I understand not such as have absolutely shook off the notion of a Deity, but such as have endeavoured and attempted so to do, by arming themselves with arguments and considerations against it; and accordingly have proceeded so far, as to weaken and eclipse the present actings of this habitual persuasion; otherwise, I fully believe that there are some lucid intervals, in which, maugre all the art and force used to suppress it, it breaks forth, and shews its terrifying, commanding majesty over the guilty hearts of such wretches, but especially when they are to bid adieu to those little worldly supports, that for a while bore up their spirits in their profaneness and contempt of God.

I have now finished what I first proposed from the words; namely, the assertion that there is no God, and the author of it, the fool.

But here, after all, is it not a sad thing, that it should be pertinent for any preacher to make a sermon against atheism? a sin, that does not only unchristian, but unman the person that is guilty of it! But we have great reason to judge that the corruption of men's manners is grown to that enormous height, that men are not as they were heretofore. Those awes of religion and a Deity, that a less improved debauchery left still untouched upon the conscience, the modern and more throughpaced sinner endeavours to efface and throw off as pedantry and narrowness, and the foolish prejudices and infusions of education.

What this will come to, and whether God and nature will suffer men to be as bad as they strive to be, I cannot determine; but surely, they generally affect a superiority in villainy above their ancestors; and

it is not enough for a man to approve himself a laborious drunkard, and a dexterous cheat, or a sly adulterer, unless he can set off all with the crowning perfection of passing for a complete atheist.

I suppose the foregoing discourse may be of some use to us; and if so, what can that use be so properly as to give every one of us a view and prospect into his own heart? None knows how much villainy lodges in this little retired room. The prophet tells us that the heart is desperately wicked; and we need no other argument to prove his words, than that it is the soil where this detestable weed grows. There are few who believe that they can be atheists, (even in the sense that I have declared,) but it is because they have not studied the workings and methods, the depths and hollownesses, of that subtle principle within them, their heart. But as for such as will set themselves to watch over and counterwork it, so as to prevent this monstrous birth, let them be advised to beware of three things, as, I think, the most ready leaders to atheism.

1st, Great and crying sins, such as`make the conscience raw and sick, and so drive it to this wretched course for its cure.

2dly, Let them beware of discontents about the cross passages of God's providence towards them. A melancholy, discontented mind, by long brooding upon these things, has at length hatched the cockatrice's egg, and brought forth atheism.

3dly and lastly, Let men especially beware of devoting themselves to pleasure and sensuality. There is no one thing in the world that casts God out of the heart like it, and makes the heart by degrees to

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A SERMON ON PSALM XIV. 1.

These things cannot here be insisted upon. It remains, therefore, that we endeavour to preserve a constant fear and love of the great God upon our spirits; that so we fall not into the fatal, devouring gulph of either of their sins; as, namely, to deny the Lord that bought, or to renounce the God that made us.

To whom therefore be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for evermore. Amen.

SERMON XXXIII.

PSALM CVI. 7.

Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the multitude of thy mercies; but provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea.

PROVIDENCE, in all its parts and methods of acting, seems to carry on this great design, not to leave itself without witness in the world. And for this cause it gives greater or less manifestations of its superintendency over affairs here below, those especially relating to the church, according to the proportion of the church's exigencies and occasions. Which when they are so great and arduous, that they seem even to call out for help from Heaven, and to exceed all possibility of redress but by the interposal of a miracle, why then miracles come in season, and shall be shewn, as being the rarities and reserves of Heaven, designed to recover upon men's hearts a belief of that Providence that the constant, uninterrupted course of natural causes is apt to obscure and to render the less observable.

But in no passage since the creation did Omnipotence ever so eminently make bare its arms and shew itself, as it did in those stupendous proceedings in Egypt, following miracle with miracle, till at length, even in spite of power, and malice, and obstinacy itself, it brought out the armies of Israel free and vic

torious from amidst the iron-grinding jaws of a long, a cruel, and unsupportable bondage and subjection.

And that the world may see that the hand of divine power is not yet shortened, nor the bowels of divine goodness straitened, but that God is as able and ready to save his church as ever; succeeding ages have not been wholly without some declarations of it, in several transcendent and miraculous instances of help and deliverance; when once the straitness and vast difficulty of affairs has baffled and laughed at all assistances of created power, and so made the omnipotent author of the deliverance visible and conspicuous.

And amongst these supernatural instances of temporal mercy, vouchsafed to mankind in these latter ages of the world, there is none certainly superior, if any parallel, to that glorious masterpiece of Providence, to the commemoration of which we are called by this day's solemnity. For if ever the miracles of Egypt were reacted, it has been upon the scene of England; which stands, as it were, a copy and a lasting transcript both of the bondage and the deliverance. Both church and state were under the yoke and lash of remorseless tyrants and taskmasters. Tyrants resolved to have bound the bonds of their captivity for ever, and never to have let them go: nor was there any hope or likelihood of it, till God himself undertook the business, and plagued the nation, by shaking the threatening sword of a civil war over it, that had so lately turned all into blood; by blasting it with the hail and stones of several insulting governments, then as changeable as the weather; also pestering the land with the frogs of this sect, and the lice of that, and the locusts of another: like