is it that has quelled
the boisterous spirit of her natives ? — and while her torrents roar
as fiercely, and her mountain brows look as grimly as ever, what
is that which has thrown so softening an influence over the minds
and manners of her living population ?

I know that there are several causes ; but sure I am, that the
civilizing influence of our Society has had an important share.
If it be true that our country is indebted to her Schools and her
Bibles for the most intelligent and virtuous peasantry in Europe,
let it never be forgotten that the Schools in the establishment of
our Society are nearly equal to one-third of all the parishes in
Scotland ; that these Schools are chiefly to be met with in the
Highland district ; that they bear as great a proportion to the
Highland population, as all our parochial seminaries do to all
our population ; or in other words, had the local convenience for
the attendance of scholars been as great as in other parts of the
country, the apparatus set agoing by our Society, for the educa
tion of the Highland peasantry, would have been as effective as
the boasted provision of the Legislature for the whole of Scot
land.

I pass over the attempts of our Society to introduce the know
ledge of the arts and the habits of useful industry amongst them.

1 have not room for everything. And to reclaim, if possible,
the prejudices of those who I fear have little sympathy with the
wants of the ever-during soul, I have been lingering all the
while upon the inferior ground of temporal advantage. But I
may detain you for hours upon this ground ; and after all I have
said about a more peaceful neighbourhood, and a more civilized
peasantry, I may positively have said nothing upon the essential
merits of the cause. I can conceive the wish of his present
Majesty, that every one in his dominions may be able to read

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 399

the Bible — to meet an echo in every bosom. But why? Because
the very habit of reading implies a more intelligent people ; —
and must stand associated in every mind with habits of order,
and comfort, and decency. But separate these from the religious
principle, and what are they ? At the very best, they are the
virtues of a life. Their office is to scatter a few fleeting joys
over a short and uncertain pilgrimage ; and to deck a temporary
scene with blessings, which are to perish and be forgotten. No !
in our attempts to carry into effect the principle of being all things
to all men, let us never exalt that which is subordinate ; let us
never give up our reckoning upon eternity — or be ashamed to
own it as our sentiment, that, though schools were to multiply,
though missionaries were to labour, and all the decencies and
accomplishments of social life were to follow in their train —
the great object would still be unattained, so long as the things
of the Holy Spirit were unrelished and undiscerned amongst
them, and they wanted that knowledge of God and of Jesus
Christ, which is life everlasting. This is the ground upon
which every Christian will rest the vindication of every Mission
ary enterprise : and this is the ground upon which he may ex
pect to be abandoned by the infidel who laughs at piety ; or the
lukewarm believer who dreads to be laughed at for the extrava
gance to which he carries it. The Christian is not for giving
up the social virtues ; but the open enemy and the cold friend
of the gospel are for giving up piety : and while they garnish
all that is right and amiable in humanity with the unsubstan
tial praises of their eloquence, they pour contempt upon that
very principle which forms our best security for the existence of
virtue in the world. We say nothing that can degrade the
social virtues in the estimation of men ; but, by making them
part of religion, we exalt them above all that poet or moralist
can do for them. We give them God for their object, and for
their end the grandeur of eternity. No ! it is not the Christian
who is the enemy of social virtue ; it is he who sighs in all the
ecstacy of sentiment over it, at the very time that he is digging
away its foundation, and wreaking on that piety which is its
principle the cruelty of his scorn.

It is very well in its place to urge the civilizing influence of a
Missionary Society. But this is not the main object of such an
institution. It is not the end. It is only the accompaniment.
It is a never-failing collateral, and may be used as a lawful
instrument in fighting the battles of the Missionary cause. It

400 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

is right enough to hold contest with our enemies at every one
point of advantage ; and for this purpose to descend, if necessary,
to the very ground on which they have posted themselves. But,
when so engaged, let us never forget the main elements of our
business ; for there is a danger that — when turning the eye of
our antagonists to the lovely picture of peace, and industry, and
cultivation, raised by many a Christian missionary, among the
wilds of heathenism — we turn it away from the very marrow
and substance of our undertaking ; the great aim of which is to
preach Christ to sinners, and to rear human souls to a beauteous
and never-fading immortality.

The wish of our pious and patriotic king, that every man in
his dominions might be able to read the Bible, has circulated
through the land. It has been commented upon with eloquence ;
and we doubt not, that something like the glow of a virtuous
sensibility has been awakened by it. But let us never forget,
that in the breasts of many, all this may be little better than a
mere theatrical emotion. Give me the man who is in the daily
habit of opening his Bible, who willingly puts himself into the
attitude of a little child when he reads it, and casts an un
shrinking eye over its information and its testimony. This is
the way of giving an effect and consistency to their boasted
admiration of the royal sentiment. The mere admiration in
itself indicates nothing. It may be as little connected with the
sturdiness of principle as the finery of any poetical delusion.
Oh ! it is easy to combine a vague and general testimony to the
Bible, with a disgusted feeling of antipathy to the methodism of
its actual contents ; and thousands can profess to make it their
rallying-point who pour contempt upon its doctrines and give
the lie to the faithfulness of its sayings.

Let us put you to the trial. The Bible tells us, that "he
who believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of
God abideth on him." It calls upon us " to preach the gospel
to every creature," that every creature may believe it ; for he
who so " believeth shall not perish, but have everlasting life."
Such is the mighty difference between believing and not be
lieving. It makes all the difference between hell and heaven.
He who believeth, hath passed from death even unto life ; and
the errand of the missionary is to carry these overtures to the
men of all languages, and all countries, that he may prevail
upon them to make this transition. Some reject his overtures,
and to them the gospel is the savour of death unto death.

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 401

Others embrace them, and to them the gospel is the savour of life
unto life. Whatever be his reception, he counts it his duty and
his business to preach the gospel j and if he get some to hear,
and others to forbear, he just fares as the apostles did before him.
Now, my brethren, have we got among the substantial realities
of the Missionary cause. We have carried you forward from the
accessaries to the radical elements of the business ; and if you,
offended at the hardness of these sayings, feel as if now we had
got within the confines of methodisrn — then know that this
feeling arose in your minds at the very moment that we got
within the four corners of the Bible ; and your fancied admira
tion of this book, however exquisitely felt or eloquently uttered,
is nothing better than the wretched flummery of a sickly and
deceitful imagination.

Our venerable Society has given the sanction of her example
to the best and the dearest objects of missionaries. Like others,
she has kept a wakeful eye over all that could contribute to the
interest of the species. She has given encouragement to art and
to industry ; but she has never been diverted from the religion
of the people, as the chief aim of all her undertakings. To this
end she has multiplied schools, and made the reading of the
Scriptures the main acquirement of her scholars. The Bible is
her school-book, and it is to her that the Highlands of Scotland
owe the translation of the Sacred Record into their own tongue.
She sends preachers as well as teachers amongst them. As she
has made the reading of the Word a practicable acquirement, so
she has made the hearing of the Word an accessible privilege.
In short, she has set up what may be called a Christian apparatus
in many districts, which the Legislature of the country had left
unprovided for. She is filling up the blanks which, among the
scattered and extended parishes of the North, occur so fre
quently over the broad surface of a thinly peopled country.
She lias come in contact with those remoter groupes and hamlets,
which the influence of the Establishment did not reach. And
she has multiplied her endowments at such at rate — that very
many people have got Christian instruction in its different
branches as nearly, and as effectively to bear upon them, as in
the more favoured districts of the land.

When a wealthy native of a Highland parish, penetrated
with a feeling of the wants of his neighbours, erects a chapel,
or endows a seminary among them, his benevolence is felt and
acknowledged by all ; and I am riot aware of a single associa-

VOL. in. 2 c

402 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

tion which can disturb our moral estimate of such a proceeding,
or restrain the fulness of that testimony which is due to it. But
should an individual, at a distance from the parish in question,
do the same thing ; should he, with no natural claim upon him,
and without the stimulus of any of those affections which the
mere circumstance of vicinity is fitted to inspire ; should he, I
say, merely upon a moving representation of their necessities,
devote his wealth to the same cause ; what influence ought this
to have upon our estimate of his character ? Why, in all fairness,
it should just lead us to infer a stronger degree of the principle
of philanthropy — a principle which in his case was unaided by
any local influence whatever ; and which urged him to exertion
and to sacrifice, in the face of an obstacle which the other had
not to contend with — the obstacle of distance. Now what one
individual may be conceived to do for one parish, a number of
individuals may do for a number of parishes. They may form
into a Society ; and combine their energies and their means for
the benefit of the whole country ; and, should that country lie
at a distance, the only way in which it affects our estimate of
their exertions — is by leading us to see in them a stronger prin
ciple of attachment to the species ; and a more determined zeal
for the object of their benevolence, in spite of the additional
difficulties with which it is encumbered.

Now the principle does not stop here. In the instance before
us, it has been carried from the metropolis of Scotland to the dis
tance of her northern extremities. But tell me, why it might
not be carried round the globe. This very Society has carried
it, over the Atlantic ; and the very apparatus which she has
planted in the Highlands and Islands of our own country, she
has set agoing more than once in the wilds of America. The
very discipline which she has applied to her own population, she
has brought to bear on human beings in other quarters of the
world. She has wrought with the same instruments upon the
same materials; and, as in sound philosophy it ought to have
been expected, she has obtained the same result — a Christian
people rejoicing in the faith of Jesus; and ripening for heaven,
l>y a daily progress upon earth, in the graces and accomplish
ments of the gospel. I have yet to learn what that is which
should make the same teaching and the same Bible, applicable
to one part of the species, and not applicable to another. I am
not aware of a single principle in the philosophy of man which
points to such a distinction ; nor do I know a single category in

UTILITY OF MISSIONS. 403

tbe science of human nature, which can assist me in drawing the
landmark between those to whom Christianity may be given,
and those who are unworthy or unfit for the participation of its
blessings. I have been among illiterate peasantry ; and I have
marked how apt they were in their narrow field of observation,
to cherish a kind of malignant contempt for the men of another
shire, or another country. I have heard of barbarians, and of
their insolent disdain for foreigners. I have read of Jews, and
of their unsocial and excluding prejudices. But I always looked
upon these as the jealousies of ignorance, which science and ob
servation had the effect of doing away ; and that the accom
plished traveller, liberalized by frequent intercourse with the
men of other countries, saw through the vanity of all these pre
judices and disowned them. Now what the man of liberal
philosophy is in sentiment, the missionary is in practice. He
sees in every man a partaker of his own nature, and a brother of
his own species. He contemplates the human mind in the gene
rality of its great, elements. He enters upon the wide field of
benevolence ; and disdains those geographical barriers by which
little men would shut out one-half of the species from the kind
offices of the other. His business is with man ; and, let his
localities be what they may, enough for his large and noble
heart, that he is bone of the same bone. To get at him, he will
shun no danger, he will shrink from no privation, he will spare
himself no fatigue, he will brave every element of heaven, he
will hazard the extremities of every clime, he will cross seas, arid
work his persevering way through the briers and thickets of the
wilderness. In perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by
the heathen, in weariness and painfulness, he seeks after him.
The cast and the colour are nothing to the comprehensive eye of
a missionary. His is the broad principle of good-will to the
children of men. His doings are with the species ; and over
looking all the accidents of climate or of country, enough for
him, if the individual he is in quest of be a man — a brother of
the same nature — with a body which a few years will bring to
the grave, and a spirit that returns to the God who gave it.

But this man of large and liberal principles is a missionary ;
and this is enough to put to flight all admiration of him, and of
his doings. I forbear to expatiate ; but sure I am that certain
philosophers of the day, arid certain fanatics of the day, should
be made to change places ; if those only are the genuine philo
sophers who keep to principles in spite of names, and tlio.se

404 UTILITY OF MISSIONS.

only the genuine fanatics who are ruled by names instead of
principles.

The Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the
Highlands and Islands of Scotland, has every claim upon a reli
gious public ; and I trust that those claims will not be forgotten
among the multiplicity of laudable and important objects which
are now afloat in this age of benevolent enterprise. She has all
the experience and respectability and tried usefulness of age ;
may she have none of the infirmities of age. May she have
nothing either of the rust or the indolence of an establishment
about her. Besting on the consciousness of her own righteous
and strongly-supported cause, may she look on the operations of
other societies with complacency, and be jealous of none of them.
She confers with them upon their common objects ; she assists
them with her experience : And when, struggling with difficul
ties, they make their appeal to the generosity of the Christian
world, she nobly leads the way; and imparts to them, with
liberal hand, out of her own revenue. She has conferred lasting
obligations upon the Missionary cause. She spreads over it the
shelter of her venerable name ; and by the answer of " Come
and see," to those who ask if any good thing can come out of it,
she gives a practical refutation to the reasonings of all its adver
saries. She redeems the best of causes from the unmerited con
tempt under which it labours, and she will be repaid. The
religious public will not be backward to own the obligation. We
are aware of the prevalence of the Missionary spirit, and of the
many useful directions in which it is now operating. But we
are not afraid of the public being carried away from us. We
know that there is room for all, that there are funds for all ; and
our policy is not to repress, but to excite the Missionary spirit,
and then there will be a heart for all.

SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS, ETC. 405

SEEMON IV.

(Preached first for a Female Society in Duwfermline, in 1814 ; then for an Orphan Hospital ;
and lastly, for the Society of the Sons of the Clergy, in Glasgow, on March 30, 1815.)*

ON THE SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF THE GIVER TO THAT OF THE RECEIVER.

" I have showed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak ; and to
remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to
receive." — ACTS xx. 35.

JOHN, at the end of his Gospel, spoke of the multitude of other
things which Jesus did, and which he could not find room for in
the compass of his short history. Now, what is true of the do
ings of our Saviour, I hold to be equally true of the sayings of
our Saviour. There are many thousands of these sayings not
recorded. The four Gospels were written within some years after
His death, and though I have no doubt of the promise being-
accomplished upon the apostles, that the Spirit would bring all
things to their remembrance, in virtue of which promise, we have
all things told of Jesus necessary for our guidance here, and our
salvation hereafter — yet I have as little doubt, when I think of
the length and frequency of His conversations with the people
around Him, that many, and very many of the gracious words
which fell from His mouth, have not been transmitted to us in
any written history whatever. They may have been kept alive
by tradition for a few years. They may have been handed from
one to another by mere oral communication. There is no doubt
that they served every purpose for which they were uttered —
but, in the lapse of one or two generations, they ceased to be
talked of, and have now vanished from all earthly remembrance.

But there is one, and only one, of these sayings, which, though
not recorded in any of the Gospels, has escaped the fate of all the
rest. In the course of its circulation among the disciples of that
period, it reached the apostle Paul, and he has thought fit to
preserve it. It seems to have obtained a general currency among
Christians ; for he speaks of it to the elders of Ephesus, as if

* See " Memoirs of Dr. Chalmers," vol. i, pp. 348-352, cheap edition.

406 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

they had heard it before. He quotes it as a saying known to
them as well as to himself. We have no doubt that it was held
in reverence, and referred to, and might have been talked of for
many years in the churches. But it would at length have sunk
into forgetfulness, with the crowd of other unrecorded sayings,
had not Paul caught hold of it in its progress to oblivion ; and,
by placing it within the confines of written history, he has made
it imperishable. It has got within the four corners of that book,
of which it is said, " If any man take away from the words of it,
he shall be accursed." He was the Son of God who uttered it ;
and it is striking enough, that, when unnoticed and unrecorded
by all the evangelists, the apostle of the Gentiles, born out of due
time, was the instrument of transmitting it to posterity. Pre
cious memorial ! There was no chance of its ever being lost to
the Christian church, for all Scripture is given by inspiration of
God ; and without it the volume of inspiration would not have
been completed. But surely the very circumstances of its being
overlooked by the professed historians of our Saviour — of its
being left for a time to fluctuate among all the chances and all
the uncertainties of verbal communications — of its being selected
by the revered apostle of the Gentiles, from among the crowd of
similar sayings which were suffered to perish for ever from the
memory of the world — of his putting his hand upon it, and arrest
ing its march to that forgetfulness to which it was so fast hasten
ing — All these have surely the effect of endearing it the more
to our hearts, and should lead the thoughtful Christian to look
upon the words of my text with a more tender and affecting
veneration.

In discoursing from these words, I shall first direct your atten
tion to those Christians who occupy such a condition of life that
they may give ; and, secondly, to those Christians who occupy
such a condition of life that they must receive.

I will not attempt to draw the precise boundary between these
two conditions. Each individual among you must determine the
question for himself. It is not for me to sit in judgment upon
your circumstances; but know that a clay is coming, when all
these secrets shall be laid open — and when the God who seeth
every heart shall tell with unerring discernment, whether the
selfishness of diseased nutiiro or the charity of the gospel, had
the rule over it.

I. — First, then, as to those Christians who occupy such a con-

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 407

dition of life that they may give. It is more blessed for them
to give than to receive. (1.) Because in so doing-, they are like
unto God ; and to be formed again after His image, is the great
purpose of the dispensation we sit under. We have nothing that
we did not receive, but we cannot say so of God. He is the un
failing fountain out of which everything flows. All originates
in Him. A mighty tide of communication from God to His
creatures, has been kept up incessantly from the first hour of
creation. It flows without intermission. It spreads over the
whole extent of the universe He has formed. It carries light,
and sustenance, and enjoyment, through the wide dominions of
Nature and of Providence. It reaches to the very humblest in
dividual among His children. There is not one shred or frag
ment in the awful immensity of His works which is overlooked
by Him ; and, wonderful to tell, the same God whose arm is
abroad over all worlds, has His eye fastened attentively upon
every one of us, compasses all our goings, gives direction to every
footstep, sustains us and holds us together through every minute
of our existence — and, at the very time that we are living in
forgetfulness of Him, walking in the counsel of our own hearts,
and after the sight of our own eyes — is the universal Creator at
the right hand of each and of all of us, to give us every breath
which we draw, and every comfort which we enjoy.

Oh ! but you may think it is nothing to Him, to open His
hand liberally. He may give and give, and be as full as ever.
He loses nothing by communication. But we cannot part witli
anything to another, without depriving ourselves. Such an ob
jection as this proceeds from an unscriptural view of God. In
the eye of a cold natural theology, He is regarded as a Being
who has nothing in Him answering to that which we feel in
ourselves — when, by a laborious exercise of self-denial, we per
form some great and painful act of liberality. The theology of
nature, or rather of the schools, makes an orderly distribution of
the attributes of God ; and, conceiving His power to be some
kind of physical and resistless energy, it also conceives that He
can accomplish every deed of benevolence however exalted it
may be without so much as the feeling of a sacrifice. Now this,
I think, is not the lesson of the Bible. He who hath seen the
Father, and is alone competent to declare Him, gives me a some
what different view of what I venture to call the constitution of
the Deity. Does not He tell us, that to be kind to our friends
is no great matter ; and then He bids us be kind to our enemies,

408 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

and upon what principle? — That we may be like unto God.
Now in the exercise of kindness to enemies, there is something
going on in our minds totally different from what goes on in the
exercise of kindness to friends ; and I do not see the significancy
of the argument at all, unless you grant me, that there must be
a difference corresponding to this in the mind of the Deity. In
the exercise of kindness to the man who hates you, there is a
preference of his good to the indulgence of your own resentment
— there is a victory over the natural tendencies of your consti
tution — there is a struggling with these tendencies — there is an
act of forbearance — there is a triumph of the principle of love,
over a painful and urgent sense of provocation. Now, if in all
this we are like unto God, must there not be something similar
to all this in the benevolence of God ? Or in other words, there
must be something in His character, corresponding to that which
imparts a character of sublime elevation to the meek and perse
vering charity of an injured Christian.

But again. When we are told that God so loved the "world, as
to send His only-begotten Son into it, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish but have everlasting life — what is the
meaning of the emphatic so f It means nothing at all, if God,
in the act of giving up His Son to death, did not make the same
kind of sacrifice with the parent who, amid the agonies of his
struggling bosom, surrenders his only child at some call of duty
or of patriotism. If it was at the bidding of God that Abraham
entertained strangers, this was some proof of his love to Him.
But it was a much higher proof of it that he so loved Him, as
to be in readiness, at His requirement, to offer up Isaac. Now
there is something analogous to this in God. It proves His love
to men, that He opens His hand, and feeds them all out of the
exuberance which flows from it ; but it is a higher proof of love
that He so loved them as to give up His only-begotten Son in
their behalf.

And the argument loses all its impression, if God did not ex
perience a something in His mind, corresponding to that which
is felt by an earthly parent — when, keeping all the struggles of
his natural tenderness under the control of principle, he gives
up his son at the impulse of some pure and lofty requirement.
Dismiss then, my brethren, all your scholastic conceptions of the
Deity ; and keep by that warm and affecting view of Him that
we have in the Bible. For if we do not, we will lose the im
pression of many of its most moving arguments ; and our hearts

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 409

will remain shut against its most powerful and pathetic repre
sentations of the character of God. To come back then upon
this objection, that it is nothing to God to open His hand libe
rally, for He may give and give, and be as full as ever. And
does God make no sacrifice in the act of giving unto you ? A
pure and unfallen angel would not detract from the praises of
His Creator — by language such as this. And what are you ?
A rebel to His laws, who will yet persist in saying, that God,
by feeding you with His bounty, is making no sacrifice. Why,
He is holding you up though you be a spectacle injurious to His
honour. He is grieved with you every day, and yet every day
He loads you with His benefits. Every sinner is an offence to
Him, and what restrains Him from sweeping the offence away
from the face of His creation altogether ? It is of His mercies
that you are not consumed — that He still bears with you — that
He keeps you in life and in all that is necessary to life — that He
holds on with you a little longer and a little longer — that He
plies you with warnings and opportunities ; and brings the voice
of a beseeching God to bear upon you, calling you to turn arid
be reconciled and live — What!' has He never for your sakes
given up anything that is dear and valuable to Himself? Did
not He give up His Son to the death for you ? All your gifts
to the poor are nothing to this. When Abraham lifted up the
knife over his son Isaac — he felt that he was making a mightier
and more painful sacrifice, than by all his alms-deeds and hos
pitalities. God had compassion on the parental feelings of Abra
ham, and He spared them. But He spared not His own Son.
He gave Him up for us all. And shall we, when we give up a
trifling proportion of our substance to the relief of our poorer
brethren, talk of the sacrifice we are making — as if there was
nothing like it in the benevolence of God ? Talk not then of
your deprivations and your sacrifices. But " be perfect, even as
your Father in heaven is perfect."

Under this particular, I have one practical direction to come
forward with. When you do an act of benevolence, think of the
extent of the sacrifice you have made by it. It is a delightful
exercise to be kind among people who have a sense of your kind
ness — to give away money, if you get an ample return of grati
tude back again — to pay a visit of tenderness to the poor family,
who load you with their acknowledgments and their blessings —
when you are received with the smile of welcome ; arid soothed
by the soft accents of the widow who prays for a reward upon

410 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

you, or of the children who hail you as an angel of mercy. Oh,
it is easy to move gently along through such scenes and families
as these. But have a care that you are not ministering all the
while to your own indulgence and your own vanity ; for then
vorily I say unto you, " you have your reward." The charity of
the gospel is not the fine and exquisite feeling of poetry. It is
a sturdy and enduring principle. It carries you through the
rough and discouraging realities of life, and it enables you to
stand them ; and it is only, my brethren, when you can be kind
in spite of ingratitude — when you can give to the poor man, not
because he thanks you, but because he needs it — when you can
be unwearied in well-doing amid all the bitterness of envy and
all the growlings of discontent — Then, and then only is it, that
you endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ Jesus ; or can
be called the children of the Highest, who is kind to the un
thankful and the evil, and sendeth down His rain on the just and
on the unjust.

(2.) It is more blessed to give than to receive — for to give as
a Christian, is to part with that" which is temporal, and to show
a preference for that which is eternal. By an alms-deed you
give up part of this world's goods. By a piece of service, you
give up a part of this world's ease. By an act of civility, you
give up to another that time which might have been employed
in the prosecution of some design or interest of your own. But,
lest I flatter you into a delusive security, I again recur to the
question, " What is the extent of the sacrifice?" For I am well
aware, that the part thus given up may be so small, as to be no
evidence whatever of a mind bent upon eternity. You may
gratify your feelings of compassion at an expense so small, that
you cannot be said to have made any sacrifice. You may gain
the good- will of all your neighbours by this act of kindness, and
count the purchase a cheap one. You may gratify your love of
ostentation by an act of alms-giving, and do it upon as easy
terms, as you gratify your love of amusement by an act of attend
ance upon the ball-room or the theatre. You may lay out your
penny a week, and be amply repaid for the sacrifice, by the dis
tinction of being one of a society, and by the pleasure of sharing
in the business of it. In all this you have your reward ; but I
do not yet see any evidence of a soul setting its affections upon
the things above in all this. Oh no, my brethren ! A bene
volent society is a very pleasurable exhibition ; and I trust that

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 411

in the one I am now pleading for, there is much of that genuine
principle which shrinks from the pollution of vanity. But were
I to bestow that praise upon the mere act which only belongs to
the principle, 1 might incur all the guilt of a lying prophet. I
might be saying, " Peace, peace, when there is no peace." I
might be proclaiming the praise of God, to him who had already
sought and obtained his reward in the praise of man. I might
be regaling with the full prospect of heaven, him whose heart
tends to the earth, 'and is earthly — whose trifling charity has not
the weight of a straw upon the luxury of his table, or the yearly
amount of that accumulating wealth upon which he sets his con
fidence. Were I, my brethren, who have come from a distance,
to adopt the language of a polite and insinuating flattery, and
send you all away so safe and so satisfied with the charities you
have performed — I might be doing as much mischief, as if I
travelled the country, and revived the old priestly trade of the
sale of indulgences. None more ready than a Christian to enter
into a scheme of benevolence ; but let it never be forgotten, that
a scheme of benevolence may be entered into by many, who fall
miserably short of the altogether Christian. 0 what a multitude
of men and of women may be found, who can give their pennies
a week with the hand, while their heart is still with the trea
sures of a perishable world. Our Saviour was rich, and for our
sake He became poor. Here was the extent of His sacrifice.
Now we may give in a thousand directions for the sake of others,
and yet be sensibly as rich as ever. I am not calling upon you
to make any great or romantic sacrifice. I do not ask you, in
deed and in performance, to forsake all ; but I say that you are
short of what you ought to be, if you are not in readiness to for
sake all upon a clear warning. I say that you may give your
name to every subscription-list, and bestow your something upon
every petitioner ; and yet stand at an infinite distance from the
example you are called upon to imitate. The great point of
inquiry should be, " Is the heart right with God ?" Now I want
to save you from a common delusion, when I tell you, that, out
of your crumbs and fragments, many a Lazarus may be fed —
while yet, like Dives, your heart may be wholly set upon the
meat that perisheth. It is well, and very well, that you are a
member of a benevolent society ; and I shall rejoice to think of
it as one of the smaller fruits of that mighty principle which
brings the whole heart under its dominion — which makes you
willing to renounce self and all its earthly interests at the call

412 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

of duty — which sinks the pursuits and enjoyments of time in the
prospects of eternity — Such a principle as would not merely
dictate the surrender of a penny for the poverty of a neighbour,
but would dictate the surrender of every earthly distinction and
enjoyment on the clear call of conscience or Eevelation — Such
a principle as has often been put to the trial in those woful sea
sons, when a sweeping tide of bankruptcy sets in upon a country ;
and the sanguine speculations of one man, on the false state
ments of another, have involved many an innocent sufferer in
the loss of all that belongs to him. Could I obtain a view of
his heart now, I might collect a more satisfying evidence of the
way in which it stands affected by the things of another world,
than I possibly could do, from all the odd fractions of his wealth,
which he made over to his poorer brethren in the day of pros
perity. When stript bare of his earthly possessions, is the hope
of eternity enough for him ? Is his heart filled with the agonies
of resentment and despair ; or with peaceful resignation to the
will of God, and charity to the human instrument of his suffer
ings ? Now is the time for the fair trial of his principles ; and
now may we learn if to him belongs the blessedness of enduring
it. And it will go further to prove his claim to the kingdom of
heaven, than all the charities of his brighter days — if trust in
Providence, and prayer for the forgiveness of those who have
injured him, shall be found to occupy and to sustain his heart
under the fallen fortunes of his family.

There may be no call upon you to surrender all, in which case
you are spared the very act of a surrender. But God who is the
discerner of the heart, sees whether yours is in such a state of
principle, as to be in readiness for the surrender, so soon as a
clear requirement of conscience is upon you. Were persecution
again to light up its fires in this land of quietness — it is to be
hoped, that there are many who would cheerfully take the spoil
ing- of their goods, rather than abandon the cause of the gospel.
They have not the opportunity of manifesting themselves to the
world ; but the discerning eye of God stands in no need of such
a manifestation. He can fathom all the secrecies of the inner
man ; and, in the great day of the revelation of hidden things,
it will be seen who they are that would have forsaken all to
follow after Christ.

Such as these, may have no opportunity of showing the whole
extent of their devotion to Christ by an actual performance.
But though we cannot speak to their performance, we can speak

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 413

to their principle. They sit loose to the interests of this world,
and their heart is fully directed to the treasure which is in
heaven. They have the willing mind ; and, whenever their
means and their opportunities allow, they will show that they
have it. The thing given may be in itself so very small as to
be no evidence whatever of the preference of eternity over time.
Think not, then, that by the giving of this thing, you will obtain
heaven. Heaven, my brethren, is not so purchased. You are
made meet for heaven by the Spirit working in your soul a con
formity to the image of the Saviour ; and if the charity which
filled His heart, actuate and inflame yours, it will carry you
forward with a mighty impulse to every likely or practicable
scheme for the interests of humanity, and for the alleviation of
all its sufferings.

Before I pass on to the second head of discourse, I shall give
my answer to a question, which may have been prompted by some
of the observations I have already come forward with.

Does not the very object of this Society, it may be asked,
furnish the opportunity we are in quest of? May it not put the
whole extent of a Christian's principles to the test ? Has he it
not in his power to forsake all in following the injunction of
Christ, " Be willing to distribute, and ready to communicate " ?
What is to hinder him from selling all his goods to feed the
poor ? And if his penny a week be no decisive evidence of the
Christian principle which actuates him, may not the evidence be
made still more decisive, by throwing his all into the treasury of
our beneficence ?

When a Christian has a clear and urgent call of conscience
upon him, it is his duty to obey that call in the face of every
sacrifice, however painful, and however mortifying. But it is
also his duty to inform and to enlighten his conscience ; and if
with this view he were to cast about for advice, and do me the
honour of making me one of his advisers, I would submit to
him the following short representation.

There are many ways in which a man may show that he has
less value for this world's wealth, than his neighbours around
him. Why ? He may do so by putting forth his hand to destroy
it. He may set it on fire. He may strip himself of all that
belongs to him by throwing it away ; but none will give to such
fanatical extravagancies as these, the credit which is only due to
the spirit of love, and of power, and of a sound mind.

It is not enough, then, that you prove your indifference to

414 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

this world's wealth by parting with it ; yon must have an object
in parting with it, and the question is, What should that object
be ? Now the feeding of the poor is only one of the many ob
jects, for which you are intrusted with the gifts of Providence.
You are called upon to love your neighbour as yourself; but
you are not called upon to love him better than yourself. Your
own subsistence is an object, therefore, which it is not your
duty to surrender. This is one limit ; and there are many others.
If you provide not for your own family, you are worse than an
infidel. Your parents have a claim upon you. You may be
rich ; and though I do not speak of it as a positive duty, to
maintain the rank and distinction which belong to you, yet you
are allowed by Christianity to do so. The New Testament
recognises the gradations of society ; and it numbers the rich
and the noble among the disciples of the Saviour. Add to all
this, that if the whole disposable wealth of the country was
turned to the one direction of feeding the poor — what would be
come of the others, ay, and of the worthier objects of Christian
benevolence ? Have not the poor souls as well as bodies ? Must
they not be taught as well as fed? Are the narrow limits of our
own parish, or even our own island, to be impassable barriers to
our charity ? Did not the same Saviour who said, Give to him
that asketh, say also, Go and preach my gospel to every creature
under heaven ; and that The labourer is worthy of his hire?
Those who cannot preach may at least hire ; and if the whole
stream of our disposable wealth were turned to the one object of
relieving the temporal necessities of others — what would become
of those sublime enterprises, by which, under the promise of
Heaven, we send the light of Christianity, and all its blessings,
over the wide and dreary extent of that moral wilderness that
is everywhere around us — by which we carry the message of
peace into the haunts of savages, and speed the arrival of those
millennial days, when the sacred principles of good-will to men
shall circulate through the world ; and when the sun, from its
rising to its going down, shall witness the people of all the
countries it shines upon, to be the members of one great and
universal family ?

But more than this — if every shilling of the disposable wealth
of the country were given to feed the poor, it would create more
poverty than it provides for. It would land us in all the mis
chief of a depraved and beggarly population. That subsistence
which they could obtain from the prodigal and injudicious

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 415

charity of others, they would never think of earning for them
selves. Idleness and profligacy would lay hold of the great
mass of our peasantry. Every honourable desire after inde
pendence would be extinguished ; and the people of the land,
thrown loose from every call to the exertions of regular industry,
would spread disorder over the whole face of the country. It
does not occur to the soft daughters of sensibility, but it is not
on that account the less true — that if every purse were emptied
in the cause of poverty, here would be more want and hunger
and hardship in our neighbourhood than there is at this moment.
With the extension of your fund, you would just multiply the
crowd of competitors — each pressing forward for his share, arid
jostling out his more modest and unobtrusive neighbour, who
would be left to pine in secret over his untold and unnoticed
indigence. The clamorous and undeserving poor, would in time
spread themselves over the whole of that ground which should
only be occupied by the children of helplessness ; and, after the
expenditure of millions, it would be found that there was more
unrelieved want, and more unsoftened wretchedness in the
country, than ever.

II. — I now come to a far more effectual check upon the mis
chiefs I have alluded to, than even the judgment and cautious
inquiry of the giver. I proceed, in the second place, to the
duthss of those who are placed in such a situation of life, as to
become receivers ; and the first thing I have to propose to them
is, that, if it be more blessed to give than to receive, then it is
merely putting this assertion of my text into another form, when
T say that it is less blessed to receive than to give. There may
be something in this to startle and alarm the feelings of the poor.
What ! they may say, is our poverty a crime in the eye of
Heaven? Are we to be punished for our circumstances? Are
we to be degraded into an inferior degree of blessedness, because
our situation imposes upon us the painful necessity of receiving
from another, what, with all our industry, we cannot earn for
ourselves? We always understood the gospel to be a mes
sage of glad tidings to the poor ; that its richest consolations
were addressed to them ; that through it God had chosen the
poor of this world to be heirs of the promised kingdom — and
shall we now be told that the man who gives, because his situa
tion enables him so to do, is more blessed than he who is forced
by his situation to be a receiver ?

416 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

In answer to this I have to observe, that man is neither
punished nor rewarded for his circumstances — that the kingdom
is only withheld from the rich, when they set their confidence
and their affections on the world, and despise the offered salva
tion ; and the poor obtain an interest in the gospel, not because
they are poor, but it is because they are rich in faith, that they
are heirs of that kingdom which God hath promised to them
that love Him.

How often shall we have to repeat it, that it is not the deed
of the hand that God looks to, but the dictate of the heart which
gave rise to it ? On this simple principle I undertake to prove
that the very poorest among you, though you have not a penny
to bestow on the necessities of others, may obtain, not the lower
blessedness of him who accepts of chanty, but the higher bless
edness of him who dispenses it ; and that even though so
humble in situation as to be a daily dependant on another's
bounty, you may stand higher in the book of God's remembrance
than even he whose liberality sustains you, and by the crumbs
and fragments of whose table you are kept from starvation.

Let rne first take the case of those poor, who are really not
able to give ; but who, by the struggles of a painful and honour
able industry, have just kept themselves above the necessity of
receiving. Had they been a little more idle, and a little more
thriftless — a thing which very often they might easily have
been without censure and without observation, they behoved to
come upon your charity. They could have made good a legal
claim to a part at least of their maintenance. They could have
drawn a certain sum out of your poors'-fund. But no, they
would not. Before they will take this sum, they try what they
can do by more work and better management. They will not
take a fraction from you, so long as they can shift for them
selves. They do as Paul the apostle did before them ; they
labour with their own hands rather than be burdensome to others;
and that sum which they might have gotten, they suffer you to
keep entire for the relief of other wants still more urgent, and of
other families still more helpless.

Now, the question I have to put to you is — "Who is the giver
of this sum?" I may take a list of them. I may put down the
names of the original contributors, who made it up by their
pennies and their sixpences. But there is one name which does
not appear in the catalogue, yet nobler than them all — even the
hard-working and the honest-hearted labourer, who might have

GIVING TO KECE1VING. 417

obtained the whole sum, but refused to touch a single fraction of
it — who shifted it from himself and let it pass unimpaired to the
lightening of a burden still heavier than his own — who declined
the offer ; or to whom the offer was never made, because it was
known to all, that his own hands ministered unto his own neces
sities. He is the giver of this sum. Others may have parted
with it out of their abundance. But he has given it out of the
sweat of his brow. He has risen up early and sat up late, that
he might have it to bestow on a poorer than himself. It was
first gotten from the easy liberalities of those who scarcely felt
it to be a sacrifice. But it was gotten a second time out of the
bones and muscles of a generous workman. I trust there are
hundreds of such in this town and neighbourhood. I offer
them the homage of my respectful congratulations; nor am I
doing them a greater honour, than the sincerity of my admira
tion goes along with, when I say that they are the best friends
of the poor, they are their kindest and most generous bene
factors.

But let me go still further down — even to the case of those
who are really riot able to give ; but who, burdened with the
infirmities of age or of disease or of sickly and deformed children,
have at length given way to the pressure of circumstances, and
come under the painful necessity of receiving. They may still
carry the same noble principle along with them ; and though in
outward deed, they are receivers — to them may belong all the
generosity of the giver, and all his blessedness. You may not
be able so to labour, as not to be burdensome ; but all of you
are able to do your best — and if you so work and so manage,
that you are as little burdensome as you can, your names may
be recorded in the book of Heaven among the most benevolent
of the species. I love the poor, and I have this very thing to
record of them ; and I have no doubt that there are some now
present, who have witnessed it along with me. Have you never
offered any one of them a sum, out of the public charity ; and
received part of it back again ? Our necessities force us to take
something ; but we shall not take to the whole extent of your
offer. We request that you will keep a part, and leave us to
make a fend with the remainder. Who, I ask again, has given
me the sum that is so returned to me ? Who is it that has fed
the poor and clothed the naked out of it ? To whose account
am I to put down this sum, more honourable to him who has
given it — than the golden donation to be seen on the forehead of

VOL. m. 2 D

418 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

many a subscription paper? Oh, it is easy for us who sit at our
warm firesides, and our plentiful tables, to throw a gift into the
treasury, and live as softly and luxuriously as ever ; but when a
man of poverty submits to voluntary hardships, and fears to be
burdensome — he may have a receiving hand but he has a giving
heart ; and the eye of the great Discerner may there see the
sacred principle of charity, in its purest and most heavenly ex
ercise.

Now, it is not necessary to make the supposition of so much
money being offered, and a part of it being given back again by
each individual in these circumstances. Enough that the in
dividual, by his labour and his frugality and his honest wish to
serve others, makes a less sum necessary to be offered than would
otherwise have been sufficient for him. I trust that there are
many such individuals; and be assured that though they get
out of the parish fund, though they get out of the produce of
your society, though they get out of the liberality of their
wealthier acquaintances, though to the outward and undiscern-
ing eye of the world they are one and all of them receivers — in
the sight of that high and heavenly Witness who pondereth the
heart of man, they are givers — they are put down as givers in
the book of His remembrance — and, if what they do and suffer
in this way be done unto Jesus and suffered for His sake — to
them will be assigned all the blessedness of givers in the day of
reckoning.

The duty which I am now7 pressing upon the poor of being as
little burdensome as they can, is i)he very lesson to be drawn
from the passage now before us. On what occasion is it that
Paul says in my text — "It is more blessed to give than to
receive " ? It is true that he gave the people of Ephesus Chris
tian instruction, he ministered to them in spiritual things ; but
he is speaking of the way in which he obtained a temporal sub
sistence for himself and for his companions. In reference to
meat and to clothing he did not give to the Ephesians ; but he
wrought for it to himself and his own company, and it was doing
this which brought down upon him the blessedness of giving.
Think not then, my brethren, that your poverty shuts you out
from the same reward. Though you do not give with the hand,
you may earn the blessedness of giving that Paul earned ; and
you may do it in the very same way that he did. You may
covet no man's silver or gold or apparel ; and, in as far as age
or disease or the pressure of a numerous and sickly offspring will

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 419

let you, you may say with the apostle " Yea, you yourselves
know that these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and
to them that are with me."

In this age of benevolent exertion, it is delightful to see the
number of societies, and the ready encouragement which comes
in upon them from the liberality of the public — an encourage
ment which I trust will never be withdrawn, till Bibles are cir
culated through all countries, and till missionaries have planted
in every land the faith of a crucified Saviour. But while wit
nessing the splendid names, and the princely donations which
appear in the printed lists of these societies, I cannot forbear
the reflection that there are many others whose labour of love is
unnoticed and unrecorded, who will be registered in the book of
heaven as fellow-helpers to the cause. There are poor who
cannot afford to give ; but who, struggling manfully with the
necessity of their circumstances, keep themselves from being
burdensome to others — and God, who judgeth righteously, will
put down in part to their account, the sum which they have
suffered to go untouched and unencroached upon to the interest
of the Kedeemer's kingdom. There are others who cannot
afford to give ; but who strive to the uttermost — and, by dint of
sobriety and of frugal management, reduce the supply of charity
to a sum as small as possible. God will not treat them as re
ceivers. He will put down to their account all that they have
saved to the givers ; and He will say, that by the whole amount
of what is thus saved, they have fed the stream of that bene
volence which is directed to other objects. The contributors
whose names are presented every year to the eye of the public,
are not the only contributors to our Bible and Missionary
Societies. I could tell you of more ; and though I cannot point
my finger to those of them who occupy this town and neigh
bourhood, I am sure that many of my hearers can do it for me.
There is the industrious labourer, who nobly clears his way
among all the difficulties which surround him. There is the
frugal housewife, who lends her important share to the interests
of the young family. There is the servant who ministers out of
her own wages — to those parents whom age has bowed down in
helpless dependence upon the gratitude of their offspring. In
the eye of the world they may not have given a penny to the
cause ; but, substantially and in effect, they have supported it.
They have circulated Bibles ; they have sent forth missionaries ;
through them the stream of Christian light has been poured

420 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

more copiously on the wilds of paganism ; and many a converted
Indian who meets them in heaven, will bear them witness that
they have added to the number of the redeemed by giving the
message of peace a speedier circulation.

I now conclude, and I do it with one observation. Ask the
giver if he would not feel more disposed to be liberal, and to
open a wider hand to the distresses of those around him, were
he assured that all he gave went to the alleviation of real dis
tress. It is the experience of imposition which shuts many a
heart — and this is a lesson both to the receivers and the visitors
of this Society. How much is it in the power of the lower
classes to befriend their poorer brethren, by the rigid observance
of the duty I have now been pressing upon them. They would
bring down upon them an aid and a sympathy from the rich,
which they have never yet experienced. The counterfeit and
the worthless poor do a world of mischief to the cause of bene
ficence. They obtain for themselves that which the unfortunate
and deserving poor should have gotten. And, what is still
more than this, they stifle in the hearts of the rich, those emo
tions of sympathy which would otherwise have kindled in them.
They throw the cold damp of suspicion over their charities.
The money which would have circulated as freely as the light
of day among the habitations of the wretched is detained, as by
an iron grasp, in the hands of men who have at one time been
misled by the dissimulations of the poor, and at another pro
voked by their ingratitude. Ye amiable and humane visitors of
this Society, it lies upon you to remedy this evil. Convince the
givers around you of the judicious application of the money in
your hands; and more will flow in upon you. Be vigilant, be
discerning, be impartial. Your judgment most be brought into
action, as well as your sympathy. There is as much of the
coolness of principle as of the high ecstacy of feeling in the
benevolence of a Christian ; and my prayer is, that the kind
office you are engaged in may be blessed to your own souls —
that a single aim to the glory of God may animate all your
exertions — that the glittering parade of ostentation may not
deceive you — that, instead of seeking the honour which cometh
from one another, you may seek the honour that cometh from
God only — that the tenderness you feel for others, may be the
genuine fruit of that Spirit which is given to them who believe
— that the labour you have undertaken may indeed be under
taken in the Lord — and then, I can assure you, it will not be in

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 421

vain ; and I call upon you to be steadfast and immovable, and
always abounding therein.

To conclude. It is our duty to relieve actual suffering in all
its forms ; and, be it ignorance or disease or age or lunacy or
hunger or nakedness, the claim upon our beneficence is made
out in one and all of these cases, if it just be made out that they
exist — and with the same tone of earnestness by which I call
upon you to instruct the ignorant, and to harbour the deranged,
and to minister to the diseased, do I call upon you to feed the
hungry, and to clothe the naked, and to give of your abundance
to him who is in need. There is no difference among all these
cases in the obligation to grant relief; and the only difference I
ever contended for, is in the way of going about it. Do the
thing in such a way as shall relieve the present case ; and do
not the thing in such a way as shall have the effect of multi
plying the future cases. Now you do not multiply the future
cases of disease or derangement or dumbness or blindness, by
giving the utmost publicity to your plans for relieving them, by
pleading for them from the pulpit, by building hospitals and
asylums, and blazoning the names and the payments of sub
scribers in the columns of a newspaper. But you do multiply
the future cases of indigence by all this noise and all this parad
ing, about a plan or a society which has for its object the general
relief of indigence. And the plain cause of the difference be
tween the former and the latter is, that a man almost never
becomes a voluntary object for the charity of an hospital ; but
he may, and in point of fact he often does, become a voluntary
object for the charity of alms : and therefore it is, that the less
he knows about the existence of the last kind of charity the
better ; and a want of attention to this principle is, I am sorry
to say, ripening or preparing the population of our great towns,
for that system which now obtains with such full and mischie
vous operation in England — and that delicacy to keep alive
which Paul gave up a portion of his apostolical labours, a
minister now-a-days is called upon also to leave his parish duties,
but for the very different purpose of breaking it down : and thus
it is that, under the soft guise of humanity, a system may be
instituted, which, with kindness for its principle, may carry
cruelty in its operation — ay, and when the yearly assessment
comes to be established, and the provision of a mistaken bene
volence is made known, and the poor have found their way to it —
they will set in upon you by thousands ; and the money which is

422 SUPEKIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

withheld from the endowment of more schools and more churches
and more ministers to meet the moral and religious wants of an
increasing population — will be as nothing to the hungry arid
unquenchable demands of a people, whom you have seduced
from that principle of independence which Christianity teaches,
and which the despised exertions of the Christian minister alone
can keep alive.

And is the cause of indigence then to be altogether aban
doned ? This does not follow. The duty of relieving want is un
questionable, but there is a way of going about it ; and while I
honestly wish it were carried to a tenfold greater extent than it
is at this moment — all I contend for is, that it shall be invested
with the good old scriptural attribute of secrecy. Let societies
be multiplied and pleaded for and publicly made known for the
improvement of the mind, and the relief of every one species
of involuntary suffering — but do let the relief of want be more
confided than it is, to the discernment and discretion and active
benevolence of individuals. It is my earnest desire that every
man among you were a Cornelius, and every woman among
you were a Dorcas — but I should like the alms of the one
unseen by human eye to ascend as a memorial before God;
and the making of coats and garments by the other to re
main unknown till the hand of death shall discover it. Were
every individual among you to give up one-tenth of his income
to the comfort of those in your neighbourhood, I am sure I
should be among the first to rejoice ; but let each of you give
one-hundredth of his income to some published and proclaimed
charity for bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked ; and
a fearful suspicion of the consequences would chill rny every
feeling of benevolent approbation. It is true that concert carries
an advantage along with it ; but is not concert consistent with
secrecy ? Is it necessary that the trumpet be sounded upon the
subject, either in the pulpit or out of it? Would not the
gradual abolition of the public charities — for like the abolition of
every established mischief I fear it must be gradual — give an
impulse to individual benevolence to replace the want of them ?
and, after almsgiving had taken this salutary direction, are there
not Christians to be found in every street, who, unknowing and
unknown to all but themselves, could meet together in the name
of Christ ; and, under the eye of their heavenly Witness, could
give their attention and their charity arid their wisdom to that
work and labour of love which He has assigned to them ?

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 423

I feel myself oppressed by the want of time and of space, for
I am aware of many questions which I must leave unresolved
behind me ; but there is one which I cannot pass over. Does
a published and proclaimed plan for the relief of orphans come
under the animadversions which I have felt it my duty to ad
vance, against any such plan for the relief of indigence in general ?
0 no, my brethren. A public charity for the relief of general
indigence may tempt many a father to the relaxation of his
industry, and many a mother to the relaxation of her manage
ment ; but a charity for the relief of orphans will neither tempt
the one nor the other to a voluntary martyrdom. Carry the
former system to a certain extent ; and you will witness many a
parent providing not for those of his own house ; but carry the
latter system to the full extent of its object, and you never can
have such a spectacle as this to freeze and to discourage you.
In the one case, many of the children you feed and you educate,
may be devolved upon you by the wilful negligence of a parent.
In the other case, they are devolved upon you by the will of God.
He has called away the parents to another scene ; and He has left
to you the care of their helpless family. If you are officious enough
to do that which is more the duty of another, you may have per
formed his work ; but by tempting him to a dereliction of his
principles, you have done it at the expense of his soul. This
language is surely not too strong, if by your injudicious chanty
you have made a single parent let down the industriousness of
his habits — for by so doing you have made him worse than an
infidel. But such is the wisdom of the object to which you have
attached yourselves, that though you do all which you propose —
you interfere with no man's duty ; you tempt and you corrupt
no parents, for alas, where are they ? — you stifle no one feeling
of parental tenderness, for this is what the cold hand of death
hath already done — you withdraw no children from father's or
mother's care, for fathers and mothers are by the mysterious
Providence of God withdrawn from them : and that duty which
at one time belonged to another, has become singly and entirely
yours. 0 how I rejoice, when the lessons of wisdom are at one
with the best and the most delightful of our sympathies — when
compassion may give full vent to its tenderness, and no one prin
ciple or maxim of prudence is trenched upon — when the sweet
movements of pity may be cherished and indulged to the utter
most, and truth brings no one severity to scowl upon us, or tell
us with stern authoritative voice that we expatiate on a forbidden

424 SUPERIOR BLESSEDNESS OF

territory. Keep by your professed object, my brethren ; and if
you do so, let your liberality know no other limit, than that the
object be provided for. And let me not dismiss you without at
least an observation, which I pray God may bless by the enlight
ening influences of His Spirit, so as to undeceive many who build
their confidence upon their charities. A man, under the impulse
of natural feeling, may do many a deed of tenderness ; arid yet
may have a mind totally unfurnished with a sense of God, and
a life totally polluted by conformity to the world. It is well
that God has provided society with so many natural securities
for its existence, in the constitution of the members' who com
pose it — just as it is well for the preservation of the other tribes
of animals, that He has endowed them with the instinct of affec
tion for their young. But ever remember that feeling is one
thing and principle is another ; and to give the stamp of religion
to your doings, a sense of God and of His will must mingle and
give the tone and the direction to every one of them. And thus
while it is true that part of pure religion and undefiled is to visit
the fatherless and the widow in their affliction, it is only when
this is done with a reference of the heart to God and the Father.
And yet how many, because endowed with the constitutional
tenderness, think that upon this single peculiarity, they may
walk in the sight of their own eyes here, and be translated with
all the waywardness of a heart alienated from God and devoted
with every one of its affections to the creature, to the joys and
the rewards of an unfading hereafter : And therefore it is, that
I call upon you not to put asunder what God has joined — not to
found your confidence upon a single half-text of a record, which,
in the vast majority of its contents, you despise and put away
from you — not to open your eye to one clause of a verse, and
shut your eye to the other clause of it ; but know that pure reli
gion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the
fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep your
selves unspotted from the world.

I have hitherto confined myself to general principles ; but let
me not forget the claims of that Institution which I have been
appointed to advocate before you. Nor have I forgotten them.
In this age of benevolent institutions, when some of them are
so legalized by the strong hand of authority, and some of them
are so paraded before the eyes of the public, as to be counted
upon by the receiver ; as to tempt him from the virtue of the
text ; as to relax his economical habits, and of course to create

GIVING TO RECEIVING. 425

and to multiply more cases of distress than it is in the power of
all human contrivances ever to provide for — I say, in these cir
cumstances, one feels a comfort in attaching himself to the cause
of an endowment, which may be supported to any extent you
please, without its ever being possible to realize the mischief I
am now alluding to. Why, my brethren — the very confinement
of the object to a limited number of families, is of itself a se
curity against that mischief which our soundest economists
apprehend from the number and the publicity of our benevolent
institutions. Were the country, upon the spontaneous move
ment of its own kindly and religious feelings, to take upon itself
the care of our destitute orphans, it just resolves itself into an
augmentation of the clerical patrimony. It is only adding a
little to the provision of the Legislature in our behalf; and it is
such an addition as will not give one single luxury to our table,
or tempt us to the pride of life by enabling us to tack one vanity
more to the splendour of our establishment. I am not aware of
a single hurtful effect that can be alleged against the charity for
which I am contending. I know of nothing that should throw
the cold damp of suspicion over it — and therefore it is that I feel
no restraint whatever, in laying it before you as an open field,
on which the benevolence of the public may expatiate without
fear and without encumbrance. It is true that the sympathies
of a man are ever most alive to those distresses which may fall
upon himself — and that it is for a minister to feel the deepest
emotion at the sad picture of the breaking up of a minister's
family. When the sons and the daughters of clergymen are left
to go, they know not whither, from the peacefulness of their
father's dwelling — never were poor outcasts less prepared by the
education and the habits of former years, for the scowl of an un-
pitying world ; nor can I figure a drearier and more affecting
contrast, than that which obtains between the blissful security
of their earlier days, and the dark and unshielded condition to
which the hand of Providence has now brought them. It is not
necessary, for the purpose of awakening your sensibilities on this
subject, to dwell upon every one circumstance of distress which
enters into the sufferings of this bereaved family — or to tell you
of the many friends they must abandon, and the many charms
of that peaceful neighbourhood which they must quit for ever.
But when they look abroad and survey the innumerable beauties
which the God of nature has scattered so profusely around them
— when they see the sun throwing its unclouded splendours over
the whole neighbourhood — when, on the fair side of the year,

426

they behold the smiling aspect of the country ; and at every
footstep they take, some flower appears in its loveliness, or some
bird offers its melody to delight them — when they see quiet
ness on all the hills, and every field glowing in the pride and
luxury of vegetation — when they see summer throwing its rich
garment over this goodly scene of magnificence arid glory, and
think, in the bitterness of their souls, that this is the last summer
which they shall ever witness smiling on that scene which all
the ties of habit and of affection have endeared to them — when
this thought, melancholy as it is, is lost and overborne in the far
darker melancholy of a father torn from their embrace, and a
helpless family left to find their way unprotected and alone
through the lowering futurity of this earthly pilgrimage — Do
you wonder that their feeling hearts should be ready to lose hold
of the promise, that He who decks the lily fair in flowery pride,
will guide them in safety through the world, and at last raise all
who believe in Him to the bloom and the vigour of immortality ?
The flowers of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet
your heavenly Father careth for them — arid how much more
careth He for you, 0 ye of little faith ?

Oh, it is kind in you, my brethren, to set yourselves forward
as the instruments of this promise — to house these unprotected
wanderers — to shield them from the blast they are far too soft and
tender to endure — and to lighten the severity of that fall which
they have suffered, by the premature loss of a father, who now
only lives in the memory of a revering people, and the affections
of a despairing family. Do, my brethren, give out of your abun
dance. You know not what the hand of death may ere long
bring upon your own habitations. Work then while it is day ;
for the night cometh when no man can work. If the Discerner
of the heart, who counts even a cup of cold water given to the
least of His little ones, sees of your offering that it is done unto
Him, and that it is for the love you bear His gospel, and the
value you have for His ministers — if He can recognise it as the
fruit of that mighty principle which purifies the heart, and sends
forth the copious streams of all that is good and kind and gener
ous into the walk and conversation, then verily I say unto you
that you shall by no means lose your reward.*

* The three different conclusions of this sermon mark the three different occasions on
which it was preached ; and also the sentiments of the author, in regard to the distinct ob
jects which he was called upon to advocate. lie may remark, that, after the experience of
twenty-four years, he should feel disinclined to plead for the first of these objects, and even
be doubtful in regard to the second — which he thinks occupies a midway or ambiguous place
between the cases which might, and those which ought not to be provided for by public
institutions.

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 427

SEKMON V.

(Preached in the Tron Church, Glasgow, on a day of National Thanksgiving in 1816.)
THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

" Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." —
ISAIAH ii. 4.

THERE are a great many passages in Scripture which warrant
the expectation that a time is corning, when war shall be put an
end to — when its abominations and its cruelties shall be banished
from the face of the earth — when those restless elements of
ambition and jealousy which have so long kept the species in a
state of unceasing commotion, and are ever and anon sending
another and another wave over the field of this world's politics,
shall at length be hushed into a placid and enduring calm ; and
many and delightful are the images which the Bible employs,
as, guided by the light of prophecy, it carries us forward to
those millennial days when the reign of peace shall be esta
blished, and the wide charity of the gospel, which is confined
by no limits and owns no distinctions, shall embosom the whole
human race within the ample grasp of one harmonious and uni
versal family.

But before I proceed, let me attempt to do away a delusion
which exists on the subject of prophecy. Its fulfilments are all
certain, say many, and we have therefore nothing to do but to
wait for them in passive and indolent expectation. The truth
of God stands in no dependence on human aid to vindicate the
immutability of all His announcements ; and the power of God
stands in no need of the feeble exertions of man to hasten the
accomplishment of any of His purposes. Let us therefore sit
down quietly in the attitude of spectators — let us leave the
Divinity to do His own work in His own way, and mark, by the
progress of a history over which we have no control, the evolu
tion of His designs, and the inarch of His wise and beneficent
administration.

428 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

Now, it is very true, that the Divinity will do His own work
in His own way, but if He choose to tell us that that way is not
without the instrumentality of men, but by their instrumentality,
might not this sitting down into the mere attitude of spectators
turn out to be a most perverse and disobedient conclusion ? It
is true that His purpose will obtain its fulfilment, whether we
shall offer or not to help it forward by our co-operation. But if
the object is to be brought about, and if, in virtue of the same
sovereignty by which He determined upon the object, He has
also determined on the way which leads to it, and that that way
shall be by the acting of human principle, and the putting forth
of human exertion, then let us keep back our co-operation as we
may, God will raise up the hearts of others to that which we
abstain from ; and they, admitted into the high honour of being
fellow-workers with God, may do homage to the truth of His
prophecy ; while we, perhaps, may unconsciously do dreadful
homage to the truth of another warning and another prophecy :
" I work a work in your days which you shall not believe,
though a man declare it unto you. Behold, ye despisers, and
wonder, and perish !"

Now this is the very way in which prophecies have been
actually fulfilled. The return of the people of Israel to their
own land was an event predicted by inspiration, and was brought
about by the stirring up of the spirit of Cyrus, who felt himself
charged with the duty of building a house to God at Jerusalem.
The pouring out of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost was fore
told by the Saviour ere He left the world, and was accomplished
upon men, who assembled themselves together at the place to
which they were commanded to repair ; and there they waited,
and they prayed. The rapid propagation of Christianity in those
days was known, by the human agents of this propagation, to
be made sure by the word of prophecy ; but the way in which
it was actually made sure was by the strenuous exertions, the
unexampled heroism, the holy devotedness and zeal, of martyrs
and apostles and evangelists. And even now, my brethren,
while no professing Christians can deny that their faith is to be
one day the faith of all countries ; but while many of them
idly sit, and wait the time of God putting forth some mysterious
and unheard-of agency, to bring about the universal diffusion,
there are men who have betaken themselves to the obvious ex
pedient of going abroad among the nations and teaching them ;
and though derided by an undiscerning world, they seem to be

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 429

the very men pointed out by the Bible, who are going to and
fro increasing the knowledge of its doctrines, and who will be
the honoured instruments of carrying into effect the most splen
did of all its anticipations.

Now the same holds true, I apprehend, of the prophecy in my
text. The abolition of war will be the effect not of any sudden
or resistless visitation from heaven on the character of men — not
of any mystical influence working with all the omnipotence of a
charm on the passive hearts of those who are the subjects of it —
not of any blind or overruling fatality which will come upon the
earth at some distant period of its history, and about which we
of the present day have nothing to do but to look silently on,
without concern and without co-operation. The prophecy of a
peace as universal as the spread of the human race, and as en
during as the moon in the firmament, will meet its accomplish
ment, and at that very time which is already fixed by Him who
seeth the end of all things from the beginning thereof. But it
will be brought about by the activity of men. It will be done
by the philanthropy of thinking and intelligent Christians. The
conversion of the Jews — the spread of gospel light among the
regions of idolatry — these are distinct subjects of prophecy, on
which the faithful of the land are now acting, and to the fulfil
ment of which they are giving their zeal and their energy. I
conceive the prophecy which relates to the final abolition of war
will be taken up in the same manner ; and the subject will be
brought to the test of Christian principle ; and many will unite
to spread a growing sense of its follies and its enormities over
the countries of the world — and the public will be enlightened
not by the factious and turbulent declamations of a party, but
by the mild dissemination of gospel sentiment through the land
— and the prophecy contained in this book will pass into effect
and accomplishment, by no other influence than the influence of
its ordinary lessons on the hearts and consciences of individuals
— and the measure will first be carried in one country, not by
the unhallowed violence of discontent, but by the control of
general opinion, expressed on the part of a people, who, if Chris
tian in their repugnance to war, will be equally Christian in all
the loyalties and subjections, and meek unresisting virtues of the
New Testament — and the sacred fire of good- will to the children
of men will spread itself through all climes, and through all
latitudes — and thus by scriptural truth conveyed with power
from one people to another, and taking its ample round among

430 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

all the tribes and families of the earth, shall we arrive at the
magnificent result of peace throughout all its provinces, and
security in all its dwelling-places.

In the further prosecution of this discourse, I shall, first, ex
patiate a little on the evils of war. In the second place, I shall
direct your attention to the obstacles which stand in the way of
its extinction, and which threaten to retard for a time the accom
plishment of the prophecy I have now selected for your con
sideration. And, in the third place, I shall endeavour to point
out, what can only be done at present in a hurried and super
ficial manner, some of the expedients by which these obstacles
may be done away.

I. — I shall expatiate a little on the evils of war. The mere
existence of the prophecy in my text, is a sentence of condemna
tion upon war, and stamps a criminality on its very forehead.
So soon as Christianity shall gain a full ascendency in the world,
from that moment war is to disappear. We have heard that
there is something noble in the art of war ; that there is some
thing generous in the ardour of that fine chivalric spirit which
kindles in the hour of alarm, and rushes with delight among the
thickest scenes of danger and of enterprise ; — that man is never
more proudly arrayed than when, elevated by a contempt for
death, he puts on his intrepid front, and looks serene, while the
arrows of destruction are flying on every side of him ; — that
expunge war, and you expunge some of the brightest names in
the catalogue of human virtue, and demolish that theatre on
which have been displayed some of the sublimest energies of the
human character. It is thus that war has been invested with a
most pernicious splendour, and men have offered to justify it as
a blessing, and an ornament to society, and attempts have been
made to throw a kind of imposing morality around it ; and one
might almost be reconciled to the whole train of its calamities
and its horrors, did he not believe his Bible, and learn from its
information, that in the days of perfect righteousness, there will
be no war ; — that so soon as the character of man has had the
last finish of Christian principle thrown over it, from that mo
ment all the instruments of war will be thrown aside, and all its
lessons will be forgotten ; — that, therefore, what are called the
virtues of war are no virtues at all, or that a better and a worthier
scene will be provided for their exercise ; but in short, that at
the commencement of that blissful era when the reign of heaven

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 431

shall be established, war will take its departure from the world
with all the other plagues and atrocities of the species.

But apart altogether from this testimony to the evil of war, let
us just take a direct look of it, and see whether we can find its
character engraven on the aspect it bears to the eye of an at
tentive observer. The stoutest heart of this assembly would
recoil, were he who owns it to behold the destruction of a
single individual by some deed of violence. Were the man who
at this moment stands before you in the full play and energy of
health, to be in another moment laid by some deadly aim a
lifeless corpse at your feet, there is not one of you who would
not prove how strong are the relentings of nature at a spectacle
so hideous as death. There are some of you who would be
haunted for whole days by the image of horror you had witnessed
— who would feel the weight of a most oppressive sensation
upon your heart, which nothing but time could wear away —
who would be so pursued by it as to be unfit for business or for
enjoyment — who would think of it through the day, and it
would spread a gloomy disquietude over your waking moments
— who would dream of it at night, and it would turn that bed
which you courted as a retreat from the torments of an ever-
meddling memory, into a scene of restlessness.

But generally the death of violence is not instantaneous, and
there is often a sad and dreary interval between its final consum
mation, and the infliction of the blow which causes it. The
winged messenger of destruction has not found its direct avenue
to that spot where the principle of life is situated — and the
soul, finding obstacles to its immediate egress, has to struggle
for hours ere it can make its weary way through the winding
avenues of that tenement, which has been torn open by a bro
ther's hand. Oh, my brethren, if there be something appalling
in the suddenness of death, think not that when gradual in its
advances, you will alleviate the horrors of this sickening con
templation by viewing it in a milder form. Oh, tell me, if there
be any relentings of pity in your bosom, how could you endure
it, to behold the agonies of the dying man, as, goaded by pain,
be grasps the cold ground in convulsive energy, or faint with
the loss of blood, his pulse ebbs low, and the gathering paleness
spreads itself over his countenance — or wrapping himself round
in despair, he can only mark by a few feeble quiverings that life
still lurks and lingers in his lacerated body — or lifting up a
faded eye, he cast on you a look of imploring helplessness for

432 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

that succour which no sympathy can yield him. It may be
painful to dwell on such a representation — but this is the way in
which the cause of humanity is served. The eye of the senti
mentalist turns away from its sufferings ; and he passes by on
the other side, lest he hear that pleading voice which is armed
with a tone of remonstrance so vigorous as to disturb him. He
cannot bear thus to pause, in imagination, on the distressing
picture of one individual ; but multiply it ten thousand times —
say, how much of all this distress has been heaped together
upon a single field — give us the arithmetic of this accumulated
wretchedness, and lay it before us with all the accuracy of an
official computation — and, strange to tell, not one sigh is lifted
up among the crowd of eager listeners as they stand on tiptoe,
arid catch every syllable of utterance which is read to them out
of the registers of death. 0 say, what mystic spell is that
which so blinds us to the sufferings of our brethren — which
deafens to our ear the voice of bleeding humanity, when it is
aggravated by the shriek of dying thousands — which makes the
very magnitude of the slaughter throw a softening disguise over
its cruelties and its horrors — which causes us to eye with indif
ference the field that is crowded with the most revolting abo
minations, and arrests that sigh which each individual would
singly have drawn from us, by the report of the many who have
fallen, and breathed their last in agony along with him ?

I am not saying that the burden of all this criminality rests
upon the head of the immediate combatants. It lies somewhere ;
but who can deny that a soldier may be a Christian, and that
from the bloody field on which his body is laid, his soul may
wing its ascending way to the shores of a peaceful eternity ?
But when I think that the Christians, even of the great world,
form but a very little flock, and that an army is not a propitious
soil for the growth of Christian principle — when I think on the
character of one such army, that had been led on for years by a
ruffian ambition — arid been inured to scenes of barbarity — and
had gathered a most ferocious hardihood of soul, from the many
enterprises of violence to which an unprincipled commander had
carried them — when I follow them to the field of battle, and
further think, that on both sides of an exasperated contest — the
gentleness of Christianity can have no place in almost any
bosom ; but that nearly every heart is lighted up with fury,
and breathes a vindictive purpose against a brother of the
species, I cannot but reckon it among the most fearful of the

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 433

calamities of war — that while the work of death is thickening
along its ranks, so many disembodied spirits should pass into
the presence of Him who sitteth upon the throne, in such a
posture, and with such a preparation.

