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their points of honour, as we are with ours; | with the truth of this monstrous indictment and elevate as indignant a voice against the that you live without God in the world; worthlessness of him who could betray the that however you may be signalized among secret of their association, or break up any your fellows, by that worth of character of the securities by which it was held to- which is held in highest value and demand gether. And, in like manner, may we be amongst the individuals of a mercantile sothe members of a wider combination, yet ciety, it is at least without the influence of brought together by the tie of reciprocal in- a godly principle that you have reached the terest; and all the virtues essential to the maturity of an established reputation; that existence, or to the good of such a combi- either the proud emotions of rectitude which nation, may come to be idolized amongst glow within your bosom are totally untincus; and the breath of human applause may tured by a feeling of homage to the Deityfan them into a lustre of splendid estima- or that, without any such emotions, Self is tion; and yet the good man of society on the divinity you have all along worshipped, earth be, in common with all his fellows, an and your very virtues are so many offer. utter outcast from the society of heaven-ings of reverence at her shrine. If such with his heart altogether bereft of that alle- be, in fact, the nakedness of your spiritual giance to God which forms the reigning condition, is it not high time, we ask, that principle of his unfallen creation-and in a you awaken out of this delusion, and shake state of entire destitution either as to that the lying spirit of deep and heavy slumber love of the Supreme Being, or as to that away from you? Is it not high time, when disinterested love of those around us, which eternity is so fast coming on, that you exform the graces and the virtues of eternity. amine your accounts with God, and seek We have not affirmed that there is no for a settlement with that Being who will such thing as a native and disinterested so soon meet your disembodied spirits with principle of honour among men. But we the question of what have you done unto have affirmed, on a former occasion, that a me?-And if all the virtues which adorn sense of honour may be in the heart, and you are but the subserviences of time, and the sense of God be utterly away from it. of its accommodation-if either done altoAnd we affirm now, that much of the ho-gether unto yourselves, or done without the nest practice of the world is not due to honesty of principle at all, but takes its origin from a baser ingredient of our constitution altogether. How wide is the operation of selfishness on the one hand, and how limited is the operation of abstract principle on the other, it were difficult to determine; and such a labyrinth to man is his own This, then, is the terminating object of heart, that he may be utterly unable, from all the experience that we have tried to set his own consciousness, to answer this ques- before you. We want to be a schoolmastion. But amid all the difficulties of such ter to bring you unto Christ. We want an analysis to himself, we ask him to think you to open your eyes to the accordancy of another who is unseen by us, but who is which obtains between the theology of the represented to us as seeing all things. We New Testament and the actual state and know not in what characters this heavenly history of man. Above all, we want you witness can be more impressively set forth, to turn your eyes inwardly upon yourthan as pondering the heart, as weighing selves, and there to behold a character the secrets of the heart, as fastening an at- without one trace or lineament of godlitentive and a judging eye on all the move-ness-there to behold a heart set upon toments of it, as treasuring up the whole of tally other things than those which constiman's outward and inward history in a tute the portion and the reward of eternity book of remembrance; and as keeping it-there to behold every principle of action in reserve for that day when, it is said, that the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open; and God shall bring out every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. Your consciousness may not distinctly inform you, in how far the integrity of your habits is due to the latent operation of selfishness, or to the more direct and obvious operation of honour. But your consciousness may, perhaps, inform you distinctly enough, how little a share the will of God has in the way of influence on any of your doings. Your own sense and memory of what passes within you, may charge you

recognition of God on the spontaneous instigation of your own feelings-is it not high time that you lean no longer to the securities on which you have rested, and that you seek for acceptance with your Maker on a more firm and unalterable foundation?

