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SERMON LV.

ON ASH-WEDNESDAY.

AMOS iii. 6.

Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?

IN the beginning of this chapter, the prophet

Amos, with great solemnity, summons all the tribes of Israel to hear the sentence of wrath and indignation, which the Lord God of Israel had pronounced against them. And, be cause he was willing before-hand to give them a right apprehension of God's justice in inflicting the evils they were going to suffer, he reminds them, in the second verse, of the many and signal favours they had received, when the Almighty chose them for himself as a peculiar people, and for a long series of ages guided and protected them by a wonderful theocracy, unknown to other lands, and justly the admiration of all succeeding times: the just and natural effect

effect of which should have been, that they should have exceeded all others as much in virtue and obedience, as they exceeded them in outward privileges and advantages. But that this was so far from being the case, that they were even become more wicked than the nations round about them, and were therefore justly obnoxious to the vengeance of God, in whose sight ingratitude is a crime of the blackest and deepest dye: :-"You only," says he, "have I "known of all the families of the earth; there"fore will I punish you for all your iniquities."

And lest they should vainly imagine, that the judgments which were coming upon them were the effects of blind chance or irresistible destiny; that their afflictions came forth of the dust, or their troubles sprang out of the ground; he proceeds to tell them, in the words of the text, that they are the effects of his power and good pleasure, without whose command, no evil could happen to them:-" Can there be evil," says he, in a city, and the Lord hath not "done it?" No: not even so much as a hair of the head falleth without his knowledge; much. less, therefore, can great national calamities happen without his direction: and therefore let all mankind be well assured of this great and im portant truth, that whenever any public and ge

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neral desolation spreads itself through a city or kingdom, I the Lord have sent it upon them, for their punishment and reformation: their punishment, in respect of what is past; and their reformation for the future.

This great truth then, that there cannot be any evil in a city, which the Lord hath not done, being established by the testimony of God himself, it naturally follows, that the best and wisest way any people can use to prevent impending calamity, is, to engage the Lord on their side, by removing the general evil of sin, which never fails, sooner or later, to call down the just vengeance of heaven on cities and kingdoms. This is an observation never improper to be spoken to; but now, I think, more especially agreeable to the present circumstances of things amongst ourselves. For we now seem to stand in need of the voice of a prophet to warn us, that there are many evils hanging over our heads, and that therefore it is high time to humble ourselves under the hand of God; sincerely confessing, heartily bewailing, ́and instantly renouncing those many national abominations, which threaten ruin and desolation on every side. I should therefore be highly inattentive to the solemn purpose for which I stand here at this season of humiliation and de

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votion, if I did not endeavour to excite you to the discharge of these penitential duties, by setting before you a faithful picture of the state of religion and morality amongst us; which, though not applicable, I trust, to many, yet clearly concerns us all as members of the same. community, and therefore, though not strictly liable to fall as individuals from our own sins, yet, like the companions of Jonah in antient times, in danger of sharing one common ruin from the grievous and crying sins of others, who are embarked in the same bottom with us.

Grievous and crying sins I call them since they are such as are not only offences against the positive law of God, but also strike at the yery vitals of all religion, morality, decency, and good order, in the world. How many thousands are there, who daily employ their tongues, or pens, or both perhaps, in scoffing at religion, and in patronizing and defending the most barefaced infidelity? The common principles of morality are no less flagrantly discarded: truth and honesty are laughed at as mere fancies and chimeras; the laws of good and evil are almost extinguished, and in their room, vice is digested into a regular and professed system. Folly and debauchery, indecency in word and action, are all comprized and

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