I have no time, arid assuredly as little taste, for expatiating
on a topic so melancholy, nor can I afford at present to set
before you a vivid picture of the other miseries which war carries
in its train — how it desolates every country through which it
rolls, and spreads violation and alarm among its villages — how,
at its approach, every home pours forth its trembling fugitives
— how all the rights of property, and all the provisions of
justice, must give way before its devouring exactions — how,
when Sabbath comes, no Sabbath charm comes along with it —
and for the sound of the church bell, which wont to spread its
music over some fine landscape of nature, and summon rustic
worshippers to the house of prayer — nothing is heard but the
deathful volleys of the battle, and the maddening outcry of in
furiated men — how, as the fruit of victory, an unprincipled
licentiousness whith no discipline can restrain, is suffered to
walk at large among the people — and all that is pure, and
reverent, and holy in the virtue of families, is cruelly trampled
on, and held in the bitterest derision. Oh ! my brethren, were
we to pursue those details, which no pen ever attempts, and no
chronicle perpetuates, we should be tempted to ask, what that
is which civilisation has done for the character of the species ?
It has thrown a few paltry embellishments over the surface of
human affairs ; and, for the order of society, it has reared the
defences of law around the rights and the property of the in
dividuals who compose it. But let war, legalized as you may,
and ushered into the field with all the parade of forms and mani
festoes — let this war only have its season, and be suffered to
overleap these artificial defences, and you will soon see how
much of the security of the commonwealth is due to positive
restrictions, and how little of it is due to a natural sense of justice
among men. I know well, that the plausibilities of human
character, which abound in every modern and enlightened
society, have been mustered up to oppose the doctrine of the
Bible, on the woful depravity of our race. But out of the his
tory of war, I can gather for this doctrine the evidence of ex
periment. It tells me, that man, when left to himself and let
loose among his fellows, to walk after the counsel of his own
heart, and in the sight of his own eyes, will soon discover how

VOL. m. 2 E

434 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

thin that tinsel is, which the boasted hand of civilisation has
thrown over him. — Arid we have only to blow the trumpet of war,
and proclaim to man the hour of his opportunity, that his char
acter may show itself in its essential elements — and that we may
see how many, in this our moral and enlightened day, would
spring forward as to a jubilee of delight, and prowl like the
wild men of the woods, amidst scenes of rapacity and cruelty
and violence.

II. — But let me hasten away from this part of the subject ;
and, in the second place, direct your attention to those obstacles
which stand in the way of the extinction of war, and which
threaten to retard, for a time, the accomplishment of the pro
phecy I have now selected for your consideration.

But is this the time, it may be asked, to complain of obstacles
to the extinction of war, when peace has been given to the
nations, and we are assembled to celebrate its triumphs? Is
this day of high and solemn gratulation to be turned to such
forebodings as these ? The whole of Europe is now at rest from
the tempest which convulsed it — and a solemn treaty, with all
its adjustments and all its guarantees, promises a firm perpetuity
to the repose of the world. We have long fought for a happier
order of things, and at length we have established it — and the
hard-earned bequest we hand down to posterity as a rich in
heritance, won by the labours and the sufferings of the present
generation. That gigantic ambition which stalked in triumph
over the firmest and the oldest of our monarchies, is now laid —
and can never again burst forth from the confinement of its
prison -hold to waken a new uproar, and send forth new troubles
over the face of a desolated world.

Now, in reply to this, let it be observed, that every interval
of repose is precious — every breathing-time from the work of
violence is to be rejoiced in by the friends of humanity — every
agreement among the powers of the earth, by which a temporary
respite can be gotten from the calamities of war, is so much
reclaimed from the amount of those miseries that afflict the
world, and of those crimes, the cry of which ascendeth unto
heaven, and bringeth down the judgments of God on this dark
and rebellious province of His creation. I trust, that on this day,
gratitude to Him who alone can still the tumults of the people,
will be the sentiment of every heart — and I trust that none who
now hear me, will refuse to evince his gratitude to the Author
of the New Testament, by their obedience to one of the most

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 435

distinct and undoubted of its lessons — I mean the lesson of a
reverential and submissive loyalty. I cannot pass an impartial
eye over this record of God's will, without perceiving the utter
repugnance that there is between the spirit of Christianity, and
the factious, turbulent, unquenchable, and ever-meddling spirit
of political disaffection. I will not compromise, by the surrender
of a single jot or tittle, the integrity of that preceptive code
which the Saviour hath left behind Him for the obedience of His
disciples. I will not detach the very minutest of its features
from the fine picture of morality that Christ hath bequeathed,
both by commandment and example, to adorn the nature He
condescended to wear — and sure I am that the man who .has
drunk in the entire spirit of the gospel — who, reposing himself
on the faith of its promised immortality, can maintain an ele
vated calm amid all the fluctuations of this world's interest —
whose exclusive ambition it is to be the unexcepted pupil of
pure and spiritual and self-denying Christianity — sure I am
that such a man will honour the king and all who are in
authority — and be subject unto them for the sake of conscience
— and render unto them all their dues — and not withhold a
single fraction of the tribute they impose upon him — and be the
best of subjects, just because he is the best of Christians — resist
ing none of the ordinances of God, and living a quiet and a
peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty.

But it gives me pleasure to advance a further testimony in
behalf of that government with which it has pleased God, who
appointeth to all men the bounds of their habitation, to bless
that portion of the globe which we occupy. I count it such a
government that I not only owe it the loyalty of my principles
— but I also owe it the loyalty of my affections. I could not
lightly part with my devotion to that government which the
other year opened the door to the Christianization of India — I
shall never withhold the tribute of my reverence from that
government which put an end to the atrocities of the Slave
Trade — I shall never forget the triumph which, in that proudest
day of Britain's story, the cause of humanity gained within the
walls of our enlightened Parliament. Let my right hand forget
her cunning, ere I forget that country of my birth, where, in
defiance to all the clamours of mercantile alarm, every calcula
tion of interest was given to the wind, arid braving every
hazard, she nobly resolved to shake off the whole burden of the
infamy which lay upon her. I shall never forget, that how

436 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

to complete the object in behalf of which she has so honourably
led the way, she has walked the whole round of civilized society,
and knocked at the door of every government in Europe, ar.cl
lifted her imploring voice for injured Africa, and pleaded with
the mightiest monarchs of the world, the cause of her outraged
shores, and her distracted families. I can neither shut my
heart nor rny eyes to the fact, that at this moment she is stretch
ing forth the protection of her naval arm, and shielding to the
uttermost of her vigour, that coast where an inhuman avarice
is still plying its guilty devices, and aiming to perpetuate among
an unoffending people, a trade of cruelty, with all the horrid
train of its terrors and abominations. Were such a government
as this to be swept from its base, either by the violence of
foreign hostility, or by the hands of her own misled and in
fatuated children — I should never cease to deplore it as the
deadliest interruption which ever had been given to the interests
of human virtue, and to the march of human improvement. 0
how it should swell every heart, not with pride, but with grati
tude, to think that the land of our fathers, with all the iniquities
which abound in it, with all the profligacy which spreads along
our streets, and all the profaneness that is heard among our
companies— to think that this our land, overspread as it is with
the appalling characters of guilt, is still the securest asylum of
worth and of liberty — that this is the land from which the most
copious emanations of Christianity are going forth to all the
quarters of the world — that this is the land which teems from
one end to the other of it with the most splendid designs and
enterprises for the good of the species — that this is the land
where public principle is most felt, and public objects are most
prosecuted, and the fine impulse of a public spirit is most ready to
carry its generous people beyond the limits of a selfish and con
tracted patriotism ! Yes, and when the heart of the philan
thropist is sinking within him at the gloomy spectacle of those
crimes and atrocities which still deform the history of man, I
know not a single earthly expedient more fitted to brighten and
sustain him, than to turn his eye to the country in which he
lives — and there see the most enlightened government in the
world acting as the organ of its most moral and intelligent
population.

It is not against the government of my country, therefore,
that I direct my observations — but against that nature of man
in the infirmities of which we all share, and the evil of which

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 437

no government can extinguish. We have carried a new political
arrangement, and we experience as the result of it, a temporary
calm — but we have not yet carried our way to the citadel of
human passions. The elements of war are hushed for a season
— but these elements are not destroyed. They still rankle iii
many an unsubdued heart — and I am too well taught by the
history of the past, and the experience of its restless variations,
not to believe that they will burst forth again in thunder over
the face of society. No, my brethren, it will only be when
diffused and vital Christianity comes upon the earth, that an
enduring peace will come along with it. The prophecy of my
text will obtain its fulfilment — but not till the fulfilment of the
verses which go before it ; — not till the influence of the gospel
has found its way to the human bosom, and plucked out of it
the elementary principles of war ; — not till the law of love shall
spread its melting arid all-subduing efficacy among the children
of one common nature ; — not till ambition be dethroned from its
mastery over the affections of the inner man ; — not till the guilty
splendours of war shall cease to captivate its admirers, and
spread the blaze of a deceitful heroism over the wholesale
butchery of the species ; — not till national pride be humbled,
and man shall learn, that if it be individually the duty of each
of us in honour to prefer one another ; then let these individuals
combine as they may, and form societies as numerous and
extensive as they may, and each of these be swelled out to the
dimensions of an empire, still, that mutual condescension and
forbearance remain the unalterable Christian duties of these
empires to each other ; — not till man learn to revere his brother
as man, whatever portion of the globe he occupies, and all the
jealousies and preferences of a contracted patriotism be given
to the wind ; — not till war shall cease to be prosecuted as a
trade, and the charm of all that interest which is linked with
its continuance, shall cease to beguile men in the peaceful walks
of merchandise, into a barbarous longing after war ; — not, in
one word, till pride, and jealousy, and interest, and all that is
opposite to the law of God and the charity of the gospel, shall
be for ever eradicated from the character of those who possess
an effectual control over the public and political movements of
the species ; — Not till all this be brought about ; and there is
not another agent in the whole compass of nature that can bring
it about but the gospel of Christ, carried home by the all-sub
duing power of the Spirit to the consciences of men ; — then,

438 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

and not till then, my brethren, will peace come to take up its
perennial abode with us, and its blessed advent on earth be
hailed by one shout of joyful acclamation throughout all its
families ; — then, and not till then, will the sacred principle of
good-will to men circulate as free as the air of heaven among
all countries — and the sun looking out from the firmament, will
behold one fine aspect of harmony throughout the wide extent
of a regenerated world.

It will only be in the last days, " when it shall come to pass,
that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in
the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills,
and all nations shall flow into it : arid many people shall go,
and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob ; and he will teach us of his
ways, and we will walk in his paths : for out of Zion shall go
forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem ; and
he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many
people ; " — then, and not till then, " they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation
shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn
war any more."

The above rapid sketch glances at the chief obstacles to the
extinction of war ; and, in what remains of this discourse, I shall
dwell a little more particularly on as many of them as my time
will allow me, finding it impossible to exhaust so wide a topic,
within the limits of the public services of one day.

The first great obstacle, then, to the extinction of war, is the
way in which the heart of man is carried off from its barbarities
and its horrors, by the splendour of its deceitful accompaniments.
There is a feeling of the sublime in contemplating the shock of
armies, just as there is in contemplating the devouring energy
of a tempest ; and this so elevates and engrosses the whole man,
that his eye is blind to the tears of bereaved parents, and his ear
is deaf to the piteous moan of the dying, and the shriek of their
desolated families. There is a gracefulness in the picture of a
youthful warrior burning for distinction on the field, and lured
by this generous aspiration to the deepest of the animated throng,
where, in the fell work of death, the opposing sons of valour
struggle for a remembrance and a name ; — and this side of the
picture is so much the exclusive object of our regard, as to dis
guise from our view the mangled carcasses of the fallen, and the
writhing agonies of the hundreds and the hundreds more who

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 439

have been laid on the cold ground, where they are left to lan
guish and to die. There no eye pities them. No sister is there
to weep over them. There no gentle hand is present to ease the
dying posture, or bind up the wounds, which, in the madden
ing fury of the combat, have been given and received by the
children of one common Father. There death spreads its pale
ensigns over every countenance ; and when night comes on, and
darkens around them, how many a despairing wretch must take
up with the bloody field as the untended bed of his last suffer
ings, without one friend to bear the message of tenderness to his
distant home, without one companion to close his eyes !

I avow it. On every side of me I see causes at work which
go to spread a most delusive colouring over war, and to remove
its shocking barbarities to the background of our contemplations
altogether. I see it in the history which tells me of the superb
appearance of the troops, and the brilliancy of their successive
charges. I see it in the poetry which lends the magic of its
numbers to the narrative of blood, and transports its many ad
mirers, as by its images, and its figures, and its nodding plumes
of chivalry, it throws its treacherous embellishments over a scene
of legalized slaughter. I see it in the music which represents
the progress of the battle ; — and where, after being inspired by
the trumpet-notes of preparation, the whole beauty and tender
ness of a drawing-room are seen to bend over the sentimental
entertainment ; nor do I hear the utterance of a single sigh to
interrupt the death-tones of the thickening contest, and the
moans of the wounded men as they fade away upon the ear, and
sink into lifeless silence. All, all goes to prove what strange
and half-sighted creatures we are. Were it not so, war could
never have been seen in any other aspect than that of unmingled
hatefulness ; and I can look to nothing but to the progress of
Christian sentiment upon earth, to arrest the strong current of
its popular and prevailing partiality for war. Then only will
an imperious sense of duty lay the check of severe principle on
all the subordinate tastes arid faculties of our nature. Then will
glory be reduced to its right estimate — and the wakeful bene
volence of the gospel chasing away every spell, will be turned
by the treachery of no delusion whatever, from its simple but
sublime enterprises for the good of the species. Then the reign
of truth and quietness will be ushered into the world, and war,
cruel, atrocious, unrelenting war, will be stript of its many and
its bewildering fascinations.

440 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

But again, another obstacle to the extinction of war, is a sen
timent which seems to be universally gone into, that the rules
and promises of the gospel which apply to a single individual,
do not apply to a nation of individuals. Just think of the
mighty effect it would have on the politics of the world, were
this sentiment to be practically deposed fro in its wonted authority
over the counsels and the doings of nations, in their transactions
with each other. If forbearance be the virtue of an individual,
forbearance is also the virtue of a nation. If it be incumbent
on men in honour to prefer each other, it is incumbent on the
very largest societies of men, through the constituted organ of
their government, to do the same. If it be the glory of a man
to defer his anger, and to pass over a transgression, that nation
mistakes its glory which is so feelingly alive to the slightest
insult, and musters tip its threats and its armaments upon the
faintest shadow of a provocation. If it be the magnanimity of
an injured man to abstain from vengeance, arid if by so doing,
he heap coals of fire upon the head of his enemy, then that is the
magnanimous nation, which, recoiling from violence and from
blood, will do no more than send its Christian embassy, and
prefer its mild and impressive remonstrance ; and that is the dis
graced nation which will refuse the impressiveness of the moral
appeal that has been made to it. — Oh ! my brethren, there must
be the breathing of a different spirit to circulate round the globe,
ere its Christianized nations resign the jealousies which now front
them to each other in the scowling attitude of defiance — and
much is to do with the people of every land, ere the prophesied
influence of the gospel shall bring its virtuous and its pacifying
control to bear with effect on the counsels and governments of
the world.

I find that I must be drawing to a close, arid that I must for
bear entering into several topics on which I meant at one time
to expatiate. I wished, in particular, to have laid it fully before
you, how the extinction of war, though it should withdraw one
of tliose scenes on which man earns the glory of intrepidity — yet
it would leave other, and better, and nobler scenes, for the dis
play and the exercise of this respectable attribute. I wished
also to explain to you, that however much I admired the general
spirit of Quakerism on the subject of war, yet that I was not
prepared to go all the length of its principles, when that war
was strictly defensive. It strikes me, that war is to be abolished
by the abolition of its aggressive spirit among the different

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 441

nations of the world. The text seems to tell me, that this is the
order of prophecy upon the subject; — and that it is when nation
shall cease to lift up its sword against nation — or in other words,
when one nation shall cease to move, for the purpose of attack
ing another, that military science will be no longer in demand,
and that the people of the earth will learn the art of war no
more. I should also have stated, that on this ground, I refrained
from pronouncing on the justice or necessity of any one war
in which this country has ever been involved. I have no doubt,
that many of those who supported our former wars, looked on
several of them as wars for existence — but on this matter I care
fully abstain from the utterance of a single sentiment — for in so
doing, I should feel myself to be descending from the generalities
of Christian principle, and employing that pulpit as the vehicle
of a questionable policy, which ought never to be prostituted
either to the unworthy object of sending forth the incense of
human flattery to any one administration, or of regaling the fac
tious, and turbulent, and disloyal passions of any party. I should
next, if I had had time, offer such observations as were suggested
by my own views of political science, on the multitude of vulner
able points by which this country is surrounded, in the shape of
numerous and distant dependencies, and which, however much
they may tend to foster the warlike politics of our government,
are, in truth, so little worth the expense of a war, that should
all of them be wrested away from us, they would leave the people
of our empire as great and as wealthy, and as competent to
every purpose of home security as ever. Lastly, I might have
whispered my inclination for a little more of the Chinese policy
being imported into Europe, not for the purpose of restraining a
liberal intercourse between its different countries, but for the
purpose of quieting in each its restless spirit of alarm, about
every foreign movement in the politics and designs of other
nations ; because, sure I am, that were each great empire of the
world to lay it down as the maxim of its most scrupulous observ
ance, not to meddle till it was meddled with, each would feel in
such a maxim both its safety and its triumph ; — for such are the
mighty resources of defensive war, that though the whole trans
portable force of Europe were to land upon our borders, the
result of the experiment would be such, that it should never be
repeated — the rallying population of Britain could sweep them
all from the face of its territory, and a whole myriad of invaders
would melt away under the power of such a government as ours.

442 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

trenched behind the loyalty of her defenders, and strong, as she
deserves to be, in the love and in the confidence of all her
children.

I would not have touched on any of the lessons of political
economy, did they not lead me, by a single step, to a Christian
lesson, which I count it my incumbent duty to press upon the
attention of you all. Any sudden change in the state of the
demand, must throw the commercial world into a temporary de
rangement. — And whether the change be from war to peace, or
from peace to war, this effect is sure to accompany it. Now for
upwards of twenty years, the direction of our trade has been
accommodated to a war system ; and when this system is put an
end to, I do not say what amount of the distress will light upon
this neighbourhood, but we may be sure that all the alarm of
falling markets, and ruined speculation, will spread an oppressive
gloom over many of the manufacturing districts of the land.
Now, let my title to address you on other grounds be as ques
tionable as it may, I feel no hesitation whatever in announcing
it, as your most imperative duty, that no outcry of impatience or
discontent from you shall embarrass the pacific policy of his
Majesty's government. They have conferred a great blessing on
the country, in conferring on it peace ; and it is your part re
signedly to weather the languid or disastrous months which may
come along with it. The interest of trade is an old argument
that has been set up in resistance to the dearest and most sub
stantial interests of humanity. When Paul wanted to bring
Christianity into Ephestis, he raised a storm of opposition around
him, from a quarter which, I dare say, he was not counting on.
There happened to be some shrine manufactories in that place,
and as the success of the apostle would infallibly have reduced
the demand for that article, forth came the decisive argument of,
Sirs, by this craft we have our wealth, and should this Paul turn
away the people from the worship of gods made with hands,
thereby much damage would accrue to our trade. Why, my
brethren, if this argument is to be admitted, there is not one
conceivable benefit that can be offered for the acceptance of the
species. Would it not be well if all the men of reading in the
country were to be diverted from the poison which lurks in many
a mischievous publication — and should this blessed reformation
be effected, are there none to be found who would feel that much
damage had accrued to their trade ? Would it not be well if
those wretched sons of pleasure, before whom, if they repent not,

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 443

there lieth all the dreariness of an unprovided eternity — would
it not be well that they were reclaimed from the maddening
intoxication which speeds them on in the career of disobedience
— and on this event too, would there be none to complain that
much damage had accrued to their trade? Is it not well that
the infamy of the Slave-trade has been swept from the page of
British history ? and yet do not many of you remember how long
the measure lay suspended, and that about twenty annual flotillas,
burdened with the load of human wretchedness, were wafted
across the Atlantic, while Parliament was deafened and over
borne by unceasing clamours about the much damage that would
accrue to the trade ? And now, is it not well that peace has
once more been given to the nations ? and are you to follow up
this goodly train of examples, by a single whisper of discontent
about the much damage that will accrue to your trade ? No,
my brethren, I will not let down a single inch of the Christian
requirement that lies upon you. Should a sweeping tide of
bankruptcy set in upon the land, and reduce every individual
who now hears me to the very humblest condition in society,
God stands pledged to give food and raiment to all who depend
upon Him — and it is not fair to make others bleed, that you
may roll in affluence — it is not fair to desolate thousands of
families, that yours may be upheld in luxury and splendour —
and your best, and noblest, and kindest part is, to throw yourself
on the promises of God, and He will hide you and your little
ones in the secret of His pavilion, till these calamities be over
past.

III. — I trust it is evident from all that has been said, how it is
only by the extension of Christian principle among the people of
the earth, that the atrocities of war will at length be swept away
from it ; and that each of us is hastening the commencement of
that blissful period, who, in his own sphere, is doing all that in
him lies to bring his own heart, and the hearts of others, under
the supreme influence of this principle. It is public opinion
which, in the long run, governs the world ; and while I look
with confidence to a gradual revolution in the state of public
opinion, from the omnipotence of gospel truth working its silent
but effectual way through the families of mankind — yet I will
not deny that much may be done to accelerate the advent of
perpetual and universal peace, by a distinct body of men embark
ing their every talent, and their every acquirement, in the pro
secution of this, as a distinct object. This was the way in which,

444 THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE.

a few years ago, the British public were gained over to the cause
of Africa. This is the way in which some of the other prophecies
of the Bible are at this moment hastening to their accomplish
ment ; and it is in this way, I apprehend, that the prophecy of
my text may be indebted for its speedier fulfilment to the agency
of men, selecting this as the assigned field, on which their phil
anthropy shall expatiate. Were each individual member of
such a scheme to prosecute his own walk, and come forward with
his own peculiar contribution, the fruit of the united labours of
all would be one of the finest collections of Christian eloquence,
and of enlightened morals, and of sound political philosophy, that
ever was presented to the world. I could not fasten on another
cause more fitted to call forth such a variety of talent, and to
rally around it so many of the generous and accomplished sons
of humanity, and to give each of them a devotedness and a power
far beyond whatever could be sent into the hearts of enthusiasts,
by the mere impulse of literary ambition.

Let one take up the question of war in its principle, and make
the full weight of his moral severity rest upon it, and upon all
its abominations. Let another take up the question of war in its
consequences, and bring his every power of graphical description
to the task of presenting an awakened public with an impressive
detail of its cruelties and its horrors. Let another neutralize the
poetry of war, and dismantle it of all those bewitching splendours
which the hand of misguided genius has thrown over it. Let
another teach the world a truer and more magnanimous path to
national glory, than any country of the world has yet walked in.
Let another tell, with irresistible argument, how the Christian
ethics of a nation is at one with the Christian ethics of its hum
blest individual. Let another bring all the resources of his
political science to unfold the vast energies of defensive war, and
show, that, instead of that ceaseless jealousy and disquietude
which are ever keeping alive the flame of hostility among the
nations, each may wait in prepared security, till the first footstep
of an invader shall be the signal for mustering around the stan
dard of its outraged rights, all the steel, and spirit, and patriotism
of the country. Let another pour the light of modern specula
tion into the mysteries of trade, and prove that not a single war
has been undertaken for any of its objects, where the millions
and the millions more which were lavished on the cause, have
not all been cheated away from us by the phantom of an imagi
nary interest. This may look to many like the Utopianism of a

THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. 445

romantic anticipation — but I shall never despair of the cause of
truth addressed to a Christian public, when the clear light of
principle can be brought to every one of its positions, and when
its practical and conclusive establishment forms one of the most
distinct of Heaven's prophecies — "that men shall beat their
swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks
— and that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn the art of war any more.''*

4*6 ON THE DEATH OF

SEBMON VI.

(Preached in the Tron Church, Glasgow, Nov. 19, 1817.)

OX THE DEATH OF HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES.

"For when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will
learn righteousness." — ISAIAH xxvi. 9.

I AM sorry that I shall not be able to extend the application
of this text beyond its more direct and immediate bearing on that
event on which we are now met to mingle our regrets, and our
sensibilities, and our prayers — that, occupied as we all are with
the mournful circumstance that has bereft our country of one of
its brightest anticipations, I shall not be able to clear my way
to the accomplishment of what is, strictly speaking, the congre
gational object of an address from the pulpit, which ought, in
every possible case, to be an address to the conscience — that,
therefore, instead of the concerns of personal Christianity, which,
under my present text, I might, if I had space for it, press home
upon the attention of my hearers, I shall be under the necessity
of restricting myself to that more partial application of the text
which relates to the matters of public Christianity. It is upon
this account, as well as upon others, that I rejoice in the present
appointment, for the improvement of that sad and sudden visita
tion which has so desolated the hearts and the hopes of a whole
people. I therefore feel more freedom in coming forward with
such remarks as, to the eyes of many, may wear a more public
and even political complexion, than is altogether suited to the
ministrations of the Sabbath. And yet I cannot but advert, and
that in such terms of reproof as I think to be most truly appli
cable, to another set of men, whose taste for preaching is very
much confined to these great and national occasions — who,
habitually absent from church on the Sabbath, are yet observed,
and that most prominently, to come together in eager and clus
tering attendance, on some interesting case of pathos or of politics
— who in this way obtrude upon the general notice their loyalty
to an earthly sovereign, while, in reference to their Lord and

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 447

Master, Jesus Christ, they scandalize all that is Christian in the
general feeling-, by their manifest contempt for Him and for His
ordinances — who look for the ready compliance of ministers, in
all that can gratify their inclinations for pageantry, while for the
real, effective, and only important business of ministers, they have
just as little reverence as if it were all a matter of hollow and
insignificant parade. It is right to share in the triumphs .o£ suc
cessful, and to shed the tears of afflicted, patriotism. But it is
also right to estimate according to its true character, the patriotism
of those who are never known to offer one homage to Christianity
except when it is associated with the affairs of state ; or with the
wishes and the commands and the expectations of statesmen.

But the frivolous and altogether despicable taste of the men
to whom I am alluding, must be entirely separated from such
an occasion as the present. For, in truth, there never was an
occasion of such magnitude, and at the same time of such
peculiarity. There never was an occasion on which a matter of
deep political interest was so blended and mixed up with matter
of very deep and affecting tenderness. It does not wear the
aspect of an affair of politics at all, but of an affair of the heart ;
and the novel exhibition is now offered, of all party irritations
merging into one common and overwhelming sensibility. Oh !
how it tends to quiet the agitations of every earthly interest and
earthly passion, when Death steps forward and demonstrates the
littleness of them all — when he stamps a character of such
affecting insignificance on all that we are contending for — when,
as if to make known the greatness of his power in the sight of
a whole country, he stalks in ghastly triumph over the might
and the grandeur of its most august family, and singling out
that member of it on whom the dearest hopes and the gayest
visions of the people were suspended, he, by one fatal and resist
less blow, sends abroad the fame of his victory and his strength,
throughout the wide extent of an afflicted nation. He has
indeed put a cruel and impressive mockery on all the glories of
mortality. A few days ago, all looked so full of life, and pro
mise, and security — when we read of the bustle of the great
preparation — and were told of the skill and the talent that were
pressed into the service — and heard of the goodly attendance of
the most eminent in the nation — and how officers of state, and
the titled dignitaries of the land, were charioted in splendour
to the scene of expectation, as to the joys of an approaching
holiday — yes, and we were told too, that the bells of the sur-

448 ON THE DEATH OF

rounding villages were all in readiness for the merry peal of
gratulation, and that the expectant metropolis of our empire, on
tiptoe for the announcement of her future monarch, had her
winged couriers of despatch to speed the welcome message to the
ears of her citizens, and that from her an embassy of gladness
was to travel over all the provinces of the land ; and the coun
try, forgetful of all that she had suffered, was at length to offer
the spectacle of one wide and rejoicing jubilee. 0 Death ! thou
hast indeed chosen the time and the victim, for demonstrating
the grim ascendency of thy power over all the hopes and for
tunes of our species ! — Our blooming Princess, whom fancy had
decked with the coronet of these realms, and under whose gentle
sway all bade so fair for the good and the peace of our nation,
has he placed upon her bier ! And, as if to fill up the measure
of his triumph, has he laid by her side, that babe, who, but for
him, might have been the monarch of a future generation ; and
he has done that, which by no single achievement he could
otherwise have accomplished — he has sent forth over the whole
of our land, the gloom of such a bereavement as cannot be re
placed by any living descendant of royalty — he has broken the
direct succession of the monarchy of England — by one and the
same disaster, has he wakened up the public anxieties of the
country, and sent a pang as acute as that of the most woful
domestic visitation, into the heart of each of its families.

In the prosecution of the following discourse, as I have already
stated, I shall satisfy myself with a veiy limited application of
the text. I shall, in the first place, offer a few remarks on that
branch of the righteousness of practical Christianity, which con
sists in the duty that subjects owe to their governors. And, in
the second place, I shall attempt to improve the present great
national disaster, to the object of impressing upon you, that,
under all our difficulties and all our fears, it is the righteousness
of the people alone which will exalt and perpetuate the nation ;
arid that therefore if this great interest be neglected, the coun
try, instead of reaping improvement from the judgments of
God, is in imminent danger of being utterly overwhelmed by
them.

I. — But here let me attempt the difficult task of rightly divid
ing the word of truth — and premise this head of discourse by ad
mitting that I know nothing more hateful than the crouching spirit
of servility. I know not a single class of men more unworthy
of reverence, than the base and interested minions of a court. I

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 4^19

know not a set of pretenders who more amply deserve to be
held out to the chastisement of public scorn, than they who,
under the guise of public principle, are only aiming at personal
aggrandizement. This is one corruption. But let us not forget
that there is another — even a spurious patriotism, which would
proscribe loyalty as one of the virtues altogether. Now, I can
not open my Bible, without learning that loyalty is one branch
of the righteousness of practical Christianity. I am not seeking
to please men but God, when I repeat His words in your hear
ing — that you should honour the king — that you should obey
magistrates — that you should meddle not with those who are
given to change — that you should be subject to principalities
and powers — that you should lead a quiet and a peaceable life
in all godliness and honesty. This, then, is a part of the right
eousness which it is our business to teach, and sure I am that
it is a part of righteousness which the judgment now dealt out
to us, should, of all others, dispose you to learn. I know not a
virtue more in harmony with the present feelings arid afflictions
and circumstances of the country, than that of a steadfast and
determined loyalty. The time has been, when such an event as
the one that we are now assembled to deplore, would have put
every restless spirit into motion, and set a guilty ambition upon
its murderous devices, and brought powerful pretenders with their
opposing hosts of vassalage into the field, and enlisted towns
and families under the rival banners, of a most destructive fray
of contention, and thus have broken up the whole peace and
confidence of society. Let us bless God that these days of bar
barism are now gone by. But the vessel of the state is still
exposed to many agitations. The sea of politics is a sea of
storms, on which the gale of human passions would make her
founder, were it not for the guidance of human principle ; and,
therefore, the truest policy of a nation is to Christianize her
subjects, and to disseminate among them the influence of re
ligion. The most skilful arrangement for rightly governing a
state, is to scatter among the governed, not the terrors of power
— not the threats of jealous and alarmed authority — not the
demonstrations of sure and ready vengeance held forth by the
rigour of an offended law. These may, at times, be imperiously
called for. But a permanent security against the wild out-
breakings of turbulence and disaster, is only to be attained by
diffusing the lessons of the gospel throughout the great mass of
our population — even those lessons which are utterly and diame-

VOL. III. 2 F

450 ON THE DEATH OF

trically at antipodes with all that is criminal arid wrong in the
spirit of political disaffection. The only radical counteraction
to this evil is to be found in the spirit of Christianity; and
though animated by such a spirit, a man may put on the intre
pidity of one of the old prophets, and denounce even in the ear
of royalty the profligacies which may disgrace or deform it —
though animated by such a spirit, he may lift his protesting
voice in the face of an unchristian magistracy, and tell them of
their errors — though animated by such a spirit, he, to avoid
every appearance of evil, will neither stoop to the flattery of
power, nor to the solicitations of patronage — and though all this
may bear to the superficial eye, a hard, and repulsive, and
hostile aspect towards the established dignities of the land — yet
forget not, that if a real and honest principle of Christianity lie
at the root of this spirit, there exists within the bosom of such a
man, a foundation of principle, on which all the lessons of Chris
tianity will rise into visible and consistent exemplification. And
it is he and such as he, who will turn out to be the salvation of
the country, when the hour of her threatened danger is approach
ing — and it is just in proportion as you spread and multiply such
a character, that you raise within the bosom of the nation the
best security against all her fluctuations — and, as in every other
department of human concerns, so will it be found, that, in this
particular department, Christians are the salt of the earth, and
Christianity the most copious and emanating fountain of all the
guardian virtues of peace, and order, and patriotism.

The judgment under which we now labour, supplies, I think,
one touching, and, to every good and Christian mind, one power
ful argument of loyalty. It is the distance of the prince from
his people which feeds the political jealousy of the latter, and
which by removing the former to a height of inaccessible gran
deur, places him, as it were, beyond the reach of their sympathies.
Much of that political rancour which festers, and agitates, and
makes such a tremendous appearance of noise and of hostility in
our land, is due to the aggravating power of distance. If two
of the deadliest political antagonists in our country, who abuse,
and vilify, and pour forth their stormy eloquence on each other,
whether in parliament or from the press, were actually to come
into such personal and familiar contact, as would infuse into
their controversy the sweetening of mere acquaintanceship, this
very circumstance would disarm and do away almost all their
violence. The truth is, that when one man rails against an-

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 451

other across the table of a legislative assembly, or when he works
up his fermenting imagination, and pens his virulent sentences
against another, in the retirement of a closet — he is fighting
against a man at a distance — he is exhausting his strength
against an enemy whom he does not know — he is swelling into
indignation, and into all the movements of what he thinks right
and generous principle, against a chimera of his own apprehen
sion ; and a similar reaction comes back upon him from the
quarter that he has assailed, and thus the controversy thickens,
and the delusion every day gets more impenetrable, and the
distance is ever widening, and the breach is always becoming
more hopeless and more irreparable ; and all this between two
men, who, if they had been in such accidental circumstances of
juxtaposition as could have let them a little more into one an
other's feelings and to one another's sympathies, would at least
have had all the asperities of their difference smoothed away by
the mere softenings and kindlinesses of ordinary human inter
course.

Now let me apply this remark to the mutual state of senti
ment which obtains between the different orders of the com
munity. Amongst the rich there is apt at times to rankle an in
jurious and unworthy impression of the poor — and just because
these poor stand at a distance from them — just because they
come not into contact with that which would draw them out in
courteousness to their persons, and in benevolent attentions to
their families. Amongst the poor, on the other hand, there is
often a disdainful suspicion of the wealthy, as if they were
actuated by a proud indifference to them and to their concerns,
and as if they were placed away from them at so distant and
lofty an elevation as not to require the exercise of any of those
cordialities which are ever sure to spring in the bosom of man
to man, when they come to know each other, and to have
the actual sight of each other. But, let any accident place
an individual of the higher before the eyes of the lower order,
on the ground of their common humanity — let the latter be
made to see that the former are akin to themselves in all the
sufferings and in all the sensibilities of our common inherit
ance — let, for example, the greatest chieftain of the territory
die, and the report of his weeping children, or of his distracted
widow, be sent through the neighbourhood — or let an infant of
his family be in suffering, and the mothers of the humble
vicinity be run to for counsel and assistance — or, in any other

452 ON THE DEATH OF

way, let the rich, instead of being viewed by their inferiors
through the dim and distant medium of that fancied interval
which separates the ranks of society, be seen as heirs of the
same frailty, and as dependent on the same sympathies with
themselves — and at that moment all the floodgates of honest
sympathy will be opened — and the lowest servants of the esta
blishment will join in the cry of distress which has come upon
their family — and the neighbouring cottagers, to share in their
grief, have only to recognise them as the partakers of one
nature, and to perceive an assimilation of feelings and of circum
stances between them.

Let me further apply all this to the sons and the daughters of
royalty. The truth is, that they appear to the public eye as
stalking on a platform so highly elevated above the general
level of society that it removes them, as it were, from all the
ordinary sympathies of our nature. And though we read at
times of their galas, and their birth-days, and their drawing-
rooms, there is nothing in all this to attach us to their interests
and their feelings, as the inhabitants of a familiar home — as the
members of an affectionate family. Surrounded as they are
with the glare of a splendid notoriety, we scarcely recognise
them as men and as women, who can rejoice, and weep, and pine
with disease, and taste the sufferings of mortality, and be op
pressed with anguish, and love with tenderness, and experience
in their bosoms the same movements of grief or of affection that
we do ourselves. And thus it is that they labour under a real
and heavy disadvantage. There is not, in their case, the counter
action of that kindly influence to alleviate the weight or the
malignity of prejudice which men of a humbler station are ever
sure to enjoy. In the case of a man whose name is hardly
known beyond the limits of his personal acquaintance, the tale
of calumny that is raised against him extends not far beyond
these limits ; and, therefore, wherever it is heard, it meets with
a something to blunt and to soften it, in those very cordialities
which the familiar exhibition of him as a brother of our com
mon nature is fitted to awaken. But it is not so with those in
the elevated walks of society. Their names are familiar where
their persons are unknown ; and whatever malignity may attach
to the one, circulates abroad, and is spread far beyond the limits
of their possible intercourse with human beings, and meets with
no kindly counteraction from our acquaintance with the other.
And this may explain how it is that the same exalted personage

THE PKINCESS CHARLOTTE. 453

may, at one and the same time, be suffering under a load of most
unmerited obloquy from the wide and the general public, and be
to all his familar domestics an object of the most enthusiastic
devotedness and regard.

Now, if through an accidental opening, the public should be
favoured with a domestic exhibition — if by some overpowering
visitation of Providence upon an illustrious family, the members
of it should come to be recognised as the partakers of one com
mon humanity with ourselves — if instead of beholding them in
their gorgeousness as princes, we look to them in the natural
evolution of their sensibilities as men — if the stately palace
should be turned into a house of mourning — in one word, if
if death should do what he has already done — be has met the
Princess of England in the prime and promise of her days, and
as she was moving onward on her march to a hereditary throne,
he has laid her at his feet ! Ah, my brethren, when the imagi
nation dwells on that bed where the remains of departed youth
and departed infancy are lying — when, instead of crowns and
canopies of grandeur, it looks to the forlorn husband, and the
weeping father, and the human feelings which agitate their
bosom, and the human tears which flow down their cheeks, and
all such symptoms of deep affliction as bespeak the workings
of suffering and dejected nature — what ought to be, and what
actually is, the feeling of the country at so sad an exhibition ?
It is just the feeling of the domestics and the labourers at
Clarernont. All is soft and tender as womanhood. Nor is there
a peasant in our land who is not touched to the very heart when
he thinks of the unhappy stranger who is now spending his days
in grief and his nights in sleeplessness — as he mourns alone
in his darkened chamber, and refuses to be comforted — as he
turns in vain for rest to his troubled feelings and cannot find it
— as he gazes on the memorials of an affection that blessed the
brightest, happiest, shortest year of his existence — as he looks
back on the endearments of the bygone months, and the thought
that they have for ever fleeted away from him, turns all to
agony — as he looks forward on the blighted prospect of this
world's pilgrimage, and feels that all which bound him to exist
ence, is now torn irretrievably away from him ! There is not a
British heart that does not feel to this interesting visitor all the
force and all the tenderness of a most affecting relationship ;
and, go where he may, will he ever be recognised and cherished
as a much-loved member of the British familv.

454 ON THE DEATH OF

It is in this way, that through the avenue of a nation's tender
ness, we can estimate the strength and the steadfastness of a
nation's loyalty. On minor questions of the constitution we
may storm, and rave, and look at each other a little ferociously
— and it was by some such appearance as this, that he who, in
the days of his strength, was the foulest and the most formid
able of all our enemies, said of the country in which we live,
that, torn by factions, it was going rapidly to dissolution. Yet
these are but the skirmishings of a pettier warfare — the move
ments of nature and of passion in a land of freemen — the harm
less contests of men pulling in opposite ways at some of the
smaller ropes in the tackling of our great national vessel. But
look to these men in the time of need and the hour of suffering
— look to them now, when in one great and calamitous visita
tion, the feeling of every animosity is overborne — look to them
now, when the darkness is gathering and the boding cloud of
disaster hangs over us, and some chilling fear of insecurity is be
ginning to circulate in whispers through the land — look to them
now, when in the entombment of this sad and melancholy day,
the hopes of more than half a century are to be interred — look to
them now, when from one end of the country to the other, there
is the mourning of a very great and sore lamentation, so that
all who pass by may say, This is a grievous mourning to the
people of the land. Oh ! is it possible that these can be other
than honest tears, or that tears of pity can, on such an emer
gency as the present, be other than tears of patriotism ! Who
does not see this principle sitting in visible expression on the
general countenance of the nation — that the people are sound at
heart, and that with this, as the main-sheet of our dependence,
we may still, under the blessing of God, weather and surmount
all the difficulties which threaten us.

II. — I now proceed to the second head of discourse, under
which I was to attempt such an improvement of this great
national disaster, as might enforce the lesson, that under every
fear and every difficulty, it is the righteousness of the people
alone which will exalt and perpetuate a nation ; and that, there
fore, if this great interest be neglected, instead of learning any
thing from the judgments of God we are in imminent danger of
being utterly overwhelmed by them.

Under my first head I restricted myself exclusively to the
virtue of loyalty, which is one of the special, but I most willingly
admit, nay, and most earnestly contend, is also one of the essen-

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 455

tial attributes of righteousness. But there is a point on which
I profess myself to be altogether at issue with a set of men, who
composed, at one time, whatever they do now, a very numerous
class of society. I mean those men, who, with all the ostentation
and all the intolerance of loyalty, evinced an titter indifference
either to their own personal religion or to the religion of the
people who were around them — who were satisfied with the single
object of keeping the neighbourhood in a state of political tran
quillity — who, if they could only get the population to be quiet,
cared riot for the extent of profaneness or of profligacy that was
amongst them — and who, while they thought to signalize them
selves in the favour of their earthly king, by keeping down every
turbulent or rebellious movement among his subjects, did in fact,
by their own conspicuous example, lead them and cheer them on
in their rebellion against the King of heaven — and, as far as the
mischief could be wrought by the contagion of their personal
influence, these men of loyalty did what in them lay, to spread
a practical contempt for Christianity, and for all its ordinances,
throughout the land.

Now, I would have such men to understand, if any such
there be within the sphere of my voice, that it is not with their
loyalty that I am quarreling. I am only telling them, that this
single attribute of righteousness will never obtain a steady foot
ing in the hearts of the people, except on the ground of a general
principle of righteousness. I am telling them how egregiously
they are out of their own politics, in ever thinking that they can
prop the virtue of loyalty in a nation, while they are busily em
ployed by the whole instrumentality of their example and of their
doings, in sapping the very foundation upon which it is reared.
I am telling them, that if they wish to see loyalty in perfection,
and such loyalty, too, as requires not any scowling vigilance of
theirs to uphold it, they must look to the most moral, and orderly,
and Christianized districts of the country. I am merely teach
ing them a lesson, of which they seem to be ignorant, that if
you loosen the hold of Christianity over the hearts of the popu
lation, you pull down from their ascendency all the virtues of
Christianity, of which loyalty is one. Yes, and I will come yet
a little closer, and take a look of that loyalty which exists in the
shape of an isolated principle in their own bosoms. I should
like to gauge the dimensions of this loyalty of theirs, in its state
of disjunction from the general principle of Christianity. I wish
to know the kind of loyalty which characterizes the pretenders

456 ON THE DEATH OF

to whom I am alluding — the men who have no value for preach
ing, but as it stands associated with the pageantry of state — the
men who would reckon it the most grievous of all heresies, to be
away from church on some yearly day of the king's appointment,
but are seldom within its walls on the weekly day of God's ap
pointment — the men who, if ministers were away from their post
of loyalty, on an occasion like the present, would, without mercy,
and without investigation, denounce them as suspicious charac
ters; but who, when we are at the post of piety, dispensing the
more solemn ordinances of Christianity, openly lead the way in
that crowded and eager emigration, which carries half the rank
and opulence of the town away from us. What, oh ! what is
the length, and the breadth, and the height, and the depth of
this vapouring, swaggering, high-sounding loyalty? — It is no
thing better than the loyalty of political subalterns, in the low
game of partizanship, or of whippers-in to an existing adminis
tration — it is not the loyalty which will avail us in the day of
danger — it is not to them that we need to look in the evil hour
of a country's visitation — but to those right-hearted, sound-
thinking, Christian men, who, without one interest to serve, or
one hope to forward, honour their king, because they fear their
God.

Let me assure such a man, if such a man there is within the
limits of this assembly — that, keen as his scent may be after
political heresies, the deadliest of all such heresies lies at his
own door — that there is not to be found, within the city of our
habitation, a rottener member of the community than himself —
that, withering as he does by his example the principle which
lies at the root of all national prosperity, it is he, and such as he,
who stands opposed to the best and the dearest objects of loyalty
— and, if ever that shall happen, which it is my most delightful
confidence that God will avert from us and from our children's
children to the latest posterity — if ever the wild frenzy of revo
lution shall run through the ranks of Britain's population, these
are the men who will be the most deeply responsible for all its
atrocities and for all its horrors.

Having thus briefly adverted to one of the causes of impiety
and consequent disloyalty, I shall proceed to offer a few remarks
on the great object of teaching the people righteousness, not so
much in a general and didactic manner, as in the way of brief.
and, if possible, of memorable illustration — gathering my argu
ment from the present event, and availing myself, at the same

THE P1UNCESS CHARLOTTE. 457

time, of such principles as have been advanced in the course of
the preceding observations.

My next remark, then, on this subject, will be taken from a
sentiment, of which I think you must all on the present occasion
feel the force and the propriety. Would it not have been most
desirable could the whole population of the city have been ad
mitted to join in the solemn services of the day ? Do you not
think that they are precisely such services as would have spread
a loyal and patriotic influence amongst them? Is it not experi
mentally the case, that, over the untimely grave of our fair
Princess, the meanest of the people would have shed as warm and
plentiful a tribute of honest sensibility as the most refined and
delicate amongst us ? And, I ask, is it not unfortunate, that,
on the day of such an affecting, and, if I may so style it, such
a national exercise, there should not have been twenty more
churches with twenty more ministers, to have contained the
whole crowd of eager and interested listeners ? A man of mere
loyalty, without one other accomplishment, will, I am sure, parti
cipate in a regret so natural ; but couple this regret with the
principle, that the only way in which the loyalty of the people
can effectually be maintained, is on the basis of their Christianity,
and then the regret in question embraces an object still more
general — and well were it for us, if, amid the insecurity of
families, and the various fluctuations of fortune and of arrange
ment that are taking place in the highest walks of society, the
country were led, by the judgment with which it has now been
visited, to deepen the foundation of all its order and of all its
interests in the moral education of its people. Then indeed the
text would have its literal fulfilment. When the judgments of
God are in the earth, the rulers of the world would lead the
inhabitants thereof to learn righteousness.

In our own city, much in this respect remains to be accom
plished ; and I speak of the great mass of our city and suburb
population, when I say, that through the week they lie open to
every rude and random exposure — and when Sabbath comes, no
solemn appeal to the conscience, no stirring recollections of the
past, po urgent calls to resolve against the temptations of the
future, come along with it. It is undeniable, that within the
compass of a few square miles, the daily walk of the vast
majority of our people is beset with a thousand contaminations ;
and whether it be on the way to the market, or on the way to
the work-shop, or on the way to the crowded manufactory, or

458 ON THE DEATH OF

on the way to any one resort of industry that you choose to
condescend upon, or on the way to the evening home, where
the labours of a virtuous day should be closed by the holy thank
fulness of a pious and affectionate family ; be it in passing from
one place to another, or be it amid all the throng of sedentary
occupations ; there is not one day of the six, and not one hour
of one of these days, when frail and unsheltered man is not plied
by the many allurements of a world lying in wickedness — when
evil communications are not assailing him with their corruptions
— when the full tide of example does not bear down upon his pur
poses, and threaten to sweep all his purity and all his principle
away from him. And when the seventh-day comes, where, I would
ask, are the efficient securities that ought to be provided against
all those inundations of profligacy which rage without control
through the week, and spread such a desolating influence among
the morals of the existing generation ? — 0 tell it not in Gath, pub
lish it not in the streets of Askelon — this seventh-day, on which
it would require a whole army of labourers to give every energy
which belongs to them, to the plenteous harvest of so mighty a
population, witnesses more than one-half of the people precluded
from attending the house of God, and wandering every man
after the counsel of his own heart, and in the sight of his own
eyes — on this day, the ear of Heaven is assailed with a more
audacious cry of rebellion than on any other, and the open door
of invitation plies with its welcome, the hundreds and the thou
sands who have found their habitual way to the haunts of de
pravity. And is there no room, then, to wish for twenty more
churches, and twenty more ministers — for men of zeal and of
strength, who might go forth among these wanderers, and com
pel them to come in — for men of holy fervour, who might set
the terrors of hell and the free offers of salvation before them —
for men of affection who might visit the sick, the dying, and the
afflicted, and cause the irresistible influence of kindness to cir
culate at large among their families — for men who, while they
fastened their most intense aim on the great object of preparing
sinners for eternity, would scatter along the path of their exer
tions all the blessings of order, and contentment, and sobriety,
and at length make it manifest as day, that the righteousness
of the people is the only effectual antidote to a country's ruin —
the only path to a country's glory ?

My next remark shall be founded on a principle to which I
have already alluded — the desirableness of a more frequent in-

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 459

tercourse between the higher and the lower orders of society ;
and what more likely to accomplish this, than a larger ecclesi
astical accommodation ? — not the scanty provision of the present
day, by which the poor are excluded from the church altogether,
but such a wide and generous system of accommodation, as that
the rich and the poor might sit in company together in the
house of God. It is this Christian fellowship which, more than
any other tie, links so intimately together the high and the low
in country parishes. There is, however, another particular to
which I would advert, arid though I cannot do so without magni
fying my office, yet I know not a single circumstance which so
upholds the golden line of life amongst our agricultural popula
tion, as the manner in which the gap between the pinnacle of
the community and its base is filled up by the week-day duties
of the clergyman — by that man, of whom it has been well said,
that he belongs to no rank, because he associates with all ranks
— by that man, whose presence may dignify the palace, but
whose peculiar glory it is to carry the influences of friendship
and piety into cottages.

This is the age of moral experiment ; and much has been
devised in our day for promoting the virtue, and the improve
ment, and the economical habits of the lower orders of society.
But in all these attempts to raise a barrier against the growing
profligacy of our towns, one important element seems to have
passed unheeded, and to have been altogether omitted in the
calculation. In all the comparative estimates of the character
of a town and the character of a country population, it has been
little attended to, that the former are distinguished from the
latter by the dreary, hopeless, arid almost impassable distance
at which they stand from their parish minister. Now, though
it be at the hazard of again magnifying my office, I must avow,
in the hearing of you all, that there is a moral charm in his
personal attentions and his affectionate civilities, and the ever-
recurring influence of his visits and his prayers, which, if re
stored to the people, would impart a new moral aspect, and
eradicate much of the licentiousness and the dishonesty that
abound in our cities. On this day of national calamity, if ever
the subject should be adverted to from the pulpit, we may be
allowed to express our riveted convictions on the close alliance
that obtains between the political interests and the religious
character of a country. And I am surely not out of place, when,
on looking at the mighty mass of a city population, I state my

460 ON THE DEATH OF

apprehension, that if something be not done to bring this enor
mous physical strength under the control of Christian and
humanized principle, the day may yet come, when it may lift
against the authorities of the land its brawny vigour, and dis
charge upon them all the turbulence of its rude and volcanic
energy.

Apart altogether from the essential character of the gospel,
and keeping out of view the solemn representations of Chris
tianity, by which we are told that each individual of these
countless myriads carries an undying principle in his bosom, and
that it is the duty of the minister to cherish it, and to watch
over it, as one who must render, at the judgment-seat, an ac
count of the charge which has been committed to him — apart
from this consideration entirely, which I do not now insist upon,
though I blush not to avow its paramount importance over all
that can be alleged on the inferior ground of political expediency,
yet, on that ground alone, I can gather argument enough for
the mighty importance of such men, devoted to the labours of
their own separate and peculiar employments — giving an un-
bewildered attention to the office of dealing with the hearts and
principles of the thousands who are around them — coming forth
from the preparations of an unbroken solitude, armed with all
the omnipotence of truth among their fellow-citizens — arid who,
rich in the resources of a mind which meditates upon these
things and gives itself wholly to them, are able to suit their
admonitions to all the varieties of human character, and to draw
their copious and persuasive illustrations from every quarter of
human experience. But I speak not merely of their Sabbath
ministrations. Give to each a manageable extent of town,
within the compass of his personal exertions, and where he
might be able to cultivate a ministerial influence among all its
families — put it into his power to dignify the very humblest of
its tenements by the courteotisness of his soothing and bene
volent attentions — let it be such a district of population as may
not bear him down by the multiplicity of its demands ; but
where, without any feverish or distracting variety of labour, he
may be able to familiarize himself to every house, and to know
every individual, and to visit every spiritual patient, and to
watch every deathbed, and to pour out the sympathies of a pious
and affectionate bosom over every mourning and bereaved
family. Bring every city of the land under such a moral regi
men as this, and another generation would not pass away, ere

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 461

righteousness ran down all their streets like a mighty river.
That sullen depravity of character, which the gibbet cannot
scare away, and which sits so irnmoveable in the face of the
most menacing severities and in despite of the yearly recurrence
of the most terrifying examples— could not keep its ground
against the mild but resistless application of an effective Chris
tian ministry. The very worst of men would be constrained to
feel the power of such an application. Sunk as they are in
ignorance, and inured as they have been from the first years of
their neglected boyhood, to scenes of week-day profligacy arid
Sabbath profanation — these men, of whom it may be said, that
all their moralities are extinct, and all their tendernesses blunted
— even they would feel the power of that reviving touch, which
the mingled influence of kindness and piety can often impress
on the souls of the most abandoned — even they would open the
floodgates of their hearts, and pour forth the tide of an honest
welcome on the men who had come in all the cordiality of good
will to themselves and to their families. Arid thus might a
humanizing and an exalting influence be made to circulate
through all their dwelling-places : and such a system as this,
labouring as it must do at first, under all the discouragements of
a heavy and unpromising outset, would gather, during every
year of its perseverance, new triumphs and new testimonies to
its power. And all that is ruthless and irreclaimable in the
character of the present day, would in time be replaced by the
softening virtues of a purer and a better generation. This I
know to be the dream of many a philanthropist ; and a dream
as visionary as the very wildest among the fancies of Utopianisrn
it ever will be, under any other expedient than the one I am
now pointing to ; and nothing, nothing within the whole com
pass of nature, or of experience, will ever bring it to its con
summation, but the multiplied exertions of the men who carry
in their hearts the doctrine, and who bear upon their persons
the seal and commission, of the New Testament. And, if it be
true that towns are the great instruments of political revolution
— if it be there that all the elements of disturbance are ever
found in busiest fermentation — if we learn, from the history of
the past, that they are the favourite and the frequented rallying-
places for all the brooding violence of the land — who does not
see that the pleading earnestness of the Christian minister is at
one with the soundest maxims of political wisdom, when he urges
upon the rulers and magistrates of the land, that this is indeed

462 ON THE DEATH OF

the cheap defence of a nation — this the vitality of all its strength
and of all its greatness.

And it is with the most undissembled satisfaction that I
advert to the first step of such a process, within the city of our
habitation, as I have now been recommending. It may still be
the day of small things ; but it is such a day as ought not to be
despised. The prospect of another church and another labourer
in this interesting field demands the most respectful acknow
ledgments of the Christian public, to the men who preside over
the administration of our affairs ; and they, I am sure, will not
feel it to be oppressive, if, met by the willing cordialities of a
responding populationr the demand should ring in their ears for
another and another, till, like the moving of the Spirit on the
face of the waters, which made beauty and order to emerge out
of the rude materials of creation, the germ of moral renovation
shall at length burst into all the efflorescence of moral accom
plishment — and the voice of psalms shall again be heard in our
families — and impurity and violence shall be banished from our
streets — and then the erasure made, in these degenerate days, on
the escutcheons of our city, again replaced in characters of gold,
shall tell to every stranger that Glasgow flourisheth through the
preaching of the Word.*

And though, under the mournful remembrance of our de
parted Princess, we cannot but feel on this day of many tears,
as if a volley of lightning from heaven had been shot at the
pillar of our State, and struck away the loveliest ornament from
its pinnacle, and shook the noble fabric to its base ; yet still, if
we strengthen its foundation in the principle and character of
our people, it will stand secure on the deep and steady basis of
a country's worth which can never be overthrown. And thus
an enduring memorial of our Princess will be embalmed in the
hearts of the people ; and good will emerge out of this dark arid
bitter dispensation, if, when the judgments of God are in the
earth, the inhabitants of the world shall learn righteousness.

* The original motto of the city is, " Let Glasgow flourish through the preaching of the
Word ; " which, by the curtailment alluded to, has becu reduced to the words, " Let Glas
gow flourish."

THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 463

NOTE.

Dr. Adam Smith, in his Treatise on the Wealth of Nations, argues against religious
establishments on the ground that the article of religious instruction should be left to the
pure operation of demand and supply, like any article of ordinary merchandise. Bfe seems
to have overlooked one most material circumstance of distinction. The native and untaught
propensities of the human constitution will always of themselves secure a demand for the
commodities of trade, sufficiently effective to bring forward a supply equal to the real needs
(if the population, and to their power of purchasing. But the appetite for religious instruc
tion is neither so strong nor so universal as to secure such an effective demand for it. Had
the people been left in this matter to themselves, there would, in point of fact, have been
large tracts of country without a place of worship, and without a minister. The legislature
have met the population half way, by providing them with a church and a religious teacher,
in every little district of the land ; and by this arrangement have increased to a very great
degree the quantity of attendance and the quantity of actual ministration. In point of fact,
a much greater number of people do come to church, and do come within the application of
Christian influence, when the church and the preacher is provided for them, than if they
had been left to build a meeting-house, and to maintain a preacher themselves. There is a
far surer and more abundant supply of this wholesome influence dealt out among the popu
lation under the former arrangement, than under the latter one.

The argument of Dr. Smith goes to demonstrate the folly of a national establishment,
either of meal-sellers or of butchers, or of any national establishment for supplying the people
with the necessaries and the comforts of life. But the peculiarity already adverted to, renders
it totally inapplicable to the question of a national establishment for supplying the people
with the lessons of Christianity. — [See Memoirs of Dr. Chalmers, vol. i. pp. 452-456, cheap
edition.— ED.]

464 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

SERMON VII.

(Preached before //?<• Glasgow Auxiliary to the Hibernian Society for cilabiixhino Schwlt,
and circulating the Holy Scriptures in Ireland. 1817.)

THE DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY APPLIED TO THE CASE OK
RRMGIOUS DIFFERENCES.

"And why bthoMest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the
beam that is in thine own eye ? Or ho\v wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the
mote out of thine eye : and behold a beam is in thine own eye ? Thou hypocrite ! first
cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the
mote out of thy brother's eye." — MATTHKW vii. 3-5.

THE word " beam " suggests the idea of a rafter ; and it looks
very strange that a thing of such magnitude should be at all
conceived to have its seat or fixture in the eye. To remove by
a single sentence this misapprehension, I shall just say that the
word in the original signifies also a thorn — a something that the
eye has room for, but at the same time much larger than a mote,
and which must, therefore, have a more powerful effect in de
ranging the vision, and preventing a man from forming a right
estimate of the object he is looking at. Take this along with
you, and the three verses will run thus : — " Why beholdest thou
the mote that is thy brother's eye, but considerest not the
thorn that is in thine own eye ? Or how wilt thou say to thy
brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye ; and behold
a thorn is in thine own eye ? Thou hypocrite ! first cast out the
thorn out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to
cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

In my farther observations on this passage, I shall first intro
duce what I propose to make the main subject of my discourse,
by a very short application of the leading principle of my text,
to the case of those judgments that.we are so ready to pronounce
on each other in private life. And I shall, secondly, proceed to
the main subject, namely, that more general kind of judgment
we are apt to pass on the men of a different persuasion in matters
of religion.

I. — Every fault of conduct in the outer man may be run up

DOCTRINE OF CHRIST! A.N CHARITY. 465

to some defect of principle in the inner man. It is this defect
of principle which gives the fault all its criminality. It is this
alone which makes it odious in the sight of God. It is upon
this that the condemnation of the law rests ; and oji the day of
judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, it
will be the share that the heart had in the matter which will
form the great topic of examination, when the deeds done in
the body pass under the review of the Son of God. For example,
it is a fault to speak evil one of another ; but the essence of
the fault lies in the want of that charity which thinketh no ill.
Had the heart been filled with this principle, no such bad thing
as slander would have come out of it ; but if the heart be not
filled with this principle, and in its stead there be the operation
of envy — or a desire to avenge yourselves of others, by getting
the judgment of men to go against them — or a taste for the
ludicrous, which, rather than be ungratified, will expose the
peculiarities of the absent to the mirth of a company — or the
idle and thoughtless levity of gossiping which cannot be checked
by any consideration of the mischief that may be done by its
indulgence ; — I say, if any or all of these, take up that room in
the heart which should have been filled with charity, and sent
forth the fruits of it, then the stream will just be as the fountain,
and out of the treasure of the evil heart, there will flow that
evil practice of censoriousness on which the gospel of Christ pro
nounces its severe and decisive condemnation.

But though all evil-speaking be referable to the want of a
good, or the existence of an evil principle in the heart, yet there
is one style of evil-speaking different from another; and you
can easily conceive how a man addicted to one way of it, may
hate, and despise, and have a mortal antipathy to another way
of it. In this case, it is not the thing itself in its essential
deformity that he condemns ; it is some of the disgusting ac
companiments of the thing ; and while these excite his condem
nation, and he views the man in whom they are realized, as
every way worthy of being reprobated, he may not be aware,
all the while, that in himself there exists an equal, and perhaps
a much larger portion of that very principle which he should be
reprobated for. The forms of evil-speaking break out into
manifold varieties. There is the soft insinuation. There is the
resentful outcry. There is the manly and indignant disapproval.
There is the invective of vulgar malignity. There is the
poignancy of satirical remark. There is the giddiness of mere

VOL. in. 2 a

466 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

volatility which trips so carelessly along, and spreads its enter
taining levities over a gay and light-hearted party. These are
all so many transgressions of one and the same duty ; and you
can easily conceive an enlightened Christian sitting in judgment
over them all, and taking hold of the right principle upon which
he would condemn them all ; and which, if brought to bear with
efficacy on the consciences of the different offenders, would not
merely silence the passionate evil-speaker out of his outrageous
exclamations, and restrain the malignant evil-speaker from his
deliberate thrusts at the reputation of the absent ; but would
rebuke the humorous evil-speaker out of his fanciful and amusing
sketches, arid the gossiping evil-speaker out of his tiresome and
never-ending narratives. Now you may further conceive how a
man who realizes upon his own character one of these varieties
might have a positive dislike to another of them ; how the open
and generous-hearted denouncer of what is wrong may hate
from his very soul the poison of a sly and secret insinuation ;
how he who delivers himself in the chastened and well-bred
tone of a gentleman may recoil from the violence of an un
mannerly invective ; how he who enjoys the ridiculous of cha
racter may be hurt and offended at hearing of the criminal of
character ; — and thus each, with the thorn in his own eye, may
advert with regret and disapprobation to the mote in his bro
ther's eye.

Now, mark the two advantages which arise from every man
bringing himself to a strict examination, that he may if possible
find out the principle of that fault in his own mind which he
conceives to deform the doings and the character of another.
His attention is cafried away from the mere accompaniment of
the fault to its actual and constituting essence. He pursues his
search from the outward and accidental varieties, to the one
principle which spreads the leaven of iniquity over them all. By
looking into his own heart he is made acquainted with the move
ments of this principle. When forced to disapprove of others,
his disapprobation is not a matter of taste or of education, but
the entire and well-founded disapprobation of principle. He
sees where the radical mischief of the whole business lies. He
sees that if the principle of doing no ill were established within
the heart, it would cut up by the root all evil-speaking in all its
shapes and in all its modifications. His own diligent keeping of
his own heart upon this subject would bring the matter into his
frequent contemplation^ and enable him to perceive where its

DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 467

essence and its malignity lay, and give him an enlightened
judgment of it in all its effects and workings upon others ; and
thus, by the very progress of struggling against it, and watching
against it, and praying against it, and in the strength of divine
grace prevailing against it, and at length succeeding in pulling
the thorn out of his own eye, he would see clearly to cast out
the mote out of his brother's eye.

But another mighty advantage of this self-examination is,
that the more a man does examine, the more does he discover
the infirmities of his own character. That very infirmity against
which, in another, he might have protested with all the force of
a vehement indignation, he might find lurking in his own
bosom, though under the disguise of a different form. Such a
discovery as this will temper his indignation. It will humble
him into the meekness of wisdom. It will soften him into charity.
It will infuse a candour and a gentleness into all his judgments.
The struggle he has had with himself to keep down the sin he
sees in another, will train him to an indulgence he might never
have felt, had he been altogether blind to the diseases of his own
moral constitution. When he tries to reform a neighbour, the
attempt will be marked by all the mildness of one who is deeply
conscious of his own frailties, and fearful of the exposures which
he himself may have to endure. And I leave it to your own
experience of human nature to determine, whether he bids fairer
for success who rebukes with the intolerant tone of a man who
is unconscious of his own blemishes ; or he who, with all the
spirituality of a humble and exercised Christian, endeavours to
restore him who is overtaken in a fault, with the spirit of meek
ness, " considering himself lest he also be tempted."

Now the fault of evil-speaking is only one out of the many.
The lesson of the text might be farther illustrated by other cases
and other examples. I might specify the various forms of
worldliness, arid wilfulriess, and fraud, and falsehood, and pro
fanity, and show how the man who realizes these sins in one
form, might pass his condemnatory sentence on the man who
realizes the very same sins in another form ; and I might succeed
in saying to the conviction of his conscience, even as Nathan
said to David, "Thou art the man;" and might press home
upon him the mighty task of self-examination ; and set him from
that to the task of diligent reform, that he might be enabled to
see the fault of his neighbour more clearly, and rebuke it more
gently, and winningly, and considerately. But my time restrains

408 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

me from expatiating ; and however great my reluctance at being
withdrawn from the higher office of dealing with the hearts and
the consciences of individuals, to any other office, which, how
ever good in itself, bears a most minute and insignificant propor
tion to the former, yet I must not forget that I stand here as
the advocate of a public Society ; — and I therefore propose to
throw the remainder of my discourse into such a train of obser
vation as may bear upon its designs and its enterprises.

II. — I now proceed, then, to the more general kind of judg
ment, which we are apt to pass on men of a different persuasion
in matters of religion, — There is something in the very circum
stance of its being a different religion from our own, which,
prior to all our acquaintance with its details, is calculated to
repel and to alarm us. It is not the religion in which we have
been educated. It is not the religion which furnishes us with
our associations of sacredness. Nay, it is a religion which, if
admitted into our creed, would tear asunder all these associations.
It would break up all the repose of our established habits. It
would darken the whole field of our accustomed contemplations.
It would put to flight all those visions of the mind which stood
linked with the favour of God, and the blissful prospects of
eternity. It would unsettle, and disturb, and agitate ; and this,
not merely because it threw a doubtfulness over the question of
our personal security, but because it shocked our dearest feelings
of tenderness for that which we had been trained to love, and of
veneration for that which we have been trained to look at in the
aspect of awful and imposing solemnity.