resolvable into the idolatry of self, or, at least into something independent of the authority of God-there to behold how worthless in their substance are those virtues which look so imposing in their semblance and their display, and draw round them here a popularity and an applause which will all be dissipated into nothing, when hereafter they are brought up for examination to the judgment seat. We want you, when the revelation of the gospel charges you with the totality and magnitude of your corruption, that you acquiesce in that charge; and that you may perceive the

trueness of it, under the disguise of all forgiven the sin of every one evil work of those hollow and unsubstantial accomplish-which he had aforetime been guilty, but ments, with which nature may deck her he is created anew unto the corresponding own fallen and degenerate children. It is good work. And therefore, if a Christian, easy to be amused, and interested, and in- will his honesty be purified from that taint tellectually regaled by an analysis of the of selfishness by which the general honesty human character, and a survey of human of this world is so deeply and extensively society. But it is not so easy to reach the pervaded. He will not do this good thing, individual conscience with the lesson-we that any good thing may be done unto are undone. It is not so easy to strike the him again. He will do it on a simple realarm into your hearts of the present guilt, gard to its own native and. independent and the future damnation. It is not so easy rectitude. He will do it because it is hoto send the pointed arrow of conviction nourable, and because God wills him so to into your bosoms, where it may keep by adorn the doctrine of his Saviour. All his you and pursue you like an arrow sticking fair dealing, and all his friendship, will be fast; or so to humble you into the conclu- fair dealing and friendship without interest. sion, that in the sight of God, you are an The principle that is in him will stand in accursed thing, as that you may seek unto no need of aid from any such auxiliaryhim who became a curse for you, and as but strong in its own unborrowed rethat the preaching of his Cross might cease sources, will it impress a legible stamp of to be foolishness. dignity and uprightness on the whole variety of his transactions in the world. All men find it their advantage, by the integrity of their dealings, to prolong the existence of some gainful fellowship into which they may have entered. But with him, the same unsullied integrity which kept this fellowship together, and sustained the progress of it, will abide with him through its last transactions, and dignify its full and final termination. Most men find, that, without the reverberation of any mischief on their own heads, they could reduce beneath the point of absolute justice, the charges of taxation. But he has a conscience both towards God, and towards man, which will not let him; and there is a rigid truth in all his returns, a pointed and precise accuracy in all his payments. When hemmed in with circumstances of difficulty, and evidently tottering to his fall, the demand of nature is, that he should ply his every artifice to secrete a provision for his family. But a Christian mind is incapable of artifice; and the voice of conscience within him will ever be louder than the voice of necessity; and he will be open as day with his creditors, nor put forth his hand to that which is rightfully theirs, any more than he would put forth his hand to the perpetration of a sacrilege; and though released altogether from that tie of interest which binds a man to equity with his fellows, yet the tie of principle will remain with him in all its strength. Nor will it ever be found that he, for the sake of subsistence, will enter into fraud, seeing that, as one of the children of light, he would not, to gain the whole world, lose his own soul.

Be assured, then, if you keep by the ground of being justified by your present works, you will perish: and though we may not have succeeded in convincing you of their worthlessness, be assured that a day is coming when such a flaw of deceitfulness, in the principle of them all, shall be laid open, as will demonstrate the equity of your entire and everlasting condemnation. To avert the fearfulness of that day is the message of the great atonement sounded in your ears-and the blood of Christ, cleansing from all sin, is offered to your acceptance; and if you turn away from it, you add to the guilt of a broken law the insult of a neglected gospel. But if you take the pardon of the gospel on the footing of the gospel, then, such is the efficacy of this great expedient, that it will reach an application of mercy farther than the eye of your own conscience ever reached; that it will redeem you from the guilt even of your most secret and unsuspected iniquities; and thoroughly wash you from a taint of sinfulness, more inveterate than, in the blindness of nature, you ever thought of, or ever conceived to belong to you.

But when a man becomes a believer, there are two great events which take place at this great turning point in his history. One of them takes place in heaven --even the expunging of his name from the book of condemnation. Another of them takes place on earth-even the application of such a sanctifying influence to his person, that all old things are done away with him, and all things become new with him. He is made the workmanship of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. He is not merely

DISCOURSE IV.

The Guilt of Dishonesty not to be estimated by the Gain of it.

"He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much."-Luke xvi. 10.

