into; inconsistent with all the reasoning and religion of the world, and irreconcilable with that patience under afflictions, that resignation and submission to the will of God in all straits, which is required of us. But if our calamities are brought upon ourselves by a man's own wickedness, still has he less to urge,-least reason has he to renounce the protection of God when he most stands in need of it, and of his mercy.

But as I intend the subject of self-murder for my discourse next Sunday, I shall not anticipate what I have to say, but proceed to consider some other cases in which the law relating to the life of our neighbour is transgressed in different degrees; all which are generally spoken of under the subject of murder, and considered by the best casuists as a species of the same, and, in justice to the subject, cannot be passed here.

St. John says, Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer-it is the first step to this sin; and our Saviour, in his sermon upon the mount, has explained in how many slighter and unsuspected ways and degrees the command in the law, Thou shalt do no murder, may be opposed, if not broken. All real mischiefs and injuries maliciously brought upon a man, to the sorrow and disturbance of his mind, eating out the comfort of his life and shortening his days, are this sin in disguise; and the ground of the Scripture expressing it with such severity is, that the beginnings of wrath and malice, in event, often extend to such great and unforeseen effects as, were we foretold them, we should give so little credit to, as to say, Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing? And though these beginnings do not necessarily produce the worst (God forbid they should!), yet they cannot be committed without these evil seeds are first sown;-as Cain's causeless anger (as Dr. Clarke observes) against his brother, to which the Apostle alludes, ended in taking away his life ;and the best instructors teach us, that to avoid a sin, we must avoid the steps and temptations which lead to it.

This should warn us to free our minds from all tincture of avarice, and desire after what is another man's. It operates the same way, and has terminated too oft in the same crime. And it is the great excellency of the Christian religion, that it has an eye to this in the stress laid upon the first springs of evil in the heart; rendering us accountable not only for our words, but the thoughts themselves, if not checked in time, but suffered to proceed further than the first motions of concupiscence.

Ye have heard, therefore, says our Saviour, that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, 'Thou fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire. The interpreta

tion of which I shall give you in the words of a great scripturist, Dr. Clarke, and is as follows:That the three gradations of crimes are an allusion to the three different degrees of punishment in the three courts of judicature amongst the Jews. And our Saviour's meaning was, that every degree of sin, from its first conception to its outrage, every degree of malice and hatred, shall receive from God a punishment proportionable to the offence; whereas the old law, according to the Jewish interpretation, extended not to these things at all-forbade only murder and outward injuries. Whosoever shall say, Thou fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire. The sense of which is not that, in the strict and literal acceptation, every rash and passionate expression shall be punished with eternal damnation (for who then would be saved?), but that, at the exact account in the judgment of the great day, every secret thought and intent of the heart shall have its just estimation and weight in the degrees of punishment which shall be assigned to every one in his final state.

There is another species of this crime which is seldom taken notice of in discourses upon the subject, and yet can be reduced to no other class; and that is, where the life of our neighbour is shortened, and often taken away as directly as by a weapon, by the empirical sale of nostrums and quack medicines, which ignorance and avarice blend. The loud tongue of ignorance impudently promises much, and the ear of the sick is open. And as many of these pretenders deal in edge tools, too many, I fear, perish with the misapplication of them.

So great are the difficulties of tracing out the hidden causes of the evils to which this frame of ours is subject, that the most candid of the profession have ever allowed and lamented how unavoidably they are in the dark. So that the best medicines, administered with the wisest heads, shall often do the mischief they were intended to prevent. These are misfortunes to which we are subject in this state of darkness; but when men without skill, without education, without knowledge either of the distemper or even of what they sell, make merchandise of the miserable, and, from a dishonest principle, trifle with the pains of the unfortunate, too often with their lives, and from the mere motive of a dishonest gain, every such instance of a person bereft of life by the hand of ignorance can be considered in no other light than a branch of the same root. It is murder in the true sense; which, though not cognisable by our laws, by the laws of right every man's own mind and conscience must appear equally black and detestable.