Add to all this, the circumstance of its being a religion with
the intolerance of which our fathers had to struggle unto the
death ; a religion which lighted up the fires of persecution in
other days ; a religion which at one time put on a face of terror,
and bathed its hands in the blood of cruel martyrdom ; a religion,
by resistance to which, the men of a departed generation are
embalmed in the memory of the present, among the worthies of
our established faith. We have only to contemplate the influ
ence uf these things, when handed down by tradition, arid written
in the most popular histories of the land, and told round the
evening fire to the children of every cottage family, who listen
in breathless wonderment to the tale of midnight alarm, and
kindle at the battle-cry lifted by the patriots of a former age,
when they made their noble stand for the outraged rights of
conscience and of liberty ; we have only to think of these things,

DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 469

and we shall cease our amazement, that such a religion, even
though its faults and its merits be equally unknown, should light
up a passionate aversion in many a bosom, and have a recoiling
sense of horror and sacrilege and blasphemy associated with its
very name.

Now Popery is just such a religion : and I appeal to many
present, if, though ignorant of almost all its doctrines and all its
distinctions, there does not spring up a quickly felt antipathy in
their bosoms even at the mention of Popery. There can be no
doubt, that for one or two generations, this feeling has been
rapidly on the decline. But it still lurks, and operates, and
spreads a very wide and sensible infusion over the great mass of
our Scottish population. There is now a dormancy about it,
and it does not break out into those rude and tumultuary surges,
which at one time filled our streets with violence, and sent a
ferment of jealousy and alarm over the whole face of our country.
But we still meet with the traces of its existence. We feel it
in our own bosoms when we hear of any of the ceremonials of
Popery : and I just ask you to think of those peculiar sensations
which rise within you at the mention of the holy water, or the
consecrated wafer, or the extreme unction of the Catholic ritual.
There is still a sensation of repugnance, though it be dim, and
in its painfulness it be rapidly departing away from us ; and I
think that, even at this hour, should a Popish chapel send up its
lofty minarets, and spread a rich and expanded magnificence
before the public eye, though many look with unmingled delight
on the grandeur of the ascending pile, yet there may still be
detected a visible expression of jealousy and offence in the side
long glance, and the inward and half-suppressed murmuring of
the occasional passenger.

Now, is it not conceivable that such a traditional repugnance
to Popery may exist in the very same mind, with a total ignor
ance of what those things are for which it merits our repugnance ?
May there not be a kind of sensitive recoil in the heart against
this religion, while the understanding is entirely blind to those
alone features which justify our dislike to it? May there not
be all the violence of an antipathy within us at Popery, and
there be at the same time within us all the faults and all the
errors of Popery ? May not the thorn be in our own eye, while
the mote in our neighbour's eye is calling forth all the severity
of our indignation? While we are sitting in the chair of judg
ment, and dealing forth from the eminence of a superior discern-

470 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

nient, our invectives against what we think to be sacrilegious in
the creed and practice of others, may it not be possible to detect
in ourselves the same perversion of principle, the same idolatrous
resistance to truth and righteousness ; and surely, it well be
comes us in this case, while we are so ready to precipitate our
invectives upon the head of bystanders, to pass a humbling ex
amination upon ourselves, that we may come to a more enlight
ened estimate of that which is the object of our condemnation ;
and that, when we condemn, we may do it with wisdom, and
with the meekness of wisdom.

Let us therefore take a nearer look of Popery, and try to find
out how much of Popery there is in the religion of Protestants.

But, let it be premised, that many of the disciples of this reli
gion disclaim much of what we impute to them ; that the Popery
of a former age may not be a fair specimen of the Popery of the
present ; that, in point of fact, many of its professors have evinced
all the spirit of devout and enlightened Christians ; that in many
districts of Popery, the Bible is in full and active circulation ,
and that thus, while the name and externals are retained, and
waken up all our traditional repugnance against it, there may
be among thousands and tens of thousands of its nominal ad
herents, all the soul, and substance, and principle, and piety of
a reformed faith. When I therefore enumerate the errors of
Popery, I do not assert the extent to which they exist. I merely
say that such errors are imputed to them ; and instead of launch
ing forth into severities against those who are thus, charged, all
I propose is, to direct you to the far more profitable and Christian
employment of shaming ourselves out of these very errors, that
we may know how to judge of others, and that we may do it
with the tenderness of charity.

First, then, it is said of Papists that they ascribe an infallibility
to the Pope, so that if he were to say one thing and the Bible
another, his authority would carry it over the authority of God.
And, think you, my brethren, that there is no such Popery among
you ? Is there no taking of your religion upon trust from an
other, when you should draw it fresh and unsullied from the
fountainhead of inspiration? You all have, or you ought to
have, Bibles ; and how often is it repeated there, " Hearken
diligently unto me"? Now, do you obey this requirement, by
making the reading of your Bibles a distinct and earnest exer
cise ? Do you ever dare to bring your favourite minister to the
tribunal of the word, or would you tremble at the presumption

'DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 471

of such an attempt, so that the hearing of the word carries a
greater authority over your mind than the reading of the word ?
Now this want of daring, this trembling at the very idea of a
dissent from your minister, this indolent acquiescence in his doc
trine, is just calling another man master; it is putting the
authority of man over the authority of God ; it is throwing your
self into a prostrate attitude at the footstool of human infalli
bility ; it is not just kissing the toe of reverence, but it is the
profounder degradation of the mind and of all its faculties : and
without the name of Popery — that name which lights up so
ready an antipathy in your bosoms, your s*oul may be infected
with the substantial poison, and your conscience be weighed
down by the oppressive shackles of Popery. And all this, in the
noon-day effulgence of a Protestant country, where the Bible, in
your mother tongue, circulates among all your families — where
it may be met with in almost every shelf, and is ever soliciting
you to look to the wisdom that is inscribed upon its pages. Oh !
how tenderly should we deal with the prejudices of a rude and
uneducated people, *who have no Bibles, and no art of reading
among them to unlock its treasures, when we think that, even
in this our land, the voice of human authority carries so mighty
an influence along with it, and veneration for the word of God is
darkened and polluted by a blind veneration for its interpreters.

We tremble to read of the fulminations that have issued in
other days from a conclave of cardinals. Have we no conclaves,
and no fulminations, and no orders of inquisition, in our own
country ? Is there no professing brotherhood, or no professing
sisterhood, to deal their censorious invectives around them, upon
the members of an excommunicated world? There is such a
thing as a religious public. There is a " little flock," on the one
hand, and a " world lying in wickedness," on the other. But
have a care, ye who think yourselves of the favoured few, how
you never transgress the mildness, and charity, and unostenta
tious virtues of the gospel ; lest you hold out a distorted picture
of Christianity in your neighbourhood, and impose that as reli
gion on the fancy of the credulous, which stands at as wide a
distance from the religion of the New Testament, as do the ser
vices of an exploded superstition, or the mummeries of an anti
quated ritual.

But, again, it is said of Papists, that they hold the monstrous
doctrine of tr an substantiation. Now a doctrine may be monstrous
on two grounds. It may be monstrous on the ground of its

472 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

absurdity, or it may be monstrous on the ground of its impiety.
It must have a most practically mischievous effect on the con
science, should a communicant sit down at the table of the Lord,
and think that the act of appointed remembrance is equivalent
to a real sacrifice, and a real expiation ; and leave the perform
ance with a mind unburdened of all its past guilt, and resolved
to incur fresh guilt to be wiped away by a fresh expiation. But
in the sacraments of our own country, is there no crucifying of
the Lord afresh ? Is there none of that which gives the doctrine
of transubstantiation all its malignant influence on the hearts
and lives of its proselytes ? Is there no mysterious virtue an
nexed to the elements of this ordinance? Instead of being
repaired to for the purpose of recruiting our languid affections to
the Saviour, and strengthening our faith, and arming us with a
firmer resolution, and more vigorous purpose of obedience, does
the conscience of no communicant solace itself by the mere per
formance of the outward act, and suffer him to go back with a
more reposing security to the follies, and vices, and indulgences
of the world? Then, my brethren, his erroneous view of the
sacrament may not be clothed in a term so appalling to the hearts
and the feelings of Protestants as transubstantiation, but to it
belongs all the immorality of transubstantiation ; and the thorn
must be pulled out of his eye, ere he can see clearly to cast the
mote out of his brother's eye.

But, thirdly, it is said that Papists worship saints, and fall
down to graven images. This is very, very bad. " Thou shalt
worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." But
let us take ourselves to task upon this charge also. Have we no
consecrated names in the annals of reformation — no worthies who
hold too commanding a place in the remembrance and affection
of Protestants ? Are there no departed theologians whose works
hold too domineering an ascendency over the faith and practice
of Christians ? Are there no laborious compilations of other
days, which, instead of interpreting the, Bible, have given its
truths a shape, and a form, and an arrangement, that confer upon
them another impression, and impart to them another influence,
from the pure and original record ? We may not bend the knee
in any sensible chamber of imagery, at the remembrance of
favourite saints. But do we not bend the understanding before
the volumes of favourite authors, and do an homage to those
representations of the minds of the men of other days, which
should be exclusively given to the representation of the mind of

DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 473

the Spirit, as put down in the book of the Spirit's revelation ? It
is right that each of us should give the contribution of his own
talents, and his own learning, to this most interesting cause ; but
let the great drift of our argument be to prop the authority of
the Bible, and to turn the eye of earnestness upon its pages ; for
if any work, instead of exalting the Bible, shall be made, by the
misjudging reverence of others, to stand in its place, then we
introduce a false worship into the heart of a reformed country, and
lay prostrate the conscience of men, under the yoke of a spurious
authority.

But fourthly and lastly — for time does not permit such an
enumeration as would exhaust all the leading peculiarities as
cribed to this faith — it is stated, that by the form of a confession,
in the last days of a sinner's life, and the ministration of extreme
unction upon his deathbed, he may be sent securely to another
world, with all the unrepented profligacy, and fraud, and wicked
ness of this world upon his forehead ; that this is looked forward
to and counted upon by every Catholic — and sets him loose from
all those anticipations which work upon the terror of other men
— and throws open to him an unbridled career, through the
whole of which he may wanton in all the varieties of criminal
indulgence — and at length, when death knocks at his door, if he
just allow him time to send for his minister, and to hurry along
with him through the steps of an adjusted ceremonial, the man's
passage through that dark vale which carries him out of the
world is strewed 'with the promises of delusion — that every
painful remembrance of the past is stifled amid the splendours
and the juggleries of an imposing ritual ; and in place of con
science rising upon him, and charging him with the guilty track
of disobedience he has run, and forcing him to flee, amid the
agitations of his restless bed, to the blood of the great Atone
ment, and alarming him into an earnest cry for the clean heart
and the right spirit j knowing that unless he be born again
unto repentance he shall perish ; — why, my brethren, instead of
these salutary exercises we are told that a fictitious hope is made
to pour its treacherous sunshine into the bosom of a deceived
Catholic — that, when standing on the verge of eternity, he can
cast a fearless eye over its dark and untravelled vastness — and
that, for the terror of its coining wrath> his guilty and unre-
newed soul is filled with all the radiance and all the elevation of
its anticipated glories.

Oh, my brethren, it is piteous to think of such a preparation,

474 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

but it is just such a preparation as meets the sad experience of
us all. The man whose every affection has clung to the world
till the last hour of his possibility to enjoy it ; who never put
forth an effort or a prayer to be delivered from the power of sin,
till every faculty for its pleasures had expired ; who, through
the varied progress of his tastes and his desires, from amusement
to dissipation, and from dissipation to business, had always a
something in all the successive stages of his career, to take up
his heart to the exclusion of Him who formed it ; — why, such a
man who never thought of pressing the lessons of the minister
upon his conscience, while life was vigorous, and the full swing
of its delights and occupations could be indulged in — do we
never find, even in the bosom of this reformed country, that
while his body retains all its health, his spirit retains all its
hardihood ; and not till the arrival of that week, or that month,
or that year, when the last messenger begins to alarm him, does
he think of sending to the man of God, a humble supplicant for
his attendant prayers. Ah, my brethren, do you not think amid
the tones, and the sympathies, and the tears which an affection
ate pastor pours out in the fervency of his soul, and mingles
with all his petitions, and all his addresses to the dying man,
that no nattering unction ever steals upon him to lull his con
science, and smooth the agony of his departure ? Then, my
brethren, you mistake it, you sadly mistake it ; and even here,
where I lift my voice among a crowd of men, in the prime and
unbroken vigour of their days — if even the youngest and like
liest of you all shall, trusting to some future repentance, cherish
the purpose of sin another hour, and not resolve at this critical
and important Now, to break it all off by an act of firm aban
donment, then be your abhorrence of Popery what it may, you
are exemplifying the worst of its errors, and wrapping yourselves
up in the cruellest and most inveterate of its delusions

I have left myself very little time for the application of all
this to the particular objects of our Society. First, Let it cor
rect the very gross and vulgar tendency we all have to think
that the kingdom of God cometh with observation. That king
dom has its seat within us, and consists in the reign of principle
over the hidden and invisible mind. The mere deposition of
the Pope from that throne where he sits surrounded with the
splendour of temporalities — the mere ascendency of Protestant
princes, over the counsels and politics of the world — the mere
exclusion of Catholic subjects from our administrations and our

DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 475

Parliaments — these things are all very observable, but they may
all happen without one inch of progress being made towards the
establishment of that kingdom which cometh not with observa
tion. Why, my brethren, the supposition may be a very odd
one, nor do I say that it is at all likely to be realized — but for
the sake of illustration I will come forward with it. Conceive
that the Spirit of God, accompanying the circulation of the
word of God, were to introduce all its truths and all its lessons
into the heart of every individual of the Catholic priesthood;
and - that the Pope himself, instead of being brought down in
person from the secular eminence he occupies, were brought
down in spirit, with all his lofty imaginations, to the captivity of
the obedience of Christ — then I am not prepared to assert, that
under the influence of this great Christian episcopacy a mighty
advancement may not be made in building up the kingdom of
God, and in throwing down the kingdom of Satan throughout
all the territories of Catholic Christendom. And yet with all
this the name of Catholic may be retained — the external and
visible marks of distinction may be as prominent as ever — and
with all those insignia about them which keep up our passionate
antipathy to this denomination, there might not be a single ingre
dient in the spirit of its members to merit our rational antipathy.
I beg you will just take all this as an attempt at the illustration
of what I count a very important principle ; — and, to make the
illustration more complete, let me take up the case of a Protestant
country, and put the supposition, that, with the name of a pure
and spiritual religion, the majority of its inhabitants are utter
strangers to its power ; that an indifference to the matters of
faith and of eternity works all the effect of a deep and fatal
infidelity on their consciences ; that the world engrosses every
heart, and the kingdom which is not of this world is virtually
disowned and held in derision among the various classes and
characters of society ; that the spirit of the New Testament is
banished from our Parliaments, and banished from our Uni
versities, and banished from the great bulk of our ecclesiastical
establishments, and is only to be met with among a few incon
siderable men, who are scouted by the general voice as the
fanatics and visionaries of the day ; — then, my brethren, I am
not to be charmed out of truth and of principle by the mockery
of a name. Call such a country reformed as you may, it is full
of the strong-holds of Antichrist, from one end to the other of
it ; and there must be a revolution of sentiment there, as well as

476 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY".

in the darkest regions of Popery, ere the " enemies of the Son of
God be consumed by the breath of his mouth," or " Babylon
the Great be fallen."

Now, secondly, mark the influence of such a train of senti
ment on the spirit of those who are employed in spreading the
light of reformation among a Catholic people. It will purify
their aim and give it a judicious direction, and chase away from
their proceedings that offensive tone of arrogance which is cal
culated to irritate and to beget a more determined obstinacy of
prejudice than ever. Their great aim, to express it in one word,
is to plant in the hearts of all men of all countries the religion of
the Bible. Their great direction will be toward the establish
ment of right principle ; and in the prosecution of it they will
carefully avoid multiplying the points of irritation, by giving
vent to their traditional repugnance against the less material
forms of Popery. Arid the meek consciousness of that woful de
parture from vital Christianity which has taken place even in
the reformed countries of Christendom, will divest them of that
repulsive superiority which, I fear, has gone far to defeat the
success of many an attempt upon many an enemy of the truth
as it is in Jesus. " The whole amount of our message is to
furnish you with the Bible, and to furnish you with the art of
reading it. We think the lessons of this book well fitted to
chase away the manifold errors which rankle in the bosom of our
own country. You are the subjects of error as well as we ; and
we trust that you will find them useful in enlightening the pre
judices and in aiding the frailties to which, as the children of
one common humanity, we are all liable. Amongst us there is
a mighty deference to the authority of man : if this exist among
yon, here is a book which tells us to call no man master, and
delivers us from the fallibility of human opinions. Amongst us
there is a delusive confidence in the forms of godliness with
little of its power : here is a book which tells us that holiness of
life is the great end of all our ceremonies and of all our sacra
ments. Amongst us there is a host of theologians, each wield
ing his separate authority over the creed and the conscience of
his countrymen, and you, Catholics, have justly reproached us
with our manifold and never-ending varieties ; but here is a book
the influence of which is throwing all these differences into the
background, and bringing forward those great and substantial
points of agreement which lead us to recognise the man of an
other creed to be essentially a Christian — and we want to widen

DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 477

this circle of fellowship, that we may be permitted to live in
the exercise of one faith and of one charity along with you.
Amongst us the great bulk of men pass through life forgetful of
eternity, and think that by the sighs and the ministrations of
their last days, they will earn all the blessedness of its ever-
during rewards : but here is a book which tells us that we
should seek first the kingdom of God ; and will not let us off
with any other repentance than repentance now ; and tells us
what we trust will light with greater energy on your consciences
than it has ever done upon ours, that we should haste and make
no delay to keep the commandments." Oh, my brethren, let
us not despair that such arguments, urged by the mild charity
which adorns the Bible, and followed up by its circulation, will
at length tell on the firmest defences that bigotry ever raised
around the conscience and the principles of men — and that out
of those jarring elements which threaten our empire with a wild
war of turbulence and disorder, we shall by the blessing of God
be enabled to cement all its members into one great and har
monious family.

I conclude with saying, that, mainly and substantially speak
ing, I conceive this to be the very spirit of the attempt that is
now making by the Society I am now pleading for. It is not
an offensive declaration of war against Popery. It is true that
it may be looked upon virtually as a measure of hostility against
the errors of Catholics, but no more than it is a measure of
hostility against the errors of Protestants. The light of truth
is fitted to chase away all error, and there is something in that
Bible which the agents of our Society are now teaching so
assiduously, that is not more humbling and more severe on the
general spirit of Ireland, than it is on the general spirit of our
own country. It is true, that some of the Catholics set their
face against the establishment of our schools, but this resistance
to education is not peculiar to them. It is to be met with in
England. It is to be met with in our own boasted and beloved
Scotland. It is to be met with even among the enlightened
classes of British society — and shall we speak of it as if it fas
tened a peculiar stigma on that country, which we have left to
languish in depression and ignorance for so many generations ?
But this resistance on the part of Catholics is far from general.
In one district the teachers of our schools are chiefly Eoman
Catholics ; many of the school-houses are Catholic chapels ; and
the great majority of the scholars are children of Catholic

478 DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY.

parents, who have appeared not a little elated that their children
have proved more expert in their Scriptural quotations than
their neighbours. — Call you not this an auspicious commence
ment ? Is there no loosening of prejudice here ? Do you not
perceive that the firmest system of bigotry, ever erected over
the minds of a prostrate population, must give way before the
continued operation of such an expedient as this ? There is no
one device of human policy that has done so much for Ireland
in a whole century, as is now doing by the progress of education,
and the freer circulation of the gospel of light through the dark
mass and interior of their peasantry. Let me crave the assist
ance of the public in this place to one of the most powerful
instruments that has yet been set agoing for helping forward
this animating cause. It is an instrument ready-made to your
hand. The Hibernian Society have already established 347
schools in our sister country — a number equal to one-third of
the parishes in Scotland ; and they are dealing out education, a
pure Scriptural education, to 27,700 Irish children. It will be a
disgrace to us if we do not signalize ourselves in such a business
as this. We talk of the Irish as a wild and uncivilised people.
It will be the indication of a very gross and uncivilised public
at home, if we restrict our interchange with the men of the
opposite shore to the one interchange of merchandise. Let the
rudeness of the Irish be what it may, sure I am that there is
much in their constitutional character to encourage us in this
enterprise. They have many good points and engaging pro
perties about them. I speak not of that peculiar style of genius
and of eloquence, which gives such fascination to the poets, the
authors, the orators of Ireland. I speak of the great mass, and
I do think that I perceive a something in the natural character
of Ireland, which draws me more attractively to the love of its
people, than any other picture of national manners ever has in
spired. Even amid the wildest extravagance of that humour
which sits so visibly and so universally on the countenance of
the Irish population, I can see a heart and a social sympathy
along with it. Amid all the wayward and ungovernable flights
of that rare pleasantry which belongs to them, there is a some
thing by which the bosom of an Irishman can be seriously and
permanently affected, and which I think, in judicious hands, is
convertible into the finest results on the ultimate character of
that people. It strikes me that, of all the men on the face of
the earth, they would be the worst fitted to withstand the ex-

DOCTRINE OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 479

pression of honest, frank, liberal, and persevering kindness ; —
that if they saw there was no artful policy in the attentions by
which you plied them, but that an upright and firmly sustained
benevolence lay at the bottom of all your exertions for the best
interest of their families ; — could they attain the conviction that,
amid all the contempt and all the resistance you experienced
from their hands, there still existed in your bosoms an unquelled
and an undissembled love for them and for their children ; —
could they see the working of this principle divested of every
treacherous and suspicious symptom, and unwearied amid every
discouragement in prosecuting the task of their substantial
amelioration, — Why, my brethren, let all this come to be seen,
and in a few years I trust our devoted missionaries will bring
it before them broad and undeniable as the light of day, and
those hearts that are now shut against you in sullenness arid
disdain will be subdued into tenderness ; the strong emotions of
gratitude and nature will at length find their way through all
the barriers of prejudice ; and a people whom no penalties could
turn, whom no terror of military violence could overcome, who
kept on a scowling front of hostility that was not to be softened,
while war spread its desolating cruelties over their unhappy
land — this very people will do homage to the omnipotence of
charity, and when the mighty armour of Christian kindness is
brought to bear upon them, it will be found to be irresistible. •

480 ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

SEKMON VIII.

(Preached in Edinburgh, March 5, 1826.)
ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

" A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast."— PEOVERBS xii. 10.

THE word " regard" is of twofold signification, and may either
apply to the moral or to the intellectual part of our nature.
In the one application, the intellectual, it is the regard of
attention. In the other, the moral, it is the regard of sympathy
or kindness. We do not marvel at this common term having
been applied to two different things ; for, in truth, they are
most intimately associated ; and the faculty by which a transi
tion is accomplished from the one to the other, may be considered
as the intermediate link between the mind and the heart. It is
the faculty by which certain objects become present to the mind ;
and then the emotions are awakened in the heart, which corre
spond to these objects. The two act and react upon each other.
But, as we must not dwell too long on generalities, we shall
satisfy ourselves with stating — that, as, on the one hand, if the
heart be very alive to any peculiar set of emotions, this of itself
is a predisposing cause why the mind should be very alert in
singling out the peculiar objects which excite them ; so, on the
other hand, that the emotions be specifically felt, the objects
must be specifically noticed ; and thus it is that the faculty of
attention — a faculty at the bidding of the will, and for the exer
cise of which therefore man is responsible — is of such mighty
and commanding influence upon the sensibilities of our nature ;
insomuch that, if the regard of attention could be fastened
strongly and singly on the pain of a suffering creature as its
object, we believe that no other emotion than the regard of sym
pathy or compassion would in any instance be awakened by it.

So much is this indeed the case — so sure is this alliance be
tween the mind simply noticing the distress of a sentient crea
ture, and the heart being sympathetically affected by it, that

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 481

Nature seems to have limited and circumscribed our power of
noticing, and just for the purpose of shielding us from the pain
of too pungent or too incessant a sympathy. And accordingly,
one of the exquisite adaptations in the mechanism of the human
frame may be observed in the very imperfection of the human
faculties. The most frequently adduced example of this, is the
limited power of that organ which is the instrument of vision.
The imagination is, that, did man look out upon nature with
microscopic eye, so that many of those wonders which now lie
hid in deep obscurity should henceforth start into open revela
tion, and be hourly and habitually obtruded upon his gaze, then,
with his present sensibilities exposed to the torture and the dis
turbance of a perpetual and most agonizing offence from all
possible quarters of contemplation, he would be utterly incapa
citated for the movements of familiar and ordinary life. Did he
actually see, for example, in the beverage which he carried to
his lips, that teeming multitude of sentient and susceptible crea
tures wherewith it is pervaded : or if it were alike palpable to
his senses, that, by the crush of every footstep, he inflicted upon
thousands the pangs of dissolution, then it is apprehended that,
to man as he is, the world would be insupportable. For, beside
the irritation of that sore and incessant disgust from which the
power of escaping was denied to him, there would be another,
and a most intense suffering, in the constantly aggrieved tender
ness of his nature. Or if, by the operation of habit, all these
sensibilities were blunted, and he could behold unmoved the
ruin and the wretchedness that he strewed along his path, then
he might attain to comfort in the midst of this surrounding
annoyance ; but what would become of character in the utter
extinction of all the delicacies and the feelings which wont to
adorn it ? Such a change in his physical, could only be adjusted
to his happiness, by a reverse and most melancholy change in
the moral constitution of his nature. The fineness of his bodily
perceptions would need to be compensated by a proportional
hardness in the temperament of his soul. With his now finer
sensations, there behoved to be duller and coarser sensibilities ;
and to assort that eye, whose retina had become tenfold more
soft and susceptible than before, its owner must be furnished
with a heart of tenfold rigidity, and a nervous system impreg
nable as iron — that he might walk forth in ease and in
complacency, while the conscious destroyer of millions by his
tread, or the conscious devourer of a whole living and suffering
VOL. in. 2 H

482 ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

hecatomb with every morsel of the sustenance which upheld
him.

But, for the purpose of a nice and delicate balance between
the actual feelings and faculties of our nature, something more
is necessary than the imperfection of our outward senses. The
blunting of man's visual organs serves, no doubt, as a screen of
protection against both the nausea and the horror of those many
spectacles, which would else have either distressed or deteriorated
the sensibilities that belong to him. But then, by help of the
microscope, this screen can be occasionally lifted up ; and what
the eye then saw, the memory might retain, and the imagination
might dwell upon, and the associating faculty might both con
stantly and vividly suggest ; and thus, even in the absence of
every provocative from without, the heart might be subjected
either to a perpetual agitation, or a perpetual annoyance, by the
meddling importunity of certain powers and activities which are
within. It is not therefore an adequate defence of our species,
against a very sore and hurtful molestation, that there should be
a certain physical incapacity in our senses. There must, further
more, be a certain physical inertness in our reflective faculties.
In virtue of the former it is, that so many painful or disgusting
objects are kept out of sight. But it seems indispensable to our
happy or even tolerable existence, that, in virtue of the latter,
these objects, when out of sight, should be also out of mind.
In the one way, they lose their power to offend as objects of
outward observation. In the other way, their power to haunt
and to harass by means of inward reflection, is also taken away.
For the first purpose, Nature has struck with a certain impotency
the organs of our material framework. For the second, she has
infused, as it were, an opiate into the recesses of our mental
economy ; and made it of sufficient strength and sedative virtue
for the needful tranquillity of man, and for upholding that
average enjoyment in the midst both of agony arid of loathsome
ness, which either senses more acute, or a spirit more wakeful,
must have effectually dissipated. It is to some such provision
too, we think, that much of the heart's purity, as well as much
of its tenderness is owing ; and it is well that the thoughts of
the spirit should be kept, though even by the weight of its own
lethargy, from too busy converse with objects which are alike
offensive or alike hazardous to both.

It is more properly with the second of these adaptations than
the first, that our argument has to do — with the inertness of our

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 483

reflective faculties, rather than with the incapacity of our senses.
It is in behalf of animals, and not of animalculse, that we are
called upon to address you — not of that countless swarm, the
agonies of whose destruction are shrouded from observation by
the veil upon the sight ; but of those creatures who move on
the face of the open perspective before us, and not as the others
in a region of invisibles, and yet whose dying agonies are
shrouded almost as darkly and as densely from general observa
tion by the veil upon the mind. For you will perceive, that in
reference to the latter veil, and by which it is that what is out
of sight is also out of mind, its purpose is accomplished, whether
the objects which are disguised by it be without the sphere of
actual vision, or beneath the surface of possible vision. Now.
it is without the sphere of your actual, although not beneath the
surface of your possible vision, where are transacted the dreadful
mysteries of a slaughter-house ; and more especially those linger
ing deaths which many an animal has to undergo for the grati
fications of a refined epicurism. It were surely most desirable
that the duties, if they may be so called, of a most revolting-
trade, were all of them got over with the least possible expense
of suffering : Nor do we ever feel so painfully the impression of
a lurking cannibalism in our nature, as when we think of the
intense study which has been given to the connexion between
modes of killing ; and the flavour or delicacy of those viands,
which are served up to the mild and pacific and gentle-looking
creatures, who form the grace and the ornament of our polished
society. One is almost tempted, after all, to look upon them as
so many savages in disguise ; and so, in truth, we should, but
for the strength of that opiate whose power and whose property
we have just endeavoured to explain ; and in virtue of which,
the guests of an entertainment are all the while most profoundly
unconscious of the horrors of that preparatory scene which went
before it. It is not therefore that there is hypocrisy in these
smiles wherewith they look so benignly to each other. It is
not that there is deceit in their words or their accents of tender
ness. The truth is, that one shriek of agony, if heard from
without, would cast most oppressive gloom over this scene of
conviviality ; and the sight, but for a moment, of one wretched
creature quivering towards death, would, with Gorgon spell,
dissipate all the gaieties which enlivened it. But Nature, as it
were, hath practised most subtle reticence, both on the senses
and the spirit of us her children ; or rather, the Author of

484 ON CKUELTY TO ANIMALS.

Nature hath, by the skill of His master hand, instituted the
harmony of a most exquisite balance between the tenderness of
the human feelings and the listlessness of the human faculties —
so as that, in the mysterious economy under which we live, He
may at once provide for the sustenance, and leave entire the
moral sensibilities of our species.

But there is a still more wondrous limitation than this, where
with He hath bounded and beset the faculties of the human
spirit. You already understand how it is that the sufferings of
the lower animals may, when out of sight, be out of mind. But
more than this, these sufferings may be in sight, and yet out of
mind. This is strikingly exemplified in the sports of the field,
in the midst of whose varied and animating bustle, that cruelty
which all along is present to the senses, may not, for one moment,
have been present to the thoughts. There sits a somewhat
ancestral dignity and glory on this favourite pastime of joyous
old England ; when the gallant knighthood, and the hearty
yeomen, and the amateurs or virtuosos of the chase, and the full
assembled jockeyship of half a province, muster together in all
the pride and pageantry of their great emprise ; arid the pan
orama of some noble landscape, lighted up with autumnal clear
ness from an unclouded heaven, pours fresh exhilaration into
every blithe and choice spirit of the scene ; and every adven
turous heart is braced, and impatient for the hazards of the
coming enterprise ; and even the high-breathed coursers catcli
the general sympathy, and seem to fret in all the restiveness of
their yet checked and irritated fire, till the echoing horn shall
set them at liberty — even that horn which is the knell of death
to some trembling victim, now brought forth of its lurking-place
to the delighted gaze, and borne down upon with the full and
open cry of its ruthless pursuers. Be assured that, amid the
whole glee and fervency of this tumultuous enjoyment, there
might not, in one single bosom, be aught so fiendish as a prin
ciple of naked and abstract cruelty. The fear which gives its
lightning-speed to the unhappy animal ; the thickening horrors
which, in the progress of exhaustion, must gather upon its flight ;
its gradually sinking energies, and, at length, the terrible cer
tainty of that destruction which is awaiting it; that piteous
cry, which the ear can sometimes distinguish amid the deafening
clamour of the blood-hounds, as they spring exultingly upon
their prey ; the dread massacre and dying agonies of a creature
so miserably torn ; — all this weight of suffering, we admit, is not

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 485

once sympathized with ; but it is just because the suffering itself
is not once thought of. It touches not the sensibilities of the
heart j but just because it is never present to the notice of the
mind. We allow that the hardy followers in the wild romance
of this occupation, we allow them to be reckless of pain ; but
this is not rejoicing in pain. Theirs is not the delight of savage,
but the apathy of unreflecting creatures. They are wholly
occupied with the chase itself, and its spirit-stirring accompani
ments ; nor bestow one moment's thought on the dread violence
of that infliction upon sentient nature which marks its termina
tion. It is the spirit of the competition, arid it alone, which
goads onward this hurrying career ; and even he who, in at the
death, is foremost in the triumph — although to him the death
itself is in sight, the agony of its wretched sufferer is wholly
out of mind.

We fire inclined to carry this principle much farther. We
are not even sure, if, within the whole compass of humanity,
fallen as it is, there be such a thing as delight in suffering for
its own sake. But, without hazarding a controversy on this, we
hold it enough for every practical object, that much, and perhaps
the whole of this world's cruelty, arises not from the enjoyment
that is felt in consequence of others' pain, but from the enjoyment
that is felt in spite of it. It is something else in the spectacle
of agony which ministers pleasure than the agony itself; and
many is the eye which glistens with transport at the fray of
animals met together for their mutual destruction, and which
might be brought to weep, if, apart from all the excitements of
such a scene, the anguish of wounded or dying creatures were
placed nakedly before it. Were it strictly analysed, it would
be found that the charm neither of the ancient gladiatorships,
nor of our modern prize-lights, lies in the torture which is there
by inflicted ; for we should feel the very same charm, and look
with the very same intentness on some doubtful yet strenuous
collision, even among the inanimate elements of nature — as
when the water and the fire contended for mastery, and the
inherent force of the one was met by a plying and a powerful
enginery that gave impulse and direction to the other. It is
even so when the enginery of bones and of muscles comes into
rivalship ; and every spectator of the ring fastens on the spec
tacle with that identical engrossment which he feels in the
hazards of some doubtful game, or in the desperate conflict and
effervescence even of the altogether mute unconscious elements.

48G ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

To him it is little else than a problem in dynamics. There is
a science connected with the fight, which has displaced the
sensibilities that are connected with its expiring moans, its
piteous and piercing outcries, its cruel lacerations. In all this,
we admit the utter heedlessness of pain ; but we are not sure if
even yet there be aught so hellishly revolting as any positive
gratification in the pain itself — or whether, even in the lowest
walks of blackguardism in society, it do not also hold, that when
sufferings even unto death are fully in sight, the pain of these
sufferings is as fully out of mind.

But the term u science," so strangely applied as it has been in
the example now quoted, reminds us of another variety in this
most afflicting detail. Even in the purely academic walk we
read or hear of the most appalling cruelties ; and the interest of
that philosophy wherewith they have been associated, has been
pleaded in mitigation of them. And just as the moral debase
ment incurred by an act of theft is somewhat redeemed if done by
one of Science's enamoured worshippers, when, overcome by the
mere passion of connoisseurship, he puts forth his hand on some
choice specimen of most tempting and irresistible peculiarity —
even so has a like indulgence been extended to certain perpetra
tors of stoutest and most resolved cruelty ; and that just because
of the halo wherewith the glories of intellect and of proud dis
covery have enshrined them. And thus it is, that bent on the
scrutiny of nature's laws, there are some of our race who have
hardihood enough to explore and elicit them at the expense of
dreadest suffering — who can make some quaking, some quiver
ing animal, the subject of their hapless experiment — who can
institute a questionary process by which to draw out the secrets
of its constitution, and, like inquisitors of old, extract every
reply by an instrument of torture — who can probe their un
faltering way among the vitalities of a system which shrinks,
and palpitates, and gives forth at every movement of their stead-
last hand, the pulsations of deepest agony ; and all, perhaps, to
ascertain and to classify the phenomena of sensation, or to mea
sure the tenacity of animal life by the power and exquisiteness
<>f animal endurance. And still it is not because of all this
wretchedness, but in spite of it, that they pursue their barbarous
occupation. Even here it is possible that there is nought so
absolutely Satanic as delight in those sufferings of which them
selves are the inflicters. That law of emotion by which the
sight of pain calls forth sympathy may not be reversed into an

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 487

opposite law, by which the sight of pain would call forth satis
faction or pleasure. The emotion is not reversed — it is only
overborne in the play of other emotions called forth by other
objects. He is intent on the science of those phenomena
which he investigates, and bethinks not himself of the suffer
ing which they involve to the unhappy animal. So far from
the sympathies of his nature being reversed or even annihilated,
there is in most cases an effort, and of great strenuousness, to
keep them down ; and his heart is differently affected from
that of other men, just because the regards of his mental eye
are differently pointed from those of other men. The whole
bent and engagement of his faculties are similar to those
of another operator who is busied with the treatment of a
piece of inanimate matter, and may almost be said to subject
it to the torture, when he puts it in the intensely-heated cru
cible, or applies to it the tests and the various searching
operations of a laboratory. The one watches every change of
hue in the substance upon which he operates, and waits for the
response which is given forth by a spark, or an effervescence, or
an explosion ; and the other, precisely similar to him, watches
every change of aspect in the suffering or dying creature that is
before him, and marks every symptom of its exhaustion or sorer
distress, every throb of renewed anguish, every cry, and every
look of that pain which it can feel, through not articulate ;
marks and considers these in no other light than as the ex
ponents of its variously-affected physiology. But still, could
merely the same interesting phenomena have been evolved
without pain, he would like it better. Only he will not be re
pelled from the study of them by pain. Even he would have
had more comfort in the study of a complex automaton, that
gave out the same results on the same application. Only he will
not shrink from the necessary incisions and openings, and separa
tion of parts, although, instead of a lifeless automaton, it should
be a sentient and sorely-agonized animal. So that there is not
even with him any reversal of the law of sympathy. There
may be the feebleness, or there may be the negation of it. Cer
tain it is, that it has given way to other laws of superior force
in his constitution. And, without imputing to him aught so
monstrous as the positive love of suffering, we may even admit
for him a hatred of suffering, but that the love of science had
overborne it.

In the views that we have now given, and which we deem of

•488 ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

advantage for the right practical treatment of our question, it
may be conceived that we palliate the atrociousness of cruelty.
It is forgotten that a charge of foullest delinquency may be
made up altogether of wants or of negatives ; and, just as the
human face by the mere want of some of its features, although
there should not be any inversion of them, might be an object of
utter loathsomeness to beholders, so the human character by the
mere absence of certain habits or certain sensibilities, which
belong ordinarily and constitutionally to our species, may be an
object of utter abomination in society. The want of natural
affection forms one article of the apostle's indictment against our
world ; and certain it is, that the total want of it were stigma
enough for the designation of a monster. The mere want of
religion, or irreligion, is enough to make man an outcast from his
God. Even to the most barbarous of our kind you apply, not
the term of anti-humanity, but of inhumanity — not the term of
anti-sensibility ; and you hold it enough for the purpose of brand
ing him for general execration, that you convicted him of com
plete arid total insensibility. He is regaled, it is true, by a
spectacle of agony — but not because of the agony. It is some
thing else, therewith associated, which regales him. But still
he is rightfully the subject of most emphatic denunciation, not
because regaled by, but because regardless of, the agony. We do
not feel ourselves to be vindicating the cruel man, when we affirm
it to be not altogether certain whether he rejoices in the extinc
tion of life ; for we count it a deep atrocity that, unlike to the
righteous man of our text, he simply does not regard the life of
a beast. You may perhaps have been accustomed to look upon
the negatives of character as making up a sort of neutral or
mid-way innocence. But this is a mistake. Unfeeling 19 but a
negative quality ; and yet we speak of an unfeeling monster. It
is thus that even the profound experimentalist, whose delight is
not in the torture which he inflicts, but in the truth which he
elicits thereby, may become an object of keenest reprobation ;
not because he was pleased with suffering, but simply because
he did not pity it — not because the object of pain, if dwelt upon
by him, would be followed up by any other emotion than that
which is experienced by other men ; but because, intent on the
prosecution of another object, it was not so dwelt upon. It is
found that the eclat even of brilliant discovery does not shield
him from the execrations of a public, who can yet convict him
of nothing more than simply of negatives — of heedlessness, of

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 489

heartlessness, of looking upon the agonies of a sentient creature
without regard, and therefore without sensibility. The true
principle of his condemnation is, that he ought to have regarded.
It is not that, in virtue of a different organic structure, he feels
differently from others when the same simple object is brought
to bear upon him. But it is that he resolutely kept that object
at a distance from his attention, or rather that he steadily kept
his attention away from the object ; and that in opposition to all
the weight of remonstrance which lies in the tremors and the
writhings and the piteous outcries of agonized nature. Had we
obtained for these the regards of his mind, the relentings of his
heart might have followed. His is not an anomalous heart ;
and the only way in which he can brace it into sternness is by
barricading the avenue which leads to it. That faculty of
attention which might have opened the door through which suf
fering without finds its way to sympathy within is otherwise
engaged ; and the precise charge on which either morality can
rightfully condemn or humanity be offended, is that he wills to
have it so.

It may be illustrated by that competition of speed which is
held, with busy appliance of whip and of spur, betwixt animals.
A similar competition can be imagined between steam-carriages,
when, either to preserve the distance which has been gained,
or to recover the distance which has been lost, the respective
guides would keep up an incessant appliance to the furnace and
the safety-valve. Now, the sport and the excitement are the
same, whether this appliance of force be to a dead or. a living
mechanism ; and the enormity of the latter does not lie in any
direct pleasure which is felt in the exhaustion or the soreness, or,
finally, in the death of the over-driven animal. If these awake
any feeling at all in the barbarous rider, it is that of pain ; and
it is either the want or the weakness of this latter feeling, and
not the presence of its opposite, which constitutes him a bar
barian. He does not rejoice in animal suffering — but it is
enough to bring down upon him the charge of barbarity that he
does not regard it.

.But these introductory remarks, although they lead, I do
think, to some most important suggestions for the management
of the evil, yet they serve not to abate its appalling magnitude.
Man is the direct agent of a wide and continual distress to the
lower animals* and the question is, Can any method be devised
for its alleviation ? On this subject that scriptural image is

490 ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

strikingly realized, " The whole inferior creation groaning and
travailing together in pain," because of him. It signifies not to
the substantive amount of the suffering, whether this be prompted
by the hardness of his heart, or only permitted through the heed-
lessness of his mind. In either way it holds true, not only that
the arch-devourer man stands pre-eminent over the fiercest chil
dren of the wilderness as an animal of prey ; but that for his
lordly and luxurious appetite, as well as for his service or merest
curiosity and amusement, Nature must be ransacked throughout
all her elements. Kather than forego the veriest gratifications
of vanity, he will wring them from the anguish of wretched and
ill-fated creatures ; and whether for the indulgence of his bar
baric sensuality, or barbaric splendour, can stalk paramount over
the sufferings of that prostrate creation which has been placed
beneath his feet. That beauteous domain whereof he has been
constituted the terrestrial sovereign, gives out so many blissful
and benignant aspects; and whether we look to its peaceful
lakes, or its flowery landscapes, or its evening skies, or to all
that soft attire which overspreads the hills and the valleys,
lighted up by smiles of sweetest sunshine, and where animals
disport themselves in all the exuberance of gaiety — this surely
were a more befitting scene for the rule of clemency, than for
the iron rod of a murderous and remorseless tyrant. But the
present is a mysterious world wherein we dwell. It still bears
much upon its materialism of the impress of Paradise. But a
breath from the air of Pandemonium has gone over its living
generations. And so " the fear of man, and the dread of man,
is now upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of
the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the
fishes of the sea ; into man's hands are they delivered : every
moving thing that liveth is meat for him ; yea, even as the
green herbs, there have been given to him all things." Such is
the extent of his jurisdiction, and with most full and wanton
licence has he revelled among its privileges. The whole earth
labours and is in violence because of his cruelties ; and from the
amphitheatre of sentient Nature, there sounds in fancy's ear the
bleat of one wide and universal suffering, — a dreadful homage
to the power of Nature's constituted lord.

These sufferings are really felt. The beasts of the field are
not so many automata without sensation, and just so constructed
as to give forth all the natural signs and expressions of it.
Nature hath not practised this universal deception upon our

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 491

species. These poor animals just look, and tremble, and give
forth the very indications of suffering that we do. Theirs is the
distinct cry of pain. Theirs is the unequivocal physiognomy of
pain. They put on the same aspect of terror on the demonstra
tions of a menaced blow. They exhibit the same distortions of
agony after the infliction of it. The bruise, or the burn, or the
fracture, or the deep incision, or the fierce encounter with one
of equal or superior strength, just affects them similarly to our
selves. Their blood circulates as ours. They have pulsations
in various parts of the body like ours. They sicken, and they
grow feeble with age ; and finally, they die just as we do. They
possess the same feelings ; and, what exposes them to like suffer
ing from another quarter, they possess the same instincts with
our own species. The lioness robbed of her whelps causes the
wilderness to ring aloud with the proclamation of her wrongs ;
or the bird whose little household has been stolen, fills and
saddens all the grove with melodies of deepest pathos. All this
is palpable even to the general and unlearned eye ; and when
the physiologist lays open the recesses of their system by means
of that scalpel, under whose operation they just shrink and are
convulsed as any living subject of our own species, there stands
forth to view the same sentient apparatus, and furnished with the
same conductors for the transmission of feeling to every minutest
pore upon the surface. Theirs is unmixed and unmitigated pain
•--the agonies of martyrdom, without the alleviation of the hopes
and the sentiments, whereof they are incapable. When they lay
them down to die, their only fellowship is with suffering ; for in
the prison-house of their beset and bounded faculties, there can
no relief be afforded by communion with other interests or other
things. The attention does not lighten their distress as it does
that of man, by carrying off his spirit from that existing pun
gency and pressure which might else be overwhelming. There
is but room in their mysterious economy for one inmate ; and
that is, the absorbing sense of their own single and concentrated
anguish. And so in that bed of torment, whereon the wounded
animal lingers and expires, there is an unexplored depth and in
tensity of suffering which the poor dumb animal itself cannot tell,
and against which it can offer no remonstrance ; an untold and
unknown amount of wretchedness, of which no articulate voice
gives utterance. But there is an eloquence in its silence ; and the
very shroud which disguises it, only serves to aggravate its horrors.
We now come to the practical treatment of this question — to

492 OX CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

the right method of which, we hold the views that are now
offered to be directly and obviously subservient.

First, then, upon this subject, we should hold no doubtful
casuistry. We should advance no pragmatic or controversial
doctrine. We should carefully abstain from all such ambiguous
or questionable positions, as the unlawfulness of animal food, or
the unlawfulness of animal experiments. We should not even
deem it the right tactics for this moral warfare, to take up the
position of the unlawfulness of field-sports ; or yet the unlawful
ness of those competitions, whether of strength or of speed, which
at one time on the turf, and at another in the ring, are held
forth to the view of assembled spectators. We are aware that
some of these positions are not so questionable, yet we should
refrain from the elaboration of them ; for we hold, that this is
not the way by which we shall most effectually make head
against the existing cruelties of our land. The moral force by
which our cause is to be advanced, does not lie even in the
soundest categories of an ethical jurisprudence — and far less in
the dogmata of any paltry sectarianism. We have almost as little
inclination for the controversy which respects animal food, as we
have for the controversy about the eating of blood ; and this,
we repeat, is not the way by which the claims of the inferior
animals are practically to be carried.

To obtain the regards of man's heart in behalf of the lower
animals, we should strive to draw the regards of his mind to
wards them. We should avail ourselves of the close alliance
that obtains between the regards of his attention, and those of
his sympathy. For this purpose, we should importunately ply
him with the objects of suffering, and thus call up its respondent
emotion of sympathy — that among the other objects which have
hitherto engrossed his attention, and the other desires or emo
tions which have hitherto lorded it over the compassion of his
nature and overpowered it ; this last may at length be restored
to its legitimate play, and reinstated in all its legitimate pre
eminence over the other affections or appetites which belong to
him. It affords a hopeful view of our cause, that so much can
be done by the mere obtrusive presentation of the object to the
notice of society. It is a comfort to know, that, in this benevo
lent warfare, we have to make head, not so much against the
cruelty of the public, as against the heedlessness of the public ;
that to hold forth a right view, is the way to call forth a right
sensibility ; and, that to assail the seat of any emotion, our like-

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 493

liest process is to make constant and conspicuous exhibition of
the object which is fitted to awaken it. Our text, taken from
the profoundest book of experimental wisdom in the world, keeps
clear of every questionable or casuistical dogma ; and rests the
whole cause of the inferior animals on one moral element, which
is, in respect of principle — and on one practical method, which
is, in respect of efficacy — unquestionable : " A righteous man
regardeth the life of his beast." Let a man be but righteous in
the general and obvious sense of the word, and let the regard of
his attention be but directed to the case of the inferior animals,
and then the regard of his sympathy will be awakened to the
full extent at which it is either duteous or desirable. Still it
may be asked, to what extent will the duty go ? and our reply
is, that we had rather push the duty forward, than be called upon
to define the extreme termination of it. Yet we do not hesitate
to say, that we foresee not aught so very extreme as the abolition
of animal food ; but we do foresee the indefinite abridgment of
all that cruelty which subserves the gratifications of a base and
selfish epicurism. We think that a Christian and humanized
society will at length lift their prevalent voice, for the least
possible expense of suffering to all the victims of a necessary
slaughter — for a business of utmost horror being also a business
of utmost despatch — for the blow, in short, of an instant exter
mination, that not one moment might elapse between a state of
pleasurable existence and a state of profound unconsciousness.
Again, we do not foresee, but with the perfecting of the two
, sciences of anatomy and physiology, the abolition of animal ex
periments ; but we do foresee a gradual, and, at length, a com
plete abandonment of the experiments of illustration, which are
at present a thousand-fold more numerous than the experiments
of humane discovery. As to field-sports, we, for the present,
abstain from all prophecy, in regard, either to their growing
disuse, or to the conclusive extinction of them. We are quite
sure, in the meantime, that casuistry upon this subject would be
altogether powerless ; arid nothing could be imagined more
keenly, or more energetically contemptuous, than the impatient
— the impetuous disdain, wherewith the enamoured votaries of
this gay and glorious adventure would listen to any demonstra
tion of its unlawfulness. We shall therefore make no attempt to
dogmatize them out of that fond and favourite amusement which
they prosecute with all the intensity of a passion. It is not thus
that the fascination will be dissipated. And, therefore, for the

494 ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

present, we should be inclined to subject the lovers of the chase,
and the lovers of the prize-fight, to the same treatment, even a?
there exists between them, we are afraid, the affinity of a certain
common or kindred character. There is, we have often thought,
a kind of professional caste, a family likeness, by which the
devotees of game, and of all sorts of stirring or hazardous enter
prise, admit of being recognised ; the hue of a certain assimi
lating quality, although of various gradations, from the noted
champions of the hunt, to the noted champions of the ring or of
the racing-course ; a certain dash of moral outlawry, if I may
use the expression, among all these children of high and heated
adventure, that bespeaks them a distinct class in society — a set
of wild and wayward humorists, who have broken them loose
from the dull regularities of life, and formed themselves into so
many trusty and sworn brotherhoods, wholly given over to frolic,
and excitement, and excess, in all their varieties. They com
pose a separate and outstanding public among themselves, nearly
arrayed in the same picturesque habiliments — bearing most dis
tinctly upon their countenance the same air of recklessness and
hardihood — admiring the same feats of dexterity or danger —
indulging the same tastes, even to their very literature — mem
bers of the same sporting society — readers of the same sporting
magazine, whose strange medley of anecdotes gives impressive
exhibition of that one and pervading characteristic for which we
are contending; anecdotes of the chase, and anecdotes of the
high-breathed or bloody contest, and anecdotes of the gaming
table, and lastly anecdotes of the high-way. We do not just
affirm a precise identity between all the specimens or species in
this very peculiar department of moral history. But, to borrow
a phrase from natural history, we affirm, that there are transi
tion processes, by which the one melts, and demoralizes, and
graduates insensibly into the other. What we have now to do
with, is the cruelty of their respective entertainments — a cruelty,
however, upon which we could not assert, even of the very worst
arid most worthless among them, that they rejoice in pain, but
that they are regardless of pain. It is not by the force of a mere
ethical dictum, in itself perhaps unquestionable, that they will
be restrained from their pursuits. But when transformed by the
operation of unquestionable principle, into righteous and regard
ful men, they will spontaneously abandon them. Meanwhile,
we try to help forward our cause, by forcing upon general regard
those sufferings which are now so unheeded and unthought of.

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 495

And we look forward to its final triumph, as one of those results
that will historically ensue, in the train of an awakened and a
moralized society.

The institution of a yearly sermon against cruelty to animals,
is of itself a likely enough expedient, that might at least be of
some auxiliary operation, along with other and more general
causes, towards such an awakening. It is not by one, but by
many successive appeals, that the cause of justice and mercy to
the brute creation will at length be practically carried. On this
subject I cannot, within the limits of a single address, pretend
to aught like a full or a finished demonstration. This might
require not one, but a whole century of sermons ; and many
therefore are the topics which necessarily I must bequeath to my
successors, in this warfare against the listlessness and apathy of
the public. And, beside the force and the impression of new
topics, if there be any truth in our doctrine, there is a mighty
advantage gained upon this subject of all others by the repetition
of old topics. It is a subject on which the public do not require
so much to be instructed, as to be reminded ; to have the regard
of their attention directed again and again to the sufferings of
poor helpless creatures, that the regard of their sympathy might
at length be effectually obtained for them. This then is a cause
to which the institution of an anniversary pleading in its favour,
is most precisely and peculiarly adapted. And besides, we must
confess, in the general, our partiality for a scheme that has origi
nated the Boyle, and the Bampton, and the Warburtonian lec
tureships of England, with all the valuable authorship which has
proceeded from them. An endowment for an annual discourse
upon a given theme, is, we believe, a novelty in Scotland ;
though it is to similar institutions that much of the best sacred
and theological literature of our sister country is owing. We
should rejoice, if, in this our comparatively meagre arid unbene
ficed land, both these themes and these endowments were multi
plied. We recommend this as a fit species of charity for the
munificence of wealthy individuals. Whatever their selected
argument shall be, whether that of cruelty to animals, or some
one evidence of our faith, or the defence and illustration of a doe-
trine, or any distinct method of Christian philanthropy for the
moral regeneration of our species, or aught else of those innu
merable topics that lie situated within the rich ample domain
of that revelation which God has made to our world — we feel
assured that such a movement must be responded to with bene-

496 ON CRUELTY' TO ANIMALS.

ficial effect, both by the gifted pastors of onr Church, and by the
aspiring youths of greatest power or greatest promise among its
candidates. Such institutions as these would help to quicken
the energies of our Establishment ; and, through means of a sus
tained and reiterated effort, directed to some one great lesson,
whether in theology or morals, they might impress, and that
more deeply every year, some specific and most salutary amelio
ration on the principles or the practices of general society.

Yet we are loath to quit our subject without one appeal more
in behalf of those poor sufferers, who, unable to advocate their
own cause, possess, on that very account, a more imperative
claim on the exertions of him who now stands as their advocate
before you.

And first, it may have been felt that by the way in which we
have attempted to resolve cruelty into its elements, we, instead
of launching rebuke against it, have only devised a palliation
for its gross and shocking enormity. But it is not so. It is
true we count the enormity to lie mainly in the heedlessness of
pain ; but then we charge this foully and flagrantly enormous
thing, not on the mere desperadoes and barbarians of our land,
but on the men and the women of general and even of cultivated
and high-bred society. Instead of stating cruelty to be what it
is not, and then confining the imputation of it to the outcast few,
we hold it better, and practically far more important, to state
what cruelty really is, and then fasten the imputation of it on
the commonplace and the companionable many. Those outcasts
to whom you would restrict the condemnation are not at present
within the reach of our voice. But you are ; and it lies with
you to confer a tenfold greater boon on the inferior creation,
than if all barbarous sports and all bloody experiments were
forthwith put an end to. It is at the bidding of your collective
will to save those countless myriads who are brought to the regu
lar and the daily slaughter, all the difference between a gradual
and an instant death. And there is a practice realized in every
day life which you can put down — a practice which strongly
reminds us of a ruder age that has long gone by ; when even
beauteous and high-born ladies could partake in the dance and
the song, and the festive chivalry of barbaric castles, unmindful
of all the piteous and the pining agony of dungeoned prisoners
below. We charge a like unmindfulness on the present genera
tion. We know not whether those wretched animals whose still
sentient frameworks are under process of ingenious manufacture

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 497

for the epicurism or the splendour of your coming entertainment
— we know not whether they are now dying by inches in your
own subterranean keeps, or through the subdivided industry of
our commercial age are now suffering all the horrors of their
protracted agony, in the prison-house of some distant street
where this dreadful trade is carried on. But truly it matters
nought to our argument, ye heedless sons and daughters of
gaiety ! We speak not of the daily thousands who have to die
that man may live ; but of those thousands who have to die
more painfully, just that man may live more luxuriously. We
speak to you of the art and the mystery of the killing trade —
from which it would appear that not alone the delicacy of the
food, but even its apppearance is, among the connoisseurs of a
refined epicurism, the matter of skilful and scientific computa
tion. There is a seqence, it would appear — there is a sequence
between an exquisite death and an exquisite or a beautiful pre
paration of cookery ; and just in the ordinary way that art avails
herself of the other sequences of philosophy — the first term is
made sure, that the second term might, according to the meta-
physic order of causation, follow in its train. And hence we
are given to understand, hence the cold-blooded ingenuities of
that previous and preparatory torture which oft is undergone,
both that man might be feasted with a finer relish, and that the
eyes of man might be feasted and regaled with a finer spectacle.
The atrocities of a Majendie have been blazoned before the eye
of a British public ; but this is worse in the fearful extent and
magnitude of the evil — truly worse than a thousand Majendies.
His is a cruel luxury, but it is the luxury of intellect. Yours
is both a cruel and a sensual luxury ; and you have positively
nought to plead for it but the roost worthless and ignoble appe
tites of our nature.

But, secondly, and if possible to secure your kindness for our
cause, let me, in the act of drawing these lengthened observa
tions to a close, offer to your notice the bright and the beautiful
side of it. I would bid you think of all that fond and pleasing
imagery which is associated even with the lower animals, when
they become the objects of a benevolent care, which at length
ripens into a strong and cherished affection for them — as when
the worn-out hunter is permitted to graze, and be still the
favourite of all the domestics through the remainder of his life ;
or the old and shaggy house-dog that has now ceased to be
serviceable, is nevertheless sure of its regular meals and a

voi. in.' 2 i

498 OX CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

decent funeral ; or when an adopted inmate of the household is
claimed as property, or as the object of decided partiality, by
some one or other of the children ; or, finally, when in the
warmth and comfort of the evening fire, one or more of these
home animals take their part in the living groupe that is around
it, and their very presence serves to complete the picture of a
blissful and smiling family. Such relationships with the inferior
creatures supply many of our finest associations of tenderness ;
and give, even to the heart of man, some of its simplest yet
sweetest enjoyments. He even can find in these some compen
sation for the dread and the disquietude wherewith his bosom is
agitated amid the fiery conflicts of infuriated men. When he
retires from the stormy element of debate, and exchanges for
the vindictive glare and the hideous discords of that outcry
which he encounters among his fellows — when these are ex
changed for the honest welcome and the guileless regards of
those creatures who gambol at his feet, he feels that even in the
society of the brutes, in whose hearts there is neither care nor
controversy, he can surround himself with a better atmosphere
far than that in which he breathes among the companionships of
his own species. Here he can rest himself from the fatigues of
that moral tempest which has beat upon him so violently ; and,
in the play of kindliness with these poor irrationals, his spirit
can forget for a while all the injustice and ferocity of their
boasted lords.

But this is only saying that our subject is connected with
the pleasures of sentiment. And therefore, in the third and
last place, we have to offer it as our concluding observation,
that it is also connected with the principles of deepest sacred-
ness. It may be thought by some that we have wasted the
whole of this Sabbath morn on what may be ranked among
but the lesser moralities of human conduct. But there is one
aspect in which it may be regarded as more profoundly and
more peculiarly religious than any one virtue which recipro
cates, or is of mutual operation among the fellows of the same
species. It is a virtue which oversteps, as it were, the limits
of a species, and which in this instance prompts a descending
movement on our part of righteousness and mercy towards
those who have an inferior place to ourselves in the scale
of creation. The lesson of this day is not the circulation of
benevolence within the limits of one species. It is the transmis
sion of it from one species to another. The first is but the

ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS 499

charity of a world. The second is the charity of a universe.
Had there been no such charity, no descending current of love
and of liberality from species to species, what, I ask, should
have become of ourselves? Whence have we learned this atti
tude of lofty unconcern about the creatures who are beneath us ?
Not from those ministering spirits who wait upon the heirs of
salvation. Not from those angels who circle the throne of
heaven, and make all its arches ring with joyful harmony, when
but one sinner of this prostrate world turns his footsteps towards
them. Not from that mighty and mysterious Visitant, who un
robed Him of all His glories, and bowed down His head unto the
sacrifice ; and still, from the seat of His now exalted mediator-
ship, pours forth His intercessions and His calls in behalf of the
race He died for. Finally, not from the eternal Father of all, in
the pavilion of whose residence there is the golden treasury of
all those bounties and beatitudes that roll over the face of nature ;
and from the footstool of whose empyreal throne there reaches a
golden chain of providence to the very humblest of His family.
He who hath given His angels charge concerning us, means that
the tide of beneficence should pass from order to order, through
all the ranks of His magnificent creation ; and we ask, is it
with man that this goodly provision is to terminate — or shall he,
with all his sensations of present blessedness and all his visions
of future glory let down upon him from above, shall he turn
him selfishly arid scornfully away from the rights of those crea
tures whom God hath placed in dependence under him ? We
know that the cause of poor and unfriended animals has many
an obstacle to contend with in the difficulties or the delicacies of
legislation. But we shall ever deny that it is a theme beneath
the dignity of legislation ; or that the nobles and the senators of
our land stoop to a cause which is degrading, when, in the imita
tion of Heaven's high clemency, they look benignly downward on
these humble and helpless sufferers. Ere we can admit this, we
must forget the whole economy of our blessed gospel. We must
forget the legislations and the cares of the upper sanctuary in
behalf of our fallen species. We must forget that the redemp
tion of our world is suspended on an act of jurisprudence which
angels desire to look into, and for effectuating which, the earth
we tread upon was honoured by the footsteps not of angel or of
archangel, but of God manifest in the flesh. The distance up
ward between us and that mysterious Being, who let Himself
down from heaven's high concave upon our lowly platform, sur-

500 ON CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

passes by infinity the distance downward between us and every
thing that breathes. And He bowed Himself thus far for the
purpose of an example, as well as for the purpose of an expia
tion ; that every Christian might extend his compassionate re
gards over the whole of sentient and suffering nature. The
high 'court of Parliament is not degraded by its attentions and
its cares in behalf of inferior creatures — else the Sanctuary of
Heaven has been degraded by its councils in behalf of the
world we occupy ; and, in the execution of which, the Lord of
heaven Himself relinquished the highest seat of glory in the
universe, and went forth to sojourn for a time on this outcast
and accursed territory.

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 501

SEKMON IX.

(Preached at the opening of the Scotch National Church, London, May 11, 1827.*

ON THE KESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

" Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is
the good way, and walk therein, <ind ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We
will not walk therein."— JEREMIAH vi. 16.

IT has been well said by Lord Bacon, that the antiquity of
past ages is the youth of the world — and therefore it is an in
version of the right order, to look for greater wisdom in some
former generation than there should be in our present day.
" The time in which we now live," says this great philosopher,
" is properly the ancient time, because now the world is ancient ;
and not that time which we call ancient, when we look in a
retrograde direction, and by a computation backward from our
selves." There must a delusion, then, in that homage which is
given to the wisdom of antiquity, as if it bore the same superiority
over the wisdom of the present times, which the wisdom of an
old does over that of a young man. When we speak of the
wisdom of any age, we mean the wisdom which at that period
belongs to the collective mind of the species. But it is an older
species at present than it was in those days called by us the
days of antiquity. It is now both more venerable in years, and
carries a greater weight of experience. It was a child before
the flood ; and if it have not yet become a man, it is nearer to
manhood now than it was then. Therefore, when reviewing the
notions and the usages of our forefathers, we, instead of casting off
the instructions of a greater wisdom than our own, may, in fact, be
putting away from us childish things. It is in vain to talk of
Socrates, and Plato, arid Aristotle. Only grant that there may
still be as many good individual specimens of humanity as be
fore ; and a Socrates now, with all the additional lights which
have sprung up in the course of intervening centuries to shine
upon his understanding, would be a greatly wiser man than the

502 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

Socrates of two thousand years ago. It is therefore well, in the
great master of the New Philosophy, to have asserted the pre
rogative, and, in fact, the priority, of our present age ; that to
it belongs a more patriarchal glory than to all the ages of all
the patriarchs ; that our generation is a more hoary-headed
chronicler, and is more richly laden with the truths and the
treasures of wisdom, than any generation which has gone before
it — the olden time, wherewith we blindly associate so much of
reverence, being indeed the season of the world's youth, and the
world's inexperience ; and this our modern day being the true
antiquity of the world.

But however important thus to reduce the deference that is
paid to antiquity ; and with whatever grace and propriety it has
been done by him who stands at the head of the greatest revolu
tion in Philosophy — we shall incur the danger of running into
most licentions waywardness, if we receive not the principle, to
which I have now adverted, with two modifications.

You will better conceive what these modifications are, by just-
figuring to yourself two distinct books, whence knowledge or
wisdom may be drawn — one the book of the world's experience,
the other the book of God's revelation ; the one therefore be
coming richer, and more replete with instruction every day, by
the perpetual additions which are making to it ; the other being
that book from which no man can take away, neither can any
man add thereunto.

Our first modification, then, is, that though, in regard to all
experimental truth, the world should be wiser now than it was
centuries ago, this is the fruit not of our contempt or our heed-
lessness in regard to former ages, but the fruit of our most
respectful attention to the lessons which their history affords.
In other words, as we are only wiser because of the now larger
book of experience which is in our hands, we are not so to scorn
antiquity, as to cast that book away from us ; but we are to
learn from antiquity, by giving the book our most assiduous
perusal, while, at the same time, we sit in the exercise of our
own free and independent judgment over the contents of it.
Although we listen not to antiquity, as if she sent forth the
voice of an oracle, yet we should look with most observant eye
to all that antiquity sets before us. She is not to be the ab
solute mistress of our judgment, but still she presents the best
materials on which the judgment of man can possibly be exer
cised. The only reason, truly, why the present age should be

THE HESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 503

wiser than the past, is that it stands on that higher vantage-
ground which its progenitor had raised for it. But we should
never have reached the vantage-ground, if, utterly heedless of
all that has gone before, we had spurned the informations and
the science of previous generations away from us. The man of
threescore should not be the wiser of his age, did a blight come
over his memory to obliterate all the experience and all the
acquisitions of his former years." The very remembrance of his
follies makes him wiser — and thus it is that every succeeding
race gathers a new store of instruction, not from the discoveries
alone, but also from the devious absurdities and errors of all the
races that had preceded it. The truth is, that an experiment may
be as instructive by its failure as by its success — in the one case
serving as a beacon, and in the other as a guide ; and so from
the very errors and misgivings of former days might we gather,
by the study of them, the most solid and important accessions to
our wisdom. We do right in not submitting to the dictation of
antiquity ; but that is no cause why we should refuse to be in
formed by her — for this were throwing us back again to the world's
infancy, like the second childhood of him whom disease had
bereft of all his recollections. Still we reserve the independence
of our own judgment, while we take this retrospective survey,
and ask for the old paths, and so compare them together as to
separate the right from the wrong, and fix at length on the good
way. And so, again, in the language of Bacon, " Antiquity
deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand there
upon, arid discover what is the best way ; but when the dis
covery is well taken then to make progression."

On pondering well the view that has been now given, you
will come to perceive how there is in truth a perfect harmony
between the utmost independence on the dictates of antiquity on
the one hand, and on the other the most deferential regard to
all its informations.

