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one point is guilty of all, tells us something | particular offence, a mischief may be done more than of the way in which God ad- equivalent to the total destruction of a hujudges condemnation to the disobedient. man soul, or to the blotting out of its prosIt also tells us of the way in which one in- pects for immortality. dividual act of sinfulness operates upon our moral nature. It is altogether an erroneous view of the commandments, to look upon them as so many observances to which we are bound by as many distinct and independent ties of obligation-insomuch, that the transgression of one of them may be brought about by the dissolution of one separate tie, and may leave all the others, with as entire a constraining influence and authority as before. The truth is, that the commandments ought rather to be looked upon as branching out from one great and general tie of obligation; and that there is no such thing as loosening the hold of one of them upon the conscience, but by the unfastening of that tie which binds them all upon the conscience. So that if one member in the system of practical righteousness be made to suffer, all the other members suffer along with it; and if one decision of that the servant whom you have taught the moral sense be thwarted, the organ of to lie, has gotten such rudiments of educathe moral sense is permanently impaired, tion at your hand, as that, without any furand a leaven of iniquity infused into all its ther help, he can now teach himself to purother decisions; and if one suggestion of loin?—and yet nothing more frequent than this inward monitor be stifled, a general loud and angry complainings against the shock is given to his authority over the treachery of servants; as if, in the general whole man; and if one of the least com- wreck of their other principles, a principle mandments of the law is left unfulfilled, the of consideration for the good and interest of law itself is brought down from its rightful their employer-and who, at the same time, ascendency; and thus it is, that one act of has been their seducer-was to survive in disobedience may be the commencement all its power, and all its sensibility. It is and the token of a systematic and universal just such a retribution as was to be looked rebelliousness of the heart against God. It for. It is a recoil upon their own heads of is this which gives such a wide-wasting malignity to each of the separate offences on which we have now expatiated. It is this which so multiplies the means and the posIt is sibilities of corruption in the world. thus that, at every one point in the intercourse of human society, there may be struck out a fountain of poisonous emanation on all who approach it; and think not, therefore, that under each of the examples we have given, we were only contending for the preservation of one single feature in the character of him who stands exposed to this world's offences. We felt it, in fact, to be a contest for his eternity; and that the case involved in it his general condition with God; and that he who leads the young into a course of dissipation—or that he who tampers with their impressions of sabbath sacredness or that he who, either in the walks of business, or in the services of the family, makes them the agents of deceitfulness-or that he, in short, who tempts them to transgress in any one thing, has, in fact, poured such a pervading taint into their moral constitution, as to spoil or corrupt them in all things; and that thus, upon one solitary occasion, or by the exhibition of one

And let us just ask a master or a mistress, who can thus make free with the moral principle of their servants in one instance, how they can look for pure or correct principle from them in other instances? What right have they to complain of unfaithfulness against themselves, who have delibe rately seduced another into a habit of unfaithfulness against God? Are they so utterly unskilled in the mysteries of our nature, as not to perceive, that if a man gather hardihood enough to break the Sabbath in opposition to his own conscience, this very hardihood will avail him to the breaking of other obligations?-that he whom, for their advantage, they have so exercised, as to fill his conscience with offence towards his God, will not scruple, for his own advantage, so to exercise himself, as to fill his conscience with offence towards his master?

the mischief which they themselves have originated. It is the temporal part of the punishment which they have to bear for the sin of our text, but not the whole of it; far the better for them that both person and property were cast into the sea, than that they should stand the reckoning of that day, when called to give an account of the souls that they have murdered, and the blood of so mighty a destruction is required at their hands.