In doing what is wrong, we stand chargeable with all the bad consequences which arise from the action, whether foreseen or not. And as the principal view of the empiric in those cases is not what he always pretends-the good of the

public, but the good of himself, it makes the action what it is. Under this head it may not be improper to comprehend all adulterations of medicines wilfully made worse through avarice. If a life is lost by such wilful adulterations, and it may be affirmed that, in many critical turns of an acute distemper, there is but a single cast left for the patient, the trial and chance of a single drug in his behalf, if that has wilfully been adulterated and wilfully despoiled of its best virtues, what will the vendor answer?

May God grant we may all answer well for ourselves, that we may be finally happy. Amen.

to put his head in, nor his corpse in when he died, but his grave, too, must be the gift of charity. These were thwarting considerations to those who waited for the redemption of Israel, and looked for it in no other shape than the accomplishment of those golden dreams of temporal power and sovereignty which had filled their imaginations. The ideas were not to be reconciled; and so insuperable an obstacle was the prejudice on one side to their belief on the other, that it literally fell out, as Simeon prophetically declared of the Messiah, that he was set forth for the fall, as well as the rising again, of many in Israel.

This, though it was the cause of their infidelity, was, however, no excuse for it. For,

'Blessed is he that shall not be offended in me.'-
MATT. XI. 6.

THE general prejudices of the Jewish nation concerning the royal state and condition of the Saviour who was to come into the world, was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to the greatest part of that unhappy and prepossessed people when the promise was actually fulfilled. Whether it was altogether the traditions of their fathers, or that the rapturous expressions of their prophets, which represented the Messiah's spiritual kingdom in such extent of power and dominion, misled them into it; or that their own carnal expectations turned wilful interpreters upon them, inclining them to look for nothing but the wealth and worldly grandeur which were to be acquired under their deliverer: whether these, or that the system of temporal blessings helped to cherish them in this gross and covetous expectation, it was one of the great causes for their rejecting him. This fellow, we know not whence he is,' was the popular cry of one part; and they who seemed to know whence he was, scornfully turned it against him by the repeated query, 'Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses, and of Juda and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.' So that, though he was prepared by God to be the glory of his people Israel, yet the circumstances of humility in which he was manifested were thought a scandal to them. Strange! that he who was born their king should be born of no other virgin than Mary, the meanest of their people (for he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden), and one of the poorest too-for she had not a lamb to offer, but was purified, as Moses directed in such a case, by the oblation of a turtle-dove;-that the Saviour of their nation, whom they expected to be ushered amidst them with all the ensigns and apparatus of royalty, should be brought forth in

which were wrought in contradiction to them brought conviction enough to leave them without excuse; and besides, it was natural for them to have concluded, had their prepossessions given them leave, that he who fed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes could not want power to be great; and therefore needed not to appear in the condition of poverty and meanness, had it not, on other scores, been more needful to confront the pride and vanity of the world, and to show his followers what the temper of Christianity was by the temper of its first institutor ;-who, though they were offered, and he could have commanded them, despised the glories of the world, took upon him the form of a servant, and, though equal with God, yet made himself of no reputation, that he might settle, and be the example of, so holy and humble a religion, and thereby convince his disciples for ever that neither his kingdom, nor their happiness, were to be of this world. Thus the Jews might have easily argued ; but when there was nothing but reason to do it with on one side, and strong prejudices, backed with interest, to maintain the dispute, upon the other, we do not find the point is always so easily determined. Although the purity of our Saviour's doctrine, and the mighty works he wrought in its support, were demonstratively stronger arguments for his divinity than the unrespected lowliness of his condition could be against it, yet the prejudice continued strong: they had been accustomed to temporal promises, so bribed to do their duty, they could not endure to think of a religion that would not promise as much as Moses did, to fill their basket, and set them high above all nations;a religion whose appearance was not great and splendid, but looked thin and meagre, and whose principles and promises, like the curses of their law, called for sufferings, and promised persecutions.

