through ages!-how dark and desolate but for you, would be this world's history!

My friends, I have spoken of the reality and worth of virtue, and I have spoken of it as a part of human nature, not surely to awaken a feeling of pride, but to lead you and myself, to an earnest aspiration after that excellence, which embraces the chief welfare and glory of our nature. A cold disdain of our species, an indulgence of sarcasm, a feeling that is always ready to distrust and disparage every indication of virtuous principle, or an utter despair of the moral fortunes of our race, will not help the purpose in view, but must have a powerful tendency to hinder its accomplish

ment.

Unhappy is it, that any are left, by any possibility, to doubt the virtues of their kind! Let us do something to wipe away from the history of human life, that fatal reproach. Let us make that best of contributions to the stock of human happiness, an example of goodness that shall disarm such gloomy and chilling scepticism, and win men's hearts to virtue. I have received many benefits, from my fellow-beings. But no gift, in their power to bestow, can ever impart such a pure and thrilling delight, as one bright action, one lovely virtue, one character that shines with all the enrapturing beauty of goodness.

Who would not desire to confer such benefits on the world as these? Who would not desire to leave such memorials behind him? Such memorials have been left on earth. The virtues of the departed, but forever dear, hallow and bless many of our dwellings, and call forth tears that lose half of their bitterness in gratitude and admiration. Yes, there are such legacies, and there are those on earth who have inherited them. Yes, there are men, poor men, whose parents have left

them a legacy in their bare memory, that they would not exchange-no, they would not exchange it for boundless wealth. Let it be our care to bequeath to society and to the world, blessings like these. "The memorial of virtue," saith the wisdom of Solomon, "is immortal. When it is present, men take example from it; and when it is gone, they desire it; it weareth a crown, and triumpheth forever."

III.

ON THE WRONG WHICH SIN DOES TO HUMAN NATURE.

HE THAT SINNETH AGAINST ME WRONGETH HIS OWN SOUL.-Prov. viii. 36.

THIS is represented as the language of wisdom. The attribute of wisdom is personified throughout the chapter; and it closes its instructions with the declaration of our text: "He that sinneth against me,wrongeth his own soul." The theme, then, which, in these words, is obviously presented for our meditation, is the wrong which the sinner does to himself, to his nature, to his own soul.

He does a wrong, indeed, to others. He does them, it may be, deep and heinous injury. The moral offender injures society, and injures it in the most vital part. Sin is, to all the dearest interests of society, a desolating power. It spreads misery through the world. It brings that misery into the daily lot of millions. The violence of anger, the exactions of selfishness, the corrodings of envy, the coldness of distrust, the contests of pride, the excesses of passion, the indulgences of sense, carry desolation into the very bosom of domestic life; and the crushed and bleeding hearts of friends and kindred, or of a larger circle of the suffering and oppressed, are every where witnesses at once, and victims to the mournful presence of this great evil.

But all the injury, great and terrible as it is, which the sinner does or can inflict upon others, is not equal to the injury that he inflicts upon himself. The evil that he does, is, in almost all cases, the greater, the

nearer it comes to himself; greater to his friends than to society at large; greater to his family, than to his friends; and so it is greater to himself than it is to any other. Yes, it is in his own nature, whose glorious traits are dimmed and almost blotted out, whose pleading remonstrances are sternly disregarded, whose immortal hopes are rudely stricken down; it is in his own nature that he does a work so dark and mournful, and so fearful, that he ought to shudder and weep to think of it.

Does any one say, "he is glad that it is so; glad that it is himself he injures most?" What a feeling, my brethren, of disinterested justice is that! How truly, may it be said, that there is something good in bad men. Doubtless, there are those, who in their remorse at an evil deed, would be glad if all the injury and suffering could be their own. I rejoice in that testimony. But does that feeling make it any less true, does not that feeling make it more true, that such a nature is wronged by base and selfish passions? Or, because it is a man's self, because it is his own soul that he has most injured; because he has not only wronged others, but ruined himself; is his course any the less guilty, or unhappy, or unnatural?

I say, unnatural; and this is a point on which I wish to insist, in the consideration of that wrong which the moral offender does to himself. The sinner, I say, is to be pronounced an unnatural being. He has cast off the government of those powers of his nature, which as being the loftiest, have the best right to reign over him, the government, that is to say, of his intellectual and moral faculties; and has yielded himself to meaner appetites. Those meaner appetites, though they belong to his nature, have no right, and he knows they have no right, to govern him. The rightful authority,

the lawful sovereignty belongs, and he knows that it belongs, not to sense, but to conscience. To rebel against this, is to sin against nature. It is to rebel against nature's order. It is to rebel against the government that God has set up within him. It is to obey, not venerable authority, but the faction which his passions have made within him.

Thus violence and misrule are always the part of transgression. Nay, every sin-I do not mean now the natural and unavoidable imperfection of a weak and ignorant being-but every wilful moral offence is a monstrous excess and excrescence in the mind, a hideous deformity, a loathsome disease, a destruction, so far as it goes, of the purposes for which our nature was made. As well might you say of the diseased plant or tree, which is wasting all its vigour on the growth of one huge and unsightly deformity, that it is in a natural condition. Grant that the natural powers of the plant or tree are converted, or rather perverted to this misuse, and help to produce this deformity; yet the deformity is not natural. Grant that evil is the possible, or supposable, or that it is the actual, nay, and in this world, the common, result of moral freedom. But it is evidently not the just and legitimate result; it is not the fair and natural result; it violates all moral powers and responsibilities. If the mechanism of a vast manufactory, were thrown into sudden disorder, the power which propels it might, indeed, spread destruction throughout the whole work; but would that be the natural course of things; the result for which the fabric was made? So passion, not in its natural state, but still natural passion, in its unnatural state of excess and fury, may spread disorder and destruction through the moral system; but wreck