It is the fine poetical conception of a late | which he suffers from it. He brings this poetical country man, whose fancy too often moral question to the standard of his own grovelled among the despicable of human interest. A master will bear with all the character-but who, at the same time, was lesser liberties of his servants, so long as he capable of exhibiting, either in pleasing or feels them to be harmless; and it is not till in proud array, both the tender and the he is awakened to the apprehension of pernoble of human character-when he says sonal injury, from the amount or frequency of the man who carried a native, unborrow- of the embezzlements, that his moral indiged, self-sustained rectitude in his bosom, nation is at all sensibly awakened. And that "his eye, even turned on empty space, thus it is, that the maxim of our great beamed keen with honour." It was affirm- teacher of righteousness seems to be very ed, in the last discourse, that much of the ho- much unfelt, or forgotten, in society. Unnourable practice of the world rested on the faithfulness in that which is little, and unsubstratum of selfishness; that society was faithfulness in that which is much, are very held together in the exercise of its relative far from being regarded, as they were by virtues, mainly, by the tie of reciprocal ad- him, under the same aspect of criminality. vantage; that a man's own interest bound If there be no great hurt, it is felt that there him to all those average equities which ob- is no great harm. The innocence of a distained in the neighbourhood around him; honest freedom in respect of morality, is and in which, if he proved himself to be rated by its insignificance in respect of matglaringly deficient, he would be abandoned ter. The margin which separates the right by the respect, and the confidence, and the from the wrong, is remorselessly trodden ungood will of the people with whom he had der foot, so long as each makes only a mito do. It is a melancholy thought, how nute and gentle encroachment beyond the little the semblance of virtue upon earth landmark of his neighbour's territory. On betokens the real and substantial presence this subject there is a loose and popular esof virtuous principle among men. But on timate, which is not at one with the deliverthe other hand, though it be a rare, there ance of the New Testament; a habit of cannot be a more dignified attitude of the petty invasion on the side of aggressors, soul, than when of itself it kindles with a which is scarcely felt by them to be at all sense of justice, and the holy flame is fed, iniquitous-and even on the part of those as it were, by its own energies; than who are thus made free with, there is a when man moves onwards in an unchang- habit of loose and careless toleration. ing course of moral magnanimity, and dis- There is, in fact, a negligence or a dordains the aid of those inferior principles, mancy of principle among men, which by which gross and sordid humanity is causes this sort of injustice to be easily kept from all the grosser violations; than practised on the one side, and as easily put when he rejoices in truth as his kindred up with on the other; and, in a general and congenial element;-so, that though slackness of observation, is this virtue, in unpeopled of all its terrestrial accompani- its strictness and in its delicacy, completely ments; though he saw no interest what- overborne. ever to be associated with its fulfilment; though without one prospect either of fame or of emolument before him, would his eye, even when turned on emptiness itself, still retain the living lustre that had been lighted up in it, by a feeling of inward and independent reverence.

It has already been observed, and that fully and frequently enough, that a great part of the homage which is rendered to integrity in the world, is due to the operation of selfishness. And this substantially is the reason, why the principle of the text has so very slender a hold upon the human conscience. Man is ever prone to estimate the enormity of injustice, by the degree in

It is the taint of selfishness, then, which has so marred and corrupted the moral sensibility of our world; and the man, if such a man can be, whose "eye, even turned on empty space, beams keen with honour;" and whose homage, therefore, to the virtue of justice, is altogether freed from the mixture of unworthy and interested feelings, will long to render to her, in every instance, a faultless and a completed offering. Whatever his forbearance to others, he could not suffer the slightest blot of corruption upon any doings of his own. He cannot be satisfied with any thing short of the very last jot and tittle of the requirements of equity being fulfilled. He not merely shares in