others of the Jews;-so particularly in this place, Matthew xi., when John had sent two of his disciples to inquire, Whether it was he that should come, or that they were to look for another? our Saviour, with a particular eye to this prejudice, and the general scandal he knew had risen against his religion upon this worldly account, after a recital to the messengers of the many miracles he had wrought, as that the blind received their sight, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the dead raised, all which characters, with their benevolent ends, fully demonstrated him to be the Messiah that was promised them,--he closes up his answer to them with the words of the text, And blessed is he that shall not be offended in me. Blessed is the man whose upright and honest heart will not be blinded by worldly considerations, nor hearken to his lusts and prepossessions in a truth of this moment. The like benediction is recorded in the seventh chapter of St. Luke, and in the sixth of St. John. When Peter broke out in that warm confession of their belief, Lord, we believe, we are sure that thou art Christ, the Son of the living God, the same benediction is uttered, though couched in different words: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it, but my Father which is in heaven. Flesh and blood-the natural workings of this carnal desire, the lust and love of the world-have had no hand in this conviction of thine; but my Father, and the works which I have wrought in his name, in vindication of this faith, have established thee in it, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

This universal ruling principle, and almost invincible attachment to the interests and glories of the world, which we see first made so powerful a stand against the belief of Christianity, has continued to have as ill an effect, at least, upon the practice of it ever since; and therefore there is no one point of wisdom that is of nearer importance to us than to purify this gross appetite, and restrain it within bounds, by lowering our high conceit of the things of this life, and our concern for those advantages which misled the Jews. To judge justly of the world, we must stand at a due distance from it, which will discover to us the vanity of its riches and honours in such true dimensions as will engage us to behave ourselves towards them with moderation. This is all that is wanting to make us wise and good : that we may be left to the full influence of religion; to which Christianity so far conduces, that it is the great blessing, the peculiar advantage we enjoy under its institution, that it affords us not only the most excellent precepts of this kind, but also it shows us those precepts confirmed by most excellent examples. A heathen philosopher may talk very elegantly about despising the world, and, like Seneca,

may prescribe very ingenious rules to teach us an art he never exercised himself; for, all the while he was writing in praise of poverty, he was enjoying a great estate, and endeavouring to make it greater. But if ever we hope to reduce those rules to practice, it must be by the help of religion. If we would find men who by their lives bore witness to their doctrines, we must look for them amongst the acts and monuments of our Church, amongst the first followers of their crucified Master; who spoke with authority, because they spoke experimentally, and took care to make their words good, by despising the world, and voluntarily accounting all things in it loss, that they might win Christ. O holy and blessed Apostles! blessed were ye indeed, for ye conferred not with flesh and blood-for ye were not offended in him through any considerations of this world; ye conferred not with flesh and blood, neither with its snares and temptations. Neither the pleasures of life nor the pains of death laid hold upon your faith, to make you fall from him. Ye had your prejudices of worldly grandeur in common with the rest of your nation,-saw, like them, your expectations blasted; but ye gave them up, as men governed by reason and truth. As ye surrendered all your hopes in this world to your faith with fortitude, so did ye meet the terrors of the world with the same temper. Neither the frowns nor discountenance of the civil powers, neither tribulation, nor distress, nor persecution, nor cold, nor nakedness, nor famine, nor the sword, could separate you from the love of Christ. Ye took up your crosses cheerfully, and followed him ;-followed the same rugged way, trod the wine-press after him; voluntarily submitting yourselves to poverty, to punishment, to the scorn and the reproaches of the world, which ye knew were to be the portion of all of you who engaged in preaching a mystery so spoken against by the world, so unpalatable to all its passions and pleasures, and so irreconcilable to the pride of human reason. So that though ye were, as one of ye expressed, and all of ye experimentally found, made as the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things, upon this account, yet ye went on as zealously as ye set out. Ye were not offended, nor ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Wherefore should ye? The impostor and hypocrite might have been ashamed; the guilty would have found cause for it: ye had no cause, though ye had temptation. preached but what ye knew, and your honest and upright hearts gave evidence, the strongest, to the truth of it; for ye left all, ye suffered all, ye gave all that your sincerity had left you to give. Ye gave your lives at last, as pledges and confirmations of your faith and warmest affection for your Lord. Holy and blessed men! ye gave all, when, alas! our cold

Ye

and frozen affection will part with nothing for his sake, not even with our vices and follies, which are worse than nothing; for they are vanity, and misery, and death.