The evil against which we have just protested, is an outrage of far greater enormity than tyrant or oppressor can inflict, in the prosecution of his worst designs against the political rights and liberties of the commonwealth. The very semblance of such designs will summon every patriot to his post of observation; and, from a thousand watchtowers of alarm, will the outery of freedom in danger be heard throughout the land. But there is a conspiracy of a far more malignant influence upon the destinies of the species that is now going on; and which seems to call forth no indignant spirit, and to bring no generous exclamation along with it. Throughout all the recesses of private and domestic history, there is an

tampered with another's principles as to defile his conscience, and to destroy him-O! how tremendously will the little brief authority in which he now plays his fantastic tricks, turn to his own condemnation; for, than thus abuse his authority, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.

ascendency of rank and station against | the servant will be brought to their reckonwhich no stern republican is ever heard to ing together; and when the one is tried lift his voice-though it be an ascendency upon the guilt and the malignant influence so exercised, as to be of most noxious ope- of his Sabbath companies-and is charged ration to the dearest hopes and best interests with the profane and careless habit of his of humanity. There is a cruel combination household establishment-and is reminded of the great against the majesty of the peo- how he kept both himself and his domesple-we mean the majesty of the people's tics from the solemn ordinance-and is made worth. There is a haughty unconcern about to perceive the fearful extent of the moral an inheritance, which, by an unalienable and spiritual mischief which he has wrought right, should be theirs-we mean their fu- as the irreligious head of an irreligious fature and everlasting inheritance. There is mily-and how, among other things he, una deadly invasion made on their rights-der a system of fashionable hypocrisy, so we mean their rights of conscience; and, in this our land of boasted privileges, are the low trampled upon by the high-we mean trampled into all the degradation of guilt and worthlessness. They are utterly bereft of that homage which ought to be rendered to the dignity of their immortal nature; and to minister to the avarice of an imperious master, or to spare the sickly delicacy of the fashionables in our land, are the truth and the piety of our population, and all the virtues of their eternity, most unfeelingly plucked away from them. It belongs to others to fight the battle of their privileges in time. But who that looks with a calculating eye on their duration that never ends, can repress an alarm of a higher order? It belongs to others generously to struggle for the place and the adjustment of the lower orders in the great vessel of the state. But, surely, the question of their place in eternity is of mightier concern than how they are to sit and be accommodated in that pathway vehicle which takes them to their everlasting habitations.

Christianity is, in one sense, the greatest of all levellers. It looks to the elements, and not to the circumstantials of humanity; and regarding as altogether superficial and temporary the distinctions of this fleeting pilgrimage, it fastens on those points of assimilation which liken the king upon the throne to the very humblest of his subject population. They are alike in the nakedness of their birth. They are alike in the sureness of their decay. They are alike in the agonies of their dissolution. And after the one is tombed in sepulchral magnificence, and the other is laid in his sod-wrapt grave, are they most fearfully alike in the corruption to which they moulder. But it is with the immortal nature of each that Christianity has to do; and, in both the one and the other, does it behold a nature alike forfeited by guilt, and alike capable of being restored by the grace of an offered salvation. And never do the pomp and the circumstance of externals appear more humiliating, than when, looking onwards to the day of resurrection, we behold the sovereign standing without his crown, and trembling, with the subject by his side, at the bar of heaven's majesty. There the master and

And how comes it, we ask, that any master is armed with a power so destructive over the immortals who are around him? God has given him no such power: The state has not given it to him. There is no law, either human or divine, by which he can enforce any order upon his servants to an act of falsehood, or to an act of impiety. Should any such act of authority be attempted on the part of the master, it should be followed up on the part of the servant by an act of disobedience. Should your master or mistress bid you say not at home, when you know that they are at home, it is your duty to refuse compliance with such an order: and if it be asked, how can this matter be adjusted after such a violent and alarming innovation on the laws of fashionable intercourse, we answer, just by the simple substitution of truth for falsehood-just by prescribing the utterance of, engaged, which is a fact, instead of the utterance of, not at home, which is a lie-just by holding the principles of your servant to be of higher account than the false delicacies of your acquaintance-just by a bold and vigorous recurrence to the simplicity of nature-just by determinedly doing what is right, though the example of a whole host were against you; and by giving impulse to the current of example, when it happens to be moving in a proper direction. And here we are happy to say that fashion has of late been making a capricious and accidental movement on the side of principle-and to be blunt, and open, and manly, is now on the fair way to be fashionable-and a temper of a homelier quality is beginning to infuse itself into the luxuriousness, and the effeminacy, and the palling and excessive complaisance of genteel society-and the staple of cultivated manners is improving in firmness, and frankness, and honesty, and may, at length, by the aid of a principle of Chris