But there is a second modification, which, in the case of a
single individual of the species, it is easy to understand, and
which we shall presently apply to the whole species. There is
a wisdom distinct from knowledge ; and one rich in the acquisi
tions of the latter, may practically be driven from the way of
the former, by the headlong impulse of his vicious and wrong
affections. Now, a book of wisdom may be taught in very
early childhood. It may, it is true, be the product of the ac
cumulated experience of all ages ; but it also may, as being a

504 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

book of moral instructions, and so dictated by the inspiration
of a higher faculty than that of mere observation — it may, in
stead of having been produced by a slow experience, have been
produced by the enlightened conscience of its author, although
afterwards all experience would attest the way of its precepts to
be a way of interest and of safety, as well as a way of excellence.
The lessons of such a book may be urged upon man, and with
all a parent's tenderness, from the outset of his education. He
may have been trained by it to observe all the infant proprieties,
and to lisp the infant's prayer. It may have been the guide
and the companion of his boyhood ; and not, perhaps, till in the
wild misrule of youthful profligacies and passions, did he shut
his eyes to the pure religious light wherewith it had shone upon
his ways. We may conceive of such a man, that, after many
years of vicious indulgence, of growing and at length confirmed
hardihood, of gradually decaying and now almost extinct sensi
bility — we may conceive of this hackneyed veteran in the world
and all its evil ways, that he is at once visited by the lights of
conscience and memory ; and that thus he is enabled to contrast
the dislike, and the dissatisfaction, and the dreariness of heart,
which now prey on the decline of his earthly existence, with all
the comparative innocence which gladdened its hopeful and its
happy morning. The wisdom of Ms manhood did not grow with
its experience ; for now that he looks back upon it, he finds it
but a mortifying retrospect of wretchedness and folly ; and the
only way in which this experience can be of use to him now,
is that it may serve as a foil by which to raise in his eyes the
lustre and the loveliness of virtue. And as he bethinks him of
his first, his early home, of the Sabbath piety which flourished
there, and that holy atmosphere in which he was taught to
breathe with kindred aspirations, he cannot picture to himself
the bliss and the beauty of such a scene, mellowed as it is by
the distance perhaps of half a century, and mingled with the
dearest recollections of parents, and sisters, and other kindred
now mouldering in the dust, he cannot recall for a moment this
fond, though faded imagery, without sighing in the bitterness
of his heart, after the good old way.

Now, what applies to one individual may apply to the species.
As the world grows older, it may, by some sweeping obliteration
of all its ancient documents, lapse again into second infancy ;
or even though it should retain all its experimental truth, and
grow every day richer therein, yet it is conceivable that, from

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 505

various causes, it may come to shut its eyes against that moral
or that revealed truth, which both are the offspring of a higher
source than mere human experience. The one, or moral truth,
may be taught in all its perfection to man when an infant ; and
the other, or revealed truth, may have been delivered to the
world when it was young. Neither can be added to by the
faculty of observation ; and, unlike to the lessons of philosophy,
the lessons of morality and revelation do not accumulate by the
succession of ages. And just as the individual man might deviate
in. the progress of years, from the pure and perfect virtues that
were inculcated upon his childhood, so the collective species
might stray, in the progress of centuries, from that unsullied
light which had been held forth to them by the lamp of revela
tion. In a prolonged course of waywardness, they may have
wandered very far from the truth of heaven. They may have
renounced all that docility and that duteous subordination which
characterize the disciples of a former age. Like as the tyranny
of youthful passions might overbear the authority of those instruc
tions which had been given by an earthly parent, so the tyranny
of prejudice might overbear the authority of the lessons and the
laws which had been given to the world by our heavenly Father.
And like as the great spiritual adversary of the human race
might, by the corrupt ascendency which he wields over the
hearts of men, seduce them from the piety of their early days —
so, by means of a priesthood upon earth, standing forth to their
prostrate and superstitious worshippers, and exercising over them
all the power of Satan transformed into an angel of light, might
he delude whole successive generations from the pure and primi
tive religion of their forefathers. And after, perhaps, a whole
dreary millennium of guilt and of darkness, may some gifted
individual arise, who can look athwart the gloom, and descry
the purer and the better age of Scripture light which lies beyond
it. And as he compares all the errors and the mazes of that vast
labyrinth into which so many generations had been led by the
jugglery of deceivers, with that simple but shining path which
conducts the believer unto glory, let us wonder not that the
aspiration of his pious and patriotic heart should be for the good
old way.

We now see wherein it is that the modern might excel the
ancient. In regard to experimental truth, he can be as much
wiser than his predecessors, as the veteran and the observant
sage is wiser than the unpractised stripling, to whom the world

506 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

is new, and who has yet all to learn of its wonders and of its
ways. The voice that is now emitted from the schools, whether
of physical or of political science, is the voice of the world's
antiquity. The voice emitted from the same schools, in former
ages, was the voice of the world's childhood, which then gave
forth in lisping utterance the conceits and the crudities of its
young unchastened speculation. But in regard to things not
experimental, in regard even to taste, or to imagination, or to
moral principle, as well as to the stable and unchanging lessons of
Divine truth, there is no such advancement. For the perfecting
of these, we have not to wait the slow processes of observation
and discovery, handed down from one generation to another.
They address themselves more immediately to the spirit's eye ;
and just as in the solar light of day, our forefathers saw the
whole of visible creation as perfectly as we — so in the lights,
whether of fancy, or of conscience, or of faith, they may have had
as just and vivid a perception of Nature's beauties ; or they may
have had as ready a discrimination, and as religious a sense of
all the proprieties of life ; or they may have had a veneration as
solemn, and an acquaintance as profound, with the mysteries of
revelation, as the men of our modern and enlightened day. And,
accordingly, we have as sweet or sublime an eloquence, and as
transcendent a poetry, and as much both of the exquisite and
noble in all the fine arts, and a morality as delicate and dignified ;
and, to crown the whole, as exalted and as informed a piety in
the remoter periods of the world, as among ourselves, to whom
the latter ends of the world have come. In respect of these, we
are not on higher vantage-ground than many of the generations
that have gone by. But neither are we on lower vantage-
ground. We have access to the same objects. We are in pos
session of the same faculties. And, if between the age in which
we live, and some bright and bygone era, there should have
intervened the deep and the long-protracted haze of many cen
turies, whether of barbarism in taste, or of profligacy in morals,
or of superstition in Christianity, it will only heighten, by com
parison, to our eyes, the glories of all that is excellent ; and if
again awakened to light and to liberty, it will only endear the
more to our hearts the good old way.

We now proceed to the application of these preliminary re
marks. We do not think that we presume too much, when we
address ourselves to the majority of those who are here present,
as if thev were the friends and adherents of the Church of Scot-

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 507

land ; and we shall endeavour, on the principles which we have
just attempted to expound, first to appreciate the titles of the
founders of that church to the respect and the confidence of its
disciples — and, secondly, to consider how this respect should be
qualified, so as not to degenerate into idolatry.

You will now perceive, first, how in regard to all experimental
truth, the moderns, furnished as they are with a larger and more
luminous book of experience, should, in the language of the
Psalmist, " understand more than the ancients," — and, secondly,
how in regard to all theological truth, furnished as they are
with the same unaltered and unalterable book of revelation, they
should at least understand as much as the ancients. Some would
on this ground too, contend for the superiority of our modern
day, because of the successive labours of that criticism wherewith
the Sacred Volume is, not amended or added to, but wherewith
the obscurities which are upon the face of it may be gradually
cleared away. We do not lay great stress upon this observation,
for, without depreciating the worth of scriptural criticism, we
cannot admit that all the additional light which is evolved by it,
bears more than a very small fractional value to the breadth and
the glory of that effulgence which shines from our English Bible,
on the mind of an ordinary peasant. On either supposition, how
ever, the most enlightened of our moderns is, in regard to the one
book, on fully equal, and in regard to the other, on a far higher
vantage-ground than the most enlightened of our ancients ; and
while it is our part to be as profoundly submissive as they, to all
that has been said, and to all that has been done, by the God
who is above us, here we sit in the entire right of our own inde
pendent judgment on all that has been said, and on all that has
been done, by the men who have gone before us.

The great service, then, for which the Scottish and other re
formers, in their respective countries, deserve the gratitude of
posterity, is not that they shone upon us with any original light
of their own, but simply that they cleared away a most grievous
obstruction which had stood for ages, and intercepted from the
eyes of mankind the light of the book of revelation. This they
did, by asserting, in behalf of God, the paramount authority of
His Scripture over the belief and the consciences of men ; and
asserting in behalf of man, his right of private judgment on the
doctrine and the information which are contained in the oracles
of God. This right of private judgment, you will observe, is a
right maintained not against the authority of God, but against

508 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

the authority of men, who have either added to the oracles of
God, or who have assumed to themselves the office of being the
infallible and ultimate interpreters of His word. It was against
this that our reformers went forth and prevailed. Theirs was a
noble struggle for the spiritual liberties of the human race,
against the papacy of Rome, and nobly did they acquit them
selves of this holy warfare. At first it was a fearful conflict ;
when, on the one side, there was the whole strength of the secular
arm, and, on the other, a few obscure but devoted men, whose
only weapons were truth and prayer, and suffering constancy.
And it is a cheering thought, and full of promise both for the
moral and political destinies of our world, that, after all, the
great and the governing force which men ultimately obey, is that
of Opinion — that the cause of truth and righteousness, cradled
by the rough hand of persecutors, and nurtured to maturity amid
the terrors of fierce and fiery intolerance, is sure at length to
overbear its adversaries — that contempt, and cruelty, and the
decrees of arbitrary power, and the fires of bloody martyrdom,
are but its stepping-stones to triumph — that in the heat and the
hardihood of this sore discipline, it grows like the indestructible
seed, and at last forces its resistless way to a superiority and a
strength before which the haughtiest potentates of our world are
made to tremble. The Reformation by Luther is far the proud
est example of this in history — who, with nought but a sense of
duty and the energies of his own undaunted heart to sustain him,
went forth single-handed against the hosts of a most obdurate
corruption that filled all Europe, and had weathered the lapse of
many centuries — who, by the might of his own uplifted arm,
shook the authority of that high pontificate which had held the
kings -and the great ones of the earth in thraldom — who, with
no other weapons than those of argument and Scripture, brought
down from its peering altitude, that old spiritual tyranny, whose
head reached unto heaven, and which had the entrenchments of
deepest and strongest prejudice thrown around its base. When
we can trace a result so magnificent as this to the workings of
one solitary spirit — when the breast of Luther was capable of
holding the germ or the embryo of the greatest revolution which
the world ever saw — when we observe how many kindred spirits
caught from his the fire of that noble inspiration by which it was
actuated, and how powerfully the voice which he lifted up in the
midst of Germany, was re-echoed to from the distant extremities
of Europe by other voices — Oh ! let us not despair of truth's

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 509

omnipotence, and of her triumph ; but rest assured that, let
despots combine to crush that moral energy which they shall
never conquer, or to put out that flame which they shall find to
be inextinguishable, there is now a glorious awakening abroad
upon the world, and, in despite of all their policy, the days of
its perfect light and its perfect liberty are coming.

Our own Knox was one in the likeness of Luther ; and, per
haps, by nature of a firmer and hardier temperament than he.
For it must be observed of the German reformer, that there
were about him a certain softness and love of tranquillity, which
inclined him more to the shade of a studious retirement, than to
the high places of society. The truth is, that most gladly would
he have hid himself in some academic bower from the strifes and
the storms of the open world ; and sore was the struggle in his
bosom ere he did adventure himself into the scenes of contro
versy from which he afterwards came off so victorious. It was
fortunate for mankind, that though his love of peace was strong,
his sense of duty was yet stronger, and that with a force which
he felt to be imperious, it bore him through the heats and the
hazards of his great warfare. Still it was at the expense of a
most painful conflict with the tender and the tremulous sensi
bilities of his nature ; for really the man's native element was
contemplation ; and then did he find himself at his most appro
priate exercise, when by the weapons, whether of a spiritual or
literary championship, he fought, as he did, most manfully, the
battles of the faith. Our countryjnan was altogether of sterner
mood ; and with a certain rigidity of fibre which the other had
not, could better sustain himself in the fray, and the onset, and
the close encounter of more immediate assailants. It has been
said of him, in virtue of his impregnable nervous system, that he
never feared the face of clay, and thus was he admirably fitted
for the conduct of a high enterprise, amid the terrors of scowling
royalty, and among the turbulent nobles of our land. Each had
a part to sustain ; and each was singularly qualified by Provi
dence for the performance of it — the one, from his closet to spread
the light of the principles of reformation over the face of Chris
tendom — the other, in the boisterous politics of a court, or by the
energy of his living voice from the pulpit, to do the executive
work of reformation in one of the provinces of Christendom. It
is obvious that Luther's was the superior station of the two ; and
that to him Knox was subordinate. And it is well in this bust
ling age, when there is so much of demand from the public

510 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

functionaries of our Church for the labour of mere handiwork, and
so little for that of literary preparation — it is well to notice, in
the present instance, that while the practical talent of Knox
carried him to such high ascendency over the affairs of men, the
pure and the powerful intellect of Luther won for him a higher
ascendency still — that through the medium of the press, and by
virtue of scholarship alone, he bore with greater weight than did
all his coadjutors on the living history of the world — and that,
after all, it was from the cell of studious contemplation, from the
silent depository of a musing and meditative spirit, there came
forth the strongest and the most widely felt impulse on the
mechanism of human society.

This, then, is the first great service which our Keformers
achieved for mankind, even freedom of access to the Scrip
tures of truth, and the right of private judgment, explained as
we have already done, over the contents of it. The second, which
springs immediately from the first, but which deserves a separate
consideration, is a theology not created by them, but a theology
evolved by them, and most eminently subservient both to the
peace and the holiness of individuals, and to the general virtue
of the world.

In Milner's Church History (a book that I would commend to
the perusal of every devout and desirous Christian) we have a
deeply interesting narrative of those mental processes through
which Luther did at length find rest to his soul. There was
nought whatever in all the penances of that laborious supersti
tion wherein he had been educated, that could bring peace to his
conscience, deeply stricken as it was by a sense of guilt, and of
the holiness and awful majesty of that Being against whom he
had offended. The Spirit of God seems, in the first instance, to
have convinced him, and that most pungently and most pro
foundly, of the malignity of sin ; and then it was that he felt
how, in the whole round of the observances and absolutions of
the Church of Eome, he could meet with no adequate Saviour.
Meanwhile the law pursued him with its exactions and its ter
rors, and long and weary was the period of his spirit's agitations,
ere he arrived at that hiding-place in which alone he could con
fidently feel that he was safe. He experienced, in regard to all
the ceremonies of that corrupt ritual in which he had been
trained, what the apostle affirms in regard to the not impure
but still imperfect ritual of Moses : " It is not possible that the
blood of bulls and of goats should take away sin." And thus,

THE EXPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 511

after the payment of all the debts and of all the drudgeries which
his church had ordained for transgression, he felt that his sins
were not taken away. He performed them, but he was not
purged by them ; and so a sense of his unexpiated guilt still ad
hered to him, like an arrow sticking fast. It was then that he
was led to ask for the old paths, that he might find out the good
way, and walk therein. And it was not till the light of Scrip
ture, beaming with its own direct radiance, and powerfully re
flected from the pages of Augustine, shone upon his inquiry —
not till he came within view of that great sacrifice which was
made once for the sins of the world — not till the imaginary
merit of human actions was all swept away, and there was sub
stituted in its place the everlasting righteousness which Christ
hath brought in — not till he saw the free and the welcome re
course which one and all have upon this righteousness by faith ;
and how, instead of springing from the toilsome but polluted
obedience of man upon earth, it comes graciously down, in a de
scending ministration from heaven, upon those who believe, —
Not till then, could he behold the reparation that was commen
surate with the demand and the dignity of God's violated law.
Now was he made, and for the first time, to understand, that
under the canopy of the appointed mediatorship, he might con
tinue to hear the thunders of the law, yet feel that they rolled
innocuous over him : and this, my brethren, was the place both
of enlargement and of quietness, where he found rest unto his
soul.

It is this doctrine of imputed righteousness that gives to the
gospel message the character of a joyful sound, the going forth
of which among all nations shall at length both reconcile and
regenerate the world. That were indeed a gladsome land, where
the truth was preached with acceptance and with power from all
the pulpits. It is, in fact, the great bond of re-union between
earth and heaven. It is like a cord of love let down from the
upper sanctuary among the sinful men who are below ; and with
every sinner who takes hold, it proves the conductor, along which
the virtues of heaven, as well as the peace of heaven, descend
upon him. This doctrine of grace is altogether a doctrine ac
cording to godliness, and as much fitted to emancipate the heart
from the tyranny of sin as from the terrors of that vengeance
which is due to it. Oh, it is an idle fear, lest the preaching of
the cross should spread the licentiousness of a proclaimed im
punity among the people. All experience assures the opposite ;

512 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

and that in parishes which are most plied with the free offers of
forgiveness through the blood of a satisfying atonement, there
we have the best and the holiest families.

But it may be suspected, that although such a theology is the
minister of peace, it cannot be the minister of holiness. Now,
to those who have this suspicion, and who would represent the
doctrine of justification by faith — that article, as Luther calls it,
of a standing or falling church — as .adverse to the interests of
virtue, I would put one question, and ask them to resolve it.
How comes it that Scotland, which, of all the countries in Europe,
is the most signalized by the rigid Calvinism of her pulpits,
should also be the most signalized by the moral glory that sits
on the aspect of her general population ? How, in the name of
mystery, should it happen that such a theology as ours is con
joined with perhaps the yet most unvitiated peasantry among the
nations of Christendom ? The allegation against our Churches
is, that in the argumentation of our abstract and speculative
controversies, the people are so little schooled to the performance
of good works. And how then is it, that in our courts of justice,
when compared with the calendars of our sister kingdom, there
should be so vastly less to do with their evil works ? It is cer
tainly a most important experience, that in that country where
there is the most of Calvinism, there should be the least of crime,
— that what may be called the most doctrinal nation of Europe,
should, at the same time, be the least depraved — arid the land
wherein people are most deeply imbued with the principles of
.salvation by grace, should be the least distempered either by
their week-day profligacies, or their Sabbath profanations. When
Knox came over from the school of Geneva, he brought its strict,
and, at that time, uncorrupted orthodoxy along with him ; and
with it he pervaded all the formularies of that church which was
founded by him ; and not only did it flame abroad from all our
pulpits, but, through our schools and our catechisms, it was
brought down to the boyhood of our land ; and from one genera
tion to another, have our Scottish youth been familiarized to the
sound of it from their very infancy ; and unpromising as such a
system of tuition might be in the eye of the mere academic
moralist to the object of building up a virtuous and well-doing
peasantry, certain it is, that, as the wholesale result, there has
palpably come forth of it the most moral peasantry in Europe
notwithstanding. We know of great and grievous declensions,
partly owing to the extension of our crowded cities being most

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 513

inadequately followed up by such a multiplication of churches
and parishes as might give fair scope to the energies of our
ecclesiastical system ; and principally, we fear, to a declension
from that very theology which has been denounced as the enemy
of practical righteousness. But on this last topic we forbear to
detain you ; for vastly rather than expatiate on the degeneracies
of what may be termed the middle age of the Church of Scotland,
we incline to rejoice in the symptoms of its bright and blessed
revival ; and would therefore only say, that should, in mockery
of these anticipations, the people of our land fall wholly away
from the integrity of their forefathers — should there come a great
and general deterioration in the worth of our common people, it
will only be because preceded by a great and general deteriora
tion in the zeal, and the doctrines, and the services of our clergy
men. And if ever the families of our beloved land shall have
apostatized from the virtues of the olden time, it will lie at the
door of pastors who have been unfaithful to their trust, and of
pastors who have apostatized from the good old divinity of other
days.

But in this enumeration of Knox's services to Scotland we
must now pass on from the theology of this great reformer, to
what may be called certain arrangements of ecclesiastical polity,
which through his means have been instituted in our land.
And this is the subject, we think, upon which the schemes and
the settlements of a comparatively younger age lie most open to
the animadversions of a now older world ; for, while a perfect
theology may be drawn at once from the now finished book of
revelation, it is not a perfect ecclesiastical polity, but only one
that admits of successive improvements which can be drawn
from the yet unfinished but constantly progressive book of ex
perience. On this ground, therefore, we shall consent to be
enlightened by the venerable founder of our church, but we
shall not consent to be inthralled by him ; and in fearlessly com
menting both upon his excellences and his errors, we feel our
selves to be only breathing in that element of liberty wherewith
himself did impregnate the atmosphere of our now emancipated
land — to be only following that noble example of independence
which himself has bequeathed to us.

But in this part of our exposition we must be very far shorter
than the magnitude of the theme would require ; for it is the
misfortune of almost every occasional sermon, that the topics
wherewith it stands associated are far too unwieldy for one

VOL. m. 2 K

514 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

address — else we should have ventured to apply onr introductory
principles on the subject of ancient authorities and ancient times,
more closely than we can now afford to the question of that pre
cise deference which is due to our illustrious Eeformer. We
should have especially urged it upon you, that neither he nor
any other of the venerable founders of our Establishment shone
upon us in their own radiance, but only by a light reflected upon
us from the pure and primary radiance of Scripture — and that,
in fact, the great service which they rendered to posterity lay
in the removal of those obstructions which stood between the
truths of revelation and the private independent judgment of
men. It is in virtue of their exertions that each may now look
to the Bible with his own eyes, and not with the eyes of another ;
and we only use the privilege which they have won for us,
when we try even themselves, either by that book of revelation
which shines as brightly upon us as upon them, or by that book
of experience to which every century is adding so many leaves,
and which at present shines more brightly than ever on the men
of our now older world. The man of the day that now is — if
thoroughly and intelligently read in that book — is as much
wiser than the man of a distant antiquity, as the hoary-headed
sage is wiser than a stripling. And in utter reversal of the pre
vailing tendency to idolize the men of other days, as if they
were the patriarchs of our species, we affirm that the Luthevs,
and the Knoxes, and the Calvins, and the Zuingliuses of old,
are but as the youths of this world's history ; and if there be
any individuals now gifted with as great a degree of mental
vigour and sagacity, they, with a larger book of experience be
fore them, are in truth its bearded and its venerable patriarchs.

We shall now, however, confine ourselves to a very few
sentences about three distinct matters of ecclesiastical polity —
and that chiefly as specimens of the way in which a man of
great authority and reputation may be deferred to when we
think that he is in the right ; and be questioned when we doubt
that he is in the wrong.

Our first, then, is a topic of the most cordial and unmixed
eulogy. Knox was the chief compiler of the First Book of Dis
cipline, and to him we owe our present system of parochial
education. By that scheme of ecclesiastical polity, a school was
required for every parish ; and had all its views been followed
up, a college would have been erected in every notable town.
On this inestimable service done to Scotland we surely do not

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 515

need to expatiate. The very mention of it lights up an instant
and enthusiastic approval in every bosom. And with all the
veneration that is due on other grounds to our Reformer, we
hold it among the proudest glories of his name, that it stands
associated with an institution which has spread abroad the light
of a most beauteous moral decoration throughout all the hamlets
of our land, and is dear to every Scottish heart as are the piety
and the worth of its peasant families.

In the second topic to which we shall advert he was not so
successful, but it argues not the less for his sagacity and his
patriotism. We mean that contest in which he failed for the
entire appropriation of the patrimony of the church to public
objects, rather than that it should be seized upon by the rapacity
of private individuals. On this matter I crave the reading of a
short extract from the admirable biography of Knox by Dr.
M'Crie — a work that should be enshrined in every public, and
which is not sought after as it deserves, if it have not a place in
every private library of Scotland.

" Another source of distress to the Eeformer at this time, was
a scheme which the courtiers had formed for altering the policy
of the church, and securing to themselves the principal part of
the ecclesiastical revenues. This plan seems to have been con
certed under the regency of Lennox ; it began to be put into
execution during that of Mar, and was afterwards completed by
Morton. We have already had occasion to notice the aversion
of many of the nobility to the Book of Discipline, and the prin
cipal source from which this aversion sprung. While the Earl
of Murray administered the government, he prevented any new
encroachments upon the rights of the church ; but the succeeding
regents were either less friendly to them, or less able to bridle
the avarice of the more powerful nobles. Several of the richest
benefices becoming vacant by the decease, or by the sequestra
tion of the Popish incumbents who had been permitted to retain
them, it was necessary to determine in what manner they should
be disposed of for the future. The church had uniformly re
quired that their revenues should be divided arid applied to the
support of the religious and the literary establishments; but
with this demand the courtiers were by no means disposed to
comply. At the same time the total secularization of them was
deemed too bold a step ; nor could laymen with any shadow of
consistency, or by a valid title, hold benefices which the law
declared to be ecclesiastical. The expedient resolved on was,

516 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

that the bishoprics and other livings should be presented to cer
tain ministers, who, previous to their admission, should make
over the principal part of their revenues to such noblemen as
had obtained the patronage of them from the court."

This most grievous error in the conduct of the Scottish refor
mation (but for which Knox is not at all chargeable), is but
little understood by the public at large, and in the statement of
which therefore we do not expect to be greatly sympathized
with. It was that compromise which took place between the
ecclesiastics and the nobles of our land ; and in virtue of which
the former concurred or rather were compelled to acquiesce, in
both our church and our literary establishments being shorn of
their patrimony. The effect has been that a revenue which
might have been applied to the exigencies of an increasing
population, now unprovided with the means of Christian instruc
tion ; or which might have been applied to uphold, in strength
and in splendour, those Universities of our land, which both in
their endowments and their architecture are fast hastening to
degradation and decay — is now wholly secularized, and serves
but to augment the expense and the luxury of private families.
And in the face of all that contempt and that commonplace
which the beneficed priesthood of every establishment has to
endure, we scruple not to say, that what Knox by his sagacity
foresaw, and which he strove in vain to make head against, has
been most fearfully realized — and that the high interests both of
religion and of learning suffer at this day under the effects of
that unprincipled, that truly Gothic spoliation.

We are aware of a fashionable political economy in this our day,
which, for the sake of leaving untouched the splendour and the
luxury of our higher classes, would suffer the public functionaries
to starve ; and in opposition to which we at present affirm (for we
have no time to argue), that in the progress both of landed and of
mercantile wealth, both the officers of religion and the officers
of education have been left immeasurably too far behind in the
career of an advancing society. On this topic we make common
cause with all other public functionaries ; and, in despite of the
popular outcry against it, we hold, that from the highest judges
of the land to the humblest teacher of a village school, there
ought to be one great and general augmentation — it being our
first principle, that every public functionary should do his duty
well ; and our second, that every public functionary should be
well paid for the doing of it.

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 517

The third topic to which we shall advert is that in which we
hold Knox to have been in an error — though precisely such an
error as I think that the book of our now larger experience, in
which so many lessons are inscribed since his day, of the wisdom
and efficacy of toleration, would have expelled from his mind.

It was an error, however, not confined to the reformers of any
particular country ; for, in truth, it was shared alike among all
the theologians of all the denominations in Christendom. It
consisted in the imagination, and it was an imagination quite
universal in these days, that Christianity could not flourish, nay
that it could not exist, save in the one framework of one certain
and defined ecclesiastical constitution ; and hence with us, that
there could be no light and no efficacy in the ministrations of
the gospel, unless they were conducted according to the forms
and in the strict model and framework of Presbytery. And so
in the works of some of the older worthies of the Kirk of Scot
land, we read about as often of black Prelacy as we do of her
who was arrayed in scarlet, and is the mother of all abomina
tions. Now, it is surely better, that this extreme and exclusive
intolerance is almost wholly done away ; and better still it
would be, if the two co-ordinate establishments of our island,
while they kept by their own respective frameworks, should
acknowledge each of the other, that although by a different
machinery, there may be the same right and religious principle
to animate the movements, and the same high capacities for
religious usefulness with both ; that if the one perhaps have
more thoroughly leavened with Christianity the bulk of her
population, the other is more signalized by the prowess of her
sons in the high walks of Christian scholarship ; that in her
Clarkes, and her Butlers, and her Warburtons, and her Kurds,
and her Horsleys, and her Paleys, and her Watson s, we behold the
divines of a church, which of all others has stood the foremost and
wielded the mightest polemic arm in the battles of the Faith.

I entreat to be forgiven if I make one allusion more, if not to
an error on the part of our old reformers, at least to a peculiarity
of theirs, which is not, to say the least of it, so authoritatively
enjoined by the book of God's revelation, as to stand exempted
from all charge and reckoning on the part of those who, in our
own modern day, have at least the benefit of a larger and more
luminous book of experience than they had. We utterly refuse
to go along with the ancients of our church in their stern and
severe sentiment of Prelacy. And however right they may have

518 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

been in their sentiment of another denomination, yet still it is,
at the very least, a questionable thing, whether they were right
in their stern and severe treatment of Popery. After having
wrested from Popery its armour of intolerance, was it right to
wield that very armour against the enemy that had fallen ?
After having laid it prostrate by the use alone of a spiritual
weapon, was it right or necessary, in order to keep it prostrate,
to make use of a carnal one ? — thus reversing the characters of
that warfare which Truth had sustained, and with such triumph,
against Falsehood ; and vilifying the noble cause by an associate
so unseemly, as that which the power of the state can make to
bear on the now disarmed and subjugated minority. Surely the
very strength which won for Protestantism its ascendency in these
realms is competent of itself to preserve it ; and if argument arid
Scripture alone have achieved the victory over falsehood, why
not confide to argument and Scripture alone the maintenance of
the truth ? It is truly instructive to mark, how, on the moment
that the forces of the statute-book were enlisted on the side of
Protestantism, from that moment Popery, armed with a generous
indignancy against its oppressors, put on that moral strength
which persecution always gives to every cause that is at once
honoured and sustained by it. Oh, if the friends of religious
liberty had but kept by their own spiritual weapons, when the
cause was moving onward in such prosperity, and with such
triumph ! But when they threw aside argument, arid brandished
the ensigns of authority, then it was that truth felt the virtue go
out of her ; and falsehood, inspired with an energy before un
known, planted the unyielding footstep, and put on the resolute
defiance. And now that centuries have rolled on, all the influ
ences, whether of persuasion or of power, have been idly thrown
away on the firm, the impracticable countenance of an aggrieved
population.

But we gladly hasten away from all these topics, on some of
which, indeed, we ought not to have touched, but for the pur
pose of illustrating the distinction between those cases in which
we should defer to the voice of antiquity, and prize its direction
as the good old way ; and those cases in which the lesson that
hath come down to us from antiquity, should be regarded in no
other light than as the puerility of a then younger species, the
yet weak and unformed judgment of the world's boyhood. The
light of experience which feebly glimmers at the outset of History,
brightens onward in its progress. But the same does not hold of

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 519

the light of revelation, which shone with as pure and as clear a
radiance on the patriarchs of our church, as it hath since done
on any of its succeeding generations. Nay, it is a possible thing,
that in the ages which followed the first establishment of Pres
bytery in Scotland, there may have been deviations from the
spirit and simplicity of Scripture ; that the pride of intellect and
of human speculation may have carried it high against that
authoritative truth, which hath come down to our world from
the upper sanctuary ; that from the exercise of a careless and a
corrupt patronage, many of our parishes may have been exposed
to the withering influence of a careless and a corrupt clergy ;
that thus, in the shape of cold and heartless apathy, a moral
blight, or mildew, may have descended on our land ; and that,
what with a meagre theology on the one hand, arid an extinct
or nearly expiring zeal upon the other, there may have been an
utter degeneracy from that golden period, when the truths of the
Bible shone full upon many an understanding, and the spirit of
the Bible animated many a desirous and devoted heart. It is
not that the wisdom of experience was greater then than it is
now, but it is that the wisdom of faith and piety was greater
then than it is now, that we should so much ameliorate our pre
sent age by calling back the genius of the olden time. And did
we but revert as before to the strict guidance and authority of
Kevelation ; did we, renouncing our own imaginations, make our
submissive appeal to the Law and to the Testimony ; did we
only suffer the word of God to carry it at all times over the way
ward fancies of men, and so recur to the apostolic humility, and
the apostolic zeal, of former periods — this, this is what is meant
in our text by the good old way.

In conclusion, let me now address you as members of the
Church of Scotland, which in principle is essentially Protestant ;
arid which, though like other churches it has its articles and its
formularies of doctrine, yet wants no such disciplesliip as that
which is grounded on blind submission to her authority — but
only the disciplesliip of those who, in the free exercise of their
judgment and their conscience, honestly believe her doctrine to
be grounded on the authority of the word of God. Both her
Catechism and Confession of Faith have been given to the public
with note and comment, it is true, but with note and comment
that consist exclusively of Bible texts ; and so, like apples of
gold in pictures of silver, they offer a list of dogmata, but of dog
mata set, as it were, or embossed in Scripture. The natural

520 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

depravity of man ; his need both of a regeneration and of an
atonement ; the accomplishment of the one by the efficacy of a
divine sacrifice, and of the other by the operation of a sanctifying
Spirit ; the doctrine that a sinner is justified by faith, followed
up, most earnestly and incessantly followed up, through the
pulpits of our land, by the doctrine that he is judged by works;
the righteousness of Christ as the alone foundation of his meri
torious claim to heaven, but this followed up by his own personal
righteousness as the indispensable preparation for heaven's exer
cises and heaven's joys ; the free offer of pardon even to the chief
of sinners, but this followed up by the practical calls of repent
ance, without which no orthodoxy can save him ; the amplitude
of the gospel invitations, and, in despite of all that has been so
unintelligently said about our gloomy and relentless Calvinism,
the wide and unexcepted amnesty that is held forth to every
creature under heaven, so as that the message of reconciliation may
be made to circulate round the globe, and the overtures of wel
come and good-will from the mercy-seat above, be affectionately
urged on all the individuals of all the families of earth below —
these are the main credenda of a church that has oft been re
proached for its hard and unfeeling theology — but nevertheless,
a theology which, deeply seated as it still is in the affections of
our peasantry, hath approved itself by their virtues and their
general habits, to be afte** all the fittest basis on which to sustain
the moral worth and the moral energies of a nation.

In adhering then to such a church and to such a creed, you
adhere to what we have no hesitation in characterizing as the
good old way of your forefathers — not the less dear, we trust, to
many of you, that you have now separated from that interesting
land, and perhaps look back through the dim and distant recol
lection of many years, to the days of your cherished and well-
taught boyhood. In this house of wider accommodation, a far
larger number of our countrymen than before, can realize the
services of a Scottish Sabbath. And, when we think of the con
stant accessions which are making to this number, and that too,
by the yearly influx of exposed and unprotected youth into this
vast metropolis, the moral importance of such an erection as the
present rises above all computation. We cannot look indeed to
those who have recently quitted the parental roof, and now in
the open world are in the midst of its snares and its fearful ex
posures, without regarding it as the most affecting of all spec
tacles, when any one of them gives up the comparative innocence

THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY. 521

of his tender years, and thence passes into the hardihood and the.
knowing depravity of vice. In the whole compass of nature,
there is not a wreck more lamentable, or which presents an ob
ject of more distressful contemplation, than does the ruin of
youthful modesty. And the flower that withers upon its stalk,
and all whose blushing graces have now vanished into the loath
someness of vilest putrefaction, is but the faint emblem of so sad
an overthrow. That indeed is one of the darkest transitions in
the history of man, when he exchanges the simplicities of his
early home for the riot, and the intemperance, and the daring
excesses that are acted in haunts of profligacy — when by the
loud laugh of his forerunners in guilt, all his purposes of virtue
are overborne, and he is at length tempted, among the urgencies
and the contaminations of surrounding example, to cast his prin
ciple and his purity away from him. Be assured that, in the
wild and lurid gleams of frantic dissipation, there is nought that
can compensate for the calm, the beauteous lustre, which some
have left behind you in the abode of domestic piety. And there
fore, now that you have departed from the hallowed influences
of an atmosphere so pure and so kindly, let me entreat you, by
all the high interests which belong to you as immortal creatures,
that you forget not the solemnity of a father's parting advice,
that you forget not the tenderness of a mother's prayers.

One of the likeliest preservatives of conduct through the
week, is a powerful religious application to the conscience upon
the Sabbath. And we repeat it as matter of high gratulation to
our Scottish families, that, in a place so capacious as this, the
lessons of Christianity are to be ministered according to the
forms of our Church, and by one of the most distinguished of
her sons — a minister who has ever counted it a small matter to
be judged of man's judgment, but who is solemnized by the
thought that He who judgeth him is God — a minister who com
bines with the utmost fearlessness for the creature, the utmost
docility and reverence for the Creator — one whose talents and
whose colossal strength of mind could have borne him aloft to
the most arduous heights of science, but who now holds it his
more becoming, as indeed it is his more dignified part to give
himself wholly to the studies and the pursuits of sacredness —
one who is willing to spend and be spent for the eternity of his
people, and who, after having survived the bufferings of a whole
world of gainsayers, now sits down amongst you with the well-
earned attachment of the thousands who know his worth, and

522 THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

who have been awakened by his ministry. His are not the
short-lived triumphs of a mere popular empiricism, but the
fairly won distinction of one who possesses the stamina of worth
and endurance, being alike gifted with great principle and with
great power. But it is not distinction that he seeks ; for intent
upon higher objects, we trust the paramount aim of his spirit to
be not his own glory, but the glory of the Master whom he
serves ; and that actuated by motives which the world can
neither understand nor sympathize with, he has received of that
grace from above which is given only to the humble, and the
want of which would stamp an utter impotency on the ablest
and most splendid ministrations. If thus upholden, he has
nothing to fear. Already have the outrages of a rude and
licentious press broken their strength upon him, and are dissi
pated. And now that the fume, and the turbulence, and the
uproar of this temporary warfare have been all cleared away,
does he stand forth with a moral dignity on his part, and a war
ranted confidence upon yours, which, under God, are the best
guarantees for the success of his future labours.

May the Spirit of all grace abundantly strengthen and uphold
him in the arduous office to which he has been called. May
living water from the sanctuary above descend on the ministra
tions of the word here below ; and both fertilizing the soil of
your hearts, and fructifying the good seed which is deposited
there, may you be made to abound in all the fruits of righteous
ness. May this House in future years be the scene of many
sound and scriptural conversions ; and never, till in the course
of generations its walls have mouldered into decay, and its
minarets have fallen, never may it cease, either in our own day
or in the days of our children's children, to be a gate to Heaven
— a place of busy and successful preparation for Heaven's exer
cises and Heaven's joys.

EFFECT OF MAN?S WRATH, ETC. 523

SEEMON X.

(Preaclied at the opening of the new Presbyterian Chapel in Belfast, Sept. 23, 1827.)

THE EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH IN THE AGITATION OF RELIGIOUS
CONTROVERSIES.

" The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God."— JAMES i. 20.

WITHOUT attempting, what we should feel to be impossible
within the limits of one discourse, to expound the principle of
our text in all its generality, we shall satisfy ourselves with
adverting to but one or two special applications of it. We shall
first consider the effect of man's wrath when interposed between
the call of the gospel and the minds of those to whom the gos
pel is addressed — and, secondly, consider the effect of man's
wrath when interposed between a right and a wrong denomina
tion of Christianity.

I. — You are all aware of there being much wrathful contro
versy on the part of men relative to the gospel of Jesus Christ,
wherein the righteousness of God is said by the apostle to be
revealed from faith to faith. To understand the way in which
this great message from heaven to earth may be darkened, and
altogether transformed out of its native character by the con
flict and controversy of its interpreters, we ask you to conceive
the effect, if a message of most free and unqualified kindness
from some earthly superior were just to be handled in the same
way. We may imagine that in his bosom there is nought but the
utmost good- will to us, in all its truth and in all its tenderness ;
and that he sends forth the expression of it in writing, on pur
pose that we may read and may rejoice ; and that if we but
perused this precious document with the simplicity of children,
we could not fail to be gladdened by the assurances of a love
which shone most directly and most unequivocally from all its
pages. Bnt instead of this we may further imagine, that be
tween our minds and all the grace and goodness of this com
munication, there should spring up a whole army of expounders

524 EFFECT OF MAN*S WRATH

— and that in the pride, and the heat, and the bitterness of
argument they fell out among themselves — and that all were
vastly too much engrossed, each with his own special under
standing about the terras of the message, ever to meet together
in harmony and in mutual felicitation on the broad and unques
tionable truths of it. Is there no danger, we ask, amid the
acerbities of such a thickening warfare, that men should lose
sight of the mildness and the mercy that lay in that embassy of
peace by which it had been stirred ? Is it not a possible thing
that many a humble spirit, whom the soft and the kind affec
tion of the original message might else have wakened into con
fidence, shall feel itself disturbed and bewildered in the fierce
and the fiery agitations of such an atmosphere as this? When
we hear from one quarter that such is the import of the message,
and that we shall forfeit all the beneficence which it proffers,
unless we so understand it — when, in vehement resistance to
this, we hear of another import, and even denounced upon them
who refuse it, the wrath of Him whose good-will is the whole
burden of the now disputed communication — when, moreover,
a third and a different interpretation is listed against each of
the two former, and supported with acrimony, and backed by
the same menaces of a displeasure on the part of that universal
friend, who had set himself forth in the benignest attitude, and
lifted the widely-sounding call of reconciliation — certain it is,
that when the mind of an inquirer is involved among these, it is
occupied with topics of another description and another cha
racter altogether, from that of the calm and the kind benevo
lence which resides at the fountain-head, and which would have
radiated from thence on the hearts of a delighted people, were it
not for the intervening turbulence that serves to hide or at least
to darken it. It is thus that, by the angry and the lowering
passions of these middle men, an obscuration might be shed on
all the goodness and the grace which sit on the brow of their
superior ; and that when stunned in the uproar of their sore con
troversy with the challenge, and the recrimination, and the
boisterous assertion of victory, and all the other clamours of
heated partizanship — that these might altogether drown the
soft utterance of that clemency whereof they are the interpreters,
and cause the gentler sounds that issue from some high seat of
munificence and mercy to be altogether unheard.

Now, it is altogether worthy of our consideration, whether
such might not be the effect of those manifold controversies that

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 525

have risen in regard to the terms and the truths of that gospel
message which has come down from the sanctuary above to the
men of our lower world. The love for mankind which resides
in the bosom of the unseen and eternal God, is there most dis
tinctly asserted ; and there is also most full and frequent declar
ation of His willingness to receive us; and in every possible
way of entreaty, and protestation, and kind encouragement, does
He manifest the forthputtings of His longing affection towards
us ; and, rather than not reclaim us hapless wanderers to that
blessedness with Himself, from which we had so widely de
parted, He lavished all the resources both of His omnipotence
and of His wisdom on a scheme of reconciliation, by which even
the guiltiest of offenders might draw nigh-; and He sent the
Son of His everlasting regards from heaven to earth, who had
to surrender all His glories, and to suffer all the vengeance of an
outraged law ere He could move away the obstructions which
stood between sinners and the mercy-seat ; and after having
thus laboriously framed a pathway of access to that throne of
righteousness which is now turned into a throne of grace, did he
lift up a voice of invitation to walk in it — a voice so diffusive
that it may go abroad over all, and yet so pointed that it singles
out and specializes each of the human family; and now, with
all the soul and sincerity of a Father's earnestness, does He ask
in the hearing of that world He has done so much to save,
" What more could I have done for my vineyard that I have
not done for it?" Such is the character of that direct, that
primary demonstration which has been made to us from heaven.
Such the felt love for our species which is honestly and genuinely
there ; and well, we repeat, is it worthy of our full considera
tion, whether, across the dark, the troubled medium of human
controversy, the sight of it is not tarnished to the eye — the
sound of it, thus mingled with notes of harshest discord, is not
lost upon the ear. In one place, the gospel is called the minis
tration of righteousness — in another, the gift which it offers is
called the gift of righteousness ; and they are said to possess or
to receive the righteousness of God, who have laid their confi
dent hold upon that offer. But while the direct view of a
benignant and a beseeching God, as He urges the offer upon
their acceptance, is so well fitted to charm them into confidence,
is there nothing, we ask, in the din of this posterior and sub
ordinate controversy that is fitted to disturb it? Surely the
noise that arises from the wars and the wranglings of earth, falls

526 EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH

differently upon the hearing to that sweetest music which de
scended from the canopy that is over our heads, and which
accompanied the declaration of good- will to us in heaven. And
so, altogether, that theology which shines immediate from his
Bible on the heart of the unlettered peasant, may come with
altered expression and effect on the mind of the scholastic, after
it has been transmuted into the theology of the portly and
polemic folio. The Sun of Kighteousness may shed a mild and
beauteous lustre upon the one, which to the eye of the other is
obscured in the turbulence of rolling vapours, in the lurid clouds
of an angry and unsettled sky. It is precisely thus, we fear,
that the dogmatism on the one hand, and the defiance upon the
other, which are associated with the conflicts and the champion
ship of our profession, may have dimmed, to the vision of those
who are below, the face of the benign and the beautiful sanc
tuary above ; and verily there is room for the question, whether
in this way too we have not one exemplification of the text,
that " the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of
God."

When God beseeches us to be reconciled to Him in Christ
Jesus, there is placed before the mind one object of contempla
tion. When man steps forward, and, in the pride or intolerance
of orthodoxy, denounces the fury of an incensed God on all who
put not faith in the merits and the mediation of His Son, there
is placed before the mind another and a distinct object of con
templation. And just in proportion to the varieties of dogmatism
or debate will the mind shift and fluctuate from one contempla
tion to another. Certain it is that it must feel a different sort
of affection, when directly engaged with the love of God in
heaven, from what it does when tost and alternated among the
wrathful elements of human controversy upon earth. It then
breathes in another atmosphere ; and the whole sense and
savour of the encompassing medium feel differently from before.
And still it comes to the same important but unhappy result, as
if the music of the spheres had been drowned in the rude and
resentful outcry of noises from beneath, and the ear had failed to
catch the utterance of Heaven's inspiration, because lost and
overborne amid sounds of earthliness. It is thus that the native
character of Heaven's embassy may at length be shrouded in
subtle but most effectual disguise from the souls of men ; and
the whole spirit and design of its munificent Sovereign be
wholly misconceived by His sinful yet much-loved children.

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 527

We interpret the Deity by the hard and imperious scowl which
sits on the countenance of angry theologians ; and in the strife
and clamour of their fierce animosities, we forget the aspect of
Him who is upon the throne, the bland and benignant aspect of
that God who waiteth to be gracious.

It is thus that men of highest respect in the Christian world
have done grievous injury to the cause. Whether, we ask,
would Calvin have found readier acceptance for his own favour
ite doctrine of justification by the righteousness of Christ (that
only righteousness which God will accept in plea of our meri
torious claim to the kingdom of heaven, and therefore called the
righteousness of God) — whether was it likelier that he should
have gained the consent of men's minds to this method of salva
tion, by declaring it in the spirit of gentleness and with the
accents of entreaty, or by denouncing it in the spirit of an
incensed polemic, and with that aspect which sits on his pages
of severe and relentless dogmatism ? Would it not have strength
ened his cause, had he, in propounding the message of reconci
liation to his fellows upon earth, caught more upon his heart of
the benignity which prompted the sending of that message from
heaven ? — and had the eye, the voice, the manner of this able
expounder of the counsels of God, represented more of the kind
ness which presided over these counsels, of the compassion felt
in the upper sanctuary, and which there originated the forth-
going of the Saviour on our guilty world? Certain it is that
there is nought to conciliate the spirits of men to the doctrine
of Calvin, all true and all momentous as it is, in that wrath
which glares upon us so repeatedly from the dark and angry
passages of his argument. That violence and vituperation by
which his Institutes are so frequently deformed never do occur,
we venture to affirm, but with an adverse influence on the minds
of his readers, in reference to the truth which he espouses. In
other words, that truth which, when couched in the language
and accompanied with the calls of affection, finds such welcome
into the hearts of men, hath brought upon its propounders the
reaction of stout indignant hostility, and just because of the
stern intolerance wherewith it has been proposed by them.
This difference in point of effect between the meek and the ma
gisterial style of instruction, makes it of the utmost practical
importance, that neither the pride nor the passions of men
should mingle in the discussion, when labouring either with or
against each other in the common pursuit of truth. For much

528 EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH

has it prejudiced the cause of the truth in the world, that it has
so oft been urged and insisted on with that wrath of man, which
most assuredly worketh not the righteousness of God.

And, though not strictly under our present head of discourse,
there is one observation more which we feel it of importance to
make ere we pass on to the next division of our subject. Apart
from the transforming effect of human wrath to give another
hue as it were to the complexion of the Godhead, and another
expression than that of its own native kindness to the message
which has proceeded from Him, there is a distinct operation in
the mind of an inquirer after religious truth which is altogether
worthy of being adverted to. When the controversialist makes
an angry demand upon us for our belief in some one of his
positions, why, that position may be the offered and the gratui
tous mercy of God in heaven, and yet the whole charm of such
a proposal may be dissipated, just through that tone and temper
of intolerance in which it is expounded to us upon earth. When
entertained in the shape of a direct announcement from the
Father of mercies Himself, it comes with a wholly different im
pression upon the heart from what it does when entertained in
the shape of an article that has been fashioned by a system-
builder, and then fulminated against us by the hand of human
combatants. All that hope and that happiness which might
else have beamed from the doctrine of grace, and that instantly
upon the soul, may, as it were, be neutralized by the passionate
and peremptory style of menace wherewith faith in that doctrine
is insisted upon. This we have already considered ; yet it must
not be overlooked, that even for the hope and the happiness faith
is indispensable — that ere we can rejoice in any truth or take the
salutary impression of it upon our hearts, the truth must be be
lieved in ; and indeed the Bible itself accompanies its statements
of doctrine with the exaction of our faith in them. Without
this faith in their reality we can have no benefit from the objects
of revelation. Faith is the avenue through which they come into
contact with the inner man, and by which alone they can obtain
an influence over the affections. It is not to be wondered at, then,
that, possessing, as it does, such vital importance, they who are
in earnest after their salvation should set such extreme value on
the acquisition of faith. It is to them the pearl of great price.
If, under the economy of the Law, men staked their eternity
upon their works — under the economy of the gospel, they stake
their eternity upon their faith. The longings and the labourings

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 529

of their hearts are now as much after the right belief as formerly
they were after the right obedience. And if, while " Do this
and live " was the reigning principle of Heaven's administration,
the natural anxiety for every expectant of Heaven was to do
properly — now that the reigning principle is, " Believe and be
saved," it is as just as natural that it should be his intense and
his unceasing anxiety to believe properly.

Now, observe the misdirection of which he is consequently in
danger. It is apt to turn away his attention from the object of
faith to the act of faith. If faith be anywhere it is in the mind,
which is its proper habitation — its place of occupancy and settle
ment ; and when ne wants to ascertain the reality of his faith,
it is indeed most natural that he should go in quest of the pre
cious article through the secrecies of this dwelling-place. In
other words, he looks inwardly instead of outwardly. In place
of gazing abroad among the objects of Eevelation, and gather
ing from thence of that direct radiance which they might have
streamed upon his soul, he seeks for the reflection of these
objects within the soul itself; and while so employed, his in
verted eye shuts crat all the illumination that is above him and
around him. It is not by looking inwardly upon the eye's own
retina, but by looking openly and outwardly on the panorama of
external nature, that we see the glories of the summer land
scape. It is not by casting a downward regard on the tablet of
vision, but by casting an upward regard on the starry firmament,
that the wonders of the midnight sky become manifest to the
beholder. And it is not, let it ever be remembered, it is not by
a painful, by a probing scrutiny amongst the mysteries or the
metaphysics of the inner man, that we admit the light of heaven
into the soul. The peace and the joy of a believer do not
spring from the traces which he finds to be within him. They
emanate and they descend upon his heart, from the truths which
are suspended over him. The work of faith consists not in look
ing to himself, but in looking to the reconciled countenance of
God. He fetches its gladdening assurances, not from any light
that has been struck out among the arcana of his own spirit, but
from that great fountain of light, the Sun of Righteousness —
the spiritual luminary which has arisen to the view of a sinful
world, that every one who looketh may be saved. If you invert
this order, if you look into yourself without looking unto Jesus,
then you suspend the exercise of faith at the very time that you
are trying to make sure of its existence. You look the wrong

VOL. in. 2 L

530 EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH

way ; and if by the former influence, even that of man's wrath
interposed between you and God's kindness, you were disturbed
out of confidence and of comfort — by the present influence you
are at least distracted away from them, even because the eye of
the mind, when inverted upon itself, is averted from the proper
object of confidence.

Let us never cease then the presentation of this object before
you ; and, when visited by fears, whether in looking to one's
own heart, and finding nought but darkness and destitution there ;
or on looking to the countenance of our fellow-men, and behold
ing the menace and intolerance which are depicted there ; let all
be overborne by a direct view of the kindness of God. Let us
lift ourselves above these turbid elements of earth, and be firmly
and erectly confident of benevolence in heaven. The good-will
that is there towards the children of men, the joy that is felt
there over every sinner who repenteth, the mild radiance there
of the upper sanctuary, and the grace and the benignity which
invest its glorious mercy-seat — these are the things which be
above — these the stable realities of that place where God sittetli
on His throne, and where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.
Yonder is the region of light and of undoubted love ; and, what
ever the mists or the obscurations may be of this lower world,
there is welcome, free, generous, unbounded welcome to one and
all in the courts of the .Eternal. The sun of our firmament is
still as gorgeously seated in fields of ethereal beauty and radiance
as ever, when veiled from the sight of mortals by the lowering
sky that is underneath. And so of the shrouded character of the
Godhead, who, all placid and serene in the midst of elevation, is
often mantled from human eye by the turbulence and the terror
of those clouds which gather on the face of our spiritual hemi
sphere. The unchangeableness of that Deity, whose compassions
fail not — the constituted Mediator, who is the same to-day, and
yesterday, and for ever — the promises, which are yea and amen
in Christ Jesus our Lord — the word of revelation, whereof it has
been said, that heaven and earth shall pass away ere it can pass
away — These are the enduring, the unextinguishable lights in
the palace of our mild and munificent Sovereign, and in which
all of us are called upon to rejoice. There may be no comfort
to draw up from the darkling recesses of our own spirits ; but
surely it may descend upon us in floods of brightness and beauty
from a canopy so glorious. There may be nought to gladden,
in the wrathful and the warring controversies of the men who

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 531

stand betwixt us and heaven ; but in heaven itself there are
notes of sweeter and kinder melody, and well may we assure our
selves in the gratulation that is awakened there over every sinner
who turns unto God.

We are aware, all the time, that the truth, as it is in Jesus,
must be sustained by argument — that this is one of the offices of
the church militant upon earth, whose part it is to silence gain-
sayers ; and not only to contend, but to contend earnestly, for
the faith which was delivered unto the saints. For this service,
we stand deeply indebted to the lore and the laborious author
ship of other days — to the prowess of those dauntless theologians,
those gigantic men of war, who, skilled alike in the mysteries of
the Bible, and in the mysteries of our common nature, have, in
the vast and the venerable productions which they left behind
them, reared such bulwarks around the system of a sound and a
settled orthodoxy, as have never yet been stormed. Yet the
most prominent article of that system — that which Luther de
nominated the test of a standing or a falling church — even the
doctrine of imputed righteousness by faith — although argument
be the weapon by which to defend it against the inroad of ad
versaries, it is not the weapon of penetration or of power by
which to force a way for its saving reception into the heart of a
believer. It is not in the clangour of arms, or in the shouts of
victory, or in the heat and hurry even of most successful gladia-
torship — it is not thus that this overture of peace and pardon
from heave Q falls with efficacy upon the sinner's ear. It is not
so much in the act of intellectually proving the truth of the doc
trine, as in the act of proceeding upon its truth, when we affec
tionately urge the sinner to make it the stepping-stone of his
return unto God — it is then most generally that it becomes mani
fest unto his conscience, and that he receives in love that which
in the spirit of love and kindness has been offered to him. In a
word, it is when the bearer of this message from God to man,
urges it upon his fellow-sinners in the very spirit which first
prompted that message from the upper sanctuary — it is when he
truly represents, not alone the contents of Heaven's overtures,
but also that heavenly kindness by which they were suggested —
it is when he entreats rather than when he denounces, and when
that compassion, which is in the heart of the Godhead, actuates
his own — it is when standing in the character of an ambassador
from Him who so loved the world, he accompanies the delivery
of his message with the looks and the language of his own mani-

532 EFFECT OF MAN S WRATH

fest tenderness — it is then that the preacher of salvation is upon
his best vantage-ground of command over the hearts of a willing
people ; and when he finds that charity, and prayer, and moral
earnestness have done what neither lordly intolerance nor even
lordly argument could have done, it is then that he rejoices in
the beautiful experience, that it is something else than the wrath
of man which is the instrument of working the righteousness of
God.

The apostle says, " Covet earnestly the best gifts," and then
adds, "but yet I show you a more excellent way " — even the
way of charity. We are also bidden " to contend earnestly for
the faith once delivered unto the saints." But notwithstanding,
there may be a still more excellent and effectual way, even to
" speak the truth in love." It is thus that the gospel, sometimes
in one passage, blends firmness of principle with the gentleness
of kind affection, towards those who are its adversaries. " Watch
ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. Let
all your things be done with charity." " Do all things without
inurmurings and disputings, that ye may be blameless and harm
less, the sons of God without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked
and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world,
holding forth the word of life." " Now we exhort you, brethren,
warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support
the weak, be patient towards all men. See that none render
evil for evil unto any man ; but ever follow that which is good,
both among yourselves and to all men." The vehemence of
passion is one thing. The vehemence of sentiment is another.
There is a hatefulness in the first. There is a certain nobleness
to be liked and admired in the second. The former vents itself
in malice against the heretic. The latter urges and assails the
heresy. The strength of irritation is wholly different from the
strength of conviction ; and a deep sensation of the importance of
truth, is wholly different from a sensitive dislike towards him
who resists or disowns it. The Bible makes the discrimination
between these two ; and it tells us to shun the one, and to cherish
the other to the uttermost. Under its guidance, we shall know
both how to maintain an unyielding front of resistance to the
error, and yet to have compassion and courtesy for him who is
the victim of it. It is a triumph to conquer by the power of
argument — but it is a greater triumph to conciliate and convert
by the power of charity.

II. — But this brings me to the second head of discourse, under

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 533

which I shall now, very shortly, consider the effect of man's
wrath, when interposed between a right and a wrong denomina
tion of Christianity.

It can require no very deep insight into onr nature to perceive,
that when there is proud or angry intolerance on the side of
truth, it must call forth the reaction of a sullen and determined
obstinacy on the side of error. Men will submit to be reasoned
out of an opinion, and more especially when treated with respect
and kindness. But they will not submit to be cavalierly driven
out of it. There is a revolt in the human spirit against contempt
and contumely, insomuch that the soundest cause is sure to suffer
from the help of such auxiliaries. When passion is enlisted on
one side of a controversy, then provocation is awakened on the
other side — and the parties erecting themselves into stouter and
loftier attitude than before, stand to each other in respective
positions which are mutually impregnable. It is this infusion of
temper by which the force even of mightiest argument is para
lysed. It is when disdain meets with defiance, when exasperat
ing charges meet with indignant recriminations, when the shouts
of exulting victory may sting the bosom of adversaries with the
humiliations, but never draw from their lips the acknowledg
ments of defeat — it is when the war of words is animated with
feelings such as these, that Truth, whose still small voice is all-
powerful, falls from her omnipotence and her glory ; and False
hood, resolute in the midst of such stormy agitations, is only
riveted thereby more firmly upon her basis. To the perversity
of human error, there is now superudded the still more hopeless
perversity of human wilfulness — and on looking at the whole
resulting amount from these fulminations of heated partisanship,
one cannot fail to acknowledge, that indeed the wrath of man
worketh not the righteousness of God.

Nevertheless, it is the part of man, both to adopt and to ad
vocate the truth, lifting his zealous testimony in its favour. Yet
there is surely a way of doing this in the spirit of charity; and
while strenuous, while even uncompromising in the argument, it
is possible surely to observe all the amenities of gentleness and
good-will in these battles of the faith. For example, it is not
wrong to feel either the strength or the importance of our cause,
when we plead the Godhead of the Saviour ; when, in affirming
this to be an article of our creed, we simply repeat a statement
of Scripture, as distinct and absolute as it is in the power of
vocables to make it — even that " the Word was God:" when,

534

after that a sound erudition hath pronounced the integrity of this
one passage, we should deem it a waste and a perversion of criti
cism, to suspend our belief, till we had adjusted all the merits
of all the controversies on other and more ambiguous passages ;
when after being satisfied that the Bible is indeed the record of
an authentic communication from heaven to earth, we put faith
in this its clearest utterance, than which it is not within the
compass of human language to frame a more unequivocal, or a
more definite ; when contrasting the ignorance of a creature so
beset and limited as man, with the amplitude of that infinite and
everlasting light, from the confines of which the message of reve
lation hath broke upon our world, we count it our becoming
attitude to listen to all its announcements even as with the
docility of little children ; when, more especially, in profoundest
darkness as we are, about the nature or constitution of the Deity,
who, throned in the mystery of His unfathomable essence, per
vades all space, and, without beginning or without end, unites in
His wondrous Being the extremes-of eternity, we hold that one
information of Himself, and from His own authoritative voice,
should rebuke and bid away all human imaginations; when,
placed, as we are, in but a corner of that immensity which He
hath peopled with innumerable worlds, with nought to instruct
us but the experience of our little day, and nought to guide our
way to that region of invisibles which is all His own — we, sur
rendering each fond and favourite preconception of ours, defer to
the teaching of Him who is Himself the fountain-head of exist
ence, and whose eye reaches to the furthest outskirts of the uni
verse that He has formed. And should He but tell of Him who
was made flesh, that He was in the beginning with God, and
that He was God, surely on a theme so vastly above us and be
yond us, it is for us to regulate our belief by the very letter of
this communication ; and, on the basis of such an evidence as
this, to honour the Son even as we honour the Father, is the
soundest philosophy, as well as the soundest faith.

Yet with all these reasons for holding ourselves to be intel
lectually right upon this question, there is not one reason why
the wrath of man should be permitted to mingle in the contro
versy. This, whenever it is admitted, operates not as an ingre
dient of strength, but as an ingredient of weakness. Let Truth
be shrined in argument — for this is its appropriate glory. And
it is a sore disparagement inflicted upon it by the hand of vin
dictive theologians, when, instead of this, it is shrined in ana-

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 535

thema, or brandished as a weapon of dread and of destruction
over the heads of all who are compelled to do it homage. The
terrible denunciations of Athanasius have not helped — they have
injured the cause. The Godhead of Christ is not thus set forth
in the New Testament. It is nowhere proposed in the shape of
a mere dictatorial article, or as a naked dogma, for the understand
ing alone ; and at one place it is introduced as an episode for
the enforcement of a moral virtue. In this famous passage, the
practical lesson occupies the station of principal, as the main or
capital figure of the piece ; and the doctrine on which so many
would eifervesce all their zeal, even to exhaustion, stands to it
but in the relation of a subsidiary. The lesson is, " Let nothing
be done through strife or vain-glory ; but in lowliness of mind
let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every
man on his own things, but every man also on the things of
others." And the doctrine (here noticed by the apostle, not to
the end that he may rectify the opinion of his disciples, but
primarily and obviously, to the end that he may rectify their
conduct), the doctrine for the enforcement of the lesson is, " Let
this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus : who, being
in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God ;
but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form
of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men ; and being
found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became
obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." In these
verses there is a collateral lesson for our faith ; but the chief,
the direct lesson, is a lesson of charity, which is greater than
faith. And would the heart of the Trinitarian be but as obediently
schooled as his head, by this passage — would Orthodoxy, instead
of the strife and the vain-glory which have given her so revolt
ing an aspect, both of pride and sternness, but put on her bowels
of mercy, and to her truth add tenderness — would the champions
of a Saviour's dignity but learn of His meekness and lowliness,
and, while they assert Him to be God manifest in the flesh, meet
the perversity of gainsayers in the very spirit of gentleness that
He did, — This were the way by which the Church militant
might be borne onwardly and upwardly to the station of the
Church triumphant in the world. This is the way in which,
by the mechanism of our moral nature, to obtain ascendency over
the hearts of men. Truth will be indebted for her best victories,
not to the overthrow of Heresy discomfited on the field of argu
ment, but to the surrender of Heresy disarmed of that in which

536 EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH

her strength and her stability lie, — of her passionate, because
provoked, wilfulness. Charity will do what reason cannot do.
It will take that which letteth out of the way — even that wrath
of man, which worketh neither the truth nor the righteousness
of God.

But our time does not permit of any further illustration — else
we might have shown at greater length, how, by the oversight
of this great principle, the cause both of truth and of righteous
ness has been impeded in the world. Theologians have for
gotten it in their controversies. Statesmen have forgotten it in
their laws. Never was there a greater blunder in legislation,
than that by which the forces of the statute-book have been
enlisted on the side of truth ; and error, as was quite natural,
instead of being subdued, has been thereby settled down into
tenfold obstinacy. The glories of martyrdom have been trans
ferred from the right to the wrong side of the question ; and
superstition, which, in a land of perfect light and perfect liberty,
would hide her head as ashamed, gathers a title to respect, and
stands forth in a character of moral heroism, because of the in
justice which" has been brought to bear upon her. She ought,
in all wisdom, to have been left to her own natural decay — or,
at least, reason and kindness are the only engines which should
have been made to play upon her strongholds. But with such
an auxiliary, as the mere authority of terror upon the one side,
and such a resistance as that of a generous and high-minded in
dignation upon the other — there have arisen the elements of
an interminable warfare. And not till truth, relieved of so un
seemly an associate, be confined to the use of her proper weapons,
will she be reinstated on her proper vantage-ground. It is not
in the fermentation of human passions and human politics, that
the lessons of heaven can be with efficacy taught — and ere these
lessons shall go abroad in triumph over the length and breadth
of the land, we must recall the impolicy by which we have turned
a whole people into a nation of outcasts. To exclude is surely
not the way to assimilate. It is by pervading, instead of sepa
rating into an unbroken mass, and then placing it off at a dis
tance from us — it is by extensively mingling with the men of
another denomination, in all the walks of civil and political
business — it is then, that the occasions of converse and of cour
tesy will be indefinitely multiplied — and then will it be found,
that it is by an influence altogether opposite to the wrath of
man, that we are enabled to work the righteousness of God.

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 537

But let us not make entrance on a field to the verge of which
we have now been conducted by the light of a principle that is
abundantly capable of shedding most beautiful, as well as
most beneficent illustration over the whole of it. Let us rather
conclude with the application of our text, not to the affairs of
an empire or the affairs of a church, but rather to the affairs of
a single congregation. Let us recur, though but for one moment
ere we shall have brought our address to its close, to that spirit
of kindness and good-will which prompted the original forma
tion of the gospel message in the upper sanctuary, as being in
deed the very spirit by which the expounder of that message
ought to be actuated. He may have at times to engage in con
flict with the infidels or the heretics around him. Nevertheless
let him be assured, that it is by other armour than that which
is wielded on the field of controversy — by an influence more
powerful still than even that of overbearing argument, by the
moral and affectionate earnestness of a heart that breathes the
very charity and tenderness of Heaven upon his audience — it is
thus that ministerial work is done most prosperously — the work
of winning souls, of turning sons and daughters unto right
eousness.

It is not so easy as may be thought to dislodge the fears or to
win the confidence of nature in Him who is nature's God. There
is a certain overhanging sense of guilt which forms the main
ingredient of this alienation. It is this which darkens, to the
eye of our world, the face of Heaven's Lawgiver; and brings
Ruch a burden of dread and of distrust on the spirit of man, that
he feels nothing to invite but to repel and overawe, in the
thought of Heaven's high sacredness. It is thus that the aspect
of the Divinity is mantled and overshaded to the human imagi
nation ; and instead of reading there the signals of welcome and
good- will, we figure to ourselves a God dwelling in some awful
and august sanctuary, or seated on a throne whence the fire of
jealousy goeth forth to burn up and to destroy. It is sin which
has laid this cold, this heavy obstruction, on the hearts of
our outcast species. There is a strong, though secret, appre
hension of displeasure in the countenance of Him who is above,
which haunts us continually, arid gives us the hourly, the habi
tual, feeling of outcasts. Man recoils to i distance from God,
and regards God as placed at an inaccessible distance from him.
There is between them a gulf of separation, across which man
looks with disquietude and dismay, as he would to some spectral

538 EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH

or portentous image shrouded in mystery, and all the more tre
mendous that he is invisible and unknown. The greatest moral
revolution which the spirit of man undergoes, is when these
clouds which overhang the hemisphere of his spiritual vision are
all cleared away, and the Godhead shines upon him with a new
and an opposite manifestation — when simply because now seeing
the Deity under an aspect of graciousness, he, instead of trem
bling before Him as an enemy, can securely trust in Him as a
friend, and can rejoice in that Being of whom he has been made
to know and to believe that He rejoices over him, to bless him
and to do him good.