The state of Christianity calls not now for such evidences as the Apostles gave of their attachment to it. We have, literally speaking, neither houses, nor lands, nor possessions to forsake; we have neither wives, nor children, nor brethren, nor sisters to be torn from,-no rational pleasure or natural endearments to give up. We have nothing to part with, but what is not our interest to keep-our lusts and passions. We have nothing to do for Christ's sake, but what is most for our own; that is, to be temperate, and chaste, and just, and peaceable, and charitable, and kind one to another. So that, if man could suppose himself in a capacity even of capitulating with God, concerning the terms upon which he would submit to his government, and to choose the laws he would be bound to observe in testimony of his faith, it were impossible for him to make any proposals which, upon all accounts, should be more advantageous to his interest than those very conditions to which we are already obliged; that is, to deny ourselves ungodliness, to live soberly and righteously in this present life, and lay such restraints upon our appetites as are for the honour of human nature, the improvement of our happiness, our health, our peace, our reputation, and safety. When one considers this representation of the temporal inducements of Christianity, and compares it with the difficulties and discouragements which they encountered who first made profession of a persecuted and hated religion, at the same time that it raises the idea of the fortitude and sanctity of these holy men, of whom the world was not worthy, it sadly diminishes that of ourselves, which, though it has all the blessings of this life apparently on its side to support it, yet can scarce be kept alive; and, if we may form a judgment from the little stock of religion that is left, should God ever exact the same trials, unless we greatly alter for the better, or there should prove some secret charm in persecution, which we know not of, it is much to be doubted, if the Son of man should make this proof of this generation, whether there would be found faith upon the earth!

As this argument may convince us, so let it shame us unto virtue, that the admirable examples of those holy men may not be left us, or commemorated by us, to no end; but rather that they may answer the pious purpose of their institution, to conform our lives to theirs, that with them we may be partakers of a glorious inheritance, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

XXXVII. PENANCES.

'And his commandments are not grievous.'-1 Jons v. 3.

No, they are not grievous, my dear auditors. Amongst the many prejudices which, at one time or other, have been conceived against our holy religion, there is scarce any one which has done more dishonour to Christianity, or which has been more opposite to the spirit of the gospel, than this, in express contradiction to the words of the text, That the commandments of God are grievous ;'-that the way which leads to life is not only strait,-for that our Saviour tells us, and that with much tribulation we shall seek it,-but that Christians are bound to make the worst of it, and tread it barefoot upon thorns and briers, if ever they expect to arrive happily at their journey's end. And, in course, during this disastrous pilgrimage, it is our duty so to renounce the world, and abstract ourselves from it, as neither to inter- | fere with its interests, nor taste any of the pleasures nor any of the enjoyments of this life.⚫

Nor has this been confined merely to speculation, but has frequently been extended to practice, as is plain not only from the lives of many legendary saints and hermits, whose chief commendation seems to have been, "That they fled unnaturally from all commerce with their fellow-creatures, and then mortified, and piously half-starved themselves to death,' but likewise from the many austere and fantastic orders which we see in the Romish Church, which have all owed their origin and establishment to the same idle and extravagant opinion.

Nor is it to be doubted but the affectation of something like it in our Methodists, when they descant upon the necessity of alienating themselves from the world, and selling all that they have, is to be ascribed to the same mistaken enthusiastic principle, which would cast so black a shade upon religion, as if the kind Author of it had created us on purpose to go mourning all our lives long in sackcloth and ashes, and sent us into the world as so many saint-errants, in quest of adventures full of sorrow and affliction. Strange force of enthusiasm! and yet not altogether unaccountable. For what opinion was there ever so odd, or action so extravagant, which has not, at one time or other, been produced by ignorance, conceit, melancholy?-a mixture of devotion, with an ill concurrence of air and diet, operating together in the same person. When the minds of men happen to be thus unfortunately prepared, whatever groundless doctrine rises up, and settles itself strongly upon their fancies, has generally the ill luck to be interpreted as an illumination from the Spirit of God; and whatever strange action they find in themselves a strong inclination to do, that

impulse is concluded to be a call from heaven; and, consequently, that they cannot err in executing it.

