III. Establish your character on the basis of ef- SERM. teem; not on the flattery of dependents, or the praise of fycophants, but on the tespect of the wife and the good. Let innocence prefide over your enjoyments. Let usefulness and beneficence, not oftentation and vanity direct the train of your purfuits. Let your alms, together with your prayers, come up in memorial before God. So fhall your profperity, under the bleffing of Heaven, be as the shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. So fhall it refemble thofe celef tial fires which glow above, with beneficent, with regular, and permanent luftre; and not prove that mirth of fools, which by Solomon is compared to the crackling of thorns under a pot, a glittering and fervent blaze, but speedily extinct. On the whole, let this be our conclufion, that both in profperity and in adversity, religion is the safeft guide of human life. Conducted by its light, we reap the pleasures, and at the fame time escape the dangers, of a profperous state. G 2 Sheltered III. 84 On the Influence of Religion upon Profperity. SERM. Sheltered under its protection, we ftand the shock of adverfity with most intrepidity, and fuffer least from the violence of the ftorm. He that defireth life, and loveth many days that he may fee good, let him keep his tongue from evil, and his lips from guile. Let him depart from evil and do good. Let him feek peace with God, and purfue it. Then, in his Adverfity, God fhall bide him in his pavilion. In his profperity, he shall flourish like a tree planted by the rivers of water. The ungodly are not fo; but are like the chaff, light and vile, which the wind driveth away. 1 SERMON THE HE Apoftle here defcribes the im- SERM. perfection of our knowledge with rela tion to spiritual and eternal objects. He employs two metaphors, to reprefent more ftrongly the disadvantages under which we lie: One, that we fee those objecs through a glass, that is, through the intervention of a medium which obfcures their glory; the other, that we see them in a riddle or enigma, which our translators have rendered by feeing them darkly; that is, the truth in part discovered, in part IV. SERM. IV. part concealed, and placed beyond our comprehenfion. This description, however juft and true, cannot fail to occafion fome perplexity to an enquiring mind. For it may feem ftrange that fo much darkness should be left upon those celeftial objects, towards which we are at the fame time commanded to aspire. We are strangers to the univerfe of God. Confined to that spot on which we dwell. We are permitted to know nothing of what is tranfacting in the regions above us and around us. By much labour, we acquire a fuperficial acquaintance with a few fenfible objects which we find in our present habitation; but we enter, and we depart, under a total ignorance of the nature and laws of the fpiritual world. One fubject in particular, when our thoughts proceed in this train, muft often recur upon the mind with peculiar anxiety; that is, the immortality of the foul, and the future ftate of man. Expofed as we are at present to fuch variety of afflictions, and subjected pur to fo much disappointment in all our on SERM. |