Now, it is by faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ and by it
alone, that this great revolution is achieved. It is through the
open door of His mediatorship that the sinner draws nigh, and
beholds God as a reconciled Father. It is because of that blood
of atonement wherewith the mercy-seat on high is sprinkled,
that he is made to hear the voice of welcome and of good-will
which issues therefrom. He now beholds no severity in the
aspect of the Lawgiver ; and yet, through the work of Him by
whom the law was magnified, he there beholds the harmony of
all the attributes. Such is the exquisite skilfulness of the eco
nomy under which we sit, that the truth, and the justice, and
the holiness which out of Christ were leagued against us for
destruction — now that these have emerged, in vindicated lustre,
from that hour of darkness when the Saviour bowed down His
head unto the sacrifice, they are the guarantees of pardon and
acceptance to all who lay hold of this great salvation. It was
in love to man that this wondrous dispensation was framed. It
was kindness, honest, heartfelt, compassionate kindness, that
formed the moving principle of the embassy from heaven to our
world. We protest, by the meekness and the gentleness of
Christ, by the tears of Him who wept at Lazarus' tomb, and
over the approaching ruin of Jerusalem, by every word of bless
ing that He uttered, and by every footstep of this wondrous
visitor over the surface of a land on which He went about doing
good continually — we protest in the name of all these unequivo
cal demonstrations, that they do Him an injustice who propound
this message in any other way than as a message of friendship
to our species. He came not to condemn, but to save ; not to
destroy, but to keep alive. And he is the fittest bearer, he the
best interpreter of these overtures from above, who urges them
upon men not with wrath, and clamour, and controversial bitter-

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 539

ness, but in the very spirit of that wisdom from above, which is
gentle, and easy to be entreated, and full of mercy.

In this way the moral power of the truth is superadded to
its argumentative power. The kind affection of the speaker be
comes an element of weight and influence in the demonstration
which falls from him. He does more than barely utter the re
alities of the gospel — he pictures them forth in the persuasive
ness of his own accents, in the looks as well as the language of
his own manifested tenderness. He is the right person for
standing between a people and heaven — seeing that Heaven's
love to men is expressed visibly in his own countenance, audibly
in the earnestness of his own voice. With a heart glowing in
charity to his hearers, he is the fit representative, the best ex
pounder of that embassy which has come from the dwelling-
place of the Eternal on an errand of charity to our world. And
fraught as he is with the tidings of mercy, it is not more when
he urges the truth, than when he affectingly sets forth the ten
derness of these tidings, that he charms the acquiescence of men,
and his message is felt to be "worthy of all acceptation."

Before I leave you, I should like, even though at the end of
our discourse and by an informal resumption of its first topic, to
possess the heart of each who now hears me with the distinct
assurance of God's proffered good-will to him, of His free and
full pardon stretched out for the acceptance of him. If hereto
fore you have been in the habit of contemplating the gospel as
at a sort of speculative distance, and in its generality, I want
you now to feel the force of its pointed, its personal application,
and to understand it as a message addressed specifically to you.
The message has been so framed, and couched in phraseology of
such peculiar import, that it knocks for entrance at every heart,
and is laid down for acceptance at every door. It is true that
you are not named and surnamed in the Bible ; but the term
" whosoever," associated as it frequently is with the offer of its
blessings, points that offer to each and to all of you. "Whoso
ever will, let him drink of the water of life freely." It is very
true that this written communication has not been handed to
you, like the letter of a distant acquaintance, with the address of
your designation and dwelling-place inscribed upon it. But the
term " all " as good as specializes the address to each, and each
has a full warrant to proceed upon the call, " Look unto me, all
ye ends of the earth, and be saved;" or, " Come unto me, all
ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

540 EFFECT OF MAN'S WRATH

It is furthermore true, that Christ has not appeared in person at
any of your assemblies, and singling out this one individual, and
that other, has bid him step forward with an application for par
don, on the assurance that he would receive it ; — but the term
" every '' singles out each ; and He has left behind Him the
precious, the unexcepted declaration, that " every one who ask-
eth receiveth," that "every one who seeketh findeth." And
lastly, it is true that He disperses no special messengers of His
grace to special individuals ; but the term " any," though occu
pying but its own little room in a single text, has a force equally
dispersive with as many messengers sent to the world as there
are men upon its surface. " If any man thirst, let him come
unto me, and drink." These are the words which, unlike the
wheels of Ezekiel's vision, turn every way, carrying the message
of salvation diffusively abroad among all, and pointing it dis-
tinctivoly to each of the human family. Their scope is wide as
the species, and their application is to every individual thereof.
And what I want each individual present to understand is, that
God in the gospel beseeches him to be reconciled — God is saying
saying unto him, "Turn thou, turn thou, why wilt thou die?"

There are certain generic words attached at times to the over
tures of the gospel, which have the same twofold power of
spreading abroad these overtures generally among all, yet of
pointing them singly at each of the human family. The
44 world," for example, is a word of this import; and Jesus
Christ is declared to be a propitiation for the sins of the whole
world. After this, man, though an inhabitant of the world,
and, as such, fairly within the scope of this communication, may
continue to forbid himself, but most assuredly God has not for
bidden him. The term " sinner " is another example, as being
comprehensive of a genus, whereof each individual may appro
priate the benefits that are said in Scripture to be intended for
the whole. " This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all accep
tation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners"
Still it is possible, as before, that many a sinner may not hold
this saying to be worthy, or at least may not make it the subject
of his acceptation. His demand perhaps is, that ere he can have
a warrantable confidence in this saying for himself, he must be
specially, and by name, included in it; whereas the truth is,
that to warrant his distrust, his want of confidence after such a
saying, he should be specially, and by name, excluded from it.
After an utterance like this, instead of needing, as a sufficient

IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 541

reason of dependence, to be made the subject of a particular
invitation, he would really need, as a sufficient reason of de
spondency, to be made the subject of a particular exception. Is
not the characteristic term, " sinner," sufficiently descriptive of
him? as much so, indeed, as if he had been named arid sur-
named in Scripture. Does it not mark him as an object for all
those announcements which bear on sinners as such, or sinners
generally ? The truth is, if we but understood the terms of this
great act of amnesty, and made the legitimate application of
them, we should perceive that to whomsoever the word of salva
tion has come, to him the offer of salvation has been made —
that he is really as welcome to all the blessings of the New
Testament, as if he had been the only creature in the universe
who stood in need of them ; as if he had been the only sinner
of all the myriads of beings whom God hath formed ; and as if
to reclaim him, and to prevent the moral harmony of creation
from being stained or interrupted by even so much as one soli
tary exception, for him alone the costly apparatus of redemption
had been reared, and Christ had died, that God might be to him
individually both a just God and a Saviour.

542 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

SERMON XI.

(Preached in St. George's Church, Edinburgh, before the Society for the Daughters of the
Clergy, in May, 1829.)

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

" And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou
to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also." — 2 TIMOTHY ii. 2.

THE apostle, by this verse, makes provision for the continu
ance of a gospel ministry upon earth. If he do not enact the
mode of succession for all ages, he at least exemplifies it from
his own age, down to a third generation of Christian teachers in
the church. He ordained Timothy to this office, who was also
to ordain others — which last, we may well conjecture, were not
only to minister, but in their turn to ordain ministers who might
come after them. It must be acknowledged, however, that there
is marvellously little of express enactment in Scripture for an
ecclesiastical constitution ; and that this fertile controversy chiefly
turns upon apostolical example, and the lights of ecclesiastical
history — thus leaving it more in the shape of an indeterminate
or discretionary question, and to be decided by considerations of
expediency — a term which, in the Christian sense of the word,
is of far loftier bearing than in the vulgar sense of it — as point
ing, not to what makes most for the good of self or the good of
society, but as pointing to what makes most for the prosperity
of religion in the world, for the extension and the glory of our
Eedeemer's kingdom. Expediency, wherewith we commonly
associate a certain character of sordidness, instantly acquires a
sacredness of character, when its objects are thus made sacred ;
and its high aim is more thoroughly to Christianize a land, and
to insure a fuller and more frequent circulation of the gospel
among its families.

Now there is one question of ecclesiastical polity, which, in the
lack of aught in the New Testament that is very distinct or
authoritative upon the subject, we should feel much inclined to
decide upon this ground — we mean the question of a religious

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 543

establishment. The truth is, that Christianity, for three cen
turies, was left to find its own way in the world — for during the
whole of that period, none of this world's princes did it reverence.
All this time it was treated as an unprotected outcast, or rather
as a branded criminal. Yet the execrable superstition, as it was
then called, neither withered under neglect, nor was quelled by
the hand of persecuting violence. It grew and gathered into
strength, under the terrible processes that were devised for its
annihilation. Disgrace could not overbear it. Threats could
not terrify it. Imprisonment could not stifle it. Exile could
not rid the world of it, or chase the nuisance away. The fires of
bloody martyrdom could not extinguish it. They could not all
prevail against a religion, which had the blessing of heaven upon
its head, and in its bosom the silent energies of conviction. And
so it spread and multiplied among men. And, signal triumph of
principle over power, of the moral over the sentient and the
grossly physical ! was the indestructible church nurtured into
might and magnitude, and settled more firmly on its basis, amid
the various elements which had conspired for its overthrow.
Throughout the whole transition — from the time that the fisher
men of Galilee tended its infancy, to the time that the emperors
of Eome did homage to its wondrous manhood — it had neither
the honours nor the revenues of an establishment. This change
did not, and could not, originate with the ecclesiastical. It
originated with the civil authority. It took effect by the state
holding out to the church the right hand of fellowship. The
advance was made by the former ; and we should hold it tanta
mount to the vindication of a religious establishment, could we
demonstrate how, without the compromise of principle, but rather
in obedience to its purest and highest behests, the advance might
be met and consented to by the latter.

Let me suppose, then, a society of Christians, great or small,
actuated, as Moravians now are, by the spirit and the zeal of
devoted missionaries — pressed in conscience by the obligation of
our Saviour's last saying, " Go and preach the gospel to every
creature" — bent on an expedition to the heathen of distant lands,
if they had but an opening for the voyage and the means of de
fraying it. Hitherto, it will be admitted, that all is purely
apostolical ; and that, as yet, no violence has been done to the
high and heaven-born sanctities of the gospel. Now what we
ask is, whether there be aught to vitiate this holy character, in
the next indispensable step of the means being provided; of

544 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

money being raised, for the essential hire and maintenance of the
labourers ; of the vessel being equipped, that is to bear them on
ward in this errand of piety ; of the wealth being transferred to
their hands firm the hands of willing contributors, for the support
of the missionary household, for the erection of the missionary
church and missionary dwelling-places. Is there aught of earthly
contamination in this ? Is the Unitas Fratrum, that church of
spiritual men, at all brought down from its saintliness, by those
annual supplies, without which their perils among the heathen
could not have been encountered — their deeds of Christian hero
ism could not have been performed? They maintain their own
independence as a church notwithstanding. Their doctrines and
discipline and mode of worship, are left untouched by the pro
ceeding. In all matters ecclesiastical, they take their own way.
It is true they are subsisted by others ; but in no one article,
relating to the church's peculiar business, are they controlled by
them. They are maintained from without ; but they need not,
because of this, suffer one taint of desecration within. There is
a connexion, no doubt, established between two parties ; but I
can see nothing in it, save a pecuniary succour rendered upon
one side, and a high service of philanthropy rendered upon the
other — yet rendered according to the strict methods, and in rigid
conformity with the most sacred principles of those who are em
barked on this high and holy vocation. The transaction, as we
now relate it, is of purest origin ; and has been nobly accredited
by the blessed consequences which have followed in its train —
for by means of these hireling labourers, the outposts of Chris
tianity have been pushed forward to the very outskirts of the
human population ; Christian villages have been reared in the
farthest wilds of Paganism ; the prowling savages of Greenland
and Labrador have been reclaimed to the habits and the decencies
of civilized life ; and, greater far than any bliss or beauty which
can be made to irradiate this fleeting pilgrimage, successive
thousands of before untaught idolaters (under the effective tuition
that has been brought to bear upon them) have lived in the obe
dience, and died in the triumphs of the faith.

Now the essential character of this whole transaction is the
same — whether we conceive these gospel-labourers to be employed
in the business of a home, or in the business of a foreign mission.
By the one process you carry the lessons of our religion beyond,
by the other you circulate them within, the territory of Christen
dom. The effect of the one is to spread Christianity externally

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 545

abroad, and so perhaps as to sprinkle many nations. The effect
of the other is to fill up the internal vacancies, and so perhaps
as thoroughly to saturate with Christianity one nation. It is not
enough reflected on, that, under the latter process, a vastly
greater number of human spirits may be medicated into spiritual
and immortal health, than under the former ; and, at all events,
that this latter also must have its accomplishment — ere the know
ledge of the Lord shall fill the earth, even as the waters, which
in their collapse admit of no internal vacancy, cover the sea. But
the position which I chiefly want to fix at present is, that,
whether the missionary movement be in an outward or in a
homeward direction, its whole economy and character may re
main essentially the same. The enterprise may be supported in
its expenses by one party. It may be executed in its work and
labour by another party. Each may be distinct of the other,
and give no disturbance to the other. The secular men may
provide the means ; yet the ecclesiastical men, in their proper
department, may have the entire and uncontrolled management.
They may take their support from others in things temporal ;
yet suffer no invasion by them, on their inviolable prerogative of
determining and ordering in things spiritual. Their mainten
ance cometh from others ; but their worship, and their creed,
and their formularies, and their sacraments, and their ministra
tions, both of word and of ordinances, are all their own. We
yet see no compromise of principle in such a connexion as this.
There is support given upon the one side. But there is no sur
render, in the least article either of faith or holiness, made upon
the other side. The only submission that we can perceive on
the part of these missionaries or ministers to other men, is a sub
mission to be fed by them ; and that, that they might wait with
out distraction on the business of their own unshackled and
uncontrolled ministry. In this instance then, as in the former,
there is the like pure origin, and there may be a like or perhaps
a surpassingly glorious result. If by the foreign mission, stations
are planted along the margin of our peopled earth — by the home
mission stations may be multiplied over the territory of our own
land. If, as the effect of the one, we now behold villages of
peace and piety in the distant wilderness — as the effect of the
other, the moral wilderness around us may be lighted up and
fertilized ; and we may be made to witness both a holier Sabbath
and purer week-days than heretofore, in all our parishes. If, in
virtue of the missionary doings abroad, we read that hundreds of

VOL. III. 2 M

546 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

families in some before untrodden field of heathenism have been
Christianized — let us not forget, that many are the cities of our
own island, where, without one mile of locomotion, we might
have converse with thousands of families, which, but for the same
doings at home, would be sunk in the apathy and the grossness
of practical heathenism. If, as the fruit of the one service,
we can appeal to humanized savages, and rudest wanderers of
the desert, transformed into Christian and companionable men
— let not the splendour of this achievement eclipse the equal
importance of the other service, if we can appeal to an effective
ness as mighty and momentous, in our own cottage patriarchs,
our own virtuous and well-taught peasantry.

Now, we think it is not by a fanciful but by a sound genera
lization, that we pass from the case of a home-mission to that of
an establishment — which is neither more nor less, in fact, than
a universal home-mission. At its first institution, in the days of
Constantine, the very work remained to be done which we have
now specified. Its proper object is not to extend Christianity
into ulterior spaces, but thoroughly to fill up the space that had
been already occupied. It is a far mightier achievement than
may appear at first view, completely to overtake the whole length
and breadth of a, land. All the itinerancies and the traverse
movements of the many thousand missionaries, who, during the
three first centuries, lived and died in the cause, fell short of
this accomplishment. They did much in the work of spreading
the gospel externally ; but they left much undone in the work
of spreading it internally. They had Christianized the thou
sands who lived in cities; but the millions of pagans or of
peasantry who were yet unconverted, evince the country to have
been everywhere a great moral fastness, which, till opened up by
an establishment, would remain impregnable. Now this very
opening was presented to the ministers of Christ, when the
Roman Emperor, whether by a movement of faith or a movement
of philanthropy and patriotism, made territorial distribution of
these over his kingdoms and provinces ; and, assigning a terri
torial revenue for the labourers of this extensive vineyard,
enabled each to set himself down in his own little vicinity — the
families of which he could assemble to the exercises of Christian
piety on the Sabbath, and among whom he could expatiate
through the week in all the offices and attentions of Christian
kindness. Such an offer, whether Christianly or but politically
made upon the one side, could most Christianly be accepted and

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 547

rejoiced in by the other. It extended inconceivably the powers
and the opportunities of usefulness. It brought the gospel of
Jesus Christ into contact with myriads more of imperishable
spirits j and with as holy a fervour as ever gladdened the heart
of the devoted missionary, when the means of an ampler service
to the Eedeemer's cause were put into his hands, might the
church in these days have raised to heaven its orisons of purest
gratitude, that kings at length had become its nursing fathers,
and opened up to it the plenteous harvest of all their population.
There is just as little of the essentially corrupt in this connexion
between the church and the state, as there is in the connexion
between a missionary board and its pecuniary supporters. Each
is a case of the Earth helping the Woman ; but whatever of
earthliness may be upon the one side, there might be none, and
there needs be none, upon the other. The one may assist in
things temporal — while the other may continue to assert its un
touched and entire jurisdiction, as heretofore, in things spiritual.
There might thus be an alliance between the Altar and the
Throne — yet without the feculence of any earthly intermixture
being at all engendered by it. The state avails itself of the
church's services ; and the church gives back again no other than
the purest services of the sanctuary. Its single aim, as hereto
fore, is the preparation of citizens for heaven ; but, in virtue of
the blessings which Christianity scatters in its way, do the
princes of this world find that these are the best citizens of
earth — and that the cheap defence of nations, the best safeguard
of their prosperity arid their power, is a universal Christian
education. There needs be nought, we repeat, of contamination
in this. The state pays the church ; yet the church, in the
entire possession of all those privileges and powers which are
strictly ecclesiastical, maintains the integrity of her faith and wor
ship notwithstanding. She might be the same hallowed church,
as when the fires of martyrdom were blazing around her — the
same spirituality among her ministers — the same lofty independ
ence in all her pulpits. The effect of an establishment is not ne
cessarily to corrupt Christianity, but to extend it — not necessarily
to vitiate the ministrations of the gospel, but certainly to dissemi
nate those ministrations more intimately amongst, as well as to
bear them more diffusively abroad over the families of the land.
But just as in philosophy and politics, there are mistakes
upon this subject of a religious establishment, from the very
common error of not assigning the right effect to its right cause.

548 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

There is a kind of vague and general imagination, as if corrup
tion were the invariable accompaniment of such an alliance be
tween the civil and the ecclesiastical ; and this has been greatly
fostered by the tremendously corrupt Popery which followed in
historical succession after the establishment of Christianity in
the days of Constantine, and which certainly holds out in vivid
contrast the difference between this religion in the period of its
suffering, and this religion in the period of its security and
triumph. But it were well to discriminate the precise origin of
this frightful degeneracy. It arose not from without ; it arose
from within. It was not because of any ascendency by the
state over the church whom it now paid, and thereby trenched
upon its independence in things spiritual. It was because of an
ascendency by the church over the state, the effect of that super
stitious terror which it wielded over the imaginations of men,
and which it most unworthily prosecuted to the usurpation of
power in things temporal. The fear that many have of an esta
blishment is, lest through it the state should obtain too great
power over the church, and so be able to graft its own secularity
or its own spirit of worldliness, on the pure system of the gos
pel — whereas the actual mischief of Popery lay in the church
having obtained too great power over the state ; and in the
false doctrines which it devised to strengthen and perpetuate a
temporal dominion which should never have been permitted to
it. There is no analogy between the apprehended evils to Chris
tianity from an establishment now-a-days, and the actual evils
inflicted on Christianity by the corrupt and audacious hierarchy
of Rome. The thing dreaded from that connexion between the
church and state which an establishment implies, is lest the
state, stepping beyond its own legitimate province, should make
invasion upon the church ; and so, by a heterogeneous ingredient
from without, in some way adulterate the faith. The thing ex
perienced, on the contrary, was that the church, stepping beyond
its legitimate province, made an invasion upon the state ; and
all the adulteration practised, either on the worship or the lessons
of Christianity, was gendered from within. So far from the state
having too much power, so that it could make unlawful invasion
on the church — it had too little power, so that it could not resist
the unlawful invasion made by the church upon itself. The
theoretical fear is, lest the state should meddle with the prero
gatives of the church ; the historical fact is, that the church
meddled with the prerogative of the state. So far from the

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 549

apprehended corruption having experience to rest upon, it is
precisely the reverse — of the actual corruption. But the truth
is, that after many conflicts the matter is now better under
stood ; and the understanding is, that neither should meddle
with the prerogatives of the other. The state may pay the
church ; yet without conceding to it one particle of temporal
sovereignty. The church may serve the state ; yet without the
surrender of one spiritual prerogative. To teach the people
Christianity — that is the church's service. To teach them no
other than what itself judges to be the Christianity of the Bible
— that is the church's prerogative. To deal out among our
parish families the lessons of faith and of holiness — this is the
church's incumbent duty. But that these shall be no other than
what itself judges to be the very lessons of that Scripture whose
guidance in things spiritual it exclusively follows, and that in
this judgment no power on earth shall control it — this is the
church's inviolable privilege. The state might maintain a
scholastic establishment ; but, without charging itself with the
methods of ordinary education, leave these to the teachers. Or
the state might maintain an ecclesiastical establishment ; but,
without charging itself with the methods of Christian education,
leave these to the church. In both cases it would multiply and
extend over the land the amount of instruction. Yet the kind
of instruction it might leave to other authorities, to other boards
of management than its own ; and this were the way to secure
the best scholarship and the best Christianity. For the sake of
an abundant gospel dispensation we are upheld in things tem
poral by the state. For the sake of a pure gospel dispensation
we are left in things spiritual to ourselves ; and on ourselves
alone does it depend, whether the church now might not be the
same saintly and unsullied church that it was in. the days of
martyrdom — as spiritual in its creed, as purely apostolic in its
spirit, as holy in all its services.

We will not allege the infallibility of our own church ; for
this were Popery though in the dress of Protestantism. We will
not contend for the wisdom and the rectitude of all its doings ;
for we hold that there is neither individual nor corporate perfec
tion upon the earth. But let the distinction be made between
the acts of an establishment and the powers of an establishment ;
and we know not, if, through the whole of Christendom, there
be one more happily devised in any other country for the religious
good of its population. The fitness of a machine is one thing ;

550 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

the working of it is another. We feel as if it were no more than
a warrantable confidence, when we stand up for the former —
though we should feel it a most tremendous presumption, did we,
in every instance and upon all occasions, stand up for the latter.
In regard to the fitness of the mechanism, it may be the best
possible. In regard the actual working of the mechanism, one
would need to side with all the majorities which have occurred
for two centuries, and under all the changes of ecclesiastical
policy, ere he could conscientiously affirm that it has at all
times been the best possible. Still, amid all the imputations
and the errors which its greatest enemies may have laid to its
door, we hold, that, upon the alternative of its existence or non-
existence, there would hang a most fearful odds to the Chris
tianity of Scotland. Let us admit it as true, that the apparatus
might be made greatly more effective, — still it is true that a
deadly effect would follow, and be felt to her remotest parishes,
were the apparatus taken down. It were tantamount to a moral
blight over the length and breadth of our land ; and though we
have not time to demonstrate, what now we have only time to
affirm — yet, with all the certainty of experimental demonstration
we say it, that the ministrations of our church then done away
would never be replaced, to within a tenth of their efficacy, by
all the zeal arid energy and talent of private adventurers. There
would arise no compensation for the present regular supply.
There would arise no compensation for its fulness. Instead of
the frequent Parish Church (that most beauteous of all spectacles
to a truly Scottish heart, because to him the richest in moral
association ; and to whom therefore its belfry, peeping forth
from among the thick verdure of the trees which embosom it,
is the sweetest and the fairest object in the landscape) — instead
of this, we should behold the bare and thinly-scattered meeting
houses. For the large intervening spaces, we should have no
thing but precarious and transient itinerancies to trust to. The
well-established habit of Sabbath attendance, now as constant
with many of our families as the weekly recurrence of the parish
bell, would necessarily disappear. In a moral sense, they would
become the waste and the howling wildernesses of Scotland.
We feel quite assured, that, under this withering deprivation, a
hard and outlandish aspect would gather on the face of our
people. The cities might be somewhat served as heretofore, but
the innumerable hamlets would be forsaken ; and, just as it was
anterior to an establishment at all, our peasants would again

ON BELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 551

become Pagans, or, under the name and the naked ritual of
Christianity, would sink into the blindness and the brutality and
the sad alienation of Paganism.

But, without enlarging on this consideration, in which how
ever there lies much of the strength of our cause, let us briefly
recur to the leading argument of the day. It is not true that
corruption must adhere, in virtue of its very nature arid as by
necessity, to an establishment. There will be corruption in
fact; but, rightly to estimate the quarter it comes from, distinc
tion should be made between the nature of the institution arid
the nature of man. In virtue of the former, there may be no
contamination ; while in virtue of the latter, there may be a
great deal. An establishment may in this case be the occasional,
but not the efficient cause of mischief. The machine may be
faultless ; but exposed, as it must be, while the species lasts, to
the intromission of hands, which to a certain degree will taint
and vitiate all that they come in contact with. The remedy is
not to demolish the machine, and transfer the hands which
wrought it to other managements and other modes of operation
— There will still be corruption notwithstanding. It will prove a
vain attempt at escape, if you think to make it good by trans
ferring human nature from the ecomony of an establishment to
the economy of any of our sectaries. The human nature which
you thus transfer, will carry its own virus along with it; and
while that nature remains, there will be corruption in both, and
which is strictly chargeable neither on the one economy nor on
the other. It follows not therefore, because of this one or that
other abuse, that the framework of our establishment should be
destroyed. To make head against an abuse, we should direct
our efforts to the place where the abuse originated — not to the
machinery therefore in the present instance but to the men who
work the machinery. It is not to a constitutional or political
change in any of our establishments, that we should look for the
coming regeneration of our land. It is to a moral and spiritual
change in those who administer them. It is there, and riot in
the framework, where the change and the correction ought to be
made. This is the way by which to get rid of corruption, and
not by putting forth upon our national institutions the innovat
ing hand of a destroyer. There is corruption in the civil govern
ment of our empire — yet that is no reason why it should be
brought to dissolution. There is corruption in the municipal
government of our towns — yet what fearful anarchy would ensue,

552 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

should that be made the pretext for another overthrow ; and
every populous community in our land were left without a pre
siding magistracy to check and to control them. There is cor
ruption, we will say it, in every family government throughout
the nation — yet who can tell the numerous ills that would fester
in every household, and flow over in innumerable streams upon
society, were the rights and the restraints of parental authority
therefore put an end to ? And there may be corruption in the
ecclesiastical government of our own church. This may be true,
and yet it be just as true, that if, either by the policy of infatua
ted rulers or by the frenzy of an infatuated people, this church
were swept away — it would inflict a most deleterious blow on
the character of Scotland and the Christianity of Scotland's
families. It is not by the violence of public hostility against
our church that the nation is to be reformed — it is rather by the
control of the public opinion upon her ministers ; and most of
all, by the answer from Heaven to the people's prayers, that her
priests may be clothed with salvation. Were the establishment,
and that, too, under the pretext of its corruption, destroyed —
this would do nothing, arid worse than nothing. Were the
establishment, either in the whole or in certain parts of its con
stitution reformed — this, of itself, would do little ; and so little,
as to stamp insignificance on many a contest of ecclesiastical
policy. Were the establishment to have the Spirit of God
poured forth upon its clergy — then, with the multiplication of its
churches and parishes made more commensurate to the wants of
our increasing population — this, and this alone, would do every
thing. A conscientious minister, even with the establishment
precisely as it is, has within its borders, the liberty and the
privilege of unbounded usefulness. He has scope and outlet
there, for the largest desires of Christian philanthropy. He
has a paiish within which he might multiply his assiduities at
pleasure ; and with no other control but of the Word of God
over bis doctrines and his services and his prayers. Should he
quarrel with the reigning policy of our church, he has a place
for the utterance of his testimony against all he might esteem
to be its defections and its errors. He can give his eloquence
and his vote to the strength of its minorities. He can, by the
contribution of his own name, and of his own proclaimed or re
corded opinion, add to the moral force which always lies in an
opposition of principle, and which numbers cannot overbear.
All this he may do, and without forfeiting the respect, nay even

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 553

the kindness, of his adversaries. But to go back from the courts
of our establishment to its parishes, where after all he is on his
best vantage-ground for the services of Christian patriotism, he
can there expatiate without restraint in all the deeds and the de
vices of highest usefulness. It is on this precious homewalk of
piety and peace, that he can acquit himself of his noblest minis
trations for the interests of our immortal nature, and the good of
human society. It is there where he sheds the purest influences
around him, whether by the holiness of his pulpit or the kind
ness of his household ministrations. I cannot imagine a stronger
yet happier ascendant, than that which belongs to a parish
minister, who, throned in the cordialities of his people, finds un
bounded welcome at every cottage door ; and, by his unwearied
attention at sicknesses and deaths and funerals, has implicated
the very sound of his name and idea of his person with the
dearest interests of families. We positively know not, if any
where else than under this mild patriarchal economy, a scene of
so much moral loveliness can be found — or one where the hopes
of heaven, and the best and kindest affections of earth, are so
beautifully blended to uphold a system which covers all the land
with so bland and benignant an economy as this, may well be
termed " the cheap defence of the nation." To uproot it, is the
Gothic imagination of certain unfeeling calculators, whose sole
principle, in the science of their politics, is a heartless arithmetic ;
but who, in the midst of their plodding computations, have over
looked what that is which constitutes the chief element of a
nation's prosperity and a nation's greatness.

It is our part to vindicate the worth and importance of a
church establishment to society; and this is best done by the
worth and importance of our services. This will form our best
security, infinitely better than any which statesmen can devise.
There were certain recent alarms in which I could not partici
pate, because I felt that any apprehended danger from without,
might be greatly more than counteracted by a moral defence
from within. This is the reaction by which we have hitherto
stood our ground, against infidelity on the one band and sectari
anism on the other ; and with such an effect, that, with enough
of energy and conscientiousness and enlightened zeal on the part
of her ministers, all the menaces and agitation by which we are
surrounded, will only rivet the Church of Scotland more firmly
upon her basis, and rally more closely around her cause the wise
and the good of our nation.

554 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

In regard to an establishment, it makes all the difference in
the world to a conscientious man, whether it exposes the church
to the evil of an overbearing constraint from without; or, in
common with every other Christian society, to the evil of a
spontaneous corruption from within its own bosom. If not to
the former, he may carry entire into the establishment, all his
powers and his liberty of usefulness. If only to the latter, he
may personally have no share in the corruption ; and politically,
if such be the constitution of the church that he is vested with
the privilege, he may resist, and if overcome, may lift his testi
mony against it. In all these respects, we know of nothing more
perfect than the constitution of the Church of Scotland. There
is, to each of its members, an independent voice from within ;
and from without there is no force or authority whatever in
matters ecclesiastical. They who feel dislike to an establish
ment, do so in general because of their recoil from all contact
and communication with the state. We have no other commu
nication with the state than that of being maintained by it —
after which we are left to regulate the proceedings of our great
home mission, with all the purity and the piety and the inde
pendence of any missionary board. We are exposed to nothing
from without which can violate the sanctity of the apostolical
character, if ourselves do not violate it. And neither are we
exposed to aught, which can trench on the authority of the
apostolical office, if ourselves we make no surrender of it. In
things ecclesiastical we decide all. Some of these things may
be done wrong ; but still they are our majorities which do it.
They are not, they cannot, be forced upon us from without. We
own no head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ. What
ever is done ecclesiastically is done by our ministers, acting in
His name, and in professed submission to His authority. Impli
cated as the church and the state are imagined to be, they are
not so implicated, as that, without the concurrence of the ecclesi
astical courts, a full and final effect can be given to any proceed
ing, by which the good of Christianity and the religion of our
people may be affected. There is not a clerical appointment,
which can take place in any of our parishes, till we have sus
tained it. Even the law of patronage, right or wrong, is in
force not by the power of the state, but by the permission of the
church ; and, with all its fancied omnipotence, has no other basis
than that of our majorities to rest upon. It should never be
forgotten, that, in things ecclesiastical, the highest power of our

ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 555

church is amenable to no higher power on earth for its decisions.
It can exclude, it can deprive, it can depose at pleasure. Ex
ternal force might make an obnoxious individual the holder of a
benefice ; but there is no external force in these realms, that
could make him a minister of the Church of Scotland: There is
not one thing which the state can do to our independent and
indestructible church, but strip her of its temporalities. "Nee
tamen consumebatur" she would remain a church notwithstand
ing — stronger than ever, in the props of her own moral and
inherent greatness ; and, at least strong as ever, in the reverence
of her country's population — she was as much a church in her
days of Buffering, as in her days of outward security and triumph
— when a wandering outcast, with nought but the mountain
breezes to play around her, and nought but the caves of the earth
to shelter her, as now when admitted to the bowers of an esta
blishment. The magistrate might withdraw his protection ; and
she cease to be an establishment any longer — but in all the high
matters of sacred and spiritual jurisdiction, she would be the
same as before. With or without an establishment, she, in these,
is the unfettered mistress of her doings. The King by himself,
or by his representative, might be a looker-on ; but more, the King
cannot, the King dare not.

But we gladly bring our argument to a close. It has been
well remarked, that, in the abstract discussion of rights between
which there may be collision, it is difficult to avoid a certain
tone of harshness — a spirit the most unlike possible to that
which should be, and indeed to that which actually is, in
real and living exemplification. The vindication of our esta
blishment, as far as we have proceeded in it, necessarily involves
the vindication of our order from the charge — that, because
supported by the state, we are therefore, as if by necessary
consequence, a mean and mercenary priesthood. In repelling
this, we cannot but assert the real independence which belongs
tons; but let. not the assertion of our independence be inter
preted into an assertion of disrespect or defiance. What we
say and say truly in the abstract, may in the concrete be never
realized ; and for this best and most desirable of all reasons, that
the one party might never be put on the hardy and resolute de
fence of its prerogative, just because the other party may never
have the wish or the thought to invade it. There is many an
ancient and venerable possession in our land, whose rights are
never called forth from their depository, or produced in court —

556 ON RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS.

just because they are never trampled on. And so of the rights
of our church — there might be no call for the parade or for the
production of them, just because there might be no contest ; and
we are left to the undisturbed exercise of every power which
legitimately belongs to us. It is thus that for centuries, nay for
a whole millennium, we can imagine a prosperous and a pacific
union, between the church on the one hand and the state upon
the other — a union most fruitful in blessings to both — the church
rendering to the state that most precious of all services, the rear
ing of a virtuous and orderly antl loyal population ; and the state
giving tenfold extent and efficacy to the labours of the church,
by multiplying and upholding its stations all over the lands, and
providing it in fact with approaches to the door of every family.
There is here no compromise of sound principle on the part of
the church — for it is not in drivelling submission to the authority
of man, it is in devout submission to the high authority of
Heaven, that we tell our people to honour the king, to obey
magistrates, to lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness
and honesty, and meddle not with them who are given to change.
Neither is there any compromise of sound policy on the part of
the state — for the Christian education of the people is the high
road to all the best objects of patriotism. In such an intercourse
of benefits as this, there needs not, we repeat it, be so much as a
taint of worldliness. We may retain entire our apostolic fervour
and our apostolic simplicity notwithstanding — pure as in the
season of our most dark and trying ordeals — equally pure in the
sunshine of blanclness and cordiality, between a Christian church
and an enlightened Government,

ON THE DEATH OF DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 557

SEBMON XII.

(Preached in St. George's Church, Edinburgh, on Sabbath, Feb. 20, 1831.)*

ON THE DEATH OF THE REV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON.

" He being dead yet speaketh." — HBBBEWS xi. 4.

THERE is one sense in which this text admits the utmost
generality of application. Every man who dies, speaks a lesson
to survivors — even that lesson which is the oftenest told, but
which is also the oftenest forgotten. There is on this subject a
cleaving and a constitutional earthliness which stands its ground
against every demonstration — giving way for a moment perhaps
at each of the successive instances, but recovering itself on the
instant when the scenes, and the companionships, and the busi
ness of the world again close around us. We are the creatures
of sense, and the present, the sensible world is the only one that
we practically acknowledge. Carnality is the scriptural term
for this disease of fallen humanity — a disease of marvellous
inveteracy and force ; and not to be dislodged, we fear, by any
assault whatever, whether ordinary or extraordinary, on the
mere sensibilities of nature. We are never more assured, that
to translate a man from the walk of sight to the walk of faith,
is a work of supernatural energy, than when we witness the
impotency of all natural appliances, and how the spell which
binds him to the world is not to be broken by the loudest and
most emphatic warnings of the world's vanity. A rooted pre
ference of the interests of time to the interests of eternity — this
is what arithmetic may disprove, but it is what arithmetic can
not dissipate. This is what the pathos and power of some
affecting visitation may suspend, but which no visitation can
ultimately quell ; and after a brief season of sighs, and sensi
bilities, and tears, the man emerges again to as whole-hearted a
secularity as before. Thus it is, that the thousand funerals
which from childhood to age he may have attended, have only

* See " Memoirs of Dr. Chalmers," vol. ii. pp. 227-232, cheap edition.

558 ON THE DEATH OF THE

cradled him into a profounder spiritual lethargy ; and that the
frequent wrecks of mortality, through which he has ploughed
his way on the ocean of life, have only stamped a sort of
weather-beaten hardihood upon his squl. The man is more
and more seasoned as it were, by every repetition of death,
against its terrors, till at last himself dies in deep and hopeless
apathy.

Such, we fear, is mainly the sad history of the world through
out its successive generations. Such is the infatuation of men
walking in a vain show ; and only more confirmed by every in
stance of death in false and fatal security. There is no question
it ought to be otherwise. Every partaker of our nature who
dies, should impressively remind us of our own mortality.
Every exemplification of the unsparing and universal law, should
be borne homeward in pointed and personal application to our
selves. There is not a human creature however insignificant,
who, simply by the act of expiring, should not speak to us in
accents of deepest seriousness ; and tell, with an eloquence not to
be resisted, of our own approaching end, our own sudden arrest
or dying agonies. All the tokens and mementoes of death should
have this effect upon us — as every funeral bell, every open grave,
every procession that day after day moves along our streets, and
scarcely arrests the eye of the heedless passenger. Nor is it
necessary that he should be a man of rank, or talent, or com
manding influence, or wide and general popularity, who is thus
borne along. Enough, if he be flesh of our flesh, and bone of
our bone. The humblest of menials is fitted to be our monitor
on such an occasion. Even he when dead speaketh ; and if he
do not effectually convince, he will at least most emphatically
condemn.

I need not say to this assembly of mourners, in what more
striking and impressive form the lesson has been given to us.
It is just as if death had wanted to make the highest demonstra
tion of his sovereignty, and for this purpose had selected as his
mark him who stood the foremost, and the most conspicuous in
the view of his countrymen. I speak not at present of any of
the relations in which he stood to the living society immediately
around him — to the thousands in church whom his well-known
voice reached upon the Sabbath — to the tens of thousands in
the city, whom, through the week, in the varied rounds and
meetings of Christian philanthropy, he either guided by his
counsel or stimulated by his eloquence. You know, over and

KEY. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 559

above, how far the wide, and the wakeful, and the nntirecl bene
volence of his nature carried him ; and that, in the labours and
the locomotions connected with these, he may be said to have
become the personal acquaintance of the people of Scotland.
Insomuch that there is not a village in the land, where the tid
ings of his death have not conveyed the intimation that a mas
ter in Israel has fallen ; and, I may also add, that such was the
charm of his companionship, such the cordiality lighted up by
his presence in every household, that connected with this death,
there is at this moment an oppressive sadness in the hearts of
many thousands even of our most distant Scottish families. And
so a national lesson has been given forth by this event, even as
a national loss has been incurred by it. It is a public death in
the view of many spectators. And when one thinks of the vital
energy by which every deed and every utterance were pervaded
— of that prodigious strength which but gamboled with the diffi
culties that would have so depressed and overborne other men —
of that prowess in conflict, and that promptitude in counsel with
his fellows — of that elastic buoyancy which ever rose with the
occasion, and bore him onward and upward to the successful
termination of his cause — of the weight and multiplicity of his
engagements ; and yet, as if nothing could overwork that colossal
mind, and that robust framework, the perfect lightness and fa
cility wherewith all was executed — when one thinks, in the
midst of these powers and these performances, how intensely he
laboured, I had almost said, how intensely he lived, in the midst
of us, we cannot but acknowledge that death, in seizing upon
him, hath made full proof of a mastery that sets all the might
and all the promise of humanity at defiance.

But while in no possible way could general society have,
through means of but one individual example, been more im
pressively told of the power of death — to you, in particular, it
is a lesson of deepest pathos. The world at large can form no
estimate of the tenderness which belongs to the spiritual re
lationship, though I trust that on this topic, mysterious to them,
yet familiar, I hope and believe, to many of you, I now spe;:k
to a goodly number who can own him as their spiritual father.
But even they who are strangers to the power and reality cf
these things, may comprehend the growing attachment of hearers
to the minister, who, Sabbath after Sabbath, imparts to them of
his own mental wealth, and excites in them somewhat of his
own moral and religious earnestness. Even, apart from all per-

500 ON THE DEATH OF THE

sonal acquaintance or intercourse, a sympathy with the personal
ministrations of the clergyman under whom you sit, often draws
a very close and binding affinity along with it. The man with
the very tones of whose voice you associate many of your most
pleasing and hallowed recollections — the man to whom you feel
yourselves indebted for the most delightful Sabbaths of other
days — he who guided your devotions, and cleared away your
difficulties, and pointed your path to heaven, and first opened
the method of salvation, and, by his expostulations, and his
arguments, was the instrument of determining you to forsake all,
and follow after Christ — every Christian can tell, that to that
man there attaches an interest of no ordinary tenderness and
force. Even a general and unconverted hearer may share in
this affection — although only his understanding was regaled by
the pulpit demonstration ; or his imagination by its splendour
and eloquence ; or his conscience, so far impressed as at least to
recognise the general truth of the principles, and the perfect
moral honesty and earnestness of him who urges and expounds
them. Tho man who is frank and fearless and able, and, above
all, whose heart was fully charged with what may be called the
brotherhood of our nature ; whose every look and utterance be
spoke the strength of his own convictions, and the intensity of
his zeal to plant them in the bosoms of other men — that man
would, in the course of months or of years, become the general
friend of the multitude whom he addresses ; apart from all
separate converse and fellowship with the individuals who com
pose it. Though only the pulpit acquaintance, and not at all
the personal of the many hundreds who listen to him, yet in
this capacity alone might he obtain a mighty hold of their affec
tions notwithstanding. At once the soul and mouth of the con
gregation, he is on high vantage-ground for such an ascendency.
He speaks as it were from a pre-eminence, and, having all the
moral forces of the gospel at command, it is incalculable with
what sure and general effect, a minister even of ordinary talents,
if but of acknowledged honesty and worth, can subdue the
people under him. But his was no ordinary championship ; and
although the weapons of our spiritual warfare are the same in
every hand, we all know that there was none who wielded them
more vigorously than he did, or who, with such an arm of might
and voice of resistless energy, carried, as if by storm, the con
victions of his people. That such an arm should now be motion
less, that such a voice should be for ever hushed in deep and

REV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 561

unbroken silence, is to all a thought of profoundest melancholy.
But he was the special property of his hearers, and to them it
comes far more urgently and impressively home, than does any
general object of touching or tragic contemplation. To them it
is a personal bereavement — and whether or not on the terms
with him of individual converse, they droop and are in heaviness,
because of their now widowed Sabbaths, their bereft and deso
lated sanctuary.

But(the lesson is prodigiously enhanced, when we pass from
his pulpit to his household ministrations. I perhaps do him
wrong, in supposing that any large proportion of his hearers did
not know him personally — for such was his matchless superiority
to fatigue, such the unconquerable strength and activity of his
nature, that he may almost be said to have accomplished a sort
of personal ubiquity among his people. But ere you can appre
ciate the whole effect of this, let me advert to a principle of very
extensive operation in nature. Painters know it well. They
nre aware how much it adds to the force and beauty of any
representation of theirs, when made strikingly and properly to
contrast with the background on which it is projected. And the
same is as true of direct nature, set forth in one of her own im
mediate scenes, as of reflex nature, set forth by the imagination
jind pencil of an artist. This is often exemplified in those Alpine
wilds, where beauty may, at times, be seen embosomed in the
lap of grandeur — as when, at the base of a lofty precipice, some
spot of verdure, or peaceful cottage-home, seems to smile in more
intense loveliness, because of the towering strength and magni
ficence which are behind it. Apply this to character, and think
how precisely analogous the effect is — when, from the ground
work of a character that, mainly, in its texture and general
aspect is masculine, there do effloresce the forth-puttings of a
softer nature, and those gentler charities of the heart, which
come out irradiated in tenfold beauty, when they arise from a
substratum of moral strength and grandeur underneath. It is
thus, when the man of strength shows himself the man of
tenderness ; and he who, sturdy and impregnable in every righ
teous cause, makes his graceful descent to the ordinary compan
ionships of life, is found to mingle, with kindred warmth, in all
the cares and the sympathies of his fellow-men. Such, I am sure,
is the touching recollection of very many who now hear me, and
who can tell, in their own experience, that the vigour of his
pulpit was only equalled by the fidelity and the tenderness of

VOL. m. ^ N

562 ON THE DEATH OF THE

his household ministrations. They understand the whole force
and significancy of the contrast I have now been speaking of —
when the pastor of the church becomes the pastor of the family ;
and he who, in the crowded assembly, held imperial sway over
every understanding, entered some parent's lowly dwelling, and
prayed and wept along with them over their infant's dying bed.
It is on occasions like these when the minister carries to its high
est pitch the moral ascendency which belongs to his station. It
is this which furnishes him with a key to every heart — and, when
the triumphs of charity are superadded to the triumphs of argu
ment, then it is that he sits enthroned over the affections of a
willing people.

But I dare not venture any further on this track of observa
tion. While yet standing aghast at a death which has come
upon us all with the rapidity of a whirlwind, it might be easy,
by means of a few touching and graphic recollections, to raise
a tempest of emotion in the midst of you. It might be easy to
awaken, in vivid delineation to the view of your mind, him who
but a few days ago trod upon the streets of our city with the
footsteps of firm manhood ; and took part, with all his accus
tomed earnestness and vigour, in the busy concerns of living
men. We could image forth the intense vitality which beamed
in every look, and kept up, to the last moment, the incessant
play of a mind that was the fertile and ever-eddying fountain of
just and solid thoughts. We could ask you to think of that
master-spirit, with what presiding efficacy, yet with what perfect
lightness and ease, he moved among his fellow-men ; and,
whether in the hall of debate, or in the circles of private convi
viality, subordinated all to his purposes and views. We could
fasten your regards on that dread encounter, when Death met
this most powerful and resolute of men upon his way, and, laying
instant arrest upon his movements, held him forth, in view of
the citizens, as the proudest, while the most appalling of his
triumphs. We could bid you weep at the thought of his agonized
family — or rather, hurrying away from this big and unsupport-
able distress, we would tell of the public grief and the public
consternation, and how the tidings of some great disaster flew
from household to household, till, under the feeling of one com
mon and overwhelming bereavement, the whole city became a
city of mourners. We could recall to you that day when the
earth was committed to the earth from which it came ; and the
deep seriousness that sat on every countenance bespoke, not the

REV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 563

pageantry, but the whole power and reality of wo. We could
point to his closing sepulchre, and read to you there the. oft-
repeated lesson of man's fading and evanescent glories. But we
gladly, my brethren, we gladly make our escape from all these
images, and all these sentiments, of oppressive melancholy. We
would fain take refuge in other views, and betake ourselves to
some other direction. What I should like, if I could accomplish
it, were to take a calm and deliberate survey of a character, the
exposition of which would, in fact, be the exposition of certain
great principles, that I might hold up to your reverence and
your practical imitation. It is thus, in fact, that he, though
dead, yet speaks unto you. In attempting the office of an inter
preter between the dead arid the living, I feel the whole difficulty
of the task which has been put into my hands ; and I have to
crave the indulgence of my fellow-mourners for one, who, after
a preparation of infirmity and sorrow, now addresses them in
fear, and in weakness, and with much trembling.

My observations will resolve themselves into two heads — the
character of the theologian, and the character of the man : and
in the prosecution of which, I trust that both the influences of
sound doctrine and of sound example may be brought to bear
upon you.

First, then, in briefest possible definition, his was the olden
theology of Scotland. A thoroughly devoted son of our Church,
he was, through life, the firm, the unflinching advocate of its
articles, and its formularies, and its rights, and the whole polity
of its constitution and discipline. His creed he derived, by in
heritance, from the fathers of the Scottish Eeformation — not,
however, as based on human authority, but as based and up-
holden on the authority of Scripture alone. Its two great articles
are — Justification, only by the righteousness of Christ — Sancti-
fication, only by that Spirit which Christ is commissioned to
bestow — the one derived to the believer by faith ; the other
derived by faith too, because obtained and realized in the exer
cise of believing prayer. This simple and sublime theology,
connecting the influences of Heaven with the moralities of earth,
did the founders of our Church incorporate, by their catechisms,
with the education of the people ; and, through the medium of a
clergy, who maintained their orthodoxy and their zeal for several
generations, was it faithfully and efficiently preached in all the
parishes of the land. The whole system originated in deepest
piety ; and has resulted in the formation of the most moral and

564 ON THE DEATH OF THE

intelligent peasantry in Europe. Yet, in spite of this palpable
evidence in its favour, it fell into discredit. Along with the
elegant literature of our sister country, did the meagre Armini-
anism of her church make invasion among our clergy ; and we
certainly receded for a time from the good old way of our fore
fathers. This was the middle age of the Church of Scotland, an
age of cold and feeble rationality, when Evangelism was derided
as fanatical, and its very phraseology was deemed an ignoble and
vulgar thing, in the upper classes of society. A morality with
out godliness — a certain prettiness of sentiment, served up in
tasteful and well-turned periods of composition — the ethics of
Philosophy, or of the academic chair, rather than the ethics of
the gospel — the speculations of Natural Theology, and perhaps
an ingenious and scholar-like exposition of the credentials, rather
than a faithful exposition of the contents of the New Testament
— These for a time dispossessed the topics of other days, and
occupied that room in our pulpits, which had formerly been given
to the demonstrations of sin, and of the Saviour. You know
there has been a reflux. The tide of sentiment has been turned ;
and there is none who has given it greater momentum, or borne
it more triumphantly along, than did the lamented pastor of this
congregation. His talents and his advocacy have thrown a lustre
around the cause. The prejudices of thousands have given way
before the might and the mastery of his resistless demonstrations.
The evangelical system has of consequence risen, has risen pro
digiously of late years, in the estimation of general society —
connected to a great degree, we doubt not, under the blessing of
God, with his powerful appeals to Scripture, and his no less
powerful appeals to the consciences of men.

But in the doing of this great service to the Christianity of
the nation, he has laid you, his individual hearers, under a heavy
load of responsibility for yourselves. You will never forget, I
trust, either the terror of his loud and emphatic denunciations ;
or what is still more persuasive, the urgency of his beseeching
voice. You will remember the powerful and the pleading
earnestness wherewith he hath so often dealt forth upon you the
impressive simplicities of the gospel — as that Christ is the only
Saviour ; and the way of His prescribed holiness the only road to
a blissful immortality. Your personal Christianity, my brethren,
would be his best and noblest memorial — the most satisfactory
evidence, that through the organs of recollection and conscience,
he was still speaking to you. Often hath he plied you with the

EEV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 565

warnings of Scripture ; and now God Himself bath interposed,
and superadded to these the solemn warning of Providence. He
hath recalled His ambassador, and you will soon follow him to
the reckoning — him to give account of his ministry ; and you,
on this principle of gospel equity, that to whom much is given,
of him much will be required — you to give account of the fruit
of his ministrations.

I can afford to say no more on the character of his theology —
but, additional to this and distinct from this, I would speak of
what I term a characteristic of his theology. I beg you will
attend for a moment to the difference of these two. The cha
racter is general, and that which he had in common with the
members of a class — the characteristic is special, or that by
which his own individual theology was signalized, and by which
I think it was ennobled. Could I make myself intelligible on
this matter, it might furnish a cipher for the explanation of
what many have called his peculiarities ; but, instead of which,
you would at once see the great and the high principle which
gave birth to them all.

The indispensable brevity of this explanation, both adds to
the difficulty of my task, and forms a call on your more strenu
ous and sustained attention to me.

There is a distinction made by moralists, between the deter
minate and the indeterminate virtues. I will not attempt to
define, but I will illustrate this distinction by an example.

Justice is a determinate virtue, and why ? — because the precise
line which separates it from its opposite, admits of being drawn
with rigid and arithmetical precision ; and he who transgresses
this line by the minutest fraction, is clearly and distinctly charge
able with injustice. It is thus that, in respect of this particular
virtue, there may turn, on the difference of a single farthing, the
utmost difference, or, I should rather say, the most distinct and
diametric opposition between two characters. He who defrauds
or steals, though but to the amount of a farthing, not only
differs in degree, but differs in kind, or belongs to a distinct and
opposite genus of character, from him whom no temptation could
ever lead to swerve from the unbending and rectilineal course of
virtue — who would recoil with the utmost moral determination
and delicacy from the slightest deviation ; and would feel as if
principle had struck its surrender, and was now lying prostrate
and degraded, should he enter by a single inch, or plant one foot
step on the forbidden territory.

566 ON THE DEATH OF THE

Generosity, again, is an indeterminate virtue, and why? — be
cause there is no such definite line of separation between this
virtue and its counterpart vice, as that you could pass by instant
transition from it to its opposite. It does not proceed by arith
metical differences of a farthing more or less. You could not, as
in the place of distinction between justice and injustice, put
your finger at the point where, in respect of this virtue of gene-
ros'ity, two men, by ever so little on the opposite sides of it,
stood contrasted in diametric opposition to each other. The man
who differs from his neighbour in withholding the farthing that
is due, differs as much from him, as a vice does from its opposite
virtue. The man who differs from his neighbour in withholding
the farthing that would have brought his donation to an equality
with the other's, only differs, not in kind but in degree and that
very imperceptibly, being only a little less liberal, and a little
less generous than his fellow. In the determinate virtue, one,
by a single farthing or a single footstep, might pass from a state
of pure and exalted morality to a state of crime. In the inde
terminate, there is what painters would call a shading off — a
melting of hues into each other — a slow and insensible gradua
tion.

It is not, then, with a determinate, as with an indeterminate
virtue. You cannot tamper with it, even to the extent of the
humblest fraction, without making an entire sacrifice. It has its
palpable and precise landmark ; and you cannot permit the
encroachment of a single hair-breadth, without a virtual giving
up of the whole territory. This princple is fully recognised in
the ethics of Scripture : " He who is unfaithful in the least, is
unfaithful also in much." Who would ever think of doing away
the turpitude or the disgrace fulness of theft, by alleging the
paltriness and insignificance of the thing stolen ? It is thus that
the little pilferments of household service ; the countless pecca
dilloes which go on in the departments of business and con
fidential agency ; the innumerable freedoms which are currently
practised, and that without remorse, along the line which separ
ates the just from the unjust — do bespeak a fearful relaxation of
principle in society. And it is thus also, on the other hand, that
the purest and most honourable virtue, even to the extent of a
moral chivalry, may be exemplified in littles. And, on the re
verse position, that u he who is faithful in the least, is faithful
also in much," may the Christian domestic, in the perfect sa-
credness and safety of all that is committed to her, even to the

REV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 567

minutest articles of her custody and care, show forth the heroism
of sublimest principle.

A determinate virtue can no more bear to be violated, eve&
though only by one footstep of encroachment, than an independ
ent country can bear an entrance upon its border, though only
by half a mile, on the part of an invading army. It is enough,
in either instance, if the line be only crossed, to call forth in the
one case the remonstrances of offended principle, and, in the
other, the resistance and the fire of indignant patriotism. In
neither example, needs the material harm to have been of any
sensible amount, that in both there might be the utmost feeling
of a moral violence.

Before applying this principle to the object of appreciating the
character of our dear and departed friend, let me remark, that
Scripture, all over, is full of the principle, and full of the most
striking and pertinent illustrations of it. u Thou mayest not
eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In
the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." This was a
determinate prohibition — and by the eating, though it had only
been of one apple, complete and conclusive outrage was done to
it. The tree, uninjured by this act of disobedience, might, in
the profusion of its golden clusters, have stood forth, to all
appearance, in as great wealth arid loveliness as before. But a
definite commandment was broken ; and therein it was that
the whole damage and desecration lay. The jurisprudence of
heaven was at stake ; and so, on this solitary apple hinged the
fate of our world. Infidels deride the history. Like those
wretched arithmetical moralists, who make virtue an affair of
product and not of principle, they are unable to see how the
moral grandeur of the transaction just rises, in proportion to the
humility of its material accompaniments ; and so, in the event
of our earth burdened with a curse to its latest generations, do
we behold at once the truth of our principle, and terrible demon
stration given to the unbroken sanctity of the Godhead.

And the same principle ever and anon breaks forth in the
subsequent dealings of God with the world. Let me only in
stance from the history of Israel's entrance into the promised
land. The silver and the gold that were taken from their ene
mies, were all to be brought as consecrated things into the trea
sury of the Lord. This was a determinate precept; and just
because of one violation, the progress of the Jewish victories
was arrested, and the frown of Heaven's offended authority

568 ON THE DEATH OF THE

spread disaster and dismay over the hosts of Israel. It was
Achan's accursed thing which distempered for a time, and was
like to have blasted the whole undertaking. They were his
goodly Babylonish garment, and wedge of gold, and two hun
dred shekels of silver — secreted in the midst of an otherwise im
maculate camp — that called forth the resentment and the reckon
ing of a God of vengeance ; and, not till the whole burden of
this provocation was swept away — not till the offence, and the
offending household, were taken forth from the midst of the con
gregation and destroyed — did God turn Him from the fierceness
of His anger, or was the jealousy of Heaven appeased, because of
the injury done to a commandment intact and inviolable.

And, lastly, what has been so often exemplified in the history
of the Old, is alike exemplified in the doctrines and declarations
of the New Testament. "A man," says the apostle, "is not
justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus
Christ." This is a determinate principle ; but the judaizing
Christians would fain have introduced one slight and circum
stantial exception to it. They made a stand for the rite of cir
cumcision ; and were willing that all the other works of the
law should be discharged from the matter of our justifying
righteousness, were there only, along with the faith of Christ, a
place found for this distinguishing ordinance of their nation. It
is against this demand and predilection of the Jews that the
apostle sets himself, in his Epistle to the Galatians — where he
rejects the compromise ; and proves, by admirable reasoning,
that it would not only deform the faith of the Gospel, but de
stroy it.

Admit this, trifling though it may appear, and "Christ is
dead in vain ; " you have fallen from your dependence upon Him,
and He has " become of no effect unto you." It is thus, that this
bold, this uncompromising champion of the Church's purity, has
bequeathed, in this epistle, a precious example to the Christian
ministers of all ages. What Luther, after him, called the
article of a standing or a falling church, is here defended from
the contact and the contamination of every deleterious ingredi
ent. The materiel of a sinner's justification with God, instead
of being partitioned, as many would have it, between the right
eousness of Christ and the righteousness of man, is strenuously
contended for by the apostle in this argument, as being pure,
unmixed, and homogeneous. The Epistle to the Galatians is a
composition charged throughout with the very essence of prin-

REV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 569

cipie ; and the thing to be noted is, that while in appearance
Paul is only warding off from the religion of Christ a misplaced
or incongruous ceremony, he embarks the whole of his apostolic
strength and apostolic zeal upon the contest, and is, in fact,
fighting for the foundations of the faith.

This will at once prepare you to understand, what I have
taken the liberty of terming a characteristic of his theology,
whose general character I have described as being the theology
of the Church of Scotland. The peculiarity lay in this, that
present him with a measure, and he, of all other men, saw at
once, and with the force of instant discernment, the principle
that was embodied in it. And did that principle belong to the
class of the determinate, he furthermore saw, with every sound
moralist before him, that he could not recede, by one inch or
hair-breadth, from the assertion of it, without making a virtual
surrender of the whole. The point of resistance, then, it is
obvious, must be at the beginning of the mischief — or at that
part in the border of the vineyard, where it first threatened to
make inroad. It was there he planted his footstep ; and there,
with the might and prowess of a champion, did he ward off
from our Church many a hurtful and withering contamination.
His was never a puerile or unmeaning conflict — but a conflict of
high moral elements. It was the warfare of a giant, enlisted on
the side of some great principle ; and, with a heart always in
the right place, it was this which imparted a substantial recti
tude to every cause, and threw a moral grandeur over all his
controversies.

You are aware that no two things can be more dissimilar
than a religion of points and a religion of principles. No one
will suspect his of being a religion of senseless or unmeaning
points. Altogether, there was a manhood in his understanding
— a strength and a firmness in the whole staple of his mind, as
remote as possible from whatever is weakly and superstitiously
fanciful. It is therefore, you will find, that whenever he laid
the stress of his zeal or energy on a cause — instead of a stress
disproportionate to its importance, there was always the weight
of some great, some cardinal principle underneath to sustain it.
It is thus, that every subject he undertook was throughout
charged with sentiment. The whole drift and doings of the
man were instinct with it ; and that, too, sentiment fresh from
the word of God, or warm with generous enthusiasm for the best
interests of the Church and of the species.

570 ON THE DEATH OF THE

There is one peculiarity by which he was signalized above all
his fellows ; and which makes him an incalculable loss, both to
the Church and to the country at large. We have known men of
great power, but they wanted promptitude ; and we have known
men of great promptitude, but they wanted power. The former,
if permitted to concentrate their energies on one great object,
may, by dint of a riveted perseverance, succeed in its accomplish
ment — but they cannot bear to have this concentration broken
up ; and it is torture to all their habits, when assailed by the
importunity of those manifold and miscellaneous applications, to
which every public man is exposed, from the philanthropy of our
modern day. The latter again — that is, they who have the
promptitude but not the power, facility without force, and whose
very lightness favours both the exceeding variety and velocity of
their movements — why, they are alert and serviceable, and can
acquit themselves in a respectable way of any slender or second
ary part which is put into their hands ; but then, they want pre
dominance and momentum in any one direction to which they
may betake themselves. But in him, never did such ponderous
faculties meet with such marvellous power of wielding them at
pleasure — insomuch, that even on the impulse of most unforeseen
occasions, he could bring them immediately to bear, and that
with sweeping and resistless effect, on the object before him.
Such a combination of forces enlisted, as all within him was, on
the side of Christianity, would have been of incalculable service
in this our day. It is true, the land in which we live is yet free
from the taint and the scandal of so gross an abomination ; but
you cannot fail to have remarked, how, mixed up with their ran
corous politics, there have of late been the frequent outbreakings
of a coarse and revolting impiety in the popular meetings of Eng
land. In the whole compass of the moral world, we know riot a
more hideous spectacle than plebeian infidelity, with its rude
invectives, its savage and boisterous outcry against all the re
straints and institutions of the gospel. If, indeed, our next war
is to be a war of principles, then, before the battle is begun, the
noblest of our champions has fallen. Yet we dare not give up
in despondency, a cause which has truth for its basis, and the
guarantee of Heaven's omnipotence for its complete and everlast
ing triumph. In this reeling of the nations, this gradual loosen
ing of all spirits from the ancient holds of habit and of principle
— still we cannot fear that the church, the one and indestructible
church, though tossed and cradled in the storm, will not be

REV. DR. ANDREW THOMSON. 571

riveted more securely upon its basis. " We are distressed, but
not in despair ; troubled, yet not forsaken ; cast down, yet not
destroyed." " Help, Lord, when the godly man ceaseth, and the
righteous fail from the children of men."

But let me again offer one word of special address to the
members of his congregation. I have spoken of his resistance
to compromise in all the great matters of Christian faith and
Christian practice. Let me entreat, that though dead, he may
still speak this lesson to you. I would rather, and I am quite
sure that all along he would, that your security before God rested
altogether on works, or altogether on grace, rather than that,
like the feet of Nebuchadnezzar's image, partly of clay, and
partly of iron, it rested on the motley foundation of two unlike
and heterogeneous ingredients. Hold fast what you have gotten
from him on this subject ; and be assured, that if, forgetful of the
decision and distinctness of his principles, you ever shall listen
with pleasure to him who vacillates from the one to the other,
or would attempt a composition between the righteousness of
man and the righteousness of Christ — there is not a likelier me
thod in which shipwreck can be made both of the faith and the
piety of this congregation. And you know, that while none more
clear and confident than he in preaching the dogmata of his
creed, he was far, and very far from being a preacher of dogmata
alone. You recollect his earnest enforcement of duty in all that
concerned the relation between God and man, and in all that
concerned the relations of human society. But it was duty
bottomed on an evangelical groundwork — even on those deep
and well-laid principles of belief, by which alone the righteous
ness of the life and practice is upholden. He was truly a preacher
of faith — yet his last words in this pulpit may be regarded as
his dying testimony to the worth of that charity which is greater
than faith. I do not mean the charity of a mere contribution
by the hand ; but the charity of that love in the heart, which
prompts to all the services of humanity.*

I must now satisfy myself with a few slight and rapid touches
on his character as a man. It is a subject I dare hardly ap
proach. To myself, he was at all times a joyous, hearty, gallant,
honourable, and out-and-out most trustworthy friend — while, in
harmony with a former observation, there were beautifully pro
jected on this broad and general groundwork, some of friendship's

* His la«t sermon, preached with all his accustomed earnestness and zeal, was a pleading
in bnhalf of the Infirmary of Edinburgh.

572 ON THE DEATH OF DR. ANDREW THOMSON.

finest and most considerate delicacies. By far the most declared
and discernible feature in his character, was a dauntless, and
direct, and right-forward honesty, that needed no disguise for
itself, and was impatient of aught like dissimulation or disguise
in other men. There were withal a heart and a hilarity in his
companionship, that everywhere carried its own welcome along
with it ; and there were none who moved with greater accept
ance, or wielded a greater ascendant over so wide a circle of
living society. Christianity does not overbear the constitutional
varieties either of talent or of temperament. After the conver
sion of the apostles, their complexional differences of mind and
character remained with them ; and there can be no doubt that,
apart from, and anterior to the influence of the gospel, the hand
of nature had stamped a generosity, and a sincerity, and an open
ness on the subject of our description, among the very strongest
of the lineaments which belong to him. Under an urgent sense
of rectitude, he delivered himself with vigour and with vehe
mence, in behalf of what he deemed to be its cause — but I would
have you to discriminate between the vehemence of passion and
the vehemence of sentiment, which, like though they be in out
ward expression, are wholly different and dissimilar in them
selves. His was, mainly, the vehemence of sentiment, which,
hurrying him when it did, into what he afterwards felt to be ex
cesses, were immediately followed up by the relentings of a noble
nature. The pulpit is not the place for the idolatry of an un
qualified panegyric on any of our fellow-mortals — but it is
impossible not to acknowledge, that whatever might have been
his errors, he was right at bottom — that truth, and piety, and
ardent philanthropy formed the substratum of his character ; and
that the tribute was altogether a just one, when the profoundest
admiration, along with the pungent regrets of his fellow-citizens,
did follow him to his grave.

ON PREACHING TO THE COMMON PEOPLE. 573

SERMON XIII.

(Delivered at the Opening of the Dean Church, near Edinburgh, May 15, 1836.)*

ON PREACHING TO THE COMMON PEOPLE.
"And the common people heard him gladly." — MARK xii. 37.