tian rectitude, be so interwoven with the whole of the gospel dispensation. Let them cardinal virtues, as to present a different learn a higher reverence for the eternity texture altogether from the soft and silken of those beneath them, by thinking of him, degeneracy of modern days. who, to purchase an inheritance for the And that we may not appear the cham- poor, and to provide them with the bless pions of an insurrection against the autho-ings of a preached gospel, unrobed him of rity of masters, let us further say, that all his greatness; and descended himself while it is the duty of clerk or apprentice to to the lot and labours of poverty; and toiled, refuse the doing of weekday work on the Sab-to the beginning of his public ministry, at bath, and while it is the duty of servants to the work of a carpenter; and submitted to refuse the utterance of a prescribed falsehood, all the horrors of a death which was aggraand while it is the duty of every dependent, vated by the burden of a world's atonein the service of his master, to serve him ment, and made inconceivably severe by only in the Lord-yet this very principle, their being infused into it all the bitter of tending as it may to a rare and occasional expiation. Think, O think, when some petty act of disobedience, is also the principle design of avarice or vanity would lead you which renders every servant who adheres to forget the imperishable souls of those to it a perfect treasure of fidelity, and at- who are beneath you, that you are setting tachment, and general obedience. This is yourselves in diametric opposition to that the way in which to obtain a credit for his which lieth nearest to the heart of the Sarefusal, and to stamp upon it a noble con- viour; that you are countervailing the whole sistency. In this way he will, even to the tendency of his redemption; that you are mind of an ungodly master, make up for thwarting the very object of that enterprise all his particularities and should he be for which all heaven is represented as in what, if a Christian, he will be; should he motion-and angels are with wonder lookbe, at all times, the most alert in service, ing on-and God the Father laid an apand the most patient of provocation, and pointment on the Son of his love—and he, the most cordial in affection, and the most the august personage in whom the magscrupulously honest in the charge and cus-nificent train of prophecy, from the begintody of all that is committed to him-then ning of the world, has its theme and its let the post of drudgery at which he toils be humble as it may, the contrast between the meanness of his office and the dignity of his character will only heighten the reverence that is due to principle, and make it more illustrious. His scruples may, at first, be the topics of displeasure, and afterwards the topics of occasional levity; but, in spite of himself, will his employer be at length constrained to look upon them with respectful toleration. The servant will be to the master a living epistle of Christ, and he may read there what he has not yet perceived in the letter of the New Testament. He may read, in the person of his own domestic, the power and the truth of Christianity. He may positively stand in awe of his own hired servant-and, regarding his bosom as a sanctuary of worth which it were monstrous to violate, will he feel, when tempted to offer one command of impiety, that he cannot, that he dare not.

And before we conclude, let us, if possible, try to rebuke the wealthy out of their unfeeling indifference to the souls of the poor, by the example of the Saviour. Let those who look on the immortality of the poor as beneath their concern, only look unto Christ—to him who, for the sake of the poorest of us all, became poor himself, that we, through his poverty, might be made rich. Let them think how the principle of all these offences which we have been attempting to expose, is in the direct face of that principle which prompted, at first, and which still presides over, the

fulfilment, at length came amongst us, in shrouded majesty, and was led to the cross, like a lamb for the slaughter, and bowed his head in agony, and gave up the ghost.