the revolt of the general world against such outrageous departures from the rule of right, as would carry in their train the ruin of acquaintances or the distress of families. Such is the delicacy of the principle within him, that he could not have peace under the consciousness even of the minutest and least discoverable violation. He looks fully and fearlessly at the whole account which justice has against him; and he cannot rest, so long as there is a single article unmet, or a single demand unsatisfied. If, in any transaction of his there was so much as a farthing of secret and injurious reservation on his side, this would be to him like an accursed thing, which marred the character of the whole proceeding, and spread over it such an aspect of evil, as to offend and to disturb him. He could not bear the whisperings of his own heart, if it told him, that, in so much as by one iota of defect, he had balanced the matter unfairly between himself and the unconscious individual with whom he deals. It would lie a burden upon his mind to hurt and to make him unhappy, till the opportunity of explanation had come round, and he had obtained ease to his conscience, by acquitting himself to the full of all his obligations. It is justice in the uprightness of her attitude: it is justice in the onwardness of her path; it is justice disdaining every advantage that would tempt her, by ever so little to the right or to the left; it is justice spurning the littleness of each paltry enticement away from her, and maintaining herself, without deviation, in a track so purely rectilinear, that even the most jealous and microscopic eye could not find in it the slightest aberration: this is the justice set forth by our great moral Teacher in the passage now submitted to you; and by which we are told, that this virtue refuses fellowship with every degree of iniquity that is perceptible; and that, were the very least act of unfaithfulness admitted, she would feel as if in her sanctity she had been violated, as if in her character she had sustained an overthrow.

In the further prosecution of this discourse, let us first attempt to elucidate the principle of our text, and then urge onward to its practical consequences-both as it respects our general relation to God, and as it respects the particular lesson of faithfulness that may be educed from it.

I. The great principle of the text is, that he who has sinned though to a small amount in respect of the fruit of his transgressionprovided he has done so, by passing over a forbidden limit which was distinctly known to him, has in the act of doing so, incurred a full condemnation in respect of the principle of his transgression. In one word, that the gain of it may be small, while the guilt of it may be great; that the latter

ought not to be measured by the former; but that he who is unfaithful in the least, shall be dealt with in respect of the offence he has given to God, in the same way as if he had been unfaithful in much.

The first reason, which we would assign in vindication of this is, that by a small act of injustice, the line which separates the right from the wrong is just as effectually broken over as by a great act of injustice. There is a tendency in gross and corporeal man to rate the criminality of injustice by the amount of its appropriations-to reduce it to a computation of weight and measureto count the man who has gained a double sum by his dishonesty, to be doubly more dishonest than his neighbour-to make it an affair of product rather than of principle; and thus to weigh the morality of a character in the same arithmetical balance with number or with magnitude. Now, this is not the rule of calculation on which our Saviour has proceeded in the text. He speaks to the man who is only half an inch within the limit of forbidden ground, in the very same terms by which he addresses the man who has made the furthest and the largest incursions upon it. It is true, that he is only a little way upon the wrong side of the line of demarcation. But why is he upon it at all? It was in the act of crossing that line, and not in the act of going onwards after he had crossed it-it was then that the contest between right and wrong was entered upon, and then it was decided. That was the instant of time at which principle struck her surrender. The great pull which the man had to make, was in the act of overleaping the fence of separation; and after that was done, justice had no other barrier by which to obstruct his progress over the whole extent of the field which she had interdicted. There might be barriers of a different description. There might be still a revolting of humanity against the sufferings that would be inflicted by an act of larger fraud or depredation. There might be a dread of exposure, if the dishonesty should so swell, in point of amount, as to become more noticeable. There might, after the absolute limit between justice and injustice is broken, be another limit against the extending of a man's encroachments, in a terror of discovery, or in a sense of interest, or even in the relentings of a kindly or a compunctious feeling towards him who is the victim of injustice. But this is not the limit with which the question of a man's truth, or a man's honesty, has to do. These have already been given up. He may only be a little way within the margin of the unlawful territory, but still he is upon it; and the God who finds him there will reckon with him, and deal with him accordingly. Other principles and other considerations, may