Two discourses might be framed on this text — one addressed
to the preachers of sermons, and another to the hearers of ser
mons. The great topic of the first should be the example of our
Saviour as a preacher ; and the great topic held out should be
that He preached to the delight and acceptance of the common
people. There is no doubt the vanity of popular applause ; but
there is also the vanity of an ambitious eloquence, which throws
the common people at a distance from our instructions altogether ;
which, in laying itself out for the admiration of the tasteful and
enlightened few, locks up the bread of life from the multitude ;
which destroys this essential attribute of the gospel, that it is a
message of glad tidings to the poor ; and wretchedly atones by
the wisdom of words, for the want of those plain and intelligible
realities which all may apprehend and by which all may be
edified. Now the great aim of our ministry is to win souls ; and
the soul of a poor man consists of precisely the same elements
with the soul of a rich. They both labour under the same
disease, and they both stand in need of the same treatment. The
physician who administers to their bodies brings forward the
same application to the same malady ; and the physician who is
singly intent on the cure of their souls will hold up to both the
same peace-speaking blood, and the same sanctifying Spirit, and
will preach to both in the same name, because the only name
given under heaven whereby men can be saved. If he do other
wise, then is he preaching himself, instead of giving an entire
and honest aim to the management of the case that is before him ;
and does the same provoking injustice to his hearers with the
physician who expends his visit in playing off the pedantry of

* See " Memoirs of Dr. Chalmers," voL ii. p. 347, cheap edition.

574: ON PREACHING TO

airs and manners before the eyes of his agonizing patient — when
he should be binding up his wounds, or letting him know in plain
language a plain and practicable remedy.

We hear of the orator of fashion, the orator of the learned, the
orator of the mob. A minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ
should be none of these ; and if an orator at all, it should be his
distinction that he is an orator of the species. He should look
beyond the accidental and temporary varieties of our condition ;
and recognise in every one who comes within his reach, the same
affecting spectacle of a soul forfeited by sin, and that can only
be restored by one Lord, one faith, one baptism. In the person
of Nicodemus, it is likely, that both wealth and learning stood
before the Saviour ; but to His eye, these appear to have been
paltry and perishable distinctions. He took up this case in pre
cisely the same way that He would have done the case of one of
the common people. They both laboured tinder the malignity
of the same disease ; and both, to be made meet for the inherit
ance, had to undergo the same regeneration. The varieties of
fortune and accomplishment were of no importance at all in His
argument. They were utterly insignificant as to the great pur
pose which He had in view. He reasoned on the great elements
of flesh and spirit, in which rich and poor are alike implicated ;
and when He described the mighty transition from the one to
the other, it was not a flowery path to heaven to which He
pointed the eye of the Jewish ruler, to be trodden only by him
and by his companions in fortune and in fine sentiment. It is
the one and universal path for every son and daughter of Adam,
who have all to undergo the same death, and to stand before the
same, judgment-seat, and to inherit their undying portion, whether
of weal or of wo, in the same eternity. In the view and consi
deration of such mighty interests as these, we should give up the
partial and insignificant distinctions of time and of society, be
tween one member of the great human family and another. They
are men and the souls of men that we have to deal with ; and let
it be our single aim to deal with them plainly, impressively, and
faithfully.

It is true that ere we completed our lesson to the preachers of
sermons, we behoved to advert to another principle, for which
we have the sanction of apostolic example, even that of Paul,
who was all things to all men, that he might gain some. But
we must now hasten to address the hearers of sermons. It was
saying more for the common people of Judea that they heard

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 575

the Saviour gladly, than for the Scribes and Pharisees who heard
Him with envy, prejudice, and opposition ; and it is saying more
for the common people of this country, that they hear the doc
trine of Christ gladly, than for those learned who call that doc
trine foolishness, for those men of taste who call it fanaticism,
for those men of this world who call it a methodistical reverie,
for those men of fashion and fine sentiment who shrink from the
peculiarities of our faith, with all the disgust of irritated pride
and offended delicacy. What the common people of Judea were
in reference to the rulers of Judea, many of the common people
of our day are in reference to the majority, we fear, of those who
are to be met with in the walks of genteel and cultivated life —
the scoffers and Sabbath-breakers of the day, or the men perhaps
who take a kind of religion along with them, but take it in
moderation ; who think that to strike the high tone of Christ
and His apostles would be to carry the matter too far ; who think
that a great deal of what is said about sin and the sacrifice for
sin is only meet for vulgar ears ; who hear a sermon because it
is decent to be exemplary ; and who even read a sermon, and
will read it to the end, if it carry them gently along through
the rich and beauteous track of a polished composition ; but who
would be very ready to throw it aside, if it alarm too much their
fears, or tell too much with energy upon their consciences.
Now, we are willing to acquit those who are here present of all
these unchristian peculiarities. We are willing to think that
both the doctrine of Scripture and the language of Scripture are
agreeable to you, arid that you do not feel as if either the one or
the other could be carried too far ; that there is no false taste,
no lofty imagination about you, disposing you to resist the fulness
or simplicity of the New Testament ; and that the voice of the
preacher never falls more sweetly upon your ears, than when he
tells of the. great things which the Saviour hath done for you.
Now, it is well that, like the common people of our text, you
hear the word with gladness ; but we want to impress it upon
you that something more than this is indispensable. We are
jealous over you, and we trust with a godly jealousy. We fear
that there are many who are satisfied with a mere liking for the
sound of Christian doctrine in their ears, while utter strangers
to the influence of Christian doctrine in their hearts ; who think
it enough that they have a taste for the faith, while they give
no proof of obedience to the faith ; who are mere hearers of the
word, but not doers of the word ; who feel as if the great use of

576 ON PREACHING TO

a sermon was to hear it, and to judge of it, and if they are
pleased, to approve of it, and then, with them, the great purpose
for which said sermon was delivered is forthwith accomplished.
There is no more of it. It is like a business settled and set by.
The minister preached, and the people were pleased, and there
is an end of the affair. They go back to their homes and their
merchandise; and they go just as they came, carrying along
with them not one trace of a living impression on their hearts,
their principles, or their consciences. What they have heard
may be talked of for some days, or remembered for some months ;
but if in a week or a fortnight after it, the question is put, Can
you tell of any actual or discernible fruit from this said sermon ?
any closer fellowship with the Saviour in consequence of it? any
of the effects upon the man which never fail to accompany this
fellowship? any dying unto sin? any fervent desires after righ
teousness ? any pressing forward to the accomplishments of the
new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord ? any greater devotedness
to the business of sanctification ? any reformation of thieves or
drunkards? any visible influence on the peace and order of
families? any breaking down of that worldly spirit which is
enough of itself to prove the enmity of man to his God, though
there were no outward or declared profligacy in any of his ac
tions ? any dissolving of this enmity ? — in a word, any one
evidence that we can point our finger to, that this faith which is
so much professed and so much talked of, is working by love ? —
is making the soul a fit habitation for God by His Spirit? — is
bringing down the fulfilment of the promise upon it, even the
Holy Ghost given to those who. should believe? whereby the
old man is destroyed, the body of sin is mortified, all former
vanities have passed away ; and the whole man, brought under
the dominion of a new and a better principle, rises every day in
purity and loveliness of character, to a meetness for the society
of angels, for the presence of God, for the holy exercises of
heaven, for the delights of an unfading immortality.

Apply these questions to a very fond and delighted hearer ;
and how often may we find, that the thing which gave so much
pleasure to the itching ears of the man, has not had the weight
of a straw on the man himself ! It plays like music upon his
ear ; but it does not enter with the subduing energy of convic
tion into his heart. Follow him through all the business of his
varied relations at home or in society, and you see him to be
substantially the same man as before, — with all his old principles

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 577

and practices about him — living his wonted life of indulgence to
himself, and at as great a distance as ever from the new habit
of living to the Saviour who died for him. His soul persists in
all the unmoved obstinacy of its alienation from God. It still
bends to the earth, and is earthly. Time and the interests of
time retain all their wonted ascendency over it. The Judge of
the secrets of the inner man sees his heart to be as alive as ever
to the world, and as dead in affection as ever to the things which
are above. Oh, he is still the old man, and still persisting in
the deeds of it. The love of the world, which is opposite to the
love of the Father, — the selfishness of diseased nature, which is
opposite to the charity of the gospel, are still the supreme and
the urging principles of his constitution ; and they tell us that
the voice of the preacher has had no more effect upon him, than
the lullaby of a nurse's song.

We are forcibly carried to this train of reflection by the passage
which lies before us. The common people heard our Saviour
gladly ; and what, we ask, became of these common people ? To
day the mob of Jerusalem lift the hosanriahs of a far-sounding
popularity — a few days more, and they call out to crucify Him.
His admirers became His murderers : and they who at one
time heard Him gladly, at another are gladly consenting unto
His death. In a few years Jerusalem was given up to the
avenging hand of the adversary ; and these wicked men, who at
one time hung with delight upon the preaching of the Saviour,
were miserably destroyed. The plea that they had eaten and
drunken in His presence, and that He had taught in their streets,
was of no avail to them. It did not save them from the awful
doom of the workers of iniquity ; and they who at one time were
the admirers and the delighted hearers of our Saviour's doctrine,
were at another the victims of His wrath.

What was the principle of this wondrous revolution in their
sentiments respecting Christ ? We shall confine ourselves to one
summary expression of it. The whole explanation of the matter
lies here. They were willing enough for the time being to
follow the Saviour ; but they would not follow Him upon His
terms, and when these terms came to be understood, they drew
back from following Him. He had before said, that "he who
followeth after me must forsake all;" and these Jewish hearers,
when put to the trial, would not forsake their national vanity, would
not forsake their worldly prospects of interest and aggrandisement,
would not forsake their fond anticipations of a temporal prince

VOL. III. 2 O

578 ON PREACHING TO

to protect and to deliver them. While these agreeable prospects
were full in their eye, they followed Him ; but when these pro
spects vanished, and it came to denying themselves, and taking
up their cross, they ceased from following Him. They listened
to Him with delight when He told them how Christ was greater
than David; but why? — because they looked forward to the
earthly felicities of a still more prosperous reign, and a still
prouder era in their history. It was all, it would appear, a
matter of selfishness. They aspired after a share in the glories
of their anticipated monarchy, and rejoiced in the near view of
-those privileges which they conceived to lie before them : but
when, instead of privileges, it came to persecution, — when, in
stead of honour, it came to humiliation, — when, instead of soft
and silken security, it came to sacrifices, to sufferings, and self-
denial, — they shrunk from it altogether ; and, by falling away
from the contest on earth, they forfeited the crown in heaven.

And there are other examples of the same thing in the Bible.
It is said of Herod that he heard John the Baptist gladly, and
that he observed him in many things. But he did not observe
nor follow him in all things. He did not come up to the prin
ciple of forsaking all. He would not forsake his unhallowed
connexion with his brother's wife ; and when put to this proof
of his self-denial, he imprisoned the prophet, and beheaded him.

The rich man who came with the question to our Saviour
about the way to eternal life heard Him with pleasure, so long
as He did not touch upon his favourite affection. There was
no self-denial in keeping himself from those sins to which ho
felt no temptation ; arid he listened with patient satisfaction to
the recital of those commandments, all of which he had been
led by his circumstances or his natural disposition to keep from
his youth up. But when the principle of "he that followeth
after me must forsake all," was applied to his besetting sin,
he could not stand it. He could not find it in his heart to slay
or to renounce this idol. He could not give up the service of
the one master, or make an entire and unexcepted dedication of
himself to the service of the other ; and the same man who
heard Him gladly at one part of His instructions, went away
from the other question exceeding sorrowful, and withdrew bis
footsteps from that following of the Lord fully, by which alone
we can obtain an entrance into the kingdom of God.

In the parable of the sower, there are men spoken of who
heard the word with joy ; but, as a proof that the joyful hearing

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 573

of the word is one thing and the effectual receiving of it is
another, these men fell away. Persecution came, and by and
bye they were offended. They at first resolved to follow the
Saviour ; but the term of forsaking all was what they had not
strength of purpose nor depth of principle for acting up to.
They gave way in the hour of temptation ; and, rather than
forsake their ease, or their life, or their fortune, they gave up all
part and lot in the inheritance.

But, can there be a more striking example of this than at the
preaching of the apostles after the resurrection ? All Jerusalem
was filled with their doctrine, and that doctrine was listened to
with indulgence and pleasure. It is true that the interested
men took the alarm at it ; but set aside these, and we are told
that they were in favour with all the people. If an apostle
preached, he was at no loss for a multitude, and an approving
multitude too, to gather around him, and hang upon him with
admiration and delight. Had there been as many Christians as
delighted hearers among them, Jerusalem would have been the
most Christian city that ever nourished on the face of the earth.
It looked so fair and so promising, when every street poured forth
its multitudes, and they all ran together to the apostles, glorify
ing God for all which they heard and saw. Some were added
to the church of such as should be saved. But they were a
mere handful to the population of the devoted city. They were
a mere gleaning among that number who kept in awe the high-
priest and the council of Jerusalem, and restrained their violence
against the first ministers of the New Testament. Yes, they
were favourite ministers at that time, men of vast acceptance
arid popularity ; and, if to hear the word gladly with the ear
were the same thing as to receive the influence of that word
into the heart, the vengeance of a rejected Saviour might have
been averted from Jerusalem. But, alas ! the hearers of that
time must have been like many of the hearers of the present
day. They heard, and they were pleased ; but they would not
forsake all to follow. They were afraid of excommunication,
and they clung by their synagogues. They would not forsake
the approbation of their priests, and the protection of their
rulers. They clung by the superstitions, by the iniquities, by
the bigotries of Jerusalem ; and with Jerusalem they perished.

What does all this teach us? Let us come to the application.
The gospel under which we sit has two great articles. By the
one, we are invited to faith ; by the other, we are called to re-

580 ON PREACHING TO

pentance. By the one, we are offered the remission of our sins ;
by the other, we are called upon for the renunciation of our sins.
By the one, we are told of a salvation, of which if we accept,
we shall be reconciled and taken into full acceptance with God.
By the other, we are told of a salvation, of which if we accept,
we shall be regenerated by the operation of the Spirit of God.
By the one, we are graciously assured that, if we turn to Christ
as into a stronghold, we shall be safe ; and the storm of the
Divine wrath will utterly pass us by. By the other, we are
solemnly warned that, in turning to Christ, we must turn from
oar iniquities — else if the Judge find us in these on the great
day of reckoning, the fury both of a violated law and an insulted
gospel will be let loose upon us, and we borne off as by a whirl
wind to the horrors of an undone eternity. Now, the whole
secret of such an exhibition as was made by the common people
at Jerusalem, and as may still be realized by the people of the
present day, is that they like the one article, they dislike the
other — glad enough to take all that God offers, but not so glad
to perform all that God requires — giving their delighted consent
to the one, refusing it to the other — and thus running with de
light after those men of popularity and acceptance who tell
them of the faith of the New Testament, but falling away with
disaffection and distaste when told of the repentance of the New
Testament. They are joyful hearers of the word ; but our
question is, are they the obedient doers of it? Oh, it is pleasant
to be told of heaven ; and, amidst the agitations of this earthly
wilderness, to have the eye carried forward to that place of
quietness. But are you willing to take, or rather are you
actually taking the prescribed road to heaven — though that road
should lead you through manifold trials and manifold tribula
tions ? — It is soothing to listen to the preacher's voice, when he
tells you to rest in the sufficiency of the Saviour. Are you
building anything upon this foundation ? If you rest on the suf
ficiency of Christ, you will receive of that sufficiency. He will
make His grace sufficient for you ; and, perfecting His strength
in your weakness, He will make you run with delight in the way
of new obedience. — It is delightful to be told of the privileges of
the Christian faith. Are you proving yourselves to be in the
faith ? It is not a name, but a principle. It is not a thing to be
merely talked of. It is like the kingdom of heaven to which
fl carries you — not in word, but in power ; and then only does
il work with power, when it works by love and keeps the com-

THE COMMON PEOPLE. «. 581

raandments. — It is indeed a welcome sound upon a sinner's ear
that he is justified by the righteousness of Christ. Oh, it is a
faithful saying ; and the only plea upon which we have access
with confidence to God. But he who is justified is also sancti
fied, is another faithful saying ; and let us come to close ques
tioning with you — are you, or are you not, in the strength of
God's promised Spirit, making the business of your sanctification
a daily and hourly and ever-doing business? — You like to follow
the minister who preaches Christ; and, in going after him, you
have forsaken all the legalists, all the mere men of morality, all
the self-sufficient expounders of that righteousness which is by
the law. But what we ask is — do you follow Christ, and that
with an entire devotedness to Him and to Him only ? And, in
following after Him, do you forsake all ? In turning to Him, do
you turn from your iniquities? In yielding yourselves up unto
His service, do you renounce the service of sin and of the
world? — for, if not, you are like the common people of Jerusa
lem, and you will share in the judgment that came over them.
You may hear gladly ; but what does it avail, if you do not
follow faithfully ? Jerusalem which they lived in was destroyed ;
and they were destroyed along with it. The world which you
live in will be destroyed also; and, when the Judge cometh, the
plea which many of the lovers of orthodoxy may lift up, will
not serve them — " Lord, we have eaten and drunken of thy
sacraments, and pleasant to our souls was the voice of thy mes
sengers." But " then will I answer to them, I never knew you ;
depart from me, all ye that work iniquity."

But in sounding the alarm, it should be our care that it reach
far enough ; and we apprehend of this denunciation that we have
now uttered against the children of iniquity — that many are the
consciences, even of those now present, who may not be rightly
or fully affected by it. When we speak of those who work
iniquity, to the fair and passable men of society, they never once
think of including themselves in this description ; but their
thoughts go abroad to thieves and drunkards and defrauders ;
and applying to them the declaration of Scripture, that " they
who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God," they
lull their own spirits into a deep slumber. But we fall short of
our aim, if we do not awaken them too out of this fatal security ;
if we do not break up this prevalent delusion ; if we do not
reach conviction into other hearts than those of gross and noto
rious offenders. We look not for theft or drunkenness among

582 ON PREACHING TO

men of honour and decency and respect in their neighbourhood
— yet would we open their eyes too to their state of spiritual
nakedness, and tell them how it is that even they are workers of
iniquity. To them belongs that most damning of all iniquity,
the iniquity of a heart alienated from God. It is the heart
wherewith He has principally to do ; and " give me thy heart "
is the first and greatest of His commandments. The evil things
which come out of it may be more or less visible to the eye of
the world ; but He does not need to look to the stream, for His
penetrating eye reaches to the fountain-head. The world may
not see you to be a thief or a drunkard ; but He sees you, and
takes note of you as an enemy of His. He sees in that heart
of yours, the hourly and the habitual guilt of spiritual idolatry.
He sees the whole current of its affections and wishes to be
away from Himself, and fully directed to the vanities and inter
ests of the world. He sees the praise of men more sought after
than is His praise ; and, with the outside of plausibility which
you maintain before the eye of your fellows, He, the discerner
of your thoughts and intents, may see how other things are
more loved and followed than God. It is the heart that He
looks to ; and well does He see its bent and its tendency,
through all the ambiguities by which you deceive arid satisfy
your own unfaithful consciences. He takes knowledge of it
when you are too busy with your own way and your own counsel
to take knowledge of it yourselves. He follows it through the
secrecy of all its hidden movements ; nor does it escape His
notice when it disowns Him, and goes in quest of other gods —
when it casts Him off and worships idols — when it renounces
the true God, and makes a God of wealth, a God of vanity, a
God of pleasure, and as many more Gods as there are allure
ments from Himself in this deceitful world. Not a worker of
iniquity, because you do not steal ! Why, you rob God of the
property which belongs to Him, of His own rightful property in
the hearts and affections of His own children. Not a worker of
iniquity, because, in the form or the outward matter of it, yon
break riot the sixth or the eighth commandment ! Why, you
live in habitual violation of the first and greatest command
ment, which is, " Love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and
strength, and mind." Not a worker of iniquity, because you do
nothing which the world can point its finger to ! Because you
escape the finger of the world, does it follow that you can escape
the eye of God? He sees you to be a rebel against Himself;

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 583

and, with that heart of yours turned to its own vanities, with
neither the enjoyment of God for its object, nor the love of God
for its principle ; be assured that it is deceitful above all things
and desperately wicked, and is fully set in you to do that which
is evil.

The maxim, then, of forsaking all to follow after Christ, reaches
a great deal farther than to the notoriously profligate. It must
go round among all the sons and daughters of Adam. It is not
confined to the visible doings of the hand, but carries its autho
rity over the whole man, and claims more especially an absolute
dominion among the affections and wishes and tastes of the inner
man. He who hears gladly to-day, and lies or steals or defrauds
to-morrow, is not the only man that we are aiming at. He who
hears gladly to-day, and to-morrow gives his soul to any of the
perishable idols of time, instead of devoting it with all its long
ings and energies to God, is fully included in the lesson which
we are now giving to you. Delighted with the sermon, we grant
you, but not one inch of progress made toward the clean heart
and the right spirit. Lulled, Sabbath after Sabbath, as if by the
sound of a pleasant song, or of one who can play well upon an
instrument — and yet the old man persisting in all the unsubdued
obstinacy of his deep and inborn principles. Eejoicing once
a week in the house of God, as if it were the gate of heaven —
yet the whole week long giving his entire heart to the world,
and resting all his security upon the world's wealth, and the
world's enjoyments. Banning after gospel ministers, and sitting
in all the complacency of approbation under them — and yet an
utter stranger to the devotedness, to the spirituality, to the close
walk, and the godly spirit of the altogether Christian. 0 my
brethren, it bids so flattering to hear the city bells, and to see
every house pouring forth its family of worshippers — to look upon
the avenue which leads to the house of prayer, and see it all in
a glow with the crowd and bustle of passengers — to enter the
church, and see every eye fastened attentively on the man of
God, as he tells of the high matters of salvation, and presses
home the preparations of eternity upon an arrested audience.
Oh, if the charmed ear were a true and unfailing index to the
subdued heart, the business of the minister would go on so pros
perously ! But there is a power of resistance within that is above
his exertions and beyond them — there is a spirit working in the
children of disobedience which no power of human eloquence
can lay — there is an obstinate alienation from God, which God

584 ON PREACHING TO

alone can subdue ; and, unless He make a willing people in the
day of His power, the influence of the preacher's lesson will die
away with the music of his voice — the old man will be carried
out as vigorous and entire as he was carried in — the word spoken
may play upon the fancy, but it will not reach the deeply-seated
corruption which lies in the affections and the will — the serious
ness which sits so visible on every countenance, will vanish into
nothing in half an hour — the men of the world, and the things
of the world, will engross and occupy the room that is now taken
up with something like Christianity — arid all will be dissipated
into a thing of nought, when you go to your shops and your
farms and your families and your market-places.

But we must now draw to a close, and will lay before you a
few things in the way of practical application.

I. — First, then, we have no quarrel with you because you are
of the number of those who hear gladly. This is so far well.
It is one of the deadliest symptoms of those who perish, that to
them the preaching of the cross is foolishness. If such be your
indifference or aversion to the word of God, if such be your con
tempt for the opportunities of hearing it, that, now when they
are brought week after week within your reach, you will never
theless turn in distaste and dissatisfaction away — if you prefer a
Sabbath on the way-side, or a Sabbath in the fields, or a Sab
bath in sordid indolence and dissipation at home, to a Sabbath in
the solemn assembly of worshippers — Then will it sorely aggra
vate your condemnation in the great day of account, that you
refused to listen to the word when the word was brought nigh
unto you — that, rather than hear the word by which you and
your families might have been saved, you chose to perish for lack
of knowledge, even that knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ
which is life everlasting — that, when the ministers of the Most
High lifted their beseeching voice, you regarded them not — that
you preferred taking your own pleasure now, reckless of the
awful day of account and of punishment that is to come after
wards, even that day when the Judge from heaven shall appear
" in naming fire, to take vengeance on those who know not God
and who obey not the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ, when they
shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence
of the Lord and from the glory of his power." Better than this
surely is it that you should hear the word gladly, and that you
should rejoice when friends and companions say, " Let us go up
to the house of God." We have no quarrel, then, we repeat,

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 585

with your being of the number of those who are the glad hearers
of the word. Are there any here present who recollect the day
when the language of the gospel was offensive to them, but who
now listen to it with eagerness and delight? A very promising
symptom most assuredly ; and it may evidence the beginning of
a good work which God may carry forward and bring to perfec
tion.

II. — But, secondly, though your hearing gladly be a promising
symptom, it is not an infallible one. The common people of
Jerusalem heard gladly ; and we need not repeat the awful dis
aster and ruin which, in the course of a few years, overtook the
families of that common people — so that their old, and their
middle-aged, and their little ones, were miserably destroyed.
Herod heard gladly. The men who fell away in the parable of
the sower heard gladly, and you may hear gladly yet fall short
of the kingdom of God. ".Be not high-minded, but fear." "Let
him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." The
apostle tells how far a man might proceed in the characteristics
and evidences of a seeming Christianity, and yet fall irrecover
ably away. One of these characteristics is a taste for the good
word of God ; but this, so far from being of any avail to the pre
sumptuous backslider, serves the more to fix and to aggravate
his doom — the doom of a perdition from which there is no possi
bility of a recall, it being impossible, he tells us, " to renew them
again unto repentance." Keep fast then what you have gotten,
and strengthen the things which remain and are ready to die.

III. — But though to hear gladly be not an infallible symptom,
yet to hear the whole truth gladly is a much more promising
symptom than only to hear part of the truth gladly. We fear
that it is this partial liking for the word which forms the whole
amount of their affection for it, with the great majority of pro
fessing Christians. They like one part ; but they do not like
another. Some like to hear of the privileges of the gospel ; but
they do not like to hear of the precepts of the gospel, and that
the soul in whom Christ is formed the hope of glory, will purify
itself even as Christ is pure. This partial liking, so far from a
promising symptom, we count to be a very dangerous one. It is
dividing Christ. It is putting asunder the things which God
hath joined. It is giving the lie to His testimony ; and making
our own taste and our own inclination take the precedency of
God's word and of God's way. Make it a high point of duty to
listen with equal reverence and satisfaction to all God's commu-

586 ON PREACHING TO

nications. Do you listen with delight to the minister, when he
tells you to follow after Christ ? Listen with equal delight to
the minister, when he tells you that in following after Christ you
must forsake all. If this truth offend you merely when it is
spoken, how much more will it offend you when you have a call
for its being acted on ? — and thus will you fall precisely under
that description of hearers who hear with joy, but, when tempta
tion comes, by and bye they are offended. Do you listen with
delight to a sermon upon the privileges of faith, and how that all
who have it shall inherit the kingdom ? Listen with equal de
light to a sermon on the properties and influences of faith ; and
when it tells you bow it is a faith which worketh, working by
love, purifying the heart, overcoming the world. Do you listen
with delight to a sermon on the freeness of grace ; and when it
tells you how it is offered to all, and that all who will may take
of it without money and without price ? Listen with equal de
light to a sermon on the power and efficacy of grace — telling
how it frees all who are under it from the dominion of sin, how
it worketh mightily in the souls of believers, how it raises them
to newness of life, and strengthens them for all the duties and
performances of the new creature — not only teaching all men,
but enabling all men who lay hold of it, to deny ungodliness
and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in
the present evil world. It looks as if it were to guard us against
this partial liking for the word of God, that these two great
articles of Christianity, what man receives from God and what
God requires of man, under the dispensation of the gospel, — that
both of these are often placed together, side by side, within the
enclosure of one and the same verse ; so as both to be taken up
at one glance of the eye by him who reads the verse, or expressed
at one breath by him who utters it. The call of the Saviour at
the commencement of Mark is, "Eepent and believe the gospel."
The apostolic description of the great subjects of preaching is
"repentance toward God, and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ."
The office of the ascended Saviour is to " give repentance and
the remission of sins." The privileges of the believer are, that
to him "there is no condemnation ;" and "he walketh not after
the flesh, but after the Spirit/' As many as receive Christ, we
are told, receive along with him " power to walk as God's chil
dren." They who are in Christ, we are again told, are " new
creatures." And lastly, do we read of God being faithful and
just — not only " to forgive our sins but to cleanse us from all our

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 587

unrighteousness." Such passages are innumerable. Let us
have our eye alike open upon them all. Let us proceed upon
them all — combining delight in the securities of the Christian
faith, with diligence in the Christian practice.

IV. — But lastly, if it do not follow that because a man is a
delighted hearer of the word, he is therefore an obedient doer of
it, how is he to become one ? What is there which can bring
relief to this melancholy helplessness? How wretched to think
that the impression, so quick and lively in the house of God,
should be so easily put to flight out of it ; and should fall away
into forgetfulness, when brought into actual collision with the
influences of the world. The man's warmth arid his elevation,
and his swelling purposes of better things, look so promising ;
but bring him to the trial, and it all turns out like the vapouring
of a coward. The one shows himself in the day of battle — the
i>ther in the day of temptation. He goes to his family after a
sermon that he has heard, and becomes peevish, though one fruit
of the Spirit be gentleness — he goes to an entertainment and be
comes luxurious, though one fruit of the Spirit be temperance —
he goes to a company and becomes censorious, though one fruit
of the Spirit be the love that worketh no ill. In a word, he goes
to any one scene of the world ; and he loses all sense and feeling
of the ever-present God — though the solemn requirement under
which he lives is to do all things to His glory. Are we not
speaking to your own experience ; and may not the personal
remembrance of every one of you spare us the task of any further
argument, when we assert that the glow of a warm and affecting
impression is one thing, and the sturdiness of an enduring prin
ciple is another ?

We again then recur to the question, how shall we give the
property of endurance to that which in time past has been so
perishable and so momentary ? The strength of your own
natural purposes, it would appear, cannot do it. The power of
argument cannot do it. The tongue of the minister, though he
spake with the eloquence of an angel, cannot do it ; and unless
some power above and beyond all these be made to rest on you,
he may speak to the delight of a crowded assembly, and it will
be of no more avail than if he lifted up his voice in the wilder
ness. But you have met together in the name of one who has
promised to be in the midst of you ; and He can do it. He
alone can deposit in your hearts that seed which remaineth ; and
come down upon you with an unction from the Holy One never

588 ON PREACHING TO

to be obliterated. What He puts in you will abide in you ; and it
will enable you to stand amid the conflicts of the world, aad the
rudest shock of its temptations. If the Spirit of Christ be in
you, then greater will be He that is in you than he that is in
the world ; and let your experience of the past, and the feeling
of your former helplessness, shut you up unto the faith of Him.
If you commit yourself in faith to Him, He will not fail you.
His promises are yea and amen ; and if they are not realized
upon yon, it is because you do not believe in them, because you
do not depend on them, because you do not wait and pray for the
performance of them. Mark here, my brethren, the efficacy and
the indispensableness of prayer. It is the link which cements
and binds together the sermon of the minister, with its living
and practical effect on the consciences and conduct of the people.
Of such essential importance is it, that the apostles made as
great account of prayer as they did of the ministry of the word ;
and so they gave themselves wholly to both. But for prayer,
all our anticipations of a great Christian blessing in the midst of
this people and from the services of this church will come to
mockery. It is right that these means should be provided ; but
the whole enterprise will be a miserable abortion, if we devolve
not the work upon God — so as both to seek from Him the bless
ing, and give to Him all the glory of it. More especially, if at
all in earnest about your personal Christianity, I would have
you to understand — that, without prayer, prompted by a sense
of your own helplessness, and a confidence in the sufficiency of
Christ Jesus as your strength and your sanctifier, it will be im
possible to realize it. The way is to make an hourly and habi
tual commitment of yourself to Him ; and He will keep in hourly
and habitual safety that which is so committed. He hath ob
tained for you a great blessing, and to which all of you are most
welcome, in having purchased forgiveness for you ; but, in the
fulness of His treasury, there is still another blessing in store for
all who believe on Him. He came to bless every one of you by
turning you from your iniquities. Keep closely and constantly
by Him in faith ; and He will keep closely and constantly by
you with the power of His grace — giving riot only mercy to
pardon, but grace to help in every time of need. He will carry
you in safety through the concerns and companies of the world.
He overcame the world Himself; and He will enable you to for
sake all, and to overcome it also. Abide in Him, and the promise
is that He will abide in you. Separate from Him, you become u

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 589

withered branch, without fruit and without loveliness. But,
abiding in Him, you are formed into His image — you rise in the
likeness of His pure and perfect example — you will at all times
hear gladly, but not after the example of the common people of
Judea. Yours will be a sincere thirst after the milk of His
word, not that you may be pleased with the taste of it, but that
you may grow thereby — and thus will you give evidence both
to God and man of your interest in the Saviour, by being not
merely the hearers of the word but the doers also.

We now proceed to the collection for the funds of this our
new undertaking; and, in order to engage your affections the
more to our cause, we should like that you fully and precisely
understood the object of it. The place of worship in which we
are now assembled for the first time is not adequately described
to you by its being merely told, that, like other and ordinary
chapels heretofore, it forms an addition to the means of Chris
tian instruction in or about Edinburgh. It has a far more
special destination than this ; and such as we should like to see
extended over town and country, till there was not only Sab
bath-room enough, but week-day service enough for one and
all of the families of our land. It is a church then erected
mainly and primarily for the accommodation of the people who
reside within the limits of the district in which it is placed.
They have the choice of its seats in the first instance ; and our
only regret is, that till Government do its duty, we shall not be
able to afford them at rents so low, as to admit of their being
taken in greater numbers, and, if possible, in household pews,
not only for the men arid women, but even for the children of
the working-classes — that the people might come, not merely by
individuals, but in whole families to the house of God ; and the
spectacle be again realized in towns which might still be wit
nessed in country parishes, where high and low meet together,
and the congregation, though sprinkled over with a few of rank
and of opulence, is chiefly made up of our men of handicraft and
of hard labour. There is none, we think, of correct moral taste,
and whose heart is in its right place, that will not rejoice in such
a spectacle as far more pleasing in itself, and, if only universal
in our churches, far more indicative of a healthful state of the
community, than the wretched system of the present day, when
the gospel is literally sold to the highest bidders among the
rich, and not preached to the poor. And the melancholy conse-

590 ON PREACHING TO

quence is, the irreligion, the ignorance, the reckless habits, and
prostrate morality of a neglected population — of a population at
the same time sunk both in comfort and character, only because
they are neglected ; and who would nobly repay, as our experi
ence in this place abundantly testifies, any justice that was done
or any attentions that were rendered to them. The process of
our operations is an exceedingly simple one. Instead of leaving
this church to fill as it may from all parts of the town, we first
hold out the seats that we have to dispose of, at such prices as
we can afford, to its own parish families — which families, at the
same time, have previously opened their doors, and given their
welcome to those ministerial yet household services, those visits
of Christian charity to the sick and the dying, those labours for
the best because the spiritual interests of themselves and their
little ones, wherewith they are incessantly plied through the
week ; and in consequence of which it is our fond expectation
and desire, that the attention of the house-going minister will
be followed up by the attendance of a church-going people.
We do hope that this plain statement will recommend itself to
your liberality; and that we shall be helped by you to clear
away the debt, and to overcome the difficulties which still attach
to our undertaking. The original subscribers look for no return,
no remuneration to themselves. Theirs has been an unreserved
gift ; and not one farthing of repayment, whether in principal or
interest, has ever been looked for by any of them. By the
generosity of their individual offerings, the main expense of the
erection has been defrayed ; and, for the liquidation of the re
maining expense, we now cast ourselves on the collective offer
ings of those who desire to see a good cause placed on the
footing of a permanent and secure establishment, and freed from
all the embarrassments of a still unfinished and unpaid-fur ope
ration. Our fond wish for Edinburgh and for its environs is —
that, district after district, new churches may arise and old ones
be thrown open to their own parish families, till not one house
remains which has not within its walls some stated worshipper
in one or other of our Christian assemblies ; and not one indivi
dual can be pointed to, however humble and unknown, who has
not some man of God for his personal acquaintance, some Chris
tian minister for his counsellor and friend.

The afternoon service is postponed till evening; and the
reason of this postponement may be well called a very singular

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 591

one, on which certainly we were not at all counting, when we had
resolved to open our church this day — an annular eclipse of the
sun, and where the greatest amount of darkness would happen
in the very middle of the exercise, or precisely at three o'clock ;
and so we fear as both to incommode the minister, and to dis
turb the congregation. We are unwilling to let this extraordi
nary event pass without some religious improvement ; and what
work or manifestation of nature's God, who at the same time is
the God of Christianity — sitting on a throne of grace as well as
on the throne of creation and providence — the God who, in the
language of the apostle's prayer in the Book of Acts, "made
heaven and earth and sea, and all that is therein," — what ex
hibition of this wonder-working God is not capable of being
turned to the account of practical godliness? We should like
you then to recognise it as one and the same lesson — that He
who has established so much certainty in nature, most true to
Himself, hath established the like certainty in Kevelation ; that
the one economy will be characterized by the same unchange-
ableness as the other — insomuch that, if we meet with so much
constancy, so much to be relied upon in the works of God, there
is at least as great a constancy and as much to be firmly and
fully relied upon in the word of God. The covenant of the
rainbow which marks the dispersion of the clouds and clearing
up of the weather, is not more sure than that covenant of grace
which forms the great charter of a Christian's hope, and of
which we are told in the Bible that it is ordered in all things
and sure. The eclipse of this day is one of the most rare and
marvellous description, not what is termed a partial and not a
total but an annular eclipse, in which the moon passes not over
the edge but centrally or almost centrally over the sun's disk —
and so that, instead of covering that disk altogether and making
the eclipse a total one, it leaves, and for four minutes only, a
little ring of the solar orb peering out on all sides of the moon's
darkened hemisphere — causing a fine and beauteous circle of
light, all that is left for the brief space of four minutes to
lighten up our world. The marvellous thing is, that all this
should be known to men beforehand ; that astronomers can tell
the whole that is to happen with such unfailing accuracy ; that
within a second of time they can announce when it is that the
darkness will make its first entrance on the south-west edge of
the sun, and when it is to a precise second that the last re
mainder of darkness will pass away from the north-east edge of

592 ON PREACHING TO

it — and when and how long it is that the golden circuit will
continue, of one delicate and unbroken line re-entering upon
itself, and so completing for a few evanescent minutes an entire
orb of luminousness in the heavens. It may well be marvelled
at — the certainty of the science of man, or of him who is but
the observer of the phenomenon. But remember well, that in
order to this, there must be a previous certainty — the unchange
able certainty of Him who is the Creator of the phenomenon ;
and the unchangeableness of whose ordinances in the heavens,
is the sure token and demonstration of the like unchangeable-
ness of His purposes in the word. The calendar of prophecy is
in every way as sure as the almanac whether of history or of
nature ; and, in the unerring fulfilments of both, we may read
alike the immutability and the faithfulness of God ; of Him who
hath said it, and shall He not do it ? — and with whom is no
variableness, nor shadow of turning.

Think not, my brethren, that we entertain you with any fancy
of our own. In Psalm cxix. 89, we are told of God's constancy
in the heavens being the sure guarantee of a like constancy in
the word. Nay, my brethren, the one has a more inviolable
constancy than the other — for heaven and earth shall pass away,
but the word of God endureth for ever, and shall not pass away.
What an emphasis then does it give to the lesson we have been
labouring to urge, of attention, solemn and steadfast attention, to
that word — what firm, what unfaltering dependence should it
establish in the mind of the believer, when he rests on the word
of promise as an anchor of the soul both sure and steadfast —
and with what a fearful looking for and certainty of the coming
judgment should it fill the heart of the impenitent, when he
thinks of the threatenings of God being as sure as His promises ;
of the laws of the divine government being in every way as
certain of fulfilment as the laws of nature, which is the divine
workmanship ; and more especially, when he thinks of the law
of revelation and the law of conscience with all the power and
terror of their denunciations against the children of iniquity —
when he thinks of these in connexion with the saying of the
Saviour, that " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but not one
jot or one tittle of the law shall fail." When you look then to
the spectacle of this day, lift up your heads ye faithful disciples
of the Lord Jesus Christ and rejoice — for as sure or surer than
the prediction of which you are now to witness the accomplish
ment, is the glorious prediction of Holy Writ that the day of

THE COMMON PEOPLE. 593

your restoration draweth nigh : and oh, take warning, ye careless
and stout-hearted who are far from righteousness — for as sure
or surer than that on this clay the sun in the firmament will be
shrouded in blackness, is the announcement of the apostle Peter
who tells us of another day " when the heavens shall pass away
with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent
heat ; the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be
burnt up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved,
what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation
and godliness ; looking for and hasting unto the coming of the
day of God, wherein the heavens, being on fire, shall be dis
solved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?" May
you all be enabled to say with well-grounded confidence, in the
language of the next verse, " Nevertheless we, according to his
promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwell-
eth righteousness."

2 P

THE TWO KINGDOMS,

THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.

BEING DISCOURSES OF A CHARACTER KINDRED WITH THE ASTRONOMICAL.

DISCOURSE I.

THE CONSTANCY OF GOD IN HTS WORKS AN ARGUMENT FOR THE FAITHFULNESS
OF GOD IN HIS WORD.

" For ever, 0 Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations:
thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. They continue this day according to
thine ordinances : for all are thy servants." — PSAI.M cxix. 89-91.

IN these verses there is affirmed to be an analogy between the
word of God and the works of God. It is said of His word,
that it is settled in heaven, and that it sustains its faithfulness
from one generation to another. It is said of His works, and
more especially of those that are immediately around us, even of
the earth which we inhabit, that as it was established at the
first so it abideth afterwards. And then, as if to perfect the
assimilation between them, it is said of both in the 91st verse,
" They continue this day according to thine ordinances, for all
are thy servants ;" thereby identifying the sureness of that word
which proceeded from His lips, with the unfailing constancy of
that Nature which was formed and is upholden by His hands.

The constancy of Nature is taught by universal experience,
and even strikes the popular eye as the most characteristic of
those features which have been impressed upon her. It may
need the aid of philosophy to learn how unvarying Nature is
in all her processes — how even her seeming anomalies can be
traced to a law that is inflexible — how what might appear at
first to be the caprices of her waywardness, are, in fact, the
evolutions of a mechanism that never changes — and that the
more thoroughly she is sifted and put to the test by the interro
gations of the curious, the more certainly will they find that she
walks by a rule which knows no abatement, and perseveres with
obedient footstep in that even course, from which the eye of
strictest scrutiny has never yet detected one hair-breadth of
deviation. It is no longer doubted by men of science, that
every remaining semblance of irregularity in the universe is due,
not to the fickleness of Nature, but to the ignorance of man —

598 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

that her most hidden movements are conducted with a uni
formity as rigorous as Fate — that even the fitful agitations of
the weather have their law and their principle — that the intensity
of every breeze, and the number of drops in every shower, and
the formation of every cloud, and all the occurring alternations
of storm and sunshine, and the endless shiftings of temperature,
and those tremulous varieties of the air which our instruments
have enabled us to discover but have not enabled us to explain
— that still, they follow each other by a method of succession,
which, though greatly more intricate, is yet as absolute in itself
as the order of the seasons, or the mathematical courses of
astronomy. This is the impression of every philosophical mind
with regard to Nature, and it is strengthened by each new acces
sion that is made to science. The more we are acquainted with
her, the more are we led to recognise her constancy ; and to
view her as a mighty though complicated machine, all whose
results are sure, and all whose workings are invariable.

But there is enough of patent and palpable regularity in
Nature, to give also to the popular mind the same impression of
her constancy. There is a gross and general experience that
teaches the same lesson, arid that has lodged in every bosom a
kind of secure and steadfast confidence in the uniformity of her
processes. The very child knows and proceeds upon it. He is
aware of an abiding character and property in the elements
around him — and has already learned as mucli of the fire, and
the water, and the food that he eats, and the firm ground that
he treads upon, and even of the gravitation by which he must
regulate his postures and his movements, as to prove, that, in
fant though he be, he is fully initiated in the doctrine, that
Nature has her laws and her ordinances, and that she continueth
therein. And the proofs of this are ever multiplying along the
journey of human observation : insomuch, that when we come
to manhood, we read of Nature's constancy throughout every
department of the visible world. It meets us wherever we turn
our eyes. Both the day and the night bear witness to it. The
silent revolutions of the firmament give it their pure testimony.
Even those appearances in the heavens, at which superstition
stood aghast, and imagined that Nature was on the eve of giving
way, are the proudest trophies of that stability which reigns
throughout her processes — of that unswerving consistency where
with she prosecutes all her movements. And the lesson that is
thus held forth to us from the heavens above, is responded to by

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 599

the earth below ; just as the tides of ocean wait the footsteps of
the moon, and, by an attendance kept up without change or
intermission for thousands of years, would seem to connect the
regularity of earth with the regularity of heaven. But, apart
from these greater and simpler energies, we see a course and
a uniformity everywhere. We recognise it in the mysteries
of vegetation. We follow it through the successive stages of
growth, and maturity, and decay, both in plants and animals.
We discern it still more palpably in that beautiful circulation of
the element of water, as it rolls its way by many thousand
channels to the ocean — and, from the surface of this expanded
reservoir, is again uplifted to the higher regions of the atmo
sphere — and is there dispersed in light and fleecy magazines
over the four quarters of the globe — and at length accomplishes
its orbit, by falling in showers on a world that waits to be re
freshed by it. And all goes to impress us with the regularity of
Nature, which, in fact, teems throughout all its varieties, with
power, and principle, and uniform laws of operation — and is
viewed by us as a vast laboratory, all the progressions of which
have a rigid and unfailing necessity stamped upon them.

Now, this contemplation has at times served to foster the
atheism of philosophers. It has led them to deify Nature, and
to make her immutability stand in the place of God. They seem
impressed with the imagination, that had the Supreme Cause been
a Being who thinks, and wills, and acts as man does, on the
impulse of a felt and a present motive, there would be more the
appearance of spontaneous activity, and less of mute and uncon
scious mechanism in the administrations of the universe. It is the
very unchangeableness of nature, and the steadfastness of those
great and mighty processes wherewith no living power that is
superior to Nature, and is able to shift or to control her, is seen
to interfere — it is this which seems to have impressed the notion
of some blind and eternal fatality on certain men of loftiest but
deluded genius. And, accordingly, in France, where the physi
cal sciences have, of late, been the most cultivated, have there
also been the most daring avowals of atheism. The universe
has been affirmed to be an everlasting and indestructible effect ;
and from the abiding constancy that is seen in Nature, through
all her departments, have they inferred, that thus it has always
been, and that thus it will ever be.

But this atheistical impression that is derived from the con
stancy of Nature is not peculiar to the disciples of philosophy.

600 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

It is the familiar and the practical impression of every-day life.
The world is apprehended to move on steady and unvarying
principles of its own ; and these secondary causes have usurped,
in man's estimation, the throne of the Divinity. Nature, in fact,
is personified into God : and as we look to the performance of
a machine without thinking of its maker — so the very exactness
and certainty wherewith the machinery of creation performs its
evolutions, has thrown a disguise over the agency of the Creator.
Should God interpose by miracle, or interfere by some striking
and special manifestation of providence, then man is awakened
to the recognition of Him. But he loses sight of the Being who
sits behind these visible elements, while he regards those attri
butes of constancy and power which appear in the elements
themselves. They see no demonstration of a God, and they feel
no need of Him, while such unchanging and such unfailing
energy continues to operate in the visible world around them ;
and we need not go to the schools of ratiocination in quest of
this infidelity, but may detect it in the bosoms of simple and
unlettered men, who, unknown to themselves, make a God of
Nature, and just because of Nature's constancy ; having no faith
in the unseen Spirit who originated all and upholds all, and
that because all things continue as they were from the beginning
of the creation.

Such has been the perverse effect of Nature's constancy on
the alienated mind of man : but let us now attend to the true
interpretation of it. God has, in the first instance, put into
our minds a disposition to count on the uniformity of nature, in
somuch that we universally look for a recurrence of the same
event in the same circumstances. This is not merely the belief
of experience, but the belief of instinct. It is antecedent to all
the findings of observation, and may be exemplified in the earliest
stages of childhood. The infant who makes a noise on the
table with his hand for the first time, anticipates a repetition of
the noise from a repetition of the stroke, with as much confidence
as he who has witnessed, for years together, the un variableness
wherewith these two terms of the succession have followed each
other. Or, in other words, God, by putting this faith into every
human creature, and making it a necessary part of his mental
constitution, has taught him at all times to expect the like result
in the like circumstances. He has thus virtually told him what
is to happen, and what he has to look for in every given condi
tion — and by its so happening accordingly, He just makes good

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 601

the veracity of His own declaration. The man who leads me to
expect that which he fails to accomplish, I would hold to be a
deceiver. God has so framed the machinery of my perceptions,
as that I am led irresistibly to expect, that everywhere events
will follow each other in the very train in which I have ever
been accustomed to observe them — and when God so sustains
the uniformity of nature, that in every instance it is rigidly so,
He is just manifesting the faithfulness of His character. Were
it otherwise he would be practising a mockery on the expecta
tion which He himself had inspired. God may be said to have
promised to every human being, that Nature will be constant —
if not by the whisper of an inward voice to every heart, at least
by the force of an uncontrollable bias which He has impressed
on every constitution. So that when we behold Nature keeping
by its constancy, we behold the God of Nature keeping by His
faithfulness — and the system of visible things, with its general
laws, and its successions which are invariable, instead of an
opaque materialism to intercept from the view of mortals the
face of the Divinity, becomes the mirror which reflects upon
them the truth that is unchangeable, the ordination that never
fails.

Conceive that it had been otherwise — first, that man had no
faith in the constancy of Nature — then how could all his experi
ence have profited him ? How could he have applied the recol
lections of his past, to the guidance of his future history? And
what would have been left to signalize the wisdom of mankind
above that of veriest infancy ? Or, suppose that he had the
implicit faith in Nature's constancy, but that Nature was want
ing in the fulfilment of it — that at every moment his intuitive
reliance on this constancy was met by some caprice or wayward
ness of Nature, which thwarted him in all his undertakings —
that, instead of holding true to her announcements, she held the
children of men in most distressful uncertainty, by the freaks
and the falsities in which she ever indulged herself — and that
every design of human foresight was thus liable to be broken up,
by ever arid anon the putting forth of some new fluctuation.
Tell us, in this wild misrule of elements changing their proper
ties, and events ever flitting from one method of succession to
another, if man could subsist for a single day, when all the
accomplishments without were thus at war with all the hopes
and calculations within. In such a chaos and conflict as this,
would not the foundations of human wisdom be utterly sub-

602 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

verted ? Would not man, with his powerful and perpetual ten
dency to proceed on the constancy of Nature, be tempted, at all
times, and by the very constitution of his being, to proceed upon
a falsehood? It were the way, in fact, to turn the administra
tion of Nature into a system of deceit. The lessons of to-day
would be falsified by the events of to-morrow. He were indeed
the father of lies who could be the author of such a regimen as
this — and well may we rejoice in the strict order of the goodly
universe which we inhabit, and regard it as a noble attestation
to the wisdom and beneficence of its great Architect.

But it is more especially as an evidence of His truth that the
constancy of Nature is adverted to in our text. It is of his
faithfulness unto all generations that mention is there made ;
and for the growth and the discipline of your piety, we know not
a better practical habit than that of recognising the unchangeable
truth of God, throughout your daily and hourly experience of
Nature's unchangeableness. Your faith in it is of His working
— and what a condition would you have been reduced to, had
the faith which is within, not been met by an entire and unex-
cepted accordaricy with the fulfilments that are without ! He
has not told you what to expect by the utterance of a voice —
but He has taught you what to expect by the leadings and the
intimations of a strong constitutional tendency — and in virtue of
this, there is not a human creature who does not believe, and
almost as firmly as in his own existence, that fire will continue
to burn, and water to cool, and matter to resist, and unsupported
bodies to fall, and ocean to bear the adventurous vessel upon its
surface, and the solid earth to uphold the tread of his footsteps ;
and that spring will appear again in her wonted smiles, and
summer will glow into heat and brilliancy, and autumn will put
on the same luxuriance as before, and winter, at her stated
periods, revisit the world with her darkness and her storms.
We cannot sum up these countless varieties of Nature ; but the
firm expectation is, that throughout them all, as she has been
established, so she will abide to the day of her final dissolution.
And we call upon you to recognise in Nature's constancy, the
answer of Nature's God to this expectation. All these material
agents are, in fact, the organs by which He expresses His faith
fulness to the world ; and that unveering generality which
reigns and continues everywhere, is but the perpetual demon
stration of a truth that never varies, as well as of laws that
never are rescinded. It is for us that He upholds the world in all

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 603

its regularity. It is for us that He sustains so unviolably the
march and the movement of those innumerable progressions
which are going on around us. It is in remembrance of His
promises to us, that He meets all our anticipations of Nature's
uniformity, with the evolutions of a law that is unalterable. It
is because He is a God that cannot lie, that He will make no
invasion on that wondrous correspondency which He himself
hath instituted between the world that is without, and our little
world of hopes, and projects, and anticipations that are within.
By the constancy of Nature, He hath imprinted upon it the
lesson of His own constancy — and that very characteristic where
with some would fortify the ungodliness of their hearts, is the
most impressive exhibition which can be given of God, as always
faithful, and always the same.

This, then, is the real character which the constancy of Nature
should lead us to assign to Him who is the Author of it. In
every human understanding, He hath planted a universal in
stinct, by which all are led to believe, that Nature will persevere
in her wonted courses, and that each succession of cause and
effect which has been observed by us in the time that is past,
will, while the world exists, be kept up invariably, and recur in
the very same order through the time that is to come. This
constancy, then, is as good as a promise that He has made unto
all men, and all that is around us on earth or in heaven, proves
how inflexibly the promise is adhered to. The chemist in his
laboratory, as he questions Nature, may be almost said to put
her to the torture, when tried in his hottest furnace, or probed
by his searching analysis, to her innermost arcana, she by a
spark or an explosion, or an effervescence, or an evolving sub
stance, makes her distinct replies to his investigations. And he
repeats her answer to all his fellows in philosophy, and they
meet in academic state and judgment to reiterate the question,
and in every quarter of the globe her answer is the same — so
that, let the experiment, though a thousand times repeated, only
be alike in all its circumstances, the result which cometh forth
is as rigidly alike, without deficiency, and without deviation.
We know how possible it is for these worshippers at the footstool
of science, to make a divinity of matter ; and that every new
discovery of her secrets, should only rivet them more devotedly
to her throne. But there is a God who liveth and sitteth there,
and these unvarying responses of Nature are all prompted by
Himself, and are but the utterances of His immutability. They

604 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

are the replies of a God who never changes, and who hath
adapted the whole materialism of creation to the constitution of
every mind that He hath sent forth upon it. And to meet the
expectation which He himself hath given of Nature's constancy,
is He at each successive instant of time, vigilant and ready in
every part of His vast dominions, to hold out to the eye of all
observers, the perpetual and unfailing demonstration of it. The
certainties of Nature and of Science, are in fact the vocables by
which God announces His truth to the world — and when told
how impossible it is that Nature can fluctuate, we are only told
how impossible it is that the God of Nature can deceive us.

The doctrine that Nature is constant, when thus related, as
it ought to be, with the doctrine that God is true, might well
strengthen our confidence in Him anew with every new experi
ence of our history. There is not an 'hour or a moment, in
which we may not verify the one — and, therefore, not an hour or
a moment in which we may not invigorate the other. Every
touch, and every look, and every taste, and every act of converse
between our senses and the things that are without, brings
home a new demonstration of the steadfastness of Nature, and
along with it a new demonstration both of His steadfastness and
of His faithfulness, who is the Governor of Nature. And the
same lesson may be fetched from times and from places, that are
far beyond the limits of our own personal history. It can be
drawn from the retrospect of past ages, where from the unvaried
currency of those very processes which we now behold, we may
learn the stability of all His ways, whose goings forth are of
old, and from everlasting. It can be gathered from the most
distant extremities of the earth, where Nature reigns with the
same unwearied constancy as it does around us — and where
savages count as we do on a uniformity, from which she never
falters. The lesson is commensurate with the whole system of
things — and with an effulgence as broad as the face of creation,
and as clear as the light which is poured over it, does it at once
tell that Nature is unchangeably constant, and that God is un
changeably true.

And so it is, that in our text there are presented together, as
if there was a tie of likeness between them — that the same God
who is fixed as to the ordinances of Nature, is faithful as to the
declarations of His word ; and as all experience proves how
firmly He may be trusted for the one, so is there an argument as
strong as experience, fo prove how firmly He may be trusted for

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 605

the other. By His work in us, He hath awakened the expecta
tion of a constancy in Nature, which He never disappoints. By
His word to us, should He awaken the expectation of a certainty
in His declarations, — this He will never disappoint. It is because
Nature is so fixed, that we apprehend the God of Nature to be
so faithful. He who never falsifies the hope that hath arisen in
every bosom, from the instinct which He himself hath commu
nicated, will never falsify the hope that shall arise in any bosom
from the express utterance of His voice. Were He a God in
whose hand the processes of Nature were ever shifting, then
might we conceive Him a God from whose mouth the proclama
tions of grace had the like characters of variance and vacillation.
But it is just because of our reliance on the one, that we feel so
much of repose in our dependence upon the other — and the same
God who is so unfailing in the ordinances of His creation, do we
hold to be equally unfailing in the ordinances of His word.

And it is strikingly accordant with these views, that Nature
never has been known to recede from her constancy, but for the
purpose of giving place and demonstration to the authority of the
word. Once, in a season of miracle, did the word take the
precedency of Nature, but ever since hath Nature resumed her
courses, and is now proving, by her steadfastness, the authority
of that which she then proved to be authentic by her deviations.
When the word was first ushered in, Nature gave way for a
period, after which she moves in her wonted order, till the present
system of things shall pass away, and that faith which is now
upholden by Nature's constancy, shall then receive its accom
plishment at Nature's dissolution. And oh, how God maguifietli
His word above all His name, when He tells that heaven and
earth shall pass away, but that His word shall not pass away —
and that while His creation shall become a wreck, not one jot or
one tittle of His testimony shall fail. The world passeth away
— but the word endureth for ever ; and if the faithfulness of God
stand forth so legibly on the face of the temporary world, how
surely may we reckon on the faithfulness of that word which has
a vastly higher place in the counsels and fulfilments of eternity ?

The argument may not be comprehended by all ; but it will
not be lost, should it lead any to feel a more emphatic certainty
and meaning than before in the declarations of the Bible — and
to conclude, that He, who for ages hath stood so fixed to all His
plans and purposes in Nature, will stand equally fixed to all that
He proclaims, and to all that He promises in Revelation. To

606 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

be in the hands of such a God, might well strike a terror into
the hearts of the guilty — and that unrelenting death which, with
all the sureness of an immutable law, is seen, before our eyes,
to seize upon every individual of every species of our world, full
well evinces how He, the uncompromising Lawgiver, will execute
every utterance that He has made against the children of ini
quity. And on the other hand, how this very contemplation
ought to encourage all who are looking to the announcements of
the same God in the gospel, and who perceive that there He has
embarked the same truth, and the same unchangeableness, on
the offers of mercy. All Nature gives testimony to this, that
He cannot lie — and seeing that He has stamped such enduring
properties on the elements even of our perishable world, never
should I falter from that confidence which He hath taught me
to feel, when I think of that property wherewith the blood which
was shed for me, clean seth from all sin ; and of that property
wherewith the body which was broken, beareth the burden of all
its penalties. He who hath so nobly met the faith that He has
given unto all in the constancy of Nature, by a uniformity which
knows no abatement, will meet the faith that He has given unto
any in the certainty of grace, by a fulfilment unto every believer,
which knows no exception.

And it is well to remark the difference that there is between
the explanation given in the text, of Nature's constancy, and the
impression which the mere students or disciples of Nature have
of it. It is because of her constancy that they have been led to
invest her, as it were, in properties of her own ; that they have
given a kind of independent power. and stability to matter; that
in the various energies which lie scattered over the field of visi
ble contemplation, they see a native inherent virtue, which never
for a single moment is slackened or suspended — and therefore
imagine, that as no force from without seems necessary to sustain,
so as little, perhaps, is there need for any such force from without
to originate. The mechanical certainty of all Nature's processes,
as it appears in their eyes to supersede the demand for any up
holding agency, so does it also supersede, in the silent imagina
tions of many, and according to the express and bold avowals of
6ome, the demand for any creative agency. It is thus, that
Nature is raised into a divinity, and has been made to reign over
all, in the state and jurisdiction of an eternal fatalism ; and proud
Science, which by wisdom knoweth not God, hath, in her march
of discovery, seized, upon the invariable certainties of Nature,

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 607

those highest characteristics of His authority and wisdom and
truth, as the instruments by which to disprove and to dethrone
Him.

Now, compare this interpretation of monstrous and melancholy
atheism, with that which the Bible gives, why all things move
so invariably. It is because that " all are Thy servants." It is be
cause they are all under the bidding of a God who has purposes
from which He never falters, and hath issued promises from
which He never fails. It is because the arrangements of His
vast and capacious household are already ordered for the best,
and all the elements of Nature are the ministers by which He
fulfils them. That is the master who has most honour and
obedience from his domestics, throughout all whose ordinations
there runs a consistency from which he never deviates ; and he
best sustains his dignity in the midst of them, who, by mild but
resistless sway, can regulate the successions of every hour, and
affix his sure and appropriate service to every member of the
family. It is when we see all, in any given time, at their re
spective places, and each distinct period of the day having itt
own distinct evolution of business or recreation, that we infer the
wisdom of the instituted government, and how irrevocable the
sanctions are by which it is upholden. The vexatious alterna
tions of command and of countermand ; the endless fancies of
humour, and caprice, and waywardness, which ever and anon
break forth, to the total overthrow of system ; the perpetual in
novations which none do foresee, and for which none, therefore,
can possibly be prepared — these are not more harassing to the
subject, than they are disparaging to the truth and authority of
the superior. It is in the bosom of a well-conducted family,
where you witness the sure dispensation of all the reward and
encouragement which have been promised, and the unfailing
execution of the disgrace and the dismissal that are held forth
to obstinate disobedience. Now those very qualities of which
this uniformity is the test and the characteristic in the govern
ment of any human society, of these also is it the test and the
characteristic in the government of Nature. It bespeaks the
wisdom, and the authority, and the truth of Him who framed and
who administers. Let there be a King eternal, immortal, and
invisible, and let this universe be His empire — and in all the
rounds of its complex but unerring mechanism, do I recognise
Him as the only wise God. In the constancy of Nature, do I
read the constancy and truth of that great master Spirit, who hath

608 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

imprinted His own character on all that hath emanated from His
power ; and when told that throughout the mighty lapse of cen
turies, all the .courses both of earth and of heaven have been
upholden as before, I only recognise the footsteps of Him who is
ever the same, and whose faithfulness is unto all generations.
That perpetuity, and order, and ancient law of succession, which
have subsisted so long, throughout the wide diversity of things,
bear witness to the Lord of hosts, as still at the head of His well-
marshalled family. The present age is only re-echoing the lesson
of all past ages — and that spectacle, which has misled those who
by wisdom know not God, into dreary atheism, has enhanced
every demonstration both of His veracity and power to all intelli
gent worshippers. We know that all things continue as they
were from the beginning of creation. We know that the whole
of surrounding materialism stands forth, to this very hour, in
all the inflexibility of her wonted characters. We know that
heaven, and earth, and sea, still discharge the same functions,
and subserve the very same beneficent processes. We know that
astronomy plies the same rounds as before, that the cycles of the
firmament move in their old and appointed order, and that the
year circulates, as it has ever done, in grateful variety, over the
face of an expectant world — but only because all are of God, and
they continue this day according to His ordinances — for all are
His servants.

Now it is just because the successions which take place in the
economy of Nature, are so invariable, that we should expect the
successions which take place in the economy of God's moral
government to be equally invariable. That expectation which
He never disappoints when it is the fruit of a universal instinct,
He surely will never disappoint when it is the fruit of His own
express and immediate revelation. If because God hath so esta
blished it, it cometh to pass, then of whatsoever it may be
affirmed that God hath so said it, it will come equally to pass.
I should certainly look for the same character in the admin
istrations of His special grace, that I at all times witness in
the administrations of His ordinary providence. If I see in the
system of His world, that the law by which two events follow
each other, gives rise to a connexion between them that never is
dissolved, then should He say in His word, that there are certain
invariable methods of succession, in virtue of which, when the
first term of it occurs, the second is sure at all times to follow, I
should be very sure in my anticipations, that it will indeed be

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 609

most punctually and most rigidly so. It is thus that the con
stancy of Nature is in fullest harmony with the authority of
Revelation — and that, when fresh from the contemplation of the
one, I would listen "with most implicit faith to all the announce
ments of the other.

When we behold all to be so sure and settled in the works of
God, then may we look for all being equally sure and settled in
the word of God. Philosophy hath never yet detected one iota
of deviation from the ordinances of Nature — and never, there
fore, may we conclude, shall the experience either of past or
future ages detect one iota of deviation from the ordinances of
Eevelation. He who so pointedly adheres to every plan that
He hath established in creation, will as pointedly adhere to every
proclamation that He hath uttered in Scripture. There is nought
of the fast and loose in any of His processes — and whether in
the terrible denunciations of Sinai, or those mild proffers of
mercy that were sounded forth upon the world through Messiah,
who upholdeth all things by the word of His power, shall we
alike experience that God is not to be mocked, and that with
Him there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

With this certainty, then, upon our spirits, let us now look
not to the successions which He hath instituted in Nature, but
to the successions which He hath announced to us in the word
of His testimony — and let us, while so doing, fix and solemnize
our thoughts by the consideration, that as God hath said it, so
will He do it.

The first of these successions, then, on which we may count
infallibly, is that which He hath proclaimed between sin and
punishment. The soul that sinneth it shall die. And here there
is a common ground on which the certainties of divine revelation
meet and are at one with the certainties of human experience.
We are told in the Bible that all have sinned, arid that therefore
death hath passed upon all men. The connexion between these
two terms is announced in Scripture to be invariable — and all
observation tells us that it is even so. Such was the sentence
utteretl in the hearing of our first parents ; and all history can
attest how God hath kept by the word of His threatening — and
how this law of jurisprudence from heaven is realized before us
upon earth, with all the certainty of a law of Nature. The
death of man is just as stable and as essential a part of his phy
siology, as are his birth, or his expansion, or his maturity, or his
decay. It looks as much a thing of organic necessity, as a thing

VOL. m. 2 Q

610 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

of arbitrary institution — and here do we see blended into one
exhibition, a certainty of the Divine word that never fails, and
a constancy in Nature that never is departed from. It is indeed
a striking accordancy that what in one view of it appears to be
a uniform process of Nature, in another view of it, is but the
unrelenting execution of a dread utterance from the God of
Nature. From this contemplation, may we gather, that God is
as certain in all His words, as He is constant in all His ways.
Men can philosophize on the diseases of the human system — and
the laborious treatise can be written on the class, and the cha
racter, and the symptoms of each of them — and in our halls of
learning, the ample demonstration can be given, and disciples
may be taught how to judge and to prognosticate, and in what
appearances to read the fell precursors of mortality — and death
has so taken up its settled place among the immutabilities of
Nature, that it is as familiarly treated in the lecture-rooms of
science, as any other phenomena which Nature has to offer for
the exercise of the human understanding. And oh, how often
are the smile and the stoutness of infidelity seen to mingle with
this appalling contemplation — and how little will its hardy pro
fessors bear to be told, that what gives so dread a -certainty to
their speculation is, that the God of Nature and the God of the
Bible are one — that when they describe, in lofty nomenclature,
the path of dying humanity, they only describe the way in which
He fulfils upon it His irrevocable denunciation — that He is but
doing now to the posterity of Adam what He told to Adam him
self on his expulsion from paradise — and that if the universality
of death prove how every law in the physics of creation is sure,
it just as impressively proves, how every word of God's imme
diate utterance to man, or how every word of prophecy is equally
sure.