And here let us address one word more to the masters and mistresses of families. By adopting the reformations to which we have been urging you, you may do good to the cause of Christianity, and yet not advance, by a single hair-breadth, the Christianity of your own souls. It is not by this one reformation, or indeed, by any given number of reformations, that you are saved. It is by believing in Christ that men are saved. You may escape, it is sure, a higher degree of punishment, but you will not escape damnation. You may do good to the souls of your servants, by a rigid observance of the lesson of this day. But we seek the good of your own souls, also, and we pronounce upon them that they are in a state of death, till one great act be performed, and one act, too, which does not consist of any number of particular acts, or particular reformations. What shall I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. And he who believeth not, the wrath of God abideth on him. Do this, if you want to make the great and impor tant transition for yourselves. Do this if you want your own name to be blotted out of the book of condemnation. If you seek to have your own persons justified before God, submit to the righteousness of God-even' that righteousness which is through the faith of Christ, and is unto all

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and upon all who believe. This is the turn- character. The particular reformation that ing point of your acceptance with the Law- we have now been urging will be one of a giver. And at this step, also, in the history crowd of other reformations; and, in the of your souls, will there be applied to spirit of him who pleased not himself, but you a power of motive, and will you be en- gave up his life for others, will you forego dowed with an obedient sensibility to the all the desires of selfishness and vanity, and influence of motive, which will make it the look not merely to your own things, but turning point of a new heart and a new also to the things of others.

DISCOURSE VIII.

On the Love of Money.

"If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence; If I rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much: If I beheld the sun when it shined or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand; this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge; for I should have denied the God that is above."-Job xxxi. 24–28.

desires on the surrounding materialism, and fetch from it all his delights, while the thought of him who formed it is habitually absent from his heart-that in the play of those attractions that subsist between him and the various objects in the neighbourhood of his person, there should be the same want of reference to God, as there is in the play of those attractions which subsist between a piece of unconscious matter and the other matter that is around itthat all the influences which operate upon the human will should emanate from so many various points in the mechanism of what is formed, but that no practical or ascendant influence should come down upon it from the presiding and the preserving Deity? Why, if such be man, he could

WHAT is worthy of remark in this pas- | dowed him with the organs, of every gratisage is, that a certain affection only known fication,--that he should thus lavish all his among the votaries of Paganism, should be classed under the same character and have the same condemnation with an affection, not only known, but allowed, nay cherished into habitual supremacy, all over Christendom. How universal is it among those who are in pursuit of wealth, to make gold their hope, and among those who are in possession of wealth, to make fine gold their confidence? Yet we are here told that this is virtually as complete a renunciation of God as to practise some of the worst charms of idolatry. And it might perhaps serve to unsettle the vanity of those who, unsuspicious of the disease that is in their hearts, are wholy given over to this world, and wholly without alarm in their anticipations of another,-could we convince them that the most reigning and re-not be otherwise, though there were no sistless desire by which they are actuated, stamps the same perversity on them, in the sight of God, as he sees to be in those who are worshippers of the sun in the firmament, or are offering incense to the moon, as the queen of heaven.

Deity. The part he sustains in the world is the very same that it would have been had the world sprung into being of itself, or without an originating mind had maintained its being from eternity. He just puts forth the evolutions of his own nature, as We recoil from an idolater, as from one one of the component individuals in a vast who labours under a great moral derange- independent system of nature, made up of ment, in suffering his regards to be carried many parts and many individuals. In hunaway from the true God to an idol. But, gering for what is agreeable to his senses, is it not just the same derangement, on the or recoiling from what is bitter or unsuitpart of man, that he should love any cre- able to them, he does so without thinking ated good, and in the enjoyment of it lose of God, or borrowing any impulse to his sight of the Creator-that he should delight own will from any thing he knows or behimself with the use and the possession of lieves to be the will of God. Religion has a gift, and be unaffected by the circum-just as little to do with those daily movestance of its having been put into his hands ments of his which are voluntary, as it has by a giver-that thoroughly absorbed with to do with the growth of his body, which the present and the sensible gratification, is involuntary; or, as it has to do, in other there should be no room left for the movements of duty or regard to the Being who furnished him with the materials, and en

words, with the progress and the phenomena of vegetation. With a mind that ought to know God, and a conscience that