restrain his progress to the very heart of | heaven must be stormed ere one inch of the territory, but justice is not one of them. entrance can be made into the region of This he deliberately flung away from him, iniquity. The morality of the Saviour never at that moment when he passed the line of leads him to gloss over the beginnings of circumvallation; and, though in the neigh-crime. His object ever is, as in the text bebourhood of that line, he may hover all his fore us, to fortify the limit, to cast a ramdays at the petty work of picking and pur- part of exclusion around the whole territory loining such fragments as he meets with, of guilt, and to rear it before the eye of though he may never venture himself to a man in such characters of strength and saplace of more daring or distinguished atro-credness, as should make them feel that it city, God sees of him, that, in respect of the is impregnable. principle of justice, at least, there is an utter unhingement. And thus it is that the Saviour, who knew what was in man, and who, therefore, knew all the springs of that moral machinery by which he is actuated, pronounces of him who was unfaithful in the least, that he was unfaithful also in much.

The second reason, why he who is unfaithful in the least has incurred the condemnation of him who is unfaithful in much, is, that the littleness of the gain, so far from giving a littleness to the guilt, is in fact a circumstance of aggravation. There is just this difference. He who has committed injustice for the sake of a less advantage, has After the transition is accomplished, the done it on the impulse of a less temptation. progress will follow of course, just as op- He has parted with his honesty at an infeportunity invites, and just as circumstances rior price; and this circumstance may go make it safe and practicable. For it is not so to equalize the estimate, as to bring it with justice as it is with generosity, and very much to one with the deliverance, in some of the other virtues. There is not the text, of our great Teacher of righteousthe same graduation in the former as there ness. The limitation between good and is in the latter. The man who, other cir- evil stood as distinctly before the notice of cumstances being equal, gives away a dou- the small as of the great depredator; and ble sum in charity, may, with more pro- he has just made as direct a contravention priety be reckoned doubly more generous to the first reason, when he passed over than his neighbour; than the man who, upon the wrong side of it. And he may with the same equality of circumstances, have made little of gain by the enterprise, only ventures on half the extent of fraudu- but this does not allay the guilt of it. Nay, lency, can be reckoned only one half as by the second reason, this may serve to agunjust as his neighbour. Each has broken gravate the wrath of the Divinity against a clear line of demarcation. Each has trans- him. It proves how small the price is which gressed a distinct and visible limit which he he sets upon his eternity, and how cheaply knew to be forbidden. Each has knowingly he can bargain the favour of God away from forced a passage beyond his neighbour's him, and how low he rates the good of an land-mark-and that is the place where inheritance with him, and for what a trifle justice has laid the main force of her inter- he can dispose of all interest in his kingdom dict. As it respects the materiel of injus- and in his promises. The very circumtice, the question revolves itself into a mere stance which gives to his character a milder computation of quantity. As it respects transgression in the eyes of the world, the morale of injustice, the computation is makes it more odious in the judgment of upon other principles. It is upon the latter the sanctuary. The more paltry it is in that our Saviour pronounces himself. And respect of profit, the more profane it may he gives us to understand, that a very hum- be in respect of principle. It likens him ble degree of the former may indicate the the more to profane Esau, who sold his latter in all its atrocity. He stands on the birthright for a mess of pottage. And thus breach between the lawful and the unlaw-it is, indeed, most woful to think of such ful; and he tells us, that the man who en- a senseless and alienated world; and how ters by a single footstep on the forbidden heedlessly the men of it are posting their ground, immediately gathers upon his per-infatuated way to destruction; and how, son the full hue and character of guiltiness. for as little gain as might serve them a day, He admits no extenuation of the lesser acts of dishonesty. He does not make right pass into wrong, by a gradual melting of the one into the other. He does not thus obliterate the distinctions of morality. There is no shading off at the margin of guilt, but a clear and vigorous delineation. It is not by a gentle transition that a man steps over from honesty to dishonesty. There is between them a wall rising up into heaven; and the high authority of

they are contracting as much guilt as will ruin them for ever; and are profoundly asleep in the midst of such designs and such doings, as will form the valid materials of their entire and everlasting condemnation.

It is with argument such as this that we would try to strike conviction among a very numerous class of offenders in society

those who, in the various departments of trust, or service, or agency, are ever prac

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