And in every instance of mortality which you are called to
witness, do we call upon you to read in it the intolerance of
God for sin, and how unsparingly and unrelentingly it is, that
God carries into effect His every utterance against it. The con
nexion which He hath instituted between the two terms of sin
and of death, should lead you from every appeal that is made to
your senses by the one, to feel the force of an appeal to your
conscience by the other. It proves the hateful ness of sin to God,
and it also proves with what unfaltering constancy God will pro
secute every threat, until He hath made an utter extirpation of
sin from His presence. There is nought which can make more

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 611

palpable the way in which God keeps every saying in His per
petual remembrance, and as surely proceeds upon it, than doth
this universal plague wherewith He hath smitten every indivi
dual of our species, and carries off its successive generations from
a world that sprung from His hand in all the bloom and vigour
of immortality. When death makes entrance upon a family,
and, perhaps, seizes on that one member of it, all whose actual
transgressions might be summed up in the outbreakings of an
occasional waywardness, wherewith the smiles of infant gaiety
were chequered — still how it demonstrates the unbending pur
poses of God against our present accursed nature, that in some
one or other of its varieties, every specimen must die. And so
it is, that from one age to another, He makes open manifestation
to the world, that every utterance which hath fallen from Him is
sure ; and that ocular proof is given to the character of Him who
is a Spirit, and is invisible ; and that sense lends its testimony
to the truth of God, and the truth of His Scripture ; and that
Nature, when rightly viewed, instead of placing its inquirers at
atheistical variance with the Being who upholds it, holds out to
us the most impressive commentary that can be given, on the
reverence which is due to all His communications, even by de
monstrating, that faith in His word is at unison with the findings
of our daily observation.

But God hath further said of sin and of its consequences, what
no observation of ours has yet realized. He hath told us of
the judgment that cometh after death, and He hath told us of
the two diverse paths which lead from the judgment-seat unto
eternity. Of these we have not yet seen the verification, yet
surely we have now seen enough to prepare us for the unfailing
accomplishment of every utterance that cometh from the lips of
God. The unexcepted death which we know cometh upon all
men, for that all have sinned, might well convince us of the cer
tainty of that second death which is threatened upon all who
turn not from sin unto the Saviour. There is an indissoluble
succession here between our sinning and our dying — and we
ought now to be so aware of God as a God of precise and per
emptory execution, as to look upon the succession being equally
indissoluble, between our dying in sin now, and rising to ever
lasting condemnation hereafter. The sinner who wraps himself
in delusive security, and who, because all things continue as they
have done, does not reflect of this very characteristic, that it is
indeed the most awful proof of God's immutable counsels, and to

612 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

himself the most tremendous presage of all the ruin and wretch
edness which have been denounced upon him — the spectacle of
uniformity that is before his eyes, only goes to ascertain that as
God hath purposed, so, without vacillation or inconstancy, will
He ever perform. He hath already given a sample, or an earn
est of this, in the awful ravages of death ; and we ask the sinner
to behold, in the ever-recurring spectacle of moving funerals, and
desolated families, the token of that still deeper perdition which
awaits him. Let him not think that the God who deals His re
lentless inflictions here on every son and daughter of the species,
will falter there from the work of vengeance that shall then de
scend on the heads of the impenitent. Oh, how deceived then
are all those ungodly, who have been building to themselves a
safety and an exemption on the perpetuity of Nature ! All the
perpetuity which they have witnessed is the pledge of a God who
is unchangeable — and who, true to His threatening as to every
other utterance which passes His lips, hath said, in the hearing
of men and of angels, that the soul which is in sin shall perish.

But, secondly, there is another succession announced to us
in Scripture, and on the certainty of which we may place as
firm a reliance as on any of the observed successions of Nature
— even that which obtains between faith and salvation. He
who believeth in Christ shall not perish, but shall have life
everlasting. The same truth which God hath embarked on the
declarations of His wrath against the impenitent, He hath also
embarked on the declarations of His mercy to the believer.
There is a law of continuity, as unfailing as any series of events
in Nature, that binds with the present state of an obstinate
sinner upon earth, all the horrors of his future wretchedness in
hell ; but there is also another law of continuity just as unfail
ing, that binds the present state of him who putteth faith in
Christ here, with the triumphs arid the transports of his coming
glory hereafter. And thus it is, that what we read of God's
constancy in the book of Nature, may well strengthen our every
assurance in the promises of the Gospel. It is not in the re
currence of winter alone, and its desolations, that God manifests
His adherence to established processes. There are many periodic
evolutions of the bright and the beautiful along the march of
His administrations — as the dawn of morn ; and the grateful
access of spring, with its many hues, and odours, and melodies ;
and the ripened abundance of harvest ; and that glorious arch of
heaven, which Science hath now appropriated as her own, but

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 613

which nevertheless is placed there by God as the unfailing
token of a sunshine already begun, and a storm now ended —
all these come forth at appointed seasons, in a consecutive order,
yet mark the footsteps of a beneficent Deity. And so the eco
nomy of grace has its regular successions, which carry, however,
a blessing in their train. The faith in Christ, to which we are
invited upon earth, has its sure result, and its landing-place in
heaven — and just with as unerring certainty as we behold in the
courses of the firmament, will it be followed up by a life of
virtue, and a death of hope, and a resurrection of joyfulness, and
a voice of welcome at the judgment-seat, and a bright ascent
into fields of ethereal blessedness, and an entrance upon glory,
and a perpetual occupation in the city of the living God.

To all men hath He given a faith in the constancy of Nature,
and He never disappoints it. To some men hath He given a
faith in the promises of the Gospel, and He is ready to bestow
it upon all who ask, or to perfect that which is lacking in it —
and the one faith will as surely meet with its corresponding ful
filment as the other. The invariableness that reigns throughout
the kingdom of Nature, guarantees the like invariableness in the
kingdom of grace. He who is steadfast to all His appointments
will be true to all His declarations — and those very exhibitions
of a strict and undeviating order in our universe, which have
ministered to the irreligion of a spurious philosophy, form a
basis on which the believer can prop a firmer confidence than
before, in all the spoken and all the written testimonies of God.

With a man of taste, and imagination, and science, and who
is withal a disciple of the Lord Jesus, such an argument as this
must shed a new interest and glory over his whole contemplation
of visible things. He knows of his Saviour, that by Him all
things were made, and that by Him too all things are upholden.
The world, in fact, was created by that Being whose name is
the Word ; and from the features that are imprinted on the one,
may he gather some of the leading characteristics of the other.
More expressly will he infer from that sure and established
order of Nature, in which the whole family of mankind are
comprehended, that the more special family of believers are
indeed encircled within the bond of a sure and a well-ordered
covenant. In those beauteous regularities by which the one
economy is marked, will he be led to recognise the " yea " and
the " amen " which are stamped on the other economy — and when
he learns that the certainties of science are unfailing, does he

614 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE

also learn that the sayings of Scripture are unalterable. Both
he knows to emanate from the same source ; and every new ex
perience of Nature's constancy, will just rivet him more tena
ciously than before to the doctrine and the declarations of his
Bible. Furnished with such a method of interpretation as this,
let him go abroad upon Nature, and all that he sees will
heighten and establish the hopes which Revelation hath awak
ened. Every recurrence of the same phenomena as before, will
be to him a distinct testimony to the faithfulness of God. The
very hours will bear witness to it. The lengthening shades of
even will repeat the lesson held out to him by the light of early
day — and when night unveils to his eye the many splendours of
the firmament, will every traveller on his circuit there, speak to
him of that mighty and invisible King, all whose ordinations are
sure. And this manifestation from the face of heaven will be
reflected to him by the panorama upon earth. Even the buds
which come forth at their appointed season on the leafless
branches ; and the springing up of the flowers arid the herbage
on the spots of ground from which they had disappeared ; and
that month of vocal harmony wherewith the mute atmosphere is
gladdened as before, with the notes of joyous festival ; and so,
the regular march of the advancing year through all its foot
steps of revival, and progress, and maturity, and decay — these
are to him but the diversified tokens of a God whom he can
trust, because of a God who changeth not. To his eyes, the
world reflects upon the word the lesson of its own wondrous
harmony ; and his science, instead of a meteor that lures from
the greater light of Revelation serves him as a pedestal on which
the stability of Scripture is more firmly upholden.

The man who is accustomed to view aright the uniformity of
Nature's sequences, will be more impressed with the certainty of
that sequence, which is announced in the Bible between faith
and salvation — and he of all others should reassure his hopes of
immortality, when he reads, that the end of our faith is the sal
vation of our souls. In this secure and wealthy place let him
take up his rest, and rejoice himself greatly with that God who
has so multiplied upon him the evidences of His faithfulness.
Let him henceforth feel that he is in the hands of one who never
deviates, and who cannot lie — and who, as He never by one
act of caprice hath mocked the dependence that is built on the
foundation of human experience, so never by one act of treach
ery will He mock the dependence that is built on the foundation

AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. 615

of the divine testimony. And more particularly, let him think
of Christ who hath all the promises in His hand, that to him also
all power has been committed in heaven and in earth — arid that
presiding therefore, as He does, over that visible administration,
of which constancy is the unfailing attribute, He by this hath
given us the best pledge of a truth that abideth the same, to
day, and yesterday, and for ever.

We are aware* that no argument can of itself work in you
the faith of the Gospel — that words, and reasons, and illustra
tions, may be multiplied without end, and yet be of no efficacy
— that if the simple manifestation of the Spirit be withheld, the
expounder of Scripture, and of all its analogies with Creation
or Providence, will lose his labour — and while it is his part to
prosecute these to the uttermost, yet nought will he find more
surely and experimentally true, than that without a special
interposition of light from on high, he runneth in vain, and
wearieth himself in vain. It is for him to ply the instrument,
it is for God to give unto it the power which availeth. We are
told of Christ on His throne of mediatorship, that He hath all
the energies of Nature at command, and up to this hour do we
know with what a steady and unfaltering hand He hath wielded
them. Look to the promise as equally steadfast, of " Lo, I am
with you always, even unto the end of the world " — and come
even now to His own appointed ordinance in the like confidence
of a fellowship with Him, as you would to any of the scenes oi1
ordinations of Nature, and in the confidence that there the Lord
of Nature will prove Himself the same that He has ever been/
The blood that was announced many centuries ago to cleanse
from all sin, cleanseth still. The body which hath borne in all
past ages the iniquity of believers, beareth it still. That faith
which appropriates Christ and all the benefits of His purchase to
the soul, still performs the same office. And that magnificent
economy of Nature which was established at the first, and so
abideth, is but the symbol of that higher economy of grace
which continueth to this day according to all its ordinances.

"Whosoever eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood," says
the Saviour, "shall never die." When you sit down at His
table, you eat the bread, and you drink the wine by which these
are represented — and if this be done worthily, if there be a
right correspondence between the hand and the heart in this
sacramental service, then by faith do you receive the benefits of

* This Sermon was delivered on the morning of a Communion Sabbath.

616 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE, ETC.

the shed blood, and the broken body ; and your go doing will as
surely as any succession takes place in the instituted courses of
Nature, be followed up by your blessed immortality. And the
brighter your hopes of glory hereafter, the holier will you be in
all your acts and affections here. The character even now will
receive a tinge from the prospect that is before you — and the
habitual anticipation of heaven will bring down both of its
charity and its sacredness upon your heart. He who hath this
hope in him purifieth himself even as Christ is pure — and even
from the present, if a true approach to the gate of His sanctuary,
will you carry a portion of His spirit away with you. In par
taking of these His consecrated elements, you become partakers
of His gentleness and devotion, and unwearied beneficence — and
because like Him in time, you will live with Him through
eternity.

EFFICACY OF PRAYER AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 617

DISCOURSE II.

ON THE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER AND THE
UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.

*' Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own
lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming ? for since the fathers fell asleep,
all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." — 2 PETER iii. 3, 4.

THE infidelity spoken of in our text, had for its basis the sta
bility of Nature, or rested on the imagination that her economy
was perpetual and everlasting — and every day of Nature's con
tinuance added to the strength and inveteracy of this delusion.
In proportion to the length of her past endurance, was there a
firm confidence felt in her future perpetuity. The longer that
Nature lasted, or the older she grew, her final dissolution was
held to be all the more improbable — till nothing seemed so un
likely to the atheistical men of that period, as the intervention
of a God with a system of visible things, which looked so un
changing and so indestructible. It was like the contest of ex
perience and faith, in which the former grew every day stronger
and stronger, and the latter weaker and weaker, till at length it
was wholly extinguished ; and men in the spirit of defiance or
ridicule, braved the announcement of a Judge who should appear
at the end of the world, and mocked at the promise of His
coming.

But there is another direction which infidelity often takes,
beside the one specified in our text. It not only perverts to its
own argument, what experience tells of the stability of Nature ;
and so concludes that we have nothing to fear from the mandate
of a God laying sudden arrest and termination on its processes.
It also perverts what experience tells of the uniformity of Na
ture ; and so concludes that we have nothing either to hope or
to fear from the intervention of a God during the continuance
or the currency of these processes. Beside making Nature in
dependent of God for its duration, which they hold to be ever
lasting, they would also make Nature to be independent of God

618 EFFICACY OF PRAYER

for its course, which they hold to be unalterable. They tell us
of the rigid and undeviating constancy from which Nature is
never known to fluctuate ; and that in her immutable laws in
the march and regularity of her orderly progressions, they can
discover no trace whatever of any interposition by the finger
of a Deity. It is not only that all things continue to be as
they were from the beginning of creation — causes and effects
following each other in wonted and invariable succession, and
the same circumstances ever issuing in the same consequents as
before. With such a system of things, there is no room in their
creed or in their imagination for the actings of a God. To their
eye Nature proceeds by the sure footsteps of a mute and uncon
scious materialism ; nor can they recognise in its evolutions those
characters of the spontaneous or the wilful, which bespeak a
living God to have had any concern with it. He may have
formed the mundane system at the first : He may have devised
for matter its properties and its laws : but these properties, they
tell us, never change ; these laws never are relaxed or receded
from. And so we may as well bid the storm itself cease from its
violence, as supplicate the unseen Being whom we fancy to be
sitting aloft and to direct the storm. This they hold to be a
superstitious imagination, which all their experience of Nature
arid of Nature's immutability forbids them to entertain. By the
one infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of
judgment. By the other infidelity, they have banished a God
from the throne of providence. By the first, they tell us that a
God has nought to do with the consummation of Nature ; or
rather, that Nature has no consummation. By the second, they
tell us that a God has nought to do with the history of Nature.
The first infidelity would expunge from our creed the doctrine
of a coming judgment. The second would expunge from it the
doctrine of a present and a special providence, and the doctrine
of the efficacy of prayer.

Now this last, though not just the infidelity of the text — yet
being very much the same with it in principle — we hold it
sufficiently textual, though we make it, and not the other, the
subject of our present argument. We admit the uniformity of
visible nature — a lesson forced upon us by all experience. We
admit that as far as our observation extends, Nature has always
proceeded in one invariable order — insomuch that the same an
tecedents have, without exception, been ever followed up by the
same consequents ; and that, saving the well-accredited miracles

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 619

of the Jewish and Christian dispensations, all things have so
continued since the beginning of the creation.

We admit that, never in our whole lives have we witnessed as
the effect of man's prayer, any infringement made on the known
laws of the universe ; or that Nature by receding from her con
stancy, to the extent that we have discovered it, has ever in one
instance yielded to his supplicating cry. We admit that by no
importunity from the voice of faith, or from any number and
combination of voices, have we seen an arrest or a shift laid on
the ascertained courses, whether of the material or the mental
economy ; or a single fulfilment of any sort, brought about in
contravention, either to the known properties of any substance,
or to the known principles of any established succession in the
history of Nature. These are our experiences ; and we are aware
the very experiences which ministered to the infidelity of our
text, and do minister to the practical infidelity of thousands in
the present day — yet, in opposition to, or rather notwithstanding
these experiences, universal and unexcepted though they be, do
we affirm the doctrine of a superintending providence, as various
and as special, as our necessities — the doctrine of a perpetual
interposition from above, as manifoldly and minutely special, as
are the believing requests which ascend from us to Heaven's
throne.

We feel the importance of the subject, both in its application
to the judgment that now hangs over us,* and to the infidelity
of the present times. But we cannot hope to be fully under
stood without your most strenuous and sustained attention — an
attention, however, which we request may be kept up to the
end, even though certain parts in the train of observation may
not have been followed by you. What some may lose in those
passages, where the subject is presented in the form of a general
argument, may again be recovered, when we attempt to establish
our doctrine by Scripture, or to illustrate it by instances taken
from the history of human affairs. In one way or other, you
may seize on the reigning principle of that explanation, by
which we endeavour to reconcile the efficacy of prayer with the
uniformity of experience. And our purpose shall have been
obtained, if we can at all help you to a greater confidence in
the reality of a superintending providence, to a greater comfort
and confidence in the act of making your requests known unto
God.

* This Sermon was preached during the prevalence of cholera.

620 EFFICACY OF PRAYER

Let us first give our view in all its generality, in the hope
that any obscurity which may rest upon it in this form will be
dissipated or cleared up in the subsequent appeals that we shall
make, both to the lessons of the Bible, and to the lessons of
human experience.

We grant, then, we unreservedly grant, the uniformity of
visible nature ; and now let us compute how much, or how
little, it amounts to. Grant of all our progressions, that, as far
as our eye can carry us, they are invariable ; and then let us
only reflect how short a way we can trace any of them upwards.
In speculating on the origin of an event, we may be able to
assign the one which immediately preceded, and term it the
proximate cause ; or even ascend by two or three footsteps, till
we have discovered some anterior event which we term the re
mote cause. But how soon do we arrive at the limit of possible
investigation, beyond which if we attempt to go, we lose our
selves among the depths and the obscurities of a region that is
unknown ! Observation may conduct us a certain length back
wards in the train of causes and effects ; but, after having done
its uttermost, we feel, that, above and beyond its loftiest place
of ascent, there are still higher steps in the train, which we
vainly try to reach, and find them inaccessible. It is even so
throughout all philosophy. After having arrived at the remotest
cause which man can reach his way to, we shall ever find there
are higher and remoter causes still, which distance all his powers
of research, and so will ever remain in deepest concealment
from his view. Of this higher part of the train he has no ob
servation. Of these remoter causes, and their mode of succes
sion, he can positively say nothing. For aught he knows, they
may be under the immediate control of higher beings in the
universe ; or, like the upper part of a chain, a few of whose
closing links are all that is visible to us, they may be directly
appended to the throne, and at all times subject to the instant
pleasure of a prayer-hearing God. And it may be by a respon
sive touch at the higher, and not the lower part of the progres
sion, that He answers our prayers. It may be not by an act of
intervention among those near and visible causes, where inter
vention would be a miracle ; it may be by an unseen, but not
less effectual act of intervention, among the remote and there
fore the occult causes, that He adapts Himself to the various
wants, and meets the various petitions of His children. If it
be in the latter way that He conducts the affairs of His daily

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 621

government — then may He rule by a providence as special as
are the needs and the occasions of His family ; and with an ear
open to every cry, might He provide for all, and minister to all
without one infringement on the uniformity of visible nature. If
the responsive touch be given at the lower part of the chain,
then the answer to prayer is by miracle, or by a contravention
to some of the known sequences of Nature. But if the respon
sive touch be given at a sufficiently higher part of the chain,
then the answer is as effectually made, but not by miracle, and
without violence to any one succession of history or nature
which philosophy has ascertained — because the reaction to the
prayer strikes at a place that is higher than the highest investi
gations of philosophy. It is not by a visible movement within
the region of human observation, but by an invisible movement
in the transcendental region above it, that the prayer is met and
responded to. The Supernal Power of the Universe, the mighty
and unseen Being who sits aloft, and has been significantly
styled the Cause of causes — He, in immediate contact with the
upper extremities of every progression, there puts forth an over
ruling influence which tells and propagates downwards to the
lower extremities ; and so, by an agency placed too remote
either for the eye of sense or for all the instruments of science
to discover, may God, in answer if He choose to prayer, fix and
determine every series of events — of which, nevertheless, all
that man can see is but the uniformity of the closing footsteps
— a few of the last causes and effects following each other in
their wonted order. It is thus that we reconcile all the ex
perience which man has of Nature's uniformity, with the effect
and sigriificancy of his prayers to the God of Nature. It is
thus that at one and the same time do we live under the care
of a presiding God, and among the regularities of a harmonious
universe.

These views are in beautiful accordance with the simple and
sublime theology unfolded to us in the Book of Job — where,
whether in the movements of the animated kingdom below, or
the great evolutions that take place in the upper regions of the
atmosphere, the phenomena and the processes of visible nature
are sketched with a masterly hand. It is in the midst of these
scenes and impressive descriptions, that we are told — " Lo, these
are parts of his ways." The translation does not say what
parts ; but the original does. They are but the lower parts —
the endings as it were of the different processes — the last and

622 EFFICAJ'x OF PRAYER

lowest footsteps, which are all that science can investigate ; and
of which, throughout the whole of her limited ascent, she has
traced the uniformity. But she has traced it a very short way :
or, in the language of the patriarch, who estimates aright the
achievements of philosophy — " How little a portion is heard of
him !" — how few the known footsteps which are beneath the veil,
to the unknown steps and workings which are above it ; arid so,
the thunder, or rather the inward and secret movements of His
power, who can understand?

" He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds ; and the
cloud is not rent under them. He holdeth back the face of his
throne, and spreadeth his cloud upon it. He hath compassed
the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end.
The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at his reproof.
He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding
he smiteth through the proud. By his Spirit he hath garnished
the heavens ; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent. Lo,
these are parts of his ways ; but how little a portion is heard of
him! but the thunder of his power who can understand?" —
Job xxvi. 8-14.

The last sentence of this magnificent passage were better
translated thus : — " These are the parts or the lower endings of
his ways ; but the secret working of his power who can under
stand?"

That part of the economy of the divine administration, in
virtue of which God works, not without but by secondary causes,
is frequently intimated in the Book of Psalms.

" Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire."
— Ps. civ. 4.

Or, as it might have been translated — "Who maketh the
winds his messengers, and the flaming fire his servant."

But without the aid of any emendations in our version, this
subserviency of visible nature to the invisible God, is distinctly
laid before us in the following passages : —

" They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in
great waters ; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders
in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind,
which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the
heaven, they go down again to the depths ; their soul is melted
because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a
drunken man, and are at their wit's end. Then they cry unto
the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their dis-

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 623

tresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof
are still. Then are they glad, because they be quiet ; so he
bringeth them unto their desired haven. Oh, that men would
praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to
the children of men." — Ps. cvii. 23-31.

He raises the tempest not without the wind, but by the wind.
In the one way it would have been a miracle ; in the other way
it is alike effectual, but without any change in the properties or
laws of visible nature — without what we commonly understand
by a miracle. He does not bring the vessel against the wind to
its desired haven ; but He makes the storm a calm, and so the
waves thereof are still. Our Saviour also bade the winds into
peace ; and the miracle there lay in the effect following on the
heard utterance of His voice. A voice no less effectual though
unheard by us, overrules at all times the working of Nature's
elements ; and brings the ordinary processes, as well as the
marked and miraculous exception to them, under the control of
a divine agency.

" Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in
earth, in the seas, and all deep places. He causeth the vapours
to ascend from the ends of the earth ; he maketh lightnings for
the rain : he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries." — Ps.
cxxxv. 6, 7.

Here, without any change of translation, we are told of the
subserviency of the visible instruments, to the invisible but real
agency of Him who wields them at His pleasure. In this pas
sage, the winds are plainly represented to us as the messen
gers of God, and the flaming fire as His servant. He changes
no properties, and no visible processes — working, not without
the wind, but by it — not without the electric matter, but by it —
not without the rain, but by it — not without the vapour, but by
it. Let the philosopher tell how far back he can go, in explor
ing the method and order of these respective agencies. Then we
have only to point further back and ask — on what evidence he
can tell, that the fiat and the finger of a God are not there ?
We grant the observed order to be invariable, save when God
chooses to interpose by miracle. But whether He does or not
— from that chamber of His hidden operations, which philosophy
has not found its way to, can He so direct all, so subordinate all,
that whatever the Lord pleases, that does He in heaven and in
earth, in the seas, and all deep places.

" Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps :

624 EFFICACY OF PRAYER

Fire and hail ; snow and vapour ; stormy wind fulfilling his
word." — Ps. cxlviii. 7, 8.

The stormy wind fulfilleth His word.

Our last example shall be from the New Testament. " Never
theless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good,
and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our
hearts with food and gladness." — Acts xiv. 17.

This last example will prepare you to go along with one of
the particular instances we are just to bring forward, of a special
prayer met by a special fulfilment.

We are thus enabled to perceive what the respective provinces
are of philosophy and faith. Every event in Nature or history
has a cause in some prior event that went before it, and that
again in another, and that again in another still higher than
itself in this scale of precedency ; and so might we climb our
ascending way from cause to cause, from consequent to ante
cedent — till the investigation has been carried upwards, from
the farthest possible verge of human discovery. There it is that
the domain of observation or of philosophy terminates ; but we
mistake, if we think that there the progression, whose terms or
whose footsteps we have traced thus far, also terminates. Be
yond this limit we cannot track the pathway of causation — not
because the pathway ceases, but because we have lost sight of it
— having now retired from view among the depths and mys
teries of an unknown region, which we, with our bounded facul
ties, cannot enter. This may be termed the region of faith,
placed as it were above the region of experience. The things
which are done in the higher, have an overruling influence by
lines of transmission on all that happens in the lower — yet with
out one breach or interruption to the uniformity of visible nature.
Whatever is done in the transcendental region — be it by the
influence of prayer ; by the immediate finger of God ; by the
ministry of angels ; by the spontaneous movements, whether of
displeasure or of mercy above, responding to the sins or to the
supplicating cries that ascend from earth's inhabitants below —
that will pass by a descending influence into the palpable region
of sense and observation — yet, from the moment it comes within
its limits, will it proceed without the semblance of a miracle, but
by the march and the movement of Nature's regularity, to its
final consummation. God hath in wisdom ordained a regimen
of general laws ; and that man might gather from the memory
of the past those lessons of observation which serve for the guid-

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 625

ance of the future, He hath enacted that all those successions
shall be invariable which have their place and their fulfilment
within the world of sensible experience. Yet God has not on
that account made the world independent of Himself. He keeps
a perpetual hold on all its events and processes notwithstanding.
He does not dissever Himself, for a single instant, from the go
vernment and the guardianship of His own universe; and can
still, notwithstanding all we see of Nature's rigid uniformity,
adapt the forthgoings of His power to all the wants and all the
prayers of His dependent family. For this purpose, He does not
need to stretch forth His hand on the inferior and the visible
links of any progression, so as to shift the known successions of
experience ; or at all to intermeddle with the lessons and the
laws of this great schoolmaster. He may work in secret, and
yet perform all His pleasure — not by the achievement of a
miracle on Nature's open platform, but by the touch of one 'or
other of those master-springs which lie within the recesses of her
inner laboratory. There, and at His place of supernal command
by the fountain-heads of influence, He can turn whithersoever
He will the machinery of our world, and without the possibility
by human eye of detecting the least infringement on any of its
processes — at once upholding the regularity of visible nature,
and the supremacy of Nature's invisible God.

But we are glad to make our escape, and now to make it con
clusively, from the obscurer part of our reasoning on this subject
— although, most assuredly, these are not the times for passing
it wholly by ; or for withholding aught which can make in favour
of the much-derided cause of humble and earnest piety. But,
instead of propounding our doctrine in the terms of a general
argument, let us try the effect of a few special instances — by
which, perhaps, we might more readily gain the consent of your
understanding to our views.

When the sigh of the midnight storm sends fearful agitation
into a mother's heart as she thinks of her sailor boy now exposed
to its fury on the waters of a distant ocean — these stern disciples
of a hard and stern infidelity would, on this notion of a rigid and
impracticable constancy in Nature, forbid her prayers — holding
them to be as impotent and vain, though addressed to the God
who has all the elements in His hand, as if lifted up with sense
less importunity to the raving elements themselves. Yet Nature
would strongly prompt the aspiration ; and, if there be truth in
our argument, there is nothing in the constitution of the universe

VOL. III. 2 K

626 EFFICACY OF PRATER

to forbid its accomplishment. God might answer the prayer,
not by unsettling the order of secondary causes — not by revers
ing any of the wonted successions that are known to take place
in the ever-restless, ever-heaving atmosphere — not by sensible
miracle among those nearer footsteps which the philosopher has
traced ; but by the touch of an immediate hand among the deep
recesses of materialism, which are beyond the ken of all his in
struments. It is thence that the Sovereign of Nature might bid
the wild uproar of the elements into silence. It is there that the
virtue comes out of Him, which passes like a winged messenger
from the invisible to the visible ; and, at the threshold of separa
tion between these two regions, impresses the direction of the
Almighty's will on the remotest cause which science can mount
her way to. From this point in the series, the path of descent
along the line of nearer and proximate causes may be rigidly
invariable ; and in respect of the order, the precise undeviating-
order, wherewith they follow each other, all things continue as
they were from the beginning of the creation. The heat, and
the vapour, and the atmospherical precipitates, and the con
sequent moving forces by which either to raise a new tempest or
to lay an old one — all these may proceed, and without one hair
breadth of deviation, according to the successions of our esta
blished philosophy — yet each be but the obedient messenger of
that voice which gave forth its command at the fountain-head of
the whole operation ; which commissioned the vapours to ascend
from the ends of the earth, and made lightnings for the rain, and
brought the wind out of His treasuries. These are the palpable
steps of the process ; but an unseen influence behind the farthest
limit of man's boasted discoveries may have set them agoing.
And that influence may have been accorded to prayer — the
power that moves Him who moves the universe ; and who,
without violence to the known regularities of Nature, can either
send forth the hurricane over the face of the deep, or recall it at
His pleasure. Such is the joyful persuasion of faith, and proud
philosophy cannot disprove it. A woman's feeble cry may have
overruled the elemental war; and hushed into silence this wild
frenzy of the winds and the waves; and evoked the gentler
breezes from the cave of their slumbers ; and wafted the vessel
of her dearest hopes, and which held the first and fondest of her
earthly treasures, to its desired haven.

And so of other prayers. It is not without instrumentality,
but by means of it, that they are answered. The fulfilment is

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 627

preceded by the accustomed series of causes and effects ; and pre
ceded as far upward as the eye of man can trace the pedigree of
sensible causation. Were it by a break anywhere in the trace
able part of this series that the prayer was answered, then its
fulfilment would be miraculous. But without a miracle the
prayer is answered as effectually. Thus, for example, is met the
cry of a people under famine for a speedy and plenteous harvest
— not by the instant appearance of the ripened grain at the
bidding of a voice from heaven — not preternaturally cherished
into maturity in the midst of storms ; but ushered onwards by a
grateful succession of shower and sunshine to a prosperous con
summation. An abundant harvest is granted to prayer — yet
without violence either to the laws of the vegetable physiology,
or to any of the known laws by which the alterations of the
weather are determined. It must be acknowledged by every
philosopher, how soon it is that we arrive in both departments
on the confines of deepest mystery : and let the constancy of
patent and palpable Nature be as unaltered and unalterable as
it may, God reserves to Himself the place of mastery and com
mand, whether among the arcana of vegetation or the depths of
meteorology. He may at once permit a most rigid uniformity
to the visible workings of Nature's mechanism — while among its
invisible, which are also its antecedent workings, He retains that
station of pre-eminence and power, whence He brings all things
to pass according to His pleasure. It is not by sending bread
from the upper storehouses of the firmament that He answers
this prayer. It is by sending rain and fruitful seasons. The
intermediate machinery of Nature is not cast aside but pressed
into the service ; and the prayer is answered by a secret touch
from the finger of the Almighty, which sets all .its parts and all
its processes agoing. With the eye of sense man sees nothing
but Nature revolving in her wonted cycles, and the months
following each other in bright and beautiful succession. In the
eye of faith, ay, and of sound philosophy, every year of smiling
plenty upon earth is a year crowned with the goodness of Heaven.
But to touch on that which more immediately concerns us, let
us now instance prayer for health. We ask, if here philosophy
has taken possession of the whole domain, and left no room for
the prerogatives and the exercise of faith — no hope for prayer ?
Has the whole intermediate space between the first cause and the
ultimate phenomena been so thoroughly explored, and the rigid
uniformity of every footstep in the series been so fixed and ascer-

628 EFFICACY OF PRAYER

tained by observation, as to preclude the rationality of prayer,
and leave it without a meaning, because without the possibility
of a fulfilment? Where is the physician or the physiologist who
can tell that he has made the ascent from one prognostic or one
predisposition to another — till he reached even to the primary
fountain-head of that influence which either medicates or dis
tempers the human frame, and found throughout an adamantine
chain of necessity, not to be broken by the sufferer's imploring
cry? We ask the guardians of our health, how far upon the
pathway of causation the discoveries of medical science have
carried them ; and whether, above and beyond their farthest look
into the mysteries of our framework, there are not higher mys
teries, where a God may work in secret, and the hand of the
Omnipotent be stretched forth to heal or to destroy ? It is thence
He may answer prayer. It is from this summit of ascendency
that He may direct all the processes of the human constitution
— yet without violating in any instance the uniformity of the few
last and visible footsteps. Because science has traced, and so
far determined this uniformity, she has riot therefore exiled God
from His own universe. She has not forced the Deity to quit
His hold of its machinery, or to forego by one iota the most per
fect command of all its evolutions. His superintendence is as
close and continuous and special, as if all things were done by
the visible intervention of His hand. Without superstition, with
the fullest recognition of science in all its prerogatives and all
its glories — might we feel our immediate dependence on God ;
and, even in this our philosophic day, and notwithstanding all
that philosophy has made known to us, might we still assert and
vindicate the higher philosophy of prayer — asking of God, as
patriarchs and holy men of old did before us, for safety and sus
tenance and health and all things.

And if ever in the dealings of God with the people of the
earth, if ever science had less of the territory and faith had
more of it, it is in that undisclosed mystery which still hangs
over us ; which now for many months has shed baleful influences
on your crowded city ; and whereof no man can tell whether in
another day or another hour, it might not descend with fell
swoop into the midst of his own family — entering there with
rude unceremonious footstep, and hurrying to one of its rapid and
inglorious funerals the dearest of the inmates. Never on any
other theme did philosophy make more entire demonstration of
her own helplessness ; and perhaps at the very first footstep of

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 629

the investigation, or on the question of the proximate cause, the
controversy is loudest of all. But however justly of the proxi
mate cause discovery may be made, or however remotely among
the anterior causes the investigation might be carried, never
will proud philosophy be able to annul the intervention of a
God, or purchase to herself the privilege of mocking at the poor
man's prayer. Indeed, amid the exuberance and variety of
speculation on this unsettled and unknown subject, there was
one remote cause assigned for this pestilent visitation, which, so
far from shutting out, rather suggests, and that most forcibly,
the intervention of a God immediately before it. " And it shall
come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall hiss for the fly that
is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee
that is in the land of Assyria : and they shall come, and shall
rest all of them in the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the
rocks, and upon all thorns, and upon all bushes."41 We hope to
have made it plain to you, let this or any other cause be found
the true one, that however high the path of discovery may have
been traced, yet higher still there is place for the finger of a
God above to regulate all the designs of a special providence,
and to move in conformity with all the accepted prayers of His
family below. But among the scoffers of our latter day, even in
the absence or the want of all discovery, the finger of a God is
disowned ; and it seems to mark how resolute and at the same
time how hopeless is the infidelity of modern times, that just in
proportion to our ignorance of all the secondary or the sensible
causes, is our haughty refusal of any homage to the first cause.
It is passing strange of this disease, that after having baffled
every attempt to find out its dependence on aught that is on
earth, the idea of its dependence on the will of Heaven should
of all others have been laughed most impiously to scorn. The
voice of derision and defiance was first heard in our high places ;
and thence it passed, as if by infection, into general society.
And so, many have disowned the power and the will of the
Deity in this visitation. They most unphilosophically, we think,
as well as impiously, have spurned at prayer.

But we cannot pass away from this part of our subject, with
out adverting to a recent event, the thought of which is at pre
sent irresistibly obtruded on us, and by which this parish and
congregation but a few weeks ago have been deprived of one of
the most conspicuous of our office-bearers — one who constitution-

* Isaiah vii. 18, 19.
I

630 EFFICACY OF PRAYER

ally the kindest and most indulgent of men, was the most alive
of all I ever knew to the wants and the miseries of our common
nature ; and who, finely alive to all the impulses and soft touches
of humanity, laboured night and day in the vocation of doing
good continually. But instead of saying that he laboured, I
should say that he luxuriated in well-doing ; for never was a
heart more attuned to ready and responsive agreement with the
calls of benevolence than his, and sooner would I believe of
Nature that she had receded from her constancy, than of him
that e'er

" He look'd unmoved on misery's languid eye,
Or heard her sinking voice without a sigh."

Of all the recollections which the friends either of my youth
or of my manhood have left behind them in this land of dying
men, there is none more beautifully irradiated — whether I look
back on the mildness of his Christian worth, or on those sensi
bilities of an open and generous and finely attempered spirit,
which gives such a charm to human companionship. And as
the second great law is like unto the first ; so that love of his
which went forth so diffusively amongst his fellows upon earth,
we humbly hope, was at once the indication and the consequent
of a love that ascended with high and habitual aspiration to
God in heaven. It was through a brief and tremendous agony
that he was carried from the world of sense to the world of
spirits ; and yet it is a happiness to be told that the faith and
hope of the gospel lighted up a halo over his expiring moments,
and that, ere death had closed his eyes, he, through nearly an
hour of audible prayer gave his last testimony to the truth as it
is in Jesus.*

But to recall ourselves from this theme of sadness, we trust
you will now understand of every event in Nature or history,
that each in the order of causation is preceded by a train which
went before it, and that man's observations can extend more or
less a certain way along this train, till they are lost in the
undiscovered and at length undiscoverable recesses which are
placed beyond the cognisance of the human faculties. Now it
is because of the higher and unknown part which belongs to
every such series, that we bid you respect the lessons of piety,
for God hath not so constructed the universe as to remove it

* This notice refers to John Wilson, Esq., silk-merchant in Glasgow, who was Kirk-
Treasurer of St. John's, and to the deep regret of all who knew him, was carried off by
cholera in the neighbourhood of Glasgow.

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 631

from the hold of His own special management and superintend
ence ; and therefore, not in one thing the Bible tells us, but in
every thing, we should make our requests known unto God.
But again, it is because of the lower and the known or ascer
tained and strictly uniform part which belongs to every series,
that we bid you respect the lessons of experience ; for God did
not so conduct the affairs of His universe, as to thrust forth His
invisible hand among its visible successions ; but while He keeps
a perpetual and ascendant hold among the springs of that ma
chinery which is behind the curtain, He leaves untouched all
those wonted regularities, which on the stage of observation are
patent to human eyes. Now these are the respective domains
of philosophy and faith, and this is the use to be made of them.
Looking to the one, we learn the subordination of all Nature.
Looking to the other, we learn the constancy of visible nature.
These great truths harmonize ; and between the lessons which
they give, there is the fullest harmony. He who is enlightened
and acts upon both is at one and the same time a man of
prudence and a man of prayer ; who never loses his confidence
in God, yet, as awake to the manifestations of experience as if
they were the manifestations of the divine will, never counts
upon a miracle. He holds perpetual converse with heaven ; yet
shapes his earthly conduct by his earthly circumstances. In his
habits of diligence he proceeds on the uniformity of visible
nature, and he does accordingly. In his habits of devotion, he
knows that there is a visible power above which subordinates
all Nature, and he prays accordingly. He is neither the mystic
who will not act, nor is he the infidel who will not pray. He
knows how to combine both, or how to combine wisdom with
piety — that rare and beauteous combination unknown to the
world at large, yet realized by many a cottage patriarch, who,
without attempting, without being capable in fact of any pro
found or philosophical adjustment between them, but on his
simple understanding alone of Scripture lessons and Scripture
examples, unites the most strenuous diligence in the use of
means, with the strictest dependence upon God. Without the
combination of these two, there has been nothing great, nothing
effective in the history of the church ; and, on the other hand,
we find that all the most illustrious, whether in philanthropy or
in Christian patriotism, from the apostle Paul to the highest
names in the descending history of the world, as Augustine, and
Luther, and Kriox, and Howard, that, superadding the wisdom

632 EFFICACY OF PRAYER

of experience to a sense of deepest piety, they were at once men
of performance and men of prayer.

But let us look for a moment to the highest example of all,
even that of our Saviour when on earth ; for in the history of
His temptation will the eye of the diligent observer recognise
an application and a moral, which serve, we think very finely,
to illustrate our whole argument.

The first proposal of the adversary was, that, because an
hungered by the abstinence of forty days and forty nights in the
wilderness, He should turn stones into bread ; and the reply of
our Saviour that " Man liveth not by bread alone, but by every
word which cometh out of the mouth of God," bespoke His con
fidence in that Supreme Power which overrules all Nature. Now,
observe how this is followed up by the tempter : — Since such
His confidence, I may perhaps prevail upon Him to cast Himself
from the pinnacle of the temple, employing the very argument
He just has used, even the overruling power of that God who
can bear Him up by the intervention of angels, lest He dash
His foot against a stone. The reply — " Thou shalt not tempt
the Lord thy God," tells us, that the same Being who overrules
all Nature, never interferes but for some worthy and great pur
pose to thwart the established successions of visible nature ; and
that it is wrong, it is wanton, in any of His creatures so to act,
as if He counted upon such an interference. It is a noble lesson
for us never to traverse or neglect the means which experience
hath told us are effectual for good ; and never to brave, but at
the call of imperious duty, the exposures which the same experi
ence has told us, on our knowledge or recollection of Nature's
established processes, are followed up by evil. Our Saviour
would riot in defiance to the law of gravitation, cast Himself oft'
from that place of security which upheld Him against its power.
And neither should we ever, though in defiance but to the pro
bable law of contagion, or by what (to borrow a usual phrase)
might well be termed a tempting of Providence, refuse those
places or cast away those measures of security, that are found to
protect us against the virulence of this destroyer. In a word,
between the wisdom of piety and the wisdom of experience
there is most profound harmony — unknown to the infidel, and so
he hath cast off prayer ; unknown to the fanatic, and so he hath
cast prudence away from him.

And we appeal to you, my brethren, if there be not much in
the state and recent history of our nation to confirm these views.

AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 633

We rejoiced in the appointment several months ago of a national
fast, and that notwithstanding the contempt and annoyance of
the many infidel manifestations to which the appointment had
been exposed — hoping, as we then did, that it would meet with
a duteous and a general response from the people of the land ;
and perceiving afterwards, in our limited sphere, the obvious
solemnity, and we trust in a goodly number of instances, the
deep and heart-felt sacredness of its observation among our
families. It is well that there should be a public and a prayer
ful recognition of God in the midst of us ; and we have failed in
our argument, we have failed, whether from the obscurity of its
illustrations or the obscurity of its terms, in obtaining for it
the sympathy of your understandings — if you perceive not, that,
in the distinct relation of cause and effect, there is a real sub
stantive connexion between the supplications which ascend for
health and safety from the midst of a land, and the actual
warding off of disease and death from its habitations. But in
fullest harmony with this it is also well, I would go farther and
say there is no infringement upon deepest piety in pronouncing
it indispensable — that while we invoke the Heavenly Agent
who sitteth above for every effectual blessing, all the earthly
means and earthly instruments should be in complete and orderly
preparation. We are aware that in many places and on many
occasions, these have been rebelled against.* And it but en
hances the lesson, beside carrying a most impressive rebuke,
both to the fanaticism of an ill-understood Christianity, and to
the ignorant frenzy of an ill-educated, and, in respect to the
woful deficiency both of churches and schools, we would say a
neglected population — that just in those places where the offered
help of the physician was most strenuously and most ungrate
fully resisted, and at times indeed by violence overborne, that
there it was where the disease reasserted its power, and as if
with the hand of an avenger, shook menace and terror among
the families. As if the same God who bids us in His word
make request unto Him in all things, would furthermore tell us
by His Providence, that, in no one thing will He permit a heed
less invasion on the regularities of that course which He him-

* In Edinburgh, the metropolis of medical science, a vigorous system of expedients was
instituted; and nothing could exceed the promptitude and the watchfulness and the
activity, at a moment's call, wherewith the disease was met and repressed at every point of
its outbreakings. And we cannot imagine a more striking demonstration for the import
ance of human agency, diligently operating on all the resources which Nature and experi
ence have placed within our reach, than is furnished by a comparison between the perfec
tion of our city arrangements, and the fewness of our city deaths.

634 EFFICACY OF PRAYER AND UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.

self has established ; that with His own hand He ordained the
footsteps of Nature, and He will chastise the presumption of
those who shall think to contravene the ordinance ; that experi
ence is the schoolmaster authorized by Him for the government
and guidance of His family on earth, and that He will resent
the outrage done to her authority whenever her lessons or her
laws are wantonly violated.

In conclusion, let us observe that, on the one hand, we shall
be glad if aught that has been said will help to conciliate our
mere religionists to the lessons of experience and of sound philo
sophy ; and, in opposition to those senseless prejudices, by which
they have often brought the most unmerited derision and dis
credit on their own cause, we would remind them that it is not
all philosophy which Scripture denounces, but only vain philo
sophy — it is not all science which it deprecates, but only the
science falsely so called. On the other hand, we should rejoice
in witnessing the mere philosopher or man of secular and expe
rimental wisdom, more conciliated than he is to the lessons of
Eeligion, and to that humble faith which is the great and actu
ating spirit of its observations and its pieties and its prayers.
We have heard that the study of Natural Science disposes to
Infidelity. But we feel persuaded that this is a danger only
associated with a slight and partial, never with a deep and ade
quate and comprehensive view of its principles. It is very
possible that the conjunction between science and scepticism
may at present be more frequently realized than in former days ;
but this is only because, in spite of all that is alleged about this
our more enlightened day and more enlightened public, our
science is neither so deeply founded nor of such firm and thorough
staple as it wont to be. We have lost in depth what we have
gained in diffusion — having neither the massive erudition, nor
the gigantic scholarship, nor the profound and well-laid philoso
phy of a period that has now gone by ; and it is to this that
infidelity stands indebted for her triumphs among the scoffers
and the superficialists of a half-learned generation.

TRANSITOKINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS. 635

DISCOURSE III.

THE TRANSITORr NATURE OF VISIBLE THINGS.
" The things which are seen are temporal."— 2 CORINTHIANS iv. 18.

THE assertion that the things which are seen are temporal,
holds true in the absolute and universal sense of it. They had
a beginning, and they will have an end. Should we go upward
through the stream of ages that are past, we come to a time
when they were not. Should we go onward through the stream
of ages that are before us, we come to a time when they will
be no more. It is indeed a most mysterious flight which the ima
gination ventures upon, when it goes back to the eternity that
is behind us — when it mounts its ascending way through the
millions and the millions of years that are already gone through,
and stop where it may, it finds the line of its march always
lengthening beyond it, and losing itself in the obscurity of as
far removed a distance as ever. It soon reaches the commence
ment of visible things, or that point in its progress when God
made the heavens and the earth. They had a beginning, but
God had none ; and what a wonderful field for the fancy to ex
patiate on, when we get above the era of created worlds, and
think of that period when, in respect of all that is visible, the
immensity around us was one vast and unpeopled solitude. But
God was there, in His dwelling-place, for it is said of Him, that
He inhabits eternity; and the Son of God was there, for we
read of the glory which he had with the Father before the world
was. The mind cannot sustain itself under the burden of these
lofty contemplations. It cannot lift the curtain which shrouds
the past eternity of God. But it is good for the soul to be
humbled under a sense of its incapacity. It is good to realize
the impression which too often abandons us, that He made us,
and not we ourselves. It is good to feel how all that is temporal
lies in passive and prostrate subordination before the will of the
uncreated God. It is good to know how little a portion it is

63G TRANSITORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS.

that we see of Him and of His mysterious ways. It is good to
lie at the feet of His awful and unknown majesty — and while
secret things belong to Him, it is good to bring with us all the
helplessness and docility of children to those revealed lessons
which belong to us and to our children.

But this is not the sense in which the temporal nature of
visible things is taken up by the apostle. It is not that there is
a time past in which they did not exist — but that there is a
time to come in which they will exist no more. He calls them
temporal, because the time and the duration of their existence
will have an end. His eye is full upon futurity. It is the pass
ing away of visible things in the time that is to come, and the
ever-during nature of invisible things through the eternity that
is to come, which the apostle is contemplating. Now, on this
one point we say nothing about the positive annihilation of the
matter of visible things. There is reason for believing, that
some of the matter of our present bodies may exist in those
more glorified and transformed bodies which we are afterwards
to occupy. And for anything we know, the matter of the pre
sent world and of the present system may exist in those new
heavens and that new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
There may be a transfiguration of matter without a destruction
of it — and therefore it is, that when we assert with the apostle
in the text how things seen are temporal, we shall not say more
than that the substance of these things, if not consigned back
again to the nothing from which they had emerged, will be em
ployed in the formation of other things totally different — that
the change will be so great as that all old things may be said
to have passed away, and all things to become new — that after
the wreck of the last conflagration, the desolated scene will be re-
peopled with other objects ; the righteous will live in another
world, and the eye of the glorified body will open on another
field of contemplation from that which is now visible around us.

Now, in this sense of the word temporal, the assertion of my
text may be carried round to all that is visible. Even those ob
jects which men are most apt to count upon as imperishable, be
cause, without any sensible decay they have stood the lapse of
many ages, will not weather the lapse of eternity. This earth
will be burnt up. The light of yonder sun will be extinguished.
These stars will cease from their twinkling. The heavens will
pass away as a scroll — and as to those solid and enormous
masses which, like the firm world we tread upon, roll in mighty

TilANSITORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS. 637

circuit through the immensity around us, it seems the solemn
language of revelation of one and all of them, that from the
face of Him who sitteth on the throne, the earth arid the heavens
will fly away, and there will be found no place for them.

Even apart from the Bible, the eye of observation can witness
in some of the hardest and firmest materials of the present sys
tem, the evidence of its approaching dissolution. What more
striding, for example, than the natural changes which take
place on the surface of the world, and which prove that the
strongest of Nature's elements must, at last, yield to the opera
tion of time and of decay — that yonder towering mountain,
though propped by the rocky battlements which surround it,'
must at last sink under the power of corruption — that every
year brings it nearer to its end — that at this moment it is wast
ing silently away, and letting itself down from the lofty emin
ence which it now occupies — that the torrent which falls from
its side never ceases to consume its substance, and to carry it off
in the form of sediment to the ocean — that the frost which
assails it in winter loosens the solid rock, detaches it in pieces
from the main precipice, and makes it fall in fragments to its
base — that the power of the weather scales off the most flinty
materials, and that the wind of heaven scatters them in dust
over the surrounding country — that even though not anticipated
by the sudden and awful convulsions of the day of God's wrath,
Nature contains within itself the rudiments of decay — that every
hill must be levelled with the plains, and every plain be swept
away by the constant operation of the rivers which run through
it — and that, unless renewed by the hand of the Almighty, the
earth on which we are now treading must disappear in the
mighty roll of ages and of centuries. We cannot take our
flight to other worlds, or have a near view of the changes to
which they are liable ; but surely if this world, which, with its
mighty apparatus of continents and islands, looks so healthful
and so firm after the wear of many centuries, is posting visibly
to its end, we may be prepared to believe that the principles of
destruction are also at work in other provinces of the visible
creation — and that though of old God laid the foundation of the
earth, and the heavens are the work of His hands, yet they shall
perish ; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment, and as a
vesture shall He change them, and they shall be changed.

We should be out of place in all this style of observation, did
we not follow it up with the sentiment of the Psalmist, " These

638 TRANSITORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS.

shall perish, but thou shalt endure ; for thou art the same, and
thy years have no end." What a lofty conception does it give
us of the majesty of God, when we think how He sits above and
presides in high authority over this mighty series of changes —
when after sinking under our attempts to trace Him through the
eternity that is behind, we look on the present system of things,
and are taught to believe that it is but a single step in the
march of His grand administrations through the eternity that is
before us — when we think of this goodly universe, summoned
into being to serve some temporary evolution of His great and
mysterious plan — when we think of the time when it shall be
broken up, and out of its disordered fragments other scenes and
other systems shall emerge — surely, when fatigued with the
vastness of these contemplations, it well becomes us to do the
homage of our reverence and wonder to the one Spirit which
conceives and animates the whole, and to the one noble design
which runs through all its fluctuations.

But there is another way in which the objects that are seen
are temporal. The object may not merely be removed from us,
but we may be removed from the object. The disappearance of
this earth and of these heavens from us, we look upon through
the dimness of a far-placed futurity. It is an event, therefore,
which may regale our imagination ; which may lift our mind by
its sublimity ; which may disengage us in the calm hour of
meditation from the littleness of life and of its cares ; and which
may even throw a clearness and a solemnity over our intercourse
with God. But such an event as this does not come home upon
our hearts with the urgency of a personal interest. It does not
carry along with it the excitement which lies in the nearness of
an immediate concern. It does not fall with such vivacity upon
our conceptions, as practically to tell on our pursuits or any of
our purposes. It may elevate and solemnize us, but this effect
is perfectly consistent with its having as little influence on the
walk of the living, and the moving, and the acting man, as a
dream of poetry. The preacher may think that he has done
great things with his eloquence — and the hearers may think that
great things have been done upon them — for they felt a fine glow
of emotion, when they heard of God sitting in the majesty of His
high counsels, over the progress and the destiny of created things.
But the truth is, that all this kindling of devotion which is felt
upon the contemplation of His greatness, may exist in the same
bosom with an utter distaste for the holiness of His character ;

TRANSITOR1NESS OF VISIBLE THINGS. 639

with an entire alienation of the heart and of the habits from the
obedience of His law ; and above all, with a most nauseous and
invincible contempt for the spiritualities of that revelation, in
which He has actually made known His will and His ways to
us. The devotion of mere taste is one thing — the devotion of
principle is another. And as surely as a man may weep over
the elegant sufferings of poetry, yet add to the real sufferings of
life by peevishness in his family, and insolence among his neigh
bours — so surely may a man be wakened to rapture by the mag
nificence of God, while his life is deformed by its rebellions, and
his heart rankles with all the foulness of idolatry against Him.

Well, then, let us try the other way of bringing the temporal
nature of visible things to bear upon your interests. It is true
that this earth and these heavens will at length disappear ; but
they may outlive our posterity for many generations. However,
if they disappear riot from us, we most certainly shall disappear
from them. They will soon cease to be anything to you ; and
though the splendour and variety of all that is visible around us,
should last for thousands of centuries, your eyes will soon be
closed upon them. The time is coming when this goodly scene
shall reach its positive consummation. But, in all likelihood,
the time is coming much sooner, when you shall resign the breath
of your nostrils, and bid a final adieu to everything around you.
Let this earth and these heavens be as enduring as they may, to
you they are fugitive as vanity. Time with its mighty strides,
will soon reach a future generation, and leave the present in
death and in forgetfulness behind it. The grave will close upon
every one of you, and that is the dark and the silent cavern
where no voice is heard, and the light of the sun never enters.

But more than this. Though we live too short a time to see
the great changes which are carrying on in the universe, we live
long enough to see many of its changes — and such changes, too,
as are best fitted to warn and to teach us; even the changes
which take place in society, made up of human beings as frail
and as fugitive as ourselves. Death moves us away from many
of those objects which are seen and temporal — but we live long
enough to see many of these objects moved away from us — to see
acquaintances falling every year — to see families broken up by
the rougli and unsparing hand of death — to see houses and neigh
bourhoods shifting their inhabitants — to see a new race and a
new generation — and, whether in church or in market, to see
unceasing changes in the faces of the people who repair to them.

640 TI1ANSITORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS.

We know well, that there is a poetic melancholy inspired by
such a picture as this which is altogether unfruitful ; and that
totally apart from religion, a man may give way to the luxury
of tears, when he thinks how friends drop away from him — how
every year brings along with it some sad addition to the registers
of death — how the kind and hospitable mansion is left without a
tenant — and how, when you knock at a neighbour's door, you
find that he who welcomed you and made you happy, is no
longer there. 0 that we could impress by all this a salutary direc
tion on the fears and on the consciences of individuals — that we
could give them a living impression of that corning day when
they shall severally share in the general wreck of the species —
when each of you shall be one of the many whom the men of the
next generation may remember to have lived in yonder street,
or laboured in yonder manufactory — when they shall speak of
you just as you speak of the men of the former generation — who
when they died had a few tears dropped over their memory, and
for a few years will still continue to be talked of. Oh, could we
succeed in giving you a real and living impression of all this ;
and then may we hope to carry the lesson of John the Baptist
with energy to your fears, " Flee from the coming wrath." But
there is something so very deceiving in the progress of time.
Its progress is so gradual. To-day is so like yesterday, that we
are not sensible of its departure. We should make head against
this delusion. We should turn to personal account every ex
ample of change or of mortality. When the clock strikes, it
should remind you of the dying hour. When you hear the sound
of the funeral bell, you should think that in a little time it will
perform for you the same office. When you wake in the morn
ing, you should think that there has been the addition of another
day to the life that is past, and the subtraction of another day
from the remainder of your journey. When the shades of the
evening fall around you, you should think of the steady and in
variable progress of time; how the sun moves and moves till it
will see you out ; and how it will continue to move after you
die, and see out your children's children to the latest generations.
Everything around us should impress the mutability of human
affairs. An acquaintance dies — you will soon follow him. A
family moves from the neighbourhood — learn that the works of
man are given to change. New families succeed — sit loose to
the world, and withdraw your affections from its unstable and
fluctuating interests. Time is rapid, though we observe not its

TRANSITORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS. 641

rapidity. The days that are past appear like the twinkling
of a vision. The days that are to come will soon have a
period, and will appear to have performed their course with
equal rapidity. We talk of our fathers and our grandfathers,
who figured their day in the theatre of the world. In a little
time we will be the ancestors of a future age. Posterity will
talk of us as of the men that are gone, and our remembrance
will soon depart from the face of the country. When we attend
the burial of an acquaintance, we see the bones of the men of
other times ; in a few years our bodies will be mangled by the
power of corruption, and be thrown up in loose and scattered
fragments among the earth of the newly-made grave. When
we wander among the tombstones of the churchyard, we can
scarcely follow the mutilated letters that compose the simple
story of the inhabitant below. In a little time, and the tomb
that covers us will moulder by the power of the seasons — and the
letters will be eaten away — and the story that was to perpetuate
our remembrance, will elude the gaze of some future inquirer.

We know that time is short, but none of us knows how short.
We know that it will not go beyond a certain limit of years ; but
none of us knows how small the number of years, or months, or
days may be. For death is at work upon all ages. The fever
of a few days may hurry the likeliest of us all from this land of
mortality. The cold of a few weeks may settle into some linger
ing but irrecoverable disease. In one instant the blood of him
who has the promise of many years may cease its circulation.
Accident may assail us. A slight fall may precipitate us into
eternity. An exposure to rain may lay us on the bed of our last
sickness, from which we are never more to rise. A little spark
may kindle the midnight conflagration, which lays a house and
its inhabitants in ashes. A stroke of lightning may arrest the
current of life in a twinkling. A gust of wind may overturn the
vessel, and lay the unwary passenger in a watery grave. A
thousand dangers beset us on the slippery path of this world ; no
age is exempted from them ; and from the infant that hangs on
its mother's bosom, to the old man who sinks under the decrepi
tude of years, we see death in all its woful and affecting varieties.

You may think it strange ; but even still we fear we may have
done little in the way of sending a fruitful impression into your
consciences. We are too well aware of the distinction between
seriousness of feeling and seriousness of principle, to think that
upon the strength of any such moving representation as we are

VOL. in. 2 s

642 TRANS1TORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS.

now indulging in, we shall be able to dissipate that confounded
spell which chains you to the world, to reclaim your wandering
affections, or to send you back to your week-day business more
pure and more heavenly. But sure we are you ought to be con
vinced, that all which binds you so cleavingly to the dust is in
fatuation and vanity ; that there is something most lamentably
wrong in your being carried away by the delusions of time —
and this is a conviction which should make you feel restless and
dissatisfied. We are well aware that it is not human eloquence
or human illustration that can accomplish a victory over the
obstinate principles of human corruption ; and therefore it is that
we feel as if we did not advance aright through a single step of
a sermon, unless we look for the influences of that mighty Spirit
who alone is able to enlighten and arrest you — and may employ
even so humble an instrument as the voice of a fellow-mortal to
send into your heart the inspiration of understanding.

We now shortly insist on the truth, that the things which are
not seen are eternal. No man hath seen God at any time, and
He is eternal. It is said of Christ — " Whom having not seen,
we love, and he is the same to-day, yesterday, and for ever."
It is said of the Spirit, that, like the wind of heaven, He eludes
the observation, arid no man can tell of Him whence He cometh,
or whither He goeth — and He is called the eternal Spirit, through
whom the Son offered Himself up without spot unto God. We
are quite aware that the idea suggested by the eternal things
which are spoken of in our text, is heaven, with all its circum
stances of splendour and enjoyment. This is an object which,
even on the principles of taste, we take a delight in contemplat
ing: and it is also an object set before us in the Scriptures,
though with a very sparing and reserved hand. All the descrip
tions we have of heaven there are general, very general. We
read of the beauty of the heavenly crown, of the unfading
nature of the heavenly inheritance, of the splendour of the
heavenly city — and these have been seized upon by men of ima
gination, who, in the construction of their fancied paradise, have
embellished it with every image of peace, and bliss, and loveli
ness ; and, at all events, have thrown over it that most kindling
of all conceptions, the magnificence of eternity. Now, such a
picture as this has the certain effect of ministering delight to
every glowing and susceptible imagination. And here lies the
deep-laid delusion which we have occasionally hinted at. A man
listens, in the first instance, to a pathetic and highly-wrought

TRANSIT ORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS. 643

narrative on the vanities of time — and it touches him even to
the tenderness of tears. He looks, in the second instance, to
the fascinating perspective of another scene, rising in all the
glories of immortality from the dark ruins of the tomb, and he
feels within him all those ravishments of fancy, which any
vision of united grandeur and loveliness would inspire. Take
these two together, and you have a man weeping over the tran
sient vanities of an ever-shifting world, and mixing with all this
softness, an elevation of thought and of prospect, as he looks
through the vista of a futurity losing itself in the mighty range
of thousands and thousands of centuries. And at this point the
delusion comes in, that here is a man who is all that religion
would have him to be — a man weaned from the littleness of the
paltry scene that is around him — soaring high above all the
evanescence of things present and things sensible — and trans
ferring every affection of his soul to the durabilities of a pure
and immortal region. It were better if this high state of occa
sional impression on the matters of time and of eternity, had
only the effect of imposing the falsehood on others, that the man
who was so touched and so transported, had on that single
account the temper of a candidate for heaven. But the false
hood takes possession of his own heart. The man is pleased
with his emotions and his tears — and the interpretation he puts

rn them is, that they come out of the fulness of a heart all
•e to religion, and sensibly affected with its charms, and its
seriousness, and its principle. Now, we venture to say, that
there may be much of all this kind of enthusiasm with the very
man who is not moving a single step towards that blessed
eternity over which his fancy delights to expatiate. The moving
representation of the preacher may be listened to as a pleasant
song — and the entertained hearer return to all the inveterate
habits of one of the children of this world. It is this which
makes us fear that a power of deceitfulness may accompany the
eloquence of the pulpit — that the wisdom of words may defeat
the great object of a practical work upon the conscience — that
a something short of a real business change in the heart and in
the principles of acting may satisfy the man who listens, and
admires, and resigns his every feeling to the magic of an im
pressive description — that, strangely compounded beings as we
are, broken loose from God, and proving it by the habitual void-
ness of our hearts to a sense of His authority and of His will ;
that blind to the realities of another world, and slaves to the
wretched infatuation which makes us cleave with the full bent

644 TRANSITORINESS OF VISIBLE THINGS.

of our affections to the one by which we are visibly arid imme
diately surrounded ; that utterly unable, by nature, to live above
the present scene, while its cares and its interests are plying us
every hour with their urgency ; that the prey of evil passions
which darken and distract the inner man, and throw us at a
wider distance from the holy Being who forbids the indulgence
of them ; and yet with all this weight of corruption about us,
having a mind that can seize the vastness of some great concep
tion, and can therefore rejoice in the expanding loftiness of its
own thoughts, as it dwells on the wonders of eternity; and
having hearts that can move to the impulse of a tender consider
ation, and can, therefore, sadden into melancholy at the dark
Eicture of death, and its unrelenting cruelties; and having
mcies that can brighten to the cheerful colouring of some
pleasing and hopeful representation, and can, therefore, be
soothed and animated when some sketch is laid before it of a
pious family emerging from a common sepulchre, and on the
morning of their joyful resurrection, forgetting all the sorrows
and separations of the dark world that has now rolled over
them. — Oh, my brethren, we fear it, we greatly fear it, that
while busied with topics such as these, many a hearer may weep
or be elevated, or take pleasure in the touching imagery that is
made to play around him, while the dust of this perishable
earth is all that his soul cleaves to — and its cheating vanities
are all that his heart cares for, or his footsteps follow after.

The thing is not merely possible — but we see in it a stamp of
likelihood to all that experience tells us of the nature or the
habitudes of man. Is there no such thing as his having a taste
for the beauties of landscape, and at the same time turning with
disgust from what he calls the methodism of peculiar Chris
tianity? Might not he be an admirer of poetry, and at the same
time nauseate with his whole heart the doctrine and the lan
guage of the New Testament? Might not he have a fancy that
can be regaled by some fair and well-formed vision of immor
tality, and at the same time have no practical hardihood what
ever for the exercise of labouring in the prescribed way after the
meat that endureth ? Surely, surely, this is all very possible —
and it is just as possible, and many we believe to be the in
stances we have of it in real life, when an eloquent description of
heaven is exquisitely felt, and wakens in the bosom the raptures
of the sincerest admiration, among those who feel an utter repug
nancy to the heaven of the Bible — and are not moving a single
inch through the narrowness of the path which leads to it.

NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. 645

DISCOURSE IV.

ON THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH.

" ^Tevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein
dwelleth righteousness."— 2 PJBTEB iii. 13.

THERE is a limit to the revelations of the Bible about futurity,
and it were a mental or spiritual trespass to go beyond it. The
reserve which it maintains in its informations, we also ought to
maintain in our inquiries — satisfied to know little on every sub
ject, where it has communicated little, arid feeling our way into
regions which are at present unseen, no farther than the light of
Scripture will carry us.

But while we attempt not to be " wise above that which is
written," we should attempt, and that most studiously, to be
wise up to that which is written. The disclosures are very few
and very partial which are given to us of that bright and beauti
ful economy which is to survive the ruins of our present one.
But still there are such disclosures — and on the principle of the
things that are revealed belonging unto us, we have a right to
walk up and down for the purpose of observation over the whole
actual extent of them. What is made known of the details of
immortality, is but small in the amount, nor are we furnished
with the materials of anything like a graphical or picturesque
exhibition of its abodes of blessedness. But still somewhat is
made known, and which, too, may be addressed to a higher
principle than curiosity, being, like every other Scripture, " pro
fitable both for doctrine and for instruction in righteousness."

In the text before us, there are two leading points of informa
tion which we should like successively to remark upon. The
first is, that in the new economy which is to be reared for the
accommodation of the blessed, there will be materialism, not
merely new heavens, but also a new earth. The second is, that
as distinguished from the present, which is an abode of rebellion,
it will be an abode of righteousness.

646 NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH.

I. — We know historically that earth, that a solid material
earth, may form the dwelling of sinless creatures in full converse
and friendship with the Being who made them — that instead of
a place of exile for outcasts, it may have a broad avenue of com
munication with the spiritual world for the descent of ethereal
beings from on high — that like the member of an extended
family, it may share in the regard and attention of the other
members, and along with them be gladdened by the presence of
Him who is the Father of them all. To inquire how this can
be, were to attempt a wisdom beyond Scripture : but to assert
that this has been, and therefore may be, is to keep most strictly
and modestly within the limits of the record. For we there
read, that God framed an apparatus of materialism, which, on
His own surveying, He pronounced to be all very good, and
the leading features of which may still be recognised among the
things and the substances that are around us — and that He
created man with the bodily organs and senses which we now
wear — and placed him under the very canopy that is over our
heads — and spread around him a scenery, perhaps lovelier in its
tints, and more smiling and serene in the whole aspect of it, but
certainly made up in the main of the same objects that still
compose the prospect of our visible contemplations — and there,
working with his hands in a garden, and with trees on every
lide of him, and even with animals sporting at his feet, was this
inhabitant of earth, in the midst of all those earthly and familiar
accompaniments, in full possession of the best immunities of a
citizen of heaven — sharing in the delight of angels, and while
he gazed on the very beauties which we ourselves gaze upon,
rejoicing in them most as the tokens of a present and presiding
Deity. It were venturing on the region of conjecture to affirm,
whether, if Adam had not fallen, the earth that we now tread
upon, would have been the everlasting abode of him and his
posterity. But certain it is, that man, at the first, had for his
place this world, and at the same time, for his privilege, an un
clouded fellowship with God, and for his prospect, an immortality
which death was neither to intercept nor put an end to. He
was terrestrial in respect of condition, and yet celestial in re
spect both of character and enjoyment. His eye looked outwardly
on a landscape of earth, while his heart breathed upwardly in the
love of heaven. And though he trod the solid platform of our
world, and was compassed about with its horizon — still was he
within the circle of God's favoured creation, and took his place

NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. 647

among the freemen and the denizens of the great spiritual com
monwealth.