ought to award to him the supreme juris- as the animal beneath him. In other words, diction, he lives as effectually without him his atheism, while tasting the bounties of as if he had no mind and no conscience; Providence, is just as complete, as is the and, bating a few transient visitations of atheism of the inferior animals. But theirs thought, and a few regularities of outward proceeds from their incapacity of knowing and mechanical observation, do we behold God. His proceeds from his not liking to man running, and willing, and preparing, retain God in his knowledge. He may and enjoying, just as if there was no other come under the power of godliness, if he portion than the creature-just as if the would. But he chooses rather that the world, and its visible elements, formed the power of sensuality should lord it over all with which he had to do. him, and his whole man is engrossed with the objects of sensuality.

But a man differs from an animal in be

I wish to impress upon you the distinction that there is between the love of money, and the love of what money pur-ing something more than a sensitive being, chases. Either of these affections may equally displace God from the heart. But there is a malignity and an inveteracy of atheism in the former which does not belong to the latter, and in virtue of which it may be seen that the love of money is, indeed, the root of all evil.

When we indulge the love of that which is purchased by money, the materials of gratification and the organs of gratification are present with each other-just as in the enjoyments of the inferior animals, and just as in all the simple and immediate enjoyments of man; such as the tasting of food, or the smelling of a flower. There is an adaptation of the senses to certain external objects, and there is a pleasure arising out of that adaptation, and it is a pleasure which may be felt by man, along with a right and a full infusion of godliness. The primitive Christians, for example, ate their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God. But, in the case of every unconverted man, the pleasure has no such accompaniment. He carries in his heart no recognition of that hand, by the opening of which it is, that the means and the materials of enjoyment are placed within his reach. The matter of the enjoyment is all with which he is conversant. The Author of the enjoyment is unheeded. The avidity with which he rushes onward to any of the direct gratifications of nature, bears a resemblance to the avidity with which one of the lower creation rushes to its food, or to its water, or to the open field, where it gambols in all the wantonness of freedom, and finds a high-breathed joy in the very strength and velocity of its movements. And the atheism of the former, who has a mind for the sense and knowledge of his Creator, is often as entire as the atheism of the latter, who has it not. Man, who ought to look to the primary cause of all his blessings, because he is capable of seeing thus far, is often as blind to God, in the midst of enjoyment, as the animal who is not capable of seeing him. He can trace the stream to its fountain; but still he drinks of the stream with as much greediness of pleasure, and as little recognition of its source,

He is also a reflective being. He has the power of thought, and inference, and anticipation, to signalize him above the beasts of the field, or of the forest; and yet will it be found, in the case of every natural man, that the exercise of those powers, so far from having carried him nearer, has only widened his departure from God, and given a more deliberate and wilful character to his atheism, than if he had been without them altogether.

In virtue of the powers of a mind which belong to him, he can carry his thoughts beyond the present desires and the present gratification. He can calculate on the visitations of future desire, and on the means of its gratification. He cannot only follow out the impulse of hunger that is now upon him; he can look onwards to the successive and recurring impulses of hunger which await him, and he can devise expedients for relieving it. Out of that great stream of supply, which comes direct from Heaven to earth, for the sustenance of all its living generations, he can draw off and appropriate a separate rill of conveyance, and direct it into a reservoir for himself. He can enlarge the capacity, or he can strengthen the embankments of this reservoir. By doing the one, he augments his proportion of this common tide of wealth which circulates through the world, and by doing the other, he augments his security for holding it in perpetual possession. The animal who drinks out of the stream thinks not whence it issues. But man thinks of the reservoir which yields to him his portion of it. And he looks no further. He thinks not that to fill it, there must be a great and original fountain, out of which there issueth a mighty flood of abundance for the purpose of distribution among all the tribes and families of the world. He stops short at the secondary and artificial fabric which he himself hath formed, and out of which, as from a spring, he draws his own peculiar enjoyments; and never thinks either of his own peculiar supply, fluctuating with the variations of the primary spring, or of connecting these variations with the will of the great but unseen director of all things. It is true,

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