If this, or some such account, was not to be admitted, how is it possible to be conceived that Christianity, which breathed out nothing but peace and comfort to mankind,-which professedly took off the severities of the Jewish law, and was given us in the spirit of meekness, to ease our shoulders of a burden which was too heavy for us; that this religion, so kindly calculated for the ease and tranquillity of man, which enjoins nothing but what is suitable to his nature, should be so misunderstood; or that it should ever be supposed that he who is infinitely happy could envy us our enjoyments; or that a Being infinitely kind would grudge a mournful passenger a little rest and refreshment, to support his spirits through a weary pilgrimage; or that he should call him to an account hereafter because, in his way, he had hastily snatched at some fugacious and innocent pleasures, till he was suffered to take up his final repose? This is no improbable account; and the many invitations we find in Scripture to a grateful enjoyment of the blessings and advantages of life, make it evident. The Apostle tells us in the text, that God's commandments are not grievous. He has pleasure in the prosperity of his people, and wills not that they should turn tyrants and executioners upon their minds or bodies, and inflict pains and penalties on them to no end or purpose; that he has proposed peace and plenty, joy and victory, as the encouragement and portion of his servants; thereby instructing us that our virtue is not necessarily endangered by the fruition of outward things, but that temporal blessings and advantages, instead of extinguishing, more naturally kindle, our love and gratitude to God, before whom it is no way inconsistent both to worship and rejoice.

If this was not so, why, you'll say, docs God seem to have made such provision for our happiness? why has he given us so many powers and faculties for enjoyment, and adapted so many objects to gratify and entertain them?-some of which he has created so fair, with such wonderful beauty, and has formed them so exquisitely for this end, that they have power, for a time, to charm away the sense of pain, to cheer up the dejected heart under poverty and sickness, and make it go and remember its miseries no more. Can all this, you'll say, be reconciled to God's wisdom, which does nothing in vain? or can it be accounted for on any other supposition but that the Author of our being, who has given us all things richly to enjoy, wills us a comfortable existence even here, and seems moreover so evidently to have ordered things with a view to this, that the ways which lead to our future happiness, when rightly understood, he has made to be ways of pleasantness, and all her paths peace?

From this representation of things, we are led to this demonstrative truth, then, That God never intended to debar man of pleasure, under certain limitations.

Travellers, on a business of the last and most important concern, may be allowed to please their eyes with the natural and artificial beauties of the country they are passing through, without reproach of forgetting the main errand they were sent upon; and if they are not led out of their road by a variety of prospects, edifices, and ruins, would it not be a senseless piece of severity to shut their eyes against such gratifications? For who has required such service at their hands?'

The humouring of certain appetites, where morality is not concerned, seems to be the means by which the Author of nature intended to sweeten this journey of life, and bear us up under the many shocks and hard jostlings which we are sure to meet with in our way. And a man might, with as much reason, muffle up himself against sunshine and fair weather, and at other times expose himself naked to the inclemencies of cold and rain, as debar himself of the innocent delights of his nature, for affected reserve and melancholy.

It is true, on the other hand, our passions are so apt to grow upon us by indulgence, and become exorbitant, if they are not kept under exact discipline, that, by way of caution and prevention, 'twere better, at certain times, to affect some degree of needless reserve than hazard any ill consequences from the other

extreme.

But when almost the whole of religion is made to consist in the pious fooleries of penances and sufferings, as is practised in the Church of Rome (did no other evil attend it), yet, since it is putting religion upon a wrong scent, placing it more in these than in inward purity and integrity of heart, one cannot guard too much against this, as well as all other such abuses of religion as make it to consist in something which it ought not. How such mockery became a part of religion at first, or upon what motives they were imagined to be services acceptable to God, is hard to give a better account of than what was hinted above; namely, that men of melancholy and morose tempers, conceiving the Deity to be like themselves, a gloomy, discontented, and sorrowful being, believed he delighted, as they did, in splenetic and mortifying actions, and therefore made their religious worship to consist of chimeras as wild and barbarous as their own dreams and vapours.

What ignorance and enthusiasm at first introduced, now tyranny and imposture continue to support. So that the political improvement of these delusions to the purposes of wealth and power is made one of the strongest pillars which upholds the Romish religion; which,. with all its pretences to a more strict mortifi