This may serve to rectify an imagination, of which we think
that all must be conscious — as if the grossness of materialism
was only for those who had degenerated into the grossness of
sin ; and that, when a spiritualizing process had purged away
all our corruption, then by the stepping-stones of a death and a
resurrection, we should be borne away to some ethereal region,
where sense, and body, and all in the shape either of audible
sound or of tangible substance, were unknown. And hence that
strangeness of impression which is felt by you, should the sup
position be offered, that in the place of eternal blessedness, there
will be ground to walk upon ; or scenes of luxuriance to delight
the corporeal senses ; or the kindly intercourse of friends talking
familiarly and by articulate converse together ; or, in short, any
thing that has the least resemblance to a local territory, filled
with various accommodations, and peopled over its whole extent
by creatures formed like ourselves — having bodies such as we
now wear, and faculties of perception, and thought, and mutual
communication, such as we now exercise. The common imagi
nation that we have of paradise on the other side of death, is,
that of a lofty aerial region, where the inmates float in ether, or
are mysteriously suspended upon nothing — where all the warm
and sensible accompaniments which give such an expression of
strength, and life, and colouring to our present habitation, are
attenuated into a sort of spiritual element, that is meagre, and
imperceptible, and utterly uninviting to the eye of mortals here
below — where every vestige of materialism is done away, and
nothing left but certain unearthly scenes that have no power of
allurement, and certain unearthly ecstasies, with which it is felt
impossible to sympathize. The holders of this imagination
forget all the while, that really there is no essential connexion
between materialism and sin — that the world which we now in
habit had all the amplitude and solidity of its present material
ism before sin entered into it — that God, so far on that account
from looking slightly upon it, after it had received the last touch
of His creating hand, reviewed the earth, and the waters, and
the firmament, and all the green herbage, with the living crea
tures, and the man whom He had raised in dominion over them,
and He saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was
all very good. They forget that on the birth of materialism,
when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the

648 NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH.

great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that then " the
morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for
joy/' They forget the appeals that are made everywhere in the
Bible to this material workmanship — arid how from the face of
these visible heavens, and the garniture of this earth that we
tread upon, the greatness and the goodness of God are reflected
on the view of His worshippers. No, my brethren, the object of
the administration we sit under, is to extirpate sin, but it is not
to sweep away materialism. By the convulsions of the last day,
it may be shaken and broken down from its present arrange
ments, and thrown into such fitful agitations, as that the whole
of its existing framework shall fall to pieces ; and with a heat so
fervent as to melt its most solid elements, may it be utterly dis
solved. And thus may the earth again become without form
and void, but without one particle of its substance going into
annihilation. Out of the ruins of this second chaos, may another
heaven and another earth be made to arise ; and a new ma
terialism, with other aspects of magnificence and beauty, emerge
from the wreck of this mighty transformation ; and the world
be peopled as before, with the varieties of material loveliness,
and space be again lighted up into a firmament of material
splendour.

Were our place of everlasting blessedness so purely spiritual
as it is commonly imagined, then the soul of man, after, at death,
having quitted his body, would quit it conclusively. That mass
of materialism with which it is associated upon earth, and which
many regard as a load and an incumbrance, would have leave
to putrefy in the grave, without being revisited by supernatural
power, or raised again out of the inanimate dust into which it
had resolved. If the body be indeed a clog and a confinement
to the spirit instead of its commodious tenement, then would the
spirit feel lightened by the departure it had made, and expatiate
in all the buoyancy of its emancipated powers over a scene of
enlargement. And this is, doubtless, the prevailing imagination.
But why then, after having made its escape from such a thral
dom, should it ever recur to the prison-house of its old material
ism, if a prison-house it really be ? Why should the disengaged
spirit again be fastened to the drag of that grosser and heavier
substance, which many think has only the effect of weighing
down its activity, and infusing into the pure element of mind an
ingredient which serves to cloud and to enfeeble it ? In other
words, what is the use of a day of resurrection, if the union which

NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. 649

then takes place is to deaden or to reduce all those energies that
are commonly ascribed to the living principle, in a state of sepa
ration ? But, as a proof of some metaphysical delusion upon this
subject, the product, perhaps, of a wrong though fashionable
philosophy, it would appear, that to embody the spirit is not the
stepping-stone to its degradation, but to its preferment. The
last day will be a day of triumph to the righteous — because the
day of the re-entrance of the spirit to its much-loved abode,
where its faculties, so far from being shut up into captivity, will
find their free and kindred development in such material organs
as are suited to them. The fact of the resurrection proves that,
with man at least, the state of a disembodied spirit is a state of
unnatural violence — arid that the resurrection of his body is an
essential step to the highest perfection of which he is susceptible.
And it is indeed an homage to that materialism, which many are
for expunging from the future state of the universe altogether —
that ere the immaterial soul of man has reached the ultimate
glory and blessedness which are designed for it, it must return
and knock at that very grave where lie the mouldered remains
of the body which it wore — and there inquisition must be made
for the flesh, and the sinews, and the bones, which the power of
corruption has perhaps for centuries before assimilated to the
earth that is around them — and there the minute atoms must be
re-assembled into a structure that bears upon it the form and the
lineaments and the general aspect of a man — and the soul passes
into this material framework, which is hereafter to be its lodging-
place for ever — and that, not as its prison, but as its pleasant and
befitting habitation — not to be trammelled, as some would have
it, in a hold of materialism, but to be therein equipped for the
services of eternity — to walk embodied among the bowers of our
second paradise — to stand embodied in the presence of our God.
There will, it is true, be a change of personal constitution be
tween a good man before his death, and a good man after his
resurrection — riot, however, that he will be set free from his body,
but that he will be set free from the corrupt principle which is
in his body — not that the materialism by which he is now sur
rounded will be done away, but that the taint of evil by which
this materialism is now pervaded, will be done away. Could
this be effected without dying, then death would be no longer an
essential stepping-stone to paradise. But it would appear of the
moral virus which has been transmitted downwards from Adam,
and is now spread abroad over the whole human family — it would

650 NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH.

appear that to get rid of this, the old fabric must be taken down
arid reared anew ; and that not of other materials, but of its own
materials, only delivered of all impurity, as if by a refining
process in the sepulchre. It is thus, that what is " sown in
weakness, is raised in power" — and for this purpose, it is not
necessary to get quit of materialism, but to get quit of sin, and
so to purge materialism of its malady. It is thus that the dead
shall come forth incorruptible — and those, we are told, who are
alive at this great catastrophe, shall suddenly and mysteriously
be changed. While we are compassed about with these vile
bodies, as the apostle emphatically terms them, evil is present,
and it is well, if, through the working of the Spirit of grace, evil
does not prevail. To keep this besetting enemy in check is the
task and the trial of our Christianity on earth — and it is the
detaching of this poisonous ingredient which constitutes that for
which the believer is represented as groaning earnestly, even the
redemption of the body that he now wears, and which will then
be transformed into the likeness of Christ's glorified body. And
this will be his heaven, that he will serve God without a struggle,
and in a full gale of spiritual delight — because with the full con
currence of all the feelings and all the faculties of his regenerated
nature. Before death, sin is only repressed — after the resurrec
tion, sin will be exterminated. Here he has to maintain the
combat with a tendency to evil still lodging in his heart, and
working a perverse movement among his inclinations ; but after
his warfare in this world is accomplished, he will no longer be so
thwarted — and lie will set him down in another world, with the
repose and the triumph of victory for his everlasting reward.
The great constitutional plague of his nature will no longer
trouble him ; and there will be the charm of a general affinity
between the purity of his heart and the purity of the element he
breathes in. Still it will not be the purity of spirit escaped from
materialism, but of spirit translated into a materialism that has
been clarified of evil. It will not be the purity of souls un
clothed as at death, but the purity of souls that have again been
clothed upon at the resurrection.

But the highest homage that we know of to materialism, is
that which God manifest in the flesh has rendered to it. That
He, the Divinity, should have wrapt His unfathomable essence
in one of its coverings, and expatiated amongst us in the palpable
form and structure of a man ; and that He should have chosen
such a tenement, not as a temporary abode, but should have borne

i\TEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. 651

it with Him to the place which He now occupies, arid where He
is now employed in preparing the mansions of His followers —
that He should have entered within the veil, and be now seated
at the right hand of the Father, with the very body which was
marked by the nails upon His cross, and wherewith He ate and
drank after His resurrection — that He who repelled the imagi
nation of His disciples, as if they had seen a spirit, by bidding
them handle Him and see, and subjecting to their familiar touch
the flesh arid the bones that encompassed Him ; that He should
now be throned in universal supremacy, and wielding the whole
power of heaven and earth, have every knee to bow at His name,
and every tongue to confess, and yet all to the glory of God the
Father — that humanity, that substantial and embodied humanity,
should thus be exalted, and a voice of adoration from every
creature be lifted up to the Lamb for ever and ever — does this
look like the abolition of materialism, after the present system
of it is destroyed ; or does it not rather prove, that transplanted
into another system, it will be preferred to celestial honours, and
prolonged in immortality throughout all ages ?

It has been our careful endeavour in all that we have said, to
keep within the limits of the record, and to offer no other remarks
than those which may fitly be suggested by the circumstance,
that a new earth is to be created, as well as a new heavens, for
the future accommodation of the righteous. We have no desire
to push the speculation beyond what is written — but it were, at
the same time, well, that in all our representations of the im
mortal state, there was just the same force of colouring, and the
same vivacity of scenic exhibition, that there is in the New
Testament. The imagination of a total and diametric opposition
between the region of sense and the region of spirituality, cer
tainly tends to abate the interest with which we might otherwise
look to the perspective that is on the other side of the grave ; and
to deaden all those sympathies that we else might have with the
joys and the exercises of the blest in paradise. To rectify this,
it is not necessary to enter on the particularities of heaven — a
topic on which the Bible is certainly most sparing and reserved
in its communications. But a great step is gained, simply by
dissolving the alliance that exists in the minds of many between
the two ideas of sin and materialism ; or proving, that when
once sin is done away, it consists with all we know of God's ad
ministration, that materialism shall be perpetuated in the full
bloom and vigour of immortality. It altogether holds out a

652 NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH.

warmer and more alluring picture of the elysium that awaits
us, when told that there will be beauty to delight the eye, and
music to regale the ear, and the comfort that springs from all
the charities of intercourse between man and man, holding con
verse as they do on earth and gladdening each other with the
benignant smiles that play on the human countenance, or the
accents of kindness that fall in soft and soothing melody from
the human voice. There is much of the innocent, and much of
the inspiring, and much to affect and elevate the heart, in the
scenes and the contemplations of materialism — and we do hail
the information of our text, that after the dissolution of its
present framework, it will again be varied and decked out anew
in all the graces of its unfading verdure and of its unbounded
variety — that in addition to our direct and personal view of the
Deity, when He comes down to tabernacle with men, we shall
also have the reflection of Him in a lovely mirror of His own
workmanship — and that instead of being transported to some
abode of dimness and of mystery, so remote from human experi
ence as to be beyond all comprehension, we shall walk for ever
in a land replenished with those sensible delights and those
sensible glories, which, we doubt not, will lie most profusely
scattered over the "new heavens and the new earth, wherein
dwelleth righteousness."

II. — But though a paradise of sense, it will not be a paradise
of sensuality. Though not so unlike the present world as many
apprehend it, there will be one point of total dissimilarity be
twixt them. It is not the entire substitution of spirit for matter
that will distinguish the future economy from the present. But
it will be the entire substitution of righteousness for sin. It is
this which signalizes the Christian from the Mahometan para
dise ; not that sense, and substance, and splendid imagery, and
the glories of a visible creation seen with bodily eyes are ex
cluded from it — but that all which is vile in principle or volup
tuous in impurity will be utterly excluded from it. There will
be a firm earth as we have at present, and a heaven stretched
over it as we have at present ; and it is not by the absence of
these, but by the absence of sin, that the abodes of immortality
will be characterized. There will both be heavens and earth,
it would appear, in the next great administration — and with
this specialty to mark it from the present one, that it will be a
heavens and an earth "wherein dwelleth righteousness."

Now, though the first topic of information that we educed

NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. 653

from the text, may be regarded as not very practical, yet the
second topic on which we now insist, is most eminently so.
Were it the great characteristic of that spirituality which is to
obtain in a future heaven, that it was a spirituality of essence
then occupying and pervading the place from which materialism
had been swept away, we could not, by any possible method,
approximate the condition we are in at present to the condition
we are to hold everlastingly. We cannot etherealize the matter
that is around us — neither can we attenuate our own bodies, nor
bring down the slightest degree of such a heaven to the earth
that we now inhabit. But when we are told that materialism is
to be kept up, and that the spirituality of our future state lies
not in the kind of substance which is to compose its framework,
but in the character of those who people it — this puts, if not the
fulness of heaven, at least a foretaste of heaven, within our reach.
We have not to strain at a thing so impracticable as that of
diluting the material economy which is without us — we have
only to reform the moral economy that is within us. We are
now walking on a terrestrial surface, not more compact, perhaps,
than the one we shall hereafter walk upon, and are now wearing
terrestrial bodies, not firmer and more solid, perhaps, than those
we shall hereafter wear. It is riot by working any change upon
them, that we could realize to any extent our future heaven.
And this is simply done by opening the door of our heart for the
influx of heaven's affections — by bringing the whole man, as
made up of soul, and spirit, and body, under the presiding
authority of heaven's principles.

This will make plain to you how it is that it could be said in
the New Testament, that the " kingdom of heaven was at hand"
— and how, in that book, its place is marked out, not by locally
pointing to any quarter, and saying, Lo here, or lo there, but by
the simple affirmation that the kingdom of heaven is within you
— and how, in defining what it was that constituted the kingdom
of heaven, there is an enumeration, not of such circumstances as
make up an outward condition, but of such feelings and qualities
as make up a character, even righteousness, and peace, and joy
in the Holy Ghost — and how the ushering in of the new dispen
sation is held equivalent to the introduction of this kingdom into
the world — all making it evident, that if the purity and the
principles of heaven begin to take effect upon our heart, what
is essentially heaven begins with us even in this world ; that
instead of ascending to some upper region for the purpose of
entering it, it may descend upon us, and make an actual entrance

654 NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH.

of itself into our bosoms ; and that so far, therefore, from that
remote and inaccessible thing which many do regard it, it may,
through the influence of the word which is nigh unto you, and
of the Spirit that is given to prayer, be lighted up in the inner
man of an individual upon earth, whose person may even here
exemplify its graces, and whose soul may even here realize a
measure of its enjoyments.

And hence one great purpose of the incarnation of our
Saviour. He came down amongst us in the full perfection of
heaven's character, and has made us see that it is a character
which may be embodied. All its virtues were, in His case,
infused into a corporeal framework, and the substance of these
lower regions was taken into intimate and abiding association
with the spirit of the higher. The ingredient which is heavenly,
admits of being united with the ingredient which is earthly
— so that we, who by nature are of the earth, and earthly,
could we catch of that pure and celestial element which made
the man Christ Jesus to differ from all other men, then might
we too be formed into that character, by which it is that the
members of the family above differ from those of the outcast
family beneath. Now, it is expressly said of Him, that He is
set before us as an example ; and we are required to look to that
living exhibition of Him, where all the graces of the upper
sanctuary are beheld as in a picture ; and instead of an abstract,
we have in His history a familiar representation of such worth,
and piety, and excellence, as, could they only be stamped upon
our own persons, and borne along with us to the place where
He now dwelleth — instead of being shunned as aliens, we should
be welcomed and recognised as seemly companions for the in
mates of that place of holiness. And, in truth, the great work
of Christ's disciples upon earth, is a constant and busy process
of assimilation to their Master who is in heaven. And we live
under a special economy that has been set up for the express
purpose of helping it forward. It is for this, in particular, that
the Spirit is provided. We are changed into the image of the
Lord, even by the Spirit of the Lord. Nursed out of this ful
ness, we grow up unto the stature of perfect men in Christ
Jesus — and instead of heaven being a remote and mysterious
unknown, heaven is brought near to us by the simple expedient
of inspiring us where we now stand, with its love and its purity
and its sacredness. We learn from Christ, that the heavenly
graces are all of them compatible with the wear of an earthly
body, and the circumstances of an earthly habitation. It is not

NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. 655

said in how many of its features the new earth will differ from
or be like unto the. present one — but we, by turning from our
iniquities unto Christ, push forward the resemblance of the one
to the other, in the only feature that is specified, even that
" therein dwelleth righteousness."

And had we only the character of heaven, we should not be
long of feeling what that is which essentially makes the comfort
of heaven. " Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest iniquity ;
therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of glad
ness above thy fellows." Let us but love the righteousness
which He loves, and hate the iniquity which He hateth ; and
this, of itself, would so soften and attune the mechanism of our
moral nature, that in all the movements of it there should be
joy. It is not sufficiently adverted to, that the happiness of
heaven lies simply and essentially in the well-going machinery
of a well-conditioned soul — and that according to its measure, it
is the same in kind with the happiness of God, who liveth for
ever in bliss ineffable, because He is unchangeable in being good
and upright and holy. There may be audible music in heaven,
but its chief delight will be in the music of well-poised affec
tions, and of principles in full and consenting harmony with the
laws of eternal rectitude. There may be visions of loveliness
there ; but it will be the loveliness of virtue, as seen directly in
God, and as reflected back again in family likeness from all His
children — it will be this that shall give its purest and sweetest
transports to the soul. In a word, the main reward of paradise
is spiritual joy, and that springing at once from the love and the
possession of spiritual excellence. It is such a joy as sin ex
tinguishes on the moment of its entering the soul ; and such a
joy as is again restored to the soul, and that immediately on
its being restored to righteousness.

It is thus that heaven may be established upon earth, and the
petition of our Lord's prayer be fulfilled, " Thy kingdom come."
This petition receives its best explanation from the one which
follows : " Thy will be done in earth as it is done in heaven."
It just requires a similarity of habit and character in the two
places, to make out a similarity of enjoyment. Let us attend,
then, to the way in which the services of the upper sanctuary
are rendered — not in the spirit of legality, for this gendereth to
bondage; but in the spirit of love, which gendereth to the
beatitude of the affections, rejoicing in their best and most
favourite indulgence. They do not work there for the purpose
of making out the conditions of a bargain. They do not act

656 NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH.

agreeably to the pleasure of God, in order to obtain the gratifi
cation of any distinct will or distinct pleasure of their own in
return for it. Their will is, in fact, identical with the will of God.
There is a perfect unison of taste and of inclination between
the creature and the Creator. They are in their element when
they are feeling righteously and doing righteously. Obedience
is not drudgery but delight to them ; and as much as there is of
the congenial between animal nature and the food that is suit
able to it, so much is there of the congenial between the moral
nature of heaven and its sacred employments and services. Let
the will of God, then, be done here as it is done there, and not
only will character and conduct be the same here as there, but
they will also resemble each other in the style though not in the
degree of their blessedness. The happiness of heaven will be
exemplified upon earth along with the virtue of heaven — for, in
truth, the main ingredient of that happiness is not given them
in payment for work ; but it lies in the love they bear to the
work itself. A man is never happier than when employed in that
which he likes best. This is all a question of taste : but should
such a taste be given as to make it a man's meat and drink to
do the will of his Father, then is he in perfect readiness for
being carried upwards to heaven, and placed beside the pure
river of water of life that proceedeth out of the throne of God
and of the Lamb. This is the way in which you may make a
heaven upon earth, not by heaping your reluctant offers at the
shrine of legality, but by serving God because you love Him ;
and doing His will, because you delight to do Him honour.

And here we may remark, that the only possible conveyance
for this new principle into the heart, is the Gospel of Jesus
Christ — that in no other way than through the acceptance of its
free pardon, sealed by the blood of an atonement, which exalts
the Lawgiver, can the soul of man be both emancipated from
the fear of terror, and solemnized into the fear of humble and
holy reverence — that it is only in conjunction with the faith
that justifies, that the love of gratitude and the love of moral
esteem are made to arise in the bosom of regenerated man ; and,
therefore, to bring down the virtues of heaven, as well as the
peace of heaven, into this lower world, we know not what else
can be done, than to urge upon you the great propitiation of the
New Testament — nor are we aware of any expedient by which
all the cold and freezing sensations of legality can be done away,
but by your thankful and unconditional acceptance of Jesus
Christ, and Him crucified.

NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 657

DISCOUESE V.

THE NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

" For the kingdom of God is not'in'word, but in power." — 1 CORINTHIANS iv. 20.

THERE is a most important lesson to be derived from the
variety of senses in which the phrases "kingdom of God" and
"kingdom of heaven" are evidently made use of in the New
Testament. If it at one time carry our thoughts to that place
where God sits in visible glory, and where, surrounded by the
family of the blessed, He presides in full and spiritual authority
— it at another time turns our thoughts inwardly upon ourselves,
and instead of leading us to say, Lo here, or lo there, as if to
some local habitation at a distance, it leads us, by the declara
tion that the " kingdom of God is within us," to look for it into
our own breast, and to examine whether heavenly affections have
been substituted there in the place of earthly ones. Such is the
tendency of our imagination upon this subject, that the kingdom
of heaven is never mentioned without our minds being impelled
thereby to take an upward direction — to go aloft to that place
of spaciousness, and of splendour, and of psalmody, which forms
the residence of angels ; and where the praises both of redeemed
and unfallen creatures rise in one anthem of gratulation to the
Father, who rejoices over them all. Now, it is evident, that in
dwelling upon such an elysium as this, the mind can picture to
itself a thousand delicious accompaniments, which, apart from
moral and spiritual character altogether, are fitted to regale
animal and sensitive and unrenewed man. There may be sights
of beauty and brilliancy for the eye. There may be sounds of
sweetest melody for the ear. There may be innumerable sensa
tions of delight, from the adaptation which obtains between the
materialism of surrounding heaven, and the materialism of our
own transformed and glorified bodies. There may even be
poured upon us, in richest abundance, a higher and a nobler
class of enjoyments — and separate still from the possession of

VOL. III. ' 2 T

658 NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

holiness, of that peculiar quality, by the accession of which a
sinner is turned into a saint, and the man who before had an
entire aspect of secularity and of the world, looks as if he had been
cast over again in another mould, and come out breathing godly
desires, and aspiring, with a newly-created fervour after godly
enjoyments. And so, without any such conversion as this, heaven
may still be conceived to minister a set of very refined and in
tellectual gratifications. One may figure it so formed as to adapt
itself to the senses of man, though he should possess not one single
virtue of the temple or of the sanctuary — and one may figure it
to be so formed, as, though alike destitute of these virtues, to
adapt itself even to the spirit of man, and to many of the loftier
principles and capacities of his nature. His taste may find an
ever-recurring delight in the panorama of its sensible glories ;
and his fancy wander untired among all the realities and all the
possibilities of created excellence ; and his understanding be
feasted to ecstasy among those endless varieties of truth which
are ever pouring in a rich flood of discovery upon his mind ; and
even his heart be kept in a glow of warm and kindly affection
among the cordialities of that benevolence by which he is sur
rounded. All this is possible to be conceived of heaven — and
when we add its secure and everlasting exemption from the
agonies of hell, let us not wonder that such a heaven should be
vehemently desired by those who have not advanced by the very
humblest degree of spiritual preparation for the real heaven of
the New Testament — who have riot the least congeniality of
feeling with that which forms its essential and characteristic
blessedness — who cannot sustain on earth for a very short inter
val of retirement, the labour and the weariness of communion
with God — who, though they could relish to the uttermost all
the sensible and all the intellectual joys of heaven, yet hold no
taste of sympathy whatever with its hallelujahs and its songs
of raptured adoration — and who, therefore, if transported at this
moment, or if transported after death, with the frame and cha
racter of soul that they have at this moment, to the New Jeru
salem, and the city of the living God, would positively find
themselves aliens, and out of their kindred and rejoicing element,
however much they may sigh after a paradise of pleasure or a
paradise of poetry.

It may go to dissipate this sentimental illusion, if we ponder
well the meaning which is often assigned to the " kingdom of
heaven" in the Bible — if we reflect, that it is often made to attach

NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 659

personally to a human creature upon earth — as well as to be
situated locally in some distant and mysterious region away from
us — that to be the subjects of such a kingdom, it is not indis
pensable that our residence be within the limits of an assigned
territory, any more, in fact, than that the subject of an earthly
sovereign should not remain so, though travelling, for a time,
beyond the confines of his master's jurisdiction. He may, though
away from his country in person, carry about with him in mind
a full principle of allegiance to his country's sovereign — and may
both, in respect of legal duty, and of his own most willing and
affectionate compliance with it, remain associated with him both
in heart and in political relationship. He is still a member of
that kingdom in the domains of which he was born — and in the
very same way may a man be travelling the journey of life in
this world, and be all the while a member of the kingdom of
heaven. The Being who reigns in supreme authority there,
may, even in this land of exile and alienation, have some one
devoted subject who renders to the same authority the deference
of his heart and the subordination of his whole practice. The
will of God may possess such a moral ascendency over his will,
as that when the one commands, the other promptly and cheer
fully obeys. The character of God may stand revealed in such
charms of perfection and gracefulness to the eye of his mind, that
by ever looking to Him, he both loves and is made like unto
Him. A sense of God may pervade his every hour and every
employment, even as it is the hand of God which preserves him,
continually, and through the actual power of God that he lives
and moves as well as has his being. Such a man, if such a man
there be on the face of our world, has the kingdom of God set
up in his heart. He is already one of the children of the king
dom. He is not locally in heaven, and yet his heaven is begun.
He has in his eye the glories of heaven ; though as yet he sees
them through a glass darkly. He feels in his bosom the prin
ciples of heaven ; though still at war with the propensities of
nature, they do not yet reign in all the freeness of an undisputed
ascendency. He carries in his heart the peace, and the joy, and
the love, and the elevation of heaven ; though under the incum-
brance of a vile body, the spiritual repast which is thus provided,
is not without its mixtures and without its mitigation. In a
word, the essential elements of heaven's reward, and of heaven's
felicity, are all in his possession. He tastes the happiness of
heaven in kind, though not in its full and finished degree. When

660 NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

he gets to heaven above, he will not meet there with a happiness
differing in character from that which he now feels ; but only
higher in gradation. There may be crowns of material splen
dour. There may be trees of unfading loveliness. There may
be pavements of emerald — and canopies of brightest radiance —
and gardens of deep and tranquil security — and palaces of proud
and stately decoration — and a city of lofty pinnacles, through
which there unceasing flows a river of gladness, and where jubi
lee is ever rung with the concord of seraphic voices. But these
are only the accessories of heaven. They form not the materials
of its substantial blessedness. Of this the man who toils in
humble drudgery an utter stranger to the delights of sensible
pleasure, or the fascinations of sensible glory, has got already a
foretaste in his heart. It consists not in the enjoyment of created
good, nor in the survey of created magnificence. It is drawn in
a direct stream through the channels of love and of contempla
tion from the fulness of the Creator. It emanates from the coun
tenance of God, manifesting the spiritual glories of His holy and
perfect character, on those whose characters are kindred to His
own. And if on earth there is no tendency towards such a charac
ter — no process of restoration to the lost image of the Godhead —
no delight in prayer — no relish for the sweets of intercourse with
our Father, now unseen, but then to be revealed to the view of
His immediate worshippers — then, let our imaginations kindle
as they may with the beatitudes of our fictitious heaven, the true
heaven of the Bible is what we shall never reach, because it is
a heaven that we are not fitted to enjoy.

But such a view of the matter seems not merely to dissipate a
sentimental illusion which obtains upon this subject. It also
serves to dissipate a theological illusion. Ere we can enter
heaven, there must be granted to us a legal capacity of admis
sion — and Christ by His atoning death and perfect righteousness
has purchased this capacity for those who believe — and they, by
the very act of believing, are held to be in possession of it, just
as a man by stretching out his hand to a deed or a passport, be
comes vested with all the privileges which are thereby conveyed
to the holder. Now, in the zeal of controversialists (and it is a
point most assuredly about which they cannot be too zealous)
— in their zeal to clear up and to demonstrate the ground on
which the sinner's legal capacity must rest — there has, with
many, been a sad overlooking of what is no less indispensable,
even his personal capacity. And yet even on the lowest and

NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 661

grossest conceptions of what that is which constitutes the felicity
of heaven, it would be no heaven, and no place of enjoyment at
all, without a personal adaptation on the part of its occupiers to
the kind of happiness which is current there. If that happiness
consisted entirely in sights of magnificence, of what use would
it be to confer a title-deed of entry on a man who was blind ?
To make it heaven to him, his eyes must be opened. Or, if that
happiness consisted in sounds of melody, of what use would a
passport be to the man who was deaf? To make out a heaven
for him, a change must be made on the person which he wears,
as well as in the place which he occupies — and his ears must be
unstopped. Or, if that happiness consisted in fresh and perpetual
accessions of new and delightful truth to the understanding,
what would rights and legal privileges avail to him who was
sunk in helpless idiotism ? To provide him with a heaven, it is
not enough that he be transported to a place among the mansions
of the celestial : he must be provided with a new faculty — and
as before, a change behoved to be made upon the senses ; so now,
ere heaven can be heaven to its occupier, a change must be made
upon his mind. And, in like manner, my brethren, if that
happiness shall consist in the love of God for His goodness, and
in the love of God for the moral and spiritual excellence which
belongs to Him — if it shall consist in the play and exercise of
affections directed to such objects as are alone worthy of their
most exalted regard — if it shall consist in the movements of a
heart now attracted in reverence and admiration towards all that
is noble and righteous and holy — it is not enough to constitute
a heaven for the sinner, that God is there in visible manifesta
tion, or that heaven is lighted up to him in a blaze of spiritual
glory. His heart must be made a fit recipient for the impression
of that glory. Of what possible enjoyment to him is heaven, as
his purchased inheritance, if heaven be not also his precious and
his much-loved home? To create enjoyment fora man, there
must be a suitableness between the taste that is in him and the
objects that are around him. To make a natural man happy
upon earth, we may let his taste alone, and surround him with
favourable circumstances — with smiling abundance, and merry
companionship, and bright anticipations of fortune or of fame,
and the salutations of public respect, and the gaieties of fashion
able amusement, and the countless other pleasures of a world
which yields so much to delight and to diversify the short-lived
period of its fleeting generations. To make the same man happy

662 NATUfvE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

in heaven, it would suffice simply to transmit him there with the
same taste, and to surround him with the same circumstances.
But God has not so ordered heaven. He will not suit the cir
cumstances of heaven to the character of man — and therefore
to make it, that man can be happy there, nothing remains but
to suit the character of man to the circumstances of heaven —
and therefore it is, that to bring about heaven to a sinner, it is
not enough that there be the preparation of a place for him, there
must be a preparation of him for the place ; it is not enough that
he be meet in law, he must be meet in person ; it is not enough
that there be a change in his forensic relation towards God, there
must be a change in the actual disposition of his heart towards
Him ; and unless delivered from his earth-born propensities ; un
less a clean heart be created, and a right spirit be renewed ; unless
transformed inte a holy and a godlike character, it is quite in
vain to have put a deed of entry into his hands — heaven will
have no charm for him ; all its notes of rapture will fall with
tasteless insipidity upon his ear ; and justification itself will cease
to be a privilege.

Let us cease to wonder, then, at the frequent application, in
Scripture, of this phrase to a state of personal feeling and
character upon earth — and rather let us press upon our remem
brance the important lessons which are to be gathered from such
an application. In that passage where it is said, that " the
kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, and
peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost," there can be no doubt that
the reference is altogether personal, for the apostle is here con
trasting the man who in these things serveth Christ, with the
man who eateth unto the Lord, or who eateth not unto the Lord.
And in the passage now before us, there can be as little doubt
that the reference is to the kingdom of God, as fixed and sub
stantiated upon the character of the human soul. He was just
before alluding to those who could talk of the things of Christ,
while it remained questionable whether there was any change or
any effect that could at all attest the power of these things upon
their person and character. This is the point which he pro
posed to ascertain on his next visit to them. " I will come to
you shortly, if the Lord will, and will know not the speech of
them which are puffed up, but the power. For the kingdom of
God is not in word, but in power." It is not enough to mark
you as the children of this kingdom ; or as those over whose
hearts the reign of God is established ; or as those in whom a

NATUBE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 663

preparation is going on here for a place of glory and blessedness
hereafter — that you know the terms of orthodoxy, or that you
can speak its language. If even an actual belief in its doctrine
could reside in your mind, without fruit and without influence,
this would as little avail you. But it is well to know, both
from experience and from the information of Him who knew
what was in man, that an actual belief of the gospel is at all
times an effectual belief — that upon the entrance of such a belief
the kingdom of God comes to us with power, being that which
availeth, even faith working by love, and purifying the heart,
and overcoming the world.

One of the simplest cases of the kingdom of God in word and
not in power is that of a child with its memory stored in passages
of Scripture, and in all the answers to all the questions of a sub
stantial and well-digested catechism. In such an instance, the
tongue may be able to rehearse the whole expression of evan
gelical truth, while neither the meaning of the truth is perceived
by the understanding, nor, of consequence, can the moral influ
ence of the truth be felt in the heart. The learner has got
words, but nothing more. This is the whole fruit of his acquisi
tion — nor would it make any difference in as far as the effect at
the time is concerned, though, instead of words adapted to the
expression of Christian doctrine, they had been the words of a
song, or a fable, or any secular narrative and performance what
ever. This is all undeniable enough — if we could only prevail
on many men and many women not to deny its application to
themselves — if we could only convince our grown-up children of
the absolute futility of many of their exercises — if we could only
arouse from their dormancy our listless readers of the Bible —
our men who make a mere piece-work of their Christianity ;
who, in making way through the Scriptures, do it by the page,
arid in addressing prayers to their Maker, do it by the sentence ;
with whom the perusal of the sacred volume is absolutely little
better than a mere exercise of the lip or of the eye, and a pre
ference for orthodoxy is little better than a preference for certain
familiar and well-known sounds ; where the thinking principle
is almost never in contact with the matter of theological truth,
however conversant both their mouths and their memories may
be with the language of it — so that, in fact, the doctrine by the
knowledge of which, and the power of which, it is that we are
saved, lies as effectually hidden from their minds, as if it lay
wrapt in hieroglyphical obscurity ; or as if their intellectual

654 NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

organ was shut against all communication with anything with
out them — and thus it is, that what is not perceived by the
mental eye, having no possible operation upon the mental feel
ings or mental purposes, the kingdom of God cometh to them in
word only, while not in power.

But again, what is translated "word" in this verse, is also
capable of being rendered by the term " reason." It may not
only denote that which constitutes the material vehicle by which
the argument conceived in the mind of one man is translated
into the mind of another — it may also denote the argument
itself ; and when rendered in this way, it offers to our notice a
very interesting case of which there are not wanting many ex
emplifications. In the case just now adverted to, the mere
word is in the mouth, without its corresponding idea being in
the mind ; but in the case immediately before us, ideas are pre
sent as well as words, and every intellectual faculty is at its
post for the purpose of entertaining them — the attention most
thoroughly awake — and the curiosity on the stretch of its utmost
eagerness — and the judgment most busily employed in the work
of comparing one doctrine and one declaration with another —
and the reason conducting its long or its intricate processes —
and, in a word, the whole machinery of the mind as powerfully
stimulated by a theological as it ever can be by a natural or
scientific speculation — and yet with this seeming advancement
that it makes from the language of Christianity to the substance
of Christianity, what shall we think of it if there be no advance
ment whatever in the power of Christianity — no accession to the
soul of any one of those three ingredients, which, taken together,
make up the apostle's definition of the kingdom of God — no
augmentation either of its righteousness or its peace or its joy in
the Holy Ghost — the man, no doubt, very much engrossed and
exercised with the subject of divinity, but with as little of the
real spirit and character of divinity thereby transferred into his
own spirit and his own character as if he were equally en
grossed and equally exercised with the subject of mathematics —
remaining, in short, after all his doctrinal acquisitions of the
truth, an utter stranger to the moral influence of the truth — and
proving, in the fact of his being practically and personally the
very same man as before, that if the kingdom of God is not in
word, it is as little in argument, but in power.

If it be of importance to know, that a man may lay hold by
his memory of all the language of Christianity, and yet not be

NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 665

a Christian — it is also of importance to know, that a man may
lay hold by his understanding of all the doctrine of Christianity,
and yet not be a Christian. It is our opinion that in this case
the man has only an apparent belief without having an actual
belief — that all the doctrine is conceived by him without being
credited by him — that it is the object of his fancy without being
the object of his faith — and that, as on the one hand, if the con
viction be real, the consequence of another heart arid another
character will be sure — so on the other hand, and on the prin
ciple of " by their fruits shall ye know them," if he want the
fruit, it is just because he is in want of the foundation — if there
be no produce, it is because there is no principle — having
experienced no salvation from sin here, he shall experience no
salvation from the abode of sinners hereafter. If faith were
present with him, he would be kept by the power of it unto
salvation, from both — but destitute as he proves himself to be
now of the faith which sanctifies, he will be found then, in the
midst of all his semblances and all his delusions, to have been
equally destitute of the faith which justifies.

And it is perhaps not so difficult to stir up in the mind of the
learned controversialist and the deeply-exercised scholar the sus
picion, that with all his acquirements in the lore of theology, he
is in respect of its personal influence upon himself, still in a state
of moral and spiritual unsoundness — it is not so difficult to raise
this feeling of self-condemnation in his mind, as it is to do it in
the mind of him who has selected his one favourite article, and
there resolved if die he must to die hard, has taken up his
obstinate and immovable position — and retiring within the en
trenchment of a few verses of the 'Bible, will defy all the truth
and all the thunder of its remaining declarations ; and with an
orthodoxy which carries on all its play in his head without one
moving or one softening touch upon his heart, will stand out to
the eye of the world, both in avowed principle, and in its cor
responding practice, a secure, sturdy, firm, impregnable Antino-
mian. He thinks that he will have heaven because he has
faith. But if his faith do not bring the virtues of heaven into
his heart, it will never spread either the glory or the security of
heaven around his person. The region to which he vainly
thinks of looking forward is a region of spirituality — and he
himself must be spiritualized ere it can prove to him a region of
enjoyment. If he count on a different paradise from this, he is
as widely mistaken as they who dream of the luxury that awaits

C66 NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

them in the paradise of Mahomet. He misinterprets the whole
undertaking of Jesus Christ. He degrades the salvation which
He hath achieved, into a salvation from animal pain. He trans
forms the heaven which He has opened, into a heaven of animal
gratifications. He forgets that on the great errand of man's
restoration, it is not more necessary to recall our departed species
to the heaven from which they had wandered, than it is to recall
to the bosom of man its departed worth and its departed excel
lence. The one is what faith will do on the other side of death.
But the other just as certainly faith must do on this side of
death. It is here that heaven begins. It is here that eternal
life is entered upon. It is here that man first breathes the air
of immortality. It is upon earth that he learns the rudiments
of a celestial character, and first tastes of celestial enjoyments.
It is here that the well of water is struck out in the heart of
renovated man, and that fruit is made to grow unto holiness, and
then, in the end, there is life everlasting. The man whose
threadbare orthodoxy is made up of meagre and unfruitful posi
tions, may think that he walks in clearness, while he is only
walking in the cold light of speculation. He walks in the feeble
sparks of his own kindling. Were it fire from the sanctuary, it
would impart to his unregenerated bosom of the heat, and spirit,
and love of the sanctuary. This is the sure result of the faith
that is unfeigned — and all that a feigned faith can possibly make
out, will be a fictitious title-deed, which will not stand before the
light of the great day of final examination. And thus will it
be found, I fear, in many cases of marked and ostentatious pro
fessorship, how possible a thing it is to have an appearance of
the kingdom of God in word, and the kingdom of God in letter,
and the kingdom of God in controversy — while the kingdom of
God is not in power.

But once more : Instead of laying a false security upon one
article, it is possible to have a mind familiarized to all the
articles — to admit the need of holiness, and to demonstrate the
channel of influence by which it is brought down from heaven
upon the hearts of believers — to cast an eye of intelligence over
the whole symphony and extent of Christian doctrine — to lay
bare those ligaments of connexion by which a true faith in the
mind is ever sure to bring a new spirit and a new practice along
with it — and to hold up the lights both of Scripture and of ex
perience over the whole process of man's regeneration. It is
possible for one to do all this, and yet to have no part in that

NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 607

regeneration — to declare with ability and effect the gospel to
others, and yet himself be a castaway — to unravel the whole of
that spiritual mechanism by which a sinner is transformed into a
saint, while he does not exemplify the working of that mechan
ism in his own person — to explain what must be done, and what
must be undergone in the process of becoming one of the chil
dren of the kingdom, while he himself remains one of the chil
dren of this world. To him the kingdom of God hath come in
word, and it hath come in letter, and it hath come in natural
discernment; but it hath not come in power. He may have
profoundly studied the whole doctrine of the kingdom, and have
conceived the various ideas of which it is composed, and have
embodied them in words, and have poured them forth in utter
ance — and yet be as little spiritualized by these manifold opera
tions, as the air is spiritualized by its being the avenue for the
sounds of his voice to the ears of his listening auditory. The
living man may with all the force of his active intelligence be a
mere vehicle of transmission. The Holy Ghost may leave the
message to take its own way through his mind — and may refuse
the accession of His influence, till it make its escape from the
lips of the preacher — and may trust for its conveyance to those
aerial undulations by which the report is carried forward to an
assembled multitude — and may only, after the entrance of hear
ing has been effected for the terms of the message, may only,
after the unaided powers of moral and physical nature have
brought the matter thus far, may then, and not till then, add
His own influence to the truths of the message, and send them
with this impregnation from the ear to the conscience of any
whom He listeth. And thus from the workings of a cold and
desolate bosom in the human expounder, may there proceed a
voice, which on its way to some of those who are assembled
around him, shall turn out to be a voice of urgency and power.
He may be the instrument of blessings to others, which have
never come with kindly or effective influence upon his own
heart. He may inspire an energy which he does not feel, and
pour a comfort into the wounded spirit, the taste of which and
the enjoyment of which is not permitted to his own — and no
thing can serve more effectually than this experimental fact to
humble him, and to demonstrate the existence of a power which
cannot be wielded by all the energies of Nature — a power often
refused to eloquence, often refused to the might and the glory of
human wisdom — often refused to the most strenuous exertions of

668 NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

human might and human talent, and generally met with in
richest abundance among the ministrations of the men of sim
plicity and prayer.

Some of you have heard of the individual who, under an op
pression of the severest melancholy, implored relief and counsel
from his physician. The unhappy patient was advised to attend
the performances of a comedian who had put all the world into
ecstasies. But it turned out that the patient was the comedian
himself — and that while his smile was the signal of merriment
to all, his heart stood uncheered and motionless, amid the gratu-
lations of an applauding theatre ; and evening after evening did-
he kindle around him a rapture in which he could not partici
pate — a poor, helpless, dejected mourner, among the tumults of
that high-sounding gaiety which he himself had created.

Let all this touch our breasts with the persuasion of the
nothingness of man. Let it lead us to withdraw our confidence
from the mere instrument, and to carry it upwards to Him who
alone worketh all in all. Let it reconcile us to the arrange
ments of His providence, and assure our minds that He can do
with one arrangement what we fondly anticipated from another.
Let us cease to be violently affected by the mutabilities of a
fleeting and a shifting world — and let nothing be suffered to
have the power of dissolving for an instant that connexion of
trust which should ever subsist between our minds and the will
of the all-working Deity. Above all, let us carefully separate be
tween our liking for certain accompaniments of the word, and our
liking for the word itself. Let us be jealous of those human pre
ferences which may bespeak some human and adventitious influ
ence upon our hearts, and be altogether different from the influence
of Christian truth upon Christianized and sanctified affections.
Let us be tenacious only of one thing — not of holding by par
ticular ministers — not of saying, that " I am of Paul, or Cephas,
or Apollos" — not of idolizing the servant while the Master is
forgotten — but let us hold by the Head, even Christ. He is the
source of all spiritual influence — and while the agents whom
He employs can do no more than bring the kingdom of God to
you in word — it lies with Him either to exalt one agency, or to
humble and depress another — and either with or without such
tin agency, by the demonstration of that Spirit which is given
unto faith, to make the kingdom of God come into your hearts
with power.

HEAVEN A CHARACTER AND NOT A LOCALITY. 669

DISCOURSE VI.

HEAVEN A CHARACTER AND NOT A LOCALITY.

" He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still :
and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still : and he that is holy, let him be holy
still."— RBV. xxii. 11.

OUR first remark on this passage of Scripture is, how very
palpably and nearly it connects time with eternity. The cha
racter wherewith we sink into the grave at death, is the very
character wherewith we shall re-appear on the day of resurrec
tion. The character which habit has fixed and strengthened
through life, adheres, it would seem, to the disembodied spirit
through the mysterious interval which separates the day of our
dissolution from the day of our account — when it will again stand
forth the very image and substance of what it was, to the inspec
tion of the Judge and the awards of the judgment-seat. The
moral lineaments which be graven on the tablet of the inner
man, and which every day of an unconverted life makes deeper
and more indelible than before, will retain the very impress they
have gotten — unaltered and uneffaced by the transition from our
present to our future state of existence. There will be a disso
lution, and then a reconstruction of the body from the sepulchral
dust into which it had mouldered. But there will be neither a
dissolution nor a renovation of the spirit, which, indestructible
both in character and essence, will weather and retain its identity
on the mid- way passage between this world and the next ; so
that at the time of quitting its earthly tenement we may say, that,
if unjust now it will be unjust still, if filthy now it will be filthy
still, if righteous now it will be righteous still, and if holy now
it will be holy still.

Our second remark, suggested by the Scripture now under
consideration, is, that there be many analogies of nature and
experience which even death itself does not interrupt. There is
nought more familiar to our daily observation than the power
and inveteracy of habit — insomuch that any vicious propensity

670 HEAVEN A CHARACTER

is strengthened by every new act of indulgence ; any virtuous
principle is more firmly established than before by every new act
of resolute obedience to its dictates. The law which connects
the actings of boyhood or of youth with the character of man
hood, is the identical the unrepealed law which connects our
actings in time with our character through eternity. The way
in which the moral discipline of youth prepares for the honours
and the enjoyments of a virtuous manhood, is the very way in
which the moral and spiritual discipline of a whole life prepares
for a virtuous and happy immortality. And on the other hand,
the succession, as of cause and effect, from a profligate youth or
a dishonest manhood to a disgraced and worthless old age — is
just the succession, also of cause and effect, between the misdeeds
and the depravities of our history on earth, and an inheritance
of worthlessness and wretchedness for ever. The law of moral
continuity between the different stages of human life, is also the
law of continuity between the two worlds — which even the death
that intervenes does not violate. Be he a saint or a sinner, each
shall be filled with the fruit of his own ways — so that when
translated into their respective places of fixed and everlasting
destination, the one shall rejoice through eternity in that pure
element of goodness which here he loved and aspired after ; the
other, a helpless, a degraded victim of those passions which lorded
over him through life, shall be irrevocably doomed to that worst
of torments and that worst of tyranny — the torment of his own
accursed nature, the inexorable tyranny of evil.

Our third remark, suggested by this Scripture, is, that it
affords no very dubious perspective of the future heaven and the
future hell of the New Testament. We are aware of the material
images employed in Scripture, and by which it bodies forth its
representation of both ; of the fire, and the brimstone, and the
lake of living agony, and the gnashing of teeth, and the waitings,
the ceaseless wailings of distress and despair unutterable, by
which the one is set before us in characters of terror and most
revolting hideousness ; of the splendour, the spaciousness, the
music, the floods of melody and sights of surpassing loveliness,
by which the other is set before us in characters of bliss and
brightness imperishable ; with all that can regale the glorified
senses of creatures rejoicing for ever in the presence and before
the throne of God. We stop not to inquire, and far less to dis
pute, whether these descriptions in the plain meaning and very
letter of them are- to be realized. But we hold that it would

AND NOT A LOCALITY. 671

purge theology from many of its errors, and that it would guide
and enlighten the practical Christianity of many honest inquirers ;
if the moral character both of heaven and hell were more dis
tinctly recognised, and held a more prominent place in the
regards and contemplations of men. If it indeed be true that
the moral, rather than the material, is the main ingredient,
whether of the coming torment or the coming ecstacy — then the
hell of the wicked may be said to have already begun, and the
heaven of the virtuous may be said to have already begun. The
one, in the bitterness of an unhinged and dissatisfied spirit, has
a foretaste of the wretchedness before him ; the other, in the
peace and triumphant complacency of an approving conscience,
has a foretaste of the happiness before him. Each is ripening
for his own everlasting destiny • and whether in the depravities
that deepen and accumulate on the character of the one, or in
the graces that brighten and multiply upon the other — we see
materials enough, either for the worm that dieth not, or for the
pleasures that are for evermore.

But again, it may be asked, will spiritual elements alone
suffice to make up either the intense and intolerable wretched
ness of a hell, or the intense beatitude of a heaven ? For an
answer to this question, let us first turn your attention to the
former of these receptacles. And we ask you to think of the
state of that heart in respect to sensation, which is the seat of a
concentrated and all-absorbing selfishness, which feels for no
other interest than its own, and holds no fellowship of truth or
honesty or confidence with the fellow-beings around it. The
owner of such a heart may live in society ; but, cut off as he is
by his own sordid nature from the reciprocities of honourable
feeling and good faith, he may be said to live an exile in the
midst of it. He is a stranger to the day-light of the moral
world ; and instead of walking abroad on an open platform of
free and fearless communion with his fellows, he spends a cold
and heartless existence in the hiding-place of his own thoughts.
You mistake it, if you think of this creeping and ignoble crea
ture that he knows aught of the real truth or substance of enjoy
ment ; or however successful he may have beeti in the wiles of
his paltry ^selfishness, that a sincere or a solid satisfaction has
been the result of it. On the contrary, if you enter his heart,
you will there find a distaste and disquietude in the lurking sense
of its own worthlessness ; and that dissevered from the respect
of society without, it finds no refuge within where he is aban-

672 HEAVEN A CHARACTER

doned by the respect of his own conscience. It does not consist
with moral nature, that there should be internal happiness or
internal harmony, when the moral sense is made to suffer per
petual violence. A man of cunning and concealment, however
dexterous, however triumphant in his worthless policy, is not at
ease. The stoop, the downcast regards, the dark and sinister
expression, of him who cannot lift up his head among his fellow-
men, or look his companions in the face, are the sensible proofs
that he who knows himself to be dishonest feels himself to be
degraded ; and the inward sense of dishonour which haunts and
humbles him here, is but the commencement of that shame and
everlasting contempt to which he shall awaken hereafter. This,
you will observe, is a purely moral chastisement ; and, apart alto
gether from the infliction of violence or pain on the sentient
economy, is enough to overwhelm the spirit that is exercised
thereby. Let him then that is unjust now be unjust still ; and
in stepping from time to eternity, he bears in his own distempered
bosom the materials of his coming vengeance along with him.
The character itself will be the executioner of its own condemna
tion ; and when, instead of each suffering apart, the unrighteous
are congregated together — as in the parable of the tares, where,
instead of eacli plant being severally destroyed, the order is given
to bind them up in bundles and burn them — we may be well
assured, that, where the turbulence and disorder of an unrighte
ous society are superadded to those sufferings which prey in
secrecy and solitude within the heart of each individual member,
a tenfold fiercer and more intolerable agony will ensue from it.
The anarchy of a state, when the authority of its government is
for a time suspended, forms but a feeble representation of that
everlasting anarchy when the unrighteous of all ages are let
loose to act and react with unmitigated violence on each other.
In this conflict of assembled myriads ; this fierce and fell colli
sion between the outrages of injustice on the one side, and the
outcries of resentment on the other ; and though no pain were
inflicted in this war of passions and of purposes, the passion and
purpose of violence in one quarter calling forth the passion and
the purpose of keenest vengeance back again — though no mate
rial or sentient agony were felt — though a war of ^embodied
spirits — yet in the wild tempest of emotions alone — the hatred,
the fury, the burning recollection of injured rights, and the brood
ing thoughts of yet unfulfilled retaliation — in these, and these
alone, do we behold the materials enough of a dire and dreadful

• AND NOT A LOCALITY. 673

pandemonium ; and apart from corporeal suffering altogether, may
we behold, in the full and final developments of character alone,
enough for imparting all its corrosion to the worm that dieth
not, enough for sustaining in all its fierceness the fire that is not
quenched.

But there is another moral ingredient in the future sufferings
of the wicked beside the one of which we have now spoken —
suggested to us by the second clause of our text ; and from
which we learn, that not only will the unjust man carry his
falsehoods and his frauds along with him to the place of condem
nation, but that also the voluptuary will carry his unsanctified
habits and unhallowed passions thitherward. " Let him that is
filthy be filthy still." We would here take the opportunity of
exposing, what we fear is a frequent delusion in society — who
give their respect to the man of honour and integrity — and he
does not forfeit that respect, though known at the same time to
be a man of dissipation. Not that we think any one of the vir
tues which enter into the composition of a perfect character can
suffer without all the other virtues suffering along with it. We
believe that a conjunction between a habit of unlawful pleasure
and the maintenance of a strict resolute exalted equity and truth,
is very seldom, we could almost say, is never realized. The
man of forbidden indulgence in the prosecution of his objects has
a thousand degrading fears to encounter, and many concealments
to practise — perhaps low and unworthy artifices to which he must
descend ; and how can either his honour or his humanity be said
to survive, if at length, in his heedless and impetuous career, he
shall trample on the dearest rights and the most sacred interests
of families ? With us it has all the authority of a moral aphorism,
that the sobrieties of human virtue can never be invaded with
out the equities of human virtue also being invaded. The mo
ralities of human life are too closely linked and interwoven with
each other, as that though one should be detached, the others
might be left uninjured and entire ; and so no one can cast his
purity away from him, without a violence being done to the
general moral structure and consistency of his whole character.
But be this as it may, we have the authority of the text, and the
oft- reiterated affirmations of the New Testament, for saying of
the voluptuary, that if the countenance of the world be not with
drawn from him, the gate of heaven is at least shut against him ;
that nothing unclean or unholy can enter there ; and that carry
ing his uncrucified affections into the place of condemnation, he

VOL. in. 2 u

G74 HEAVEN A CHARACTER

will find them to be the ministers of wrath, the executioners of
a still sorer vengeance. The loathing, the remorse, the felt and
conscious degradation, the dreariness of heart that follow in the
train of guilty indulgence here — these form but the beginning of
his sorrows, and are but the presages and the precursors of that
deeper wretchedness, which, by the unrepealed laws of moral
nature, the same character will entail on its possessors in another
state of existence. They are but the penalties of vice in embryo,
and they may give at least the conception of what are these
penalties in full. It will add — it will add inconceivably, to the
darkness and disorder of that moral chaos in which the impeni
tent shall spend their eternity — when the uproar of the baccha
nalian and the licentious emotions is thus superadded to the
selfish and malignant passions of our nature ; and when the
frenzy of unsated desire, followed up by the languor and the com
punction of its worthless indulgence, shall make up the sad his
tory of many an unhappy spirit. We need not to dwell on the
picture, though it brings out into bolder relief the all-important
truth, that there is an inherent bitterness in sin ; that by the
very constitution of our nature, moral evil is its own curse and
its own worst punishment ; that the wicked on the other side of
death, but reap what they sow on this side of it; and that
whether we look to the tortures of a distempered spirit, or. to the
countless ills of a distempered society, we may be very sure that
to the character of its inmates — a character which they have
fostered upon earth, and which now remains fixed on them
through eternity — the main wretchedness of hell is owing.

Before quitting this part of the subject, we have but one re
mark more to offer. It may be felt as if we had overstated the
power of mere character to beget a wretchedness at all approach
ing to the wretchedness of hell — seeing that the character is
often realized in this world, without bringing along with it ;i
distress or a discomfort which is at all intolerable. Neither the
unjust man of our text, nor the licentious man of our text, is seen
to be so unhappy here, in virtue of the moral characteristics
which respectively belong to them, as to justify the imagination
that there these characteristics will be of power to effectuate such
anguish and disorder of spirit as we have now been represent
ing. But it is forgotten, first, that the world presents in its busi
ness, its amusements, and its various gratifications, a refuge from
the mental agonies of reflection and remorse — and, secondly, that
the governments of the world offer a restraint against the out-

AND NOT A LOCALITY. 675

breakings of violence which would keep up a perpetual anarchy
in the species. Let us simply conceive of these two securities
against our having even now a hell upon earth, that they are
both taken down ; that there is no longer such a world as ours,
affording to each individual spirit innumerable diversions from
the burden of its own thoughts ; and no longer such a human go
vernment as ours, affording to general society a powerful defence
against the countless variety of ills that would otherwise rage
and tumultuate within its borders — then, as sure as that a solitary
prison is felt by every criminal to be the most dreadful of all
punishments ; and as sure as that on the authority of law being
suspended, the reign of terror would commence, and the un
chained passions of humanity would go forth over the face of the
land to raven and to destroy — so surely, out of moral elements
and influences alone might an eternity of utter wretchedness
and despair be entailed on the rebellious. And only let all the
unjust and all the licentious of our text be formed into a com
munity by themselves, and the Christianity which now acts as a
purifying and preserving salt upon the earth be wholly removed
from them ; and then it will be seen that the picture has not been
overcharged, but that the wretchedness is intense and universal,
just because the wickedness reigns uncontrolled, without mixture
and without mitigation.

But we now exchange this appalling for a delightful contem
plation. The next clause of our text suggests to us the moral
character of heaven. We learn from it, that on the universal
principle, " as a tree falleth so it lies," the righteous now will be
righteous still. We no more dispute the material accompani
ments of heaven, than we dispute the material accompaniments
in the place of condemnation. But still we must affirm of the
happiness that reigns and holds unceasing jubilee there — that
mainly and pre-eminently it is the happiness of virtue ; that the
joy of -the eternal state is not so much a sensible or a tasteful or
even an intellectual as it is a moral and spiritual joy ; that it is
a thing of mental infinitely more than it is a thing of corporeal
gratification ; and to convince us how much the former has the
power and predominance over the latter, we bid you reflect, that
even in this world, with all the defect and disorder of its ma
terialism, the curse upon its ground inflicting the necessity of
sore labour, and the angry tempest from its sky after destroying
or sweeping off the fruits of it, the infirmity of their feeble and
distempered frames, after the pining sickness and at times the

676 HEAVEN A CHARACTER

sore agony — yet, in spite of these, we ask whether it would not
hold nearly if not universally true, that if all men were righteous
then all men would be happy ? Just imagine for a moment, that
honour and integrity and benevolence were perfect and universal
in the world ; that each held the property and right and reputa
tion of his neighbour to be dear to him as his own ; that the
suspicions and the jealousies and the heart-burnings, whether of
hostile violence or envious competition, were altogether banished
from human society ; that the emotions, at all times delightful,
of goodwill on the one side, were ever and anon calling the emo
tions no less delightful of gratitude back again ; that truth and
tenderness held their secure abode in every family ; and on step
ping forth among the wider companionships of life, that each
could confidently rejoice in every one he met with as a brother
and a friend — we ask if on this simple change, a change, you
will observe, in the morale of humanity, though winter should
repeat its storms as heretofore, and every element of Nature were
to abide unaltered — yet, in. virtue of a process and a revolution
altogether mental, would not our millennium have begun, and
a heaven on earth be realized ? Now let this contemplation be
borne aloft as it were to the upper sanctuary, where we are told
there are the spirits of just men made perfect, or where those
who were once the righteous on earth are righteous still. Let
it be remembered, that nothing is admitted there which worketh
wickedness or maketh a lie ; and that therefore, with every fecu
lence of evil detached and dissevered from the mass, there is
nought in heaven but the pure the transparent element of good
ness — its unbounded love, its tried and unalterable faithfulness,
its confiding sincerity. Think of the expressive designation
given to it in the Bible — the land of uprightness. Above all
think, that, revealed in visible glory, the righteous God, who
loveth righteousness, there sitteth upon His throne in the midst
of a rejoicing family — Himself rejoicing over them, because
formed in His own likeness, they love what He loves, they re
joice in what He rejoices. There may be palms of triumph ;
there may be crowns of unfading lustre; there may be pave
ments of emerald, and rivers of pleasure, and groves of surpassing
loveliness, and palaces of delight, and high arches in heaven
which ring with sweetest melody — but, mainly and essentially,
it is a moral glory which is lighted up there ; it is virtue which
blooms and is immortal there ; it is the goodness by which the
spirits of the holy are regulated here, it is this which forms the

AND NOT A LOCALITY. 677

beatitude of eternity. The righteous now, who, when they die
and rise again, shall be righteous still, have heaven already in
their bosoms ; and when they enter within its portals, they carry
the very being and substance of its blessedness along with them
— the character which is itself the whole of heaven's worth,
the character which is the very essence of heaven's enjoyments.
" Let him that is holy, be holy still." The two clauses de
scriptive of the character in the place of celestial blessedness,
are counterparts to the clauses descriptive of the character in
the place of infernal wo. He that is righteous in the one stands
contrasted with him that is unjust in the other. He that is holy
in the one stands contrasted with him that is licentious in the
other. But we would have you attend to the full extent and
significance of the term "holy." It is not abstinence from the
outward deeds of profligacy alone. It is not a mere recoil from
impurity in action. It is a recoil from impurity in thought. It
is that quick and sensitive delicacy to which even the very con
ception of evil is offensive — a virtue which has its residence
within ; which takes guardianship of the heart, as of a citadel
or unviolated sanctuary in which no wrong or worthless imagi
nation is permitted to dwell. It is not purity of action that
is all which we contend for. It is exalted purity of sentiment —
the ethereal purity of the third heavens, which if once settled in
the heart, brings the peace and the triumph and the unutterable
serenity of heaven along with it. In the maintenance of this
there is a curious elevation ; there is the complacency, we had
almost said the pride, of a great moral victory over the infirmi
ties of an earthly and accursed nature ; there is a health and
harmony to the soul ; a beauty of holiness, which though it
effloresces on the countenance and the manner and the outward
path, is itself so thoroughly internal, as to make purity of heart
the most distinctive evidence of a work of grace in time, the
most distinct and decisive evidence of a character that is ripen
ing and expanding for the glories of eternity. " Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God." " Yfithout holiness no
man shall see God." " Into the holy city nothing which defileth
or worketh an abomination shall enter." These are distinct and
decisive passages, and point to that consecrated way through
which alone the gate of heaven can be opened to us. On this
subject, there is a remarkable harmony between the didactic
sayings of various books in the New Testament, and the descrip
tive scenes which are laid before us in the Book of Eevelation.

078 HEAVEN A CHARACTER

However partial and imperfect the glimpses there afforded of
heaven may be, one thing is palpable as day, that holiness in its
very atmosphere. It is the only element which its inmates
breathe, and which it is their supreme and ineffable delight to
breathe in. They luxuriate therein as in their best-loved and
most congenial element. Holiness is their oil of gladness — the
elixir, if we may use the expression, the moral elixir of glorified
spirits. And in their joyful hosannas, whether of " Holy, Holy,
Holy, Lord God Almighty," or of " Just and true are thy ways,
thou King of Saints," we may read, that as virtue in the God
head is the theme of their adoration, so virtue in themselves is
the very treasure they have laid up in heaven — the wealth as
well as the ornament of their now celestial natures.

We would once more advert to a prevalent delusion that ob
tains in society. We are aware of nothing more ruinous than
the acquiescence of whole multitudes in a low standard of quali
fications for Heaven. The distinct aim is to be righteous now,
that after the death and the resurrection you may be righteous
still — to be holy now, that you may be holy still. But hold it
not enough that you are free from the dishonesties which would
forfeit the mere respect and confidence of the world, or from the
profligacies which even the world itself would hold to be dis
graceful. There is a certain amount of morality which is in
demand upon earth, but which is miserably short of the requisite
preparation for Heaven — the holiness indispensable there, is a
universal, an unspotted, and withal a mental and spiritual holi
ness. It is this which distinguishes the morality of a regene
rated and aspiring saint from the morality of a respectable
citizen, who still is but a citizen of the world, with his con
versation not in heaven, with neither his heart nor his treasure
there. The "righteous" of our text would recoil from the
least act of unfaithfulness, from being unfaithful in the least as
from being unfaithful in much. The " holy " of our text would
shrink in sensitive aversion and alarm from the first approaches
of evil, from the incipient contaminations of thought and fancy
and feeling, as from the foul and final contamination of the out
ward history. Both are diligent to be found of Christ without
spot and blameless in the great day of account — glorifying the
Lord with their soul and spirit as well as with their bodies —
aspiring after those graces which, unseen by every earthly eye,
belong to the hidden man of the heart, and in the sight of
Heaven are of great price ; and so proceeding onward from

AND NOT A LOCALITY. 679

strength to strength on this lofty path of obedience, till they
appear perfect before God in Zion.

We feel that we have not nearly exhausted the subject of our
text by these brief and almost miscellaneous observations. The
truth is, it is a great deal too unwieldy for any single address,
and we shall therefore conclude with the notice of one specimen,
that might be alleged for the importance of the view that we
have just given, in purging theology from error. If the moral
character then of these future states of existence were distinctly
understood and consistently applied, it would serve directly and
decisively to extinguish Antiriomianism. It would, in fact, re
duce that heresy to a contradiction in terms. There is no sound
and scriptural Christian who ever thinks of virtue as the price
of heaven. It is something a great deal higher, it is heaven
itself — the very essence, as we have already said, of heaven's
blessedness. It occupies therefore a much higher place than the
secondary and the subordinate one ascribed to it even by many
of the writers termed evangelical — who view it mainly as a
token or an evidence that heaven will be ours. Instead of which
it is the very substance of heaven — a sample on hand of the
identical good which, in larger measure and purer quality, is
afterwards awaiting us — an entrance on the path which leads to
heaven ; or rather an actual lodgement of ourselves within that
line of demarcation which separates the heaven of the New
Testament from the hell of the New Testament. For heaven
is not so much a locality as a character ; and we, by a moral
transition from the old to the new character, have, in fact, crossed
the threshold, and are now rejoicing within the confines of God's
spiritual family. By the doctrine of justification through faith,
we understand that Christ purchased our right of admittance
into heaven — or opened its door for us. Is fhere aught antino-
mian in this ? The obstacle, the legal obstacle, between us and
a life of prosperous and never-ending virtue, is now broken
down ; and is it upon that event that we are to relinquish the
path which has just been opened to welcome and invite our
advancing footsteps ? The doctrine of justification by faith is
not an obstacle to virtue — it is but an introduction to it. It
is in truth the removal of an obstacle — the unfastening of that
drag which before held us in apathy and despair ; and restrained
us from breaking forth on that career of obedience in which,
with the hope of glory before us, we purify ourselves even as
Christ is pure. The purpose of His death was not to supersede,

680 HEAVEN A CHARACTER AND NOT A LOCALITY.

but to stimulate our obedience. " He gave himself tor us, to
redeem us from all iniquity, and purify to himself a peculiar
people, zealous of good works." The object of His promises is
not to lull our indolence, but rouse us to activity. " Having
received these promises, therefore, dearly beloved, let us cleanse
ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting
holiness in the fear of God."

We expatiate no further ; but shall be happy, if, as the fruit
of these imperfect observations, you can be made to recognise
how distinctly practical a business the work of Christianity is.
It is simply to destroy one character, and to build up another in
its room ; to resist the temptations which vitiate and debase,
and make all the graces and moralities which enter into the
composition of perfect virtue the objects of our most strenuous
cultivation. In the expediting of this mighty transformation,
on the completion of which there hinges our eternity, we have
need of believing prayer ; a thorough renunciation of all de
pendence on our own strength ; a thorough reliance on the prof
fered strength and aid of the upper sanctuary ; a deep sense of
our infirmities, and constant application for that Spirit who has
promised to help them ; that, in the language of the apostle, we
may strive mightily, according to the grace which worketh in us
mightily.

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