the words of inspiration are recorded; the emblems of antiquity are described, and their prospective reference is interpreted; the events of Providence, for four thousand years past, are compendiously stated; and the outline of God's dispensations, till the end of time and in the eternal future, is sketched among the faint, yet brightning, anticipations of his prophets. As the character of God is the perfection of moral excellence; as the happiness of his creatures depends upon their knowledge of that character; as they cannot know it, but by his manifestations of it, how precious is the volume in which all these manifestations are embodied,-in which the proceedings of God, as they relate to man, through the whole of time, and even through eternity, are made known, to fix our attention, to illuminate and satisfy our souls! In this testimony, we not only hear a voice, proclaiming his perfections from the midst of thunders, and clouds, and lightnings; we see the softened effulgence of his glory; he makes his goodness to pass before us, and we learn HIS NAME. He is a spirit, whom no man hath seen, nor can see. His presence pervades, his government controls, his power sustains, his wisdom arranges, his goodness preserves, the universe. He is holy, "of purer eyes than to behold sin." He is just, for he will by no means clear the guilty. He is omniscient, knowing the secrets of every soul. He is faithful, for he will perform his promises, and fulfil his threatenings. He is gracious, "delighting in mercy, according to the good pleasure of his will." He is "most blessed for evermore."

To each individual man, he who has thus revealed himself, is saying, "I am the Lord thy God." Because he is self-existent, infinite, and eternal, he is. the source of life, authority, and happiness, to every other being. Hence arise the claims of God on every one of his creatures. He is not only your Maker, but your Supporter, your Inspector, your Governor, and Judge. He has formed you capable of knowing

him, has supplied you with the means of knowing him, and is constantly surrounding you with the strongest motives for desiring to know Him, that you may glorify Him with your body and your spirit, which are his. It is not left for you to choose whether you will have any God or not; you are not the author of your own existence; and therefore you may assume no right to dispose of any part of that existence at your pleasure; no more are you at liberty to decide whether you will have the God revealed in the Bible, or a God possessing attributes with which your reason or imagination, your hopes, or fears, or wishes, may have invested him. He who made you, has placed you under his own government, and has so made you, that it is absolutely impossible for you to be happy, but in allegiance to himself. The first and fundamental law of that government is here brought before you: regarding you as one of its subjects, acquainted, or capable of being acquainted, with the claims and character of God, it addresses you, singly, and with solemn emphasis, - Thou shalt have no other gods before

ME."

II. The commandment suggests, at once, the idea, not that there are, or can be, in reality, any other gods, but that there is a tendency in man to imagine other gods, and having imagined, to honour and to serve them.

The tendency had displayed itself, to its grossest extent, very soon after the apostacy of man; and it was continually operating, even among the people to whom the oracles of the true God had been committed. It is no part of our present design (as it will be introduced, with greater propriety, in the next discourse,) to trace the rise and progress of polytheism and idolatry. They are frequently, and vehemently denounced in the writings of the Old Testament; they are handed down in the traditions. of every nation, adorned by the fictions of the ancient mythologies, admired and celebrated by modern

poets, historians, and philosophers. We refer to them now as unquestionable evidences of the tendency opposed in this commandment; as melancholy illustrations of the apostle's assertion, that the classic nations of antiquity, with all their superstitions and devotions, with all their deities and ceremonies, were without God; and, as demonstrating the necessity of some manifestation of the divine character and claims, for the maintenance of piety, and consequently of virtue, in the world. The proneness of the Jewish people to fall into the grossest enormities of polytheism, is exceedingly instructive. It teaches us, that, even when favoured with the clearest indications of the existence and unity of the Supreme God,-when furnished with the tenderest and most constraining reasons for cleaving to Him, there is still, ever since the divine image was effaced, in the heart of man, a tendency to depart from God. This tendency is not the creature of education, nor the endemic of any country, nor the false philosophy of any period. Oh, no! it is the moral character of man. Man shrinks from God; and though, when the proofs of a divine existence overwhelm the reasoning faculty;-when the dependent condition, and unsatisfied thirstings of the soul for high, unmixed, and endless felicity, suggest the necessity of some regard to a superior Being,-when remembrance excites such shame, and anticipation such terror, that the bare idea of responsibility is as agonizing as it is inevitable,-then a superior being may be approached with terror; yet, it is not God. It may be the god of your own fancy, of your early prepossessions, or of your philosophy:-it is not "the Lord your God," who has displayed himself in the emblems, and events, and words of Scripture, and who speaks to you in these commandments. Men do not "like to retain God in their knowledge. They change his truth into a lie." Even when they knew God, "they glorified him not as God." “The carnal mind is enmity against God;" and this

is both the proof and the consequence,-"it is not subject to 'the law (or government) of God, neither indeed can be."

It may, perhaps, be questioned whether the tendency, so fatally exhibited, in ancient times, in every country, and, at present, in heathen countries, among a vast majority of our fellow men, displays itself among the professors of Christianity. It may not display itself very obviously, though its effects be sufficiently apparent to a fellow creature. But mark the language of the command, "before ME:" this is a matter of which God himself takes cognizance. When no human being suspects it,-when you are unwilling to confess it,-He who "sets your secret sins in the light of his countenance" inspects the "chambers" of your "imagery," and sees his own commandment broken before his presence!

You may have a false notion of the character and claims of God: it is in imbibing such a notion, that the tendency to depart from God begins to work. You may be thinking of a god who is capable of changing his determinations; who does not actually behold, and remember, for judicial purposes, all your thoughts and actions; who is too benignant to execute the threatenings of his wrath; who will not severely condemn you, for acting according to your natural inclinations, and falling in with the maxims and the spirit of society: and, the effects of this your thinking on the subject, may be a most hardened carelessness respecting the demands of infinite righteousness on you; a total want of reference, in your transactions, to the will of Him who is to judge you; a soothing hope of impunity; a sole regard to your present interests and pleasures; perfect apathy towards all that is spiritual and conscientious in religion, and an utter disrelish for all those discoveries of the truth and grace of God, which are peculiar to the gospel. Now the god of whom you are thinking is not "the Lord," who has revealed his character and his requirements as your God. He

is not in all your thoughts. All the notions of God by which your conduct is influenced, (and your notions of God cannot but influence your conduct,) are the reverse of those, which his discoveries of himself warrant you to cherish. You think that He is altogether such as yourself. You are living under the power of that tendency, which he detects and denounces, when he says, "Thou shalt have no other god before ME!"

This tendency is found to operate, not only in our acquiring and fostering false ideas of God, but in wishing that his character were, in some respects, different from that which is revealed; and, in attempting to accommodate his declarations, as much as we can or dare, to these wishes. The same tendency is manifest, in our regarding other objects with either the veneration, or the dependence, or the delight, which we withhold from God. "Cursed is he who maketh flesh his arm, whose heart departeth from the living God." When we read in Scripture, that the stubbornness of the Israelites were idolatry; when an apostle asserts that "covetousness is idolatry;" when a Christian church is cautioned against the worshipping of angels; when it is said of some professed christians, "their god is their belly;" when some are affectionately warned to "keep themselves from idols;" and when it is foretold, that, in the last days, perilous times shall come, for men shall be "lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God;"these expressions are not the exaggerations of figurative language, but demonstrations of that tendency, against which the force of the first commandment is directed. These passages evince, that self-will,-the excessive thirst of aggrandizement,—the undue veneration of creatures, the greedy indulgence of animal appetites,-the predominance of the love of pleasure, and all inordinate attachments of every kind,

are indications of this tendency, are breaches of this holy commandment.-In using the word tendency so frequently, in these observations, we cannot be