upon not to work out our own salvation, but to compute the reflex influence of all our works, and of all our ways, on the principles of others. And when one thinks of the mischief which this influence might spread around it, even from Christians of chiefest reputation: when one thinks of the readiness of man to take shelter in the example of an acknowledged superior; when one thinks that some inconsistency of ours might seduce another into such an

his own conscience, and as, by vitiating the singleness of his eye, makes the whole of his body, instead of being full of light, to be full of darkness; when one takes the lesson along with him into the various conditions of life he may be called by Providence to occupy, and thinks, that if, either as a parent surrounded by his family, or as a master by the members of his establishment, or as a citizen by the many observers of his neighbourhood around him, he shall either speak such words, or do such actions, or administer his affairs in such a

an essential defect of principle at the first; | might have been the little ones of Christ, to which proves, in fact, that he made the fall; and it is against him that our Saviour, mistake of one principle for another; and in the text, lifts not a cool, but an impasthat, while he thought he had the faith, it sioned testimony. It is of him that he was not that very faith of the New Tes-utters one of the most severe and solemn tament which is unto salvation. There denunciations of the gospel. might have been the semblance of a work If this text were thoroughly pursued of grace without its reality. Such a work, into its manifold applications, it would be if genuinely begun, will be carried on- found to lay a weight of fearful responsi- · wards even unto perfection. But this is ability upon us all. We are here called point on which it is not at all necessary, at present, to dogmatize. We are led, by the text, to expatiate on the guilt of that one man who has wrecked the interest of another man's eternity. Now, it may be very true, that if the second has actually entered within the strait gate, it is not in the power of the first, with all his artifices, and all his temptations, to draw him out again. But instead of having entered the gate, he may only be on the road that leads to it; and it is enough, amid the uncertain-imitation as overbears the reproaches of ties which, in this life, hang over the question of who are really believers, and who are not? that it is not known in which of these two conditions the little one is; and that, therefore, to seduce him from obedience to the will of Christ, may, in fact, be to arrest his progress towards Christ, and to draw him back unto the perdition of his soul. The whole guilt of the text may be realized by him who keeps back another from the church, where he might have heard, and heard with acceptance, that word of life which he has not yet accepted; or by him, whose influence or whose ex-way as is unworthy of his high and imample detains, in the entanglement of any one sin, the acquaintance who is meditating an outset on the path of decided Christianity-seeing, that every such outset will land in disappointment those who, in the act of following after Christ, do not forsake all; or by him who tampers with the conscience of an apparently zealous and confirmed disciple, so as to seduce him into some habitual sin, either of neglect or of performance-seeing, that the individual who but for this seduction might have cleaved fully unto the Lord, and turned out a prosperous and decided Christian, has been led to put a good conscience away from him--and so, by making shipwreck of his faith, has proved to the world, that it was not the faith which could obtain the victory. It is true, that it is not possible to seduce the elect. But even this suggestion, perverse and unjust as it would be in its application, is not generally present to the mind of him who is guilty of the attempt to seduce, or of the act which carries a seducing influence along with it. The guilt with which he is chargeable, is that of an indifference to the spiritual and everlasting fate of others. He is wilfully the occasion of causing those who are the little ones, or, for any thing he knows,

mortal destination, that then a taint of corruption is sure to descend from such an exhibition, upon the immortals who are on every side of him; when one thinks of himself as the source and the centre of a contagion which might bring a blight upon the graces and the prospects of other souls besides his own-surely this is enough to supply him with a reason why, in working out his own personal salvation, he should do it with fear, and with watchfulness, and with much trembling.

But we are now upon the ground of a higher and more delicate conscientiousness, than is generally to be met with. Whereas, our object, at present, is to expose certain of the grosser offences which abound in society, and which spread a most dangerous and ensnaring influence among the individuals who compose it. To this we have been insensibly led, by the topics of that discourse which we addressed to you on a former occasion; and when it fell in our way to animadvert on the magnitude of that man's guilt, who, either by his example, or his connivance, or his direct and formal tuition, can speed the entrance of the yet unpractised young on a career of dissipation. And whether he be a parent, who, trenched in this world's maxims, can, with

out a struggle, and without a sigh, leave his rules of the great trading establishment; and helpless offspring to take their random and every thing is made to give way to the hurunprotected way through this world's con- rying emergency of orders, and clearances, formities; or whether he be one of those and the demands of instant correspondence. seniors in depravity, who can cheer on his Such is the magnitude of this stumblingmore youthful companion to a surrender of block, that many is the young man who has all those scruples, and all those delicacies, here fallen to rise no more-that, at this which have hitherto adorned him; or whe- point of departure, he has so widened his ther he be a more aged citizen, who, having distance from God, as never, in fact, to rerun the wonted course of intemperance, can turn to him-that, in this distressing contest cast an approving eye on the corruption between principle and necessity, the final throughout all its stages, and give a tenfold blow has been given to his religious princiforce to all its allurements, by setting up the ples-that the master whom he serves, and authority of grave and reformed manhood under whom he earns his provision for time, upon its side; in each of these characters do has here wrested the whole interests of his we see an offence that is pregnant with eternity away from him-that, from this deadliest mischief to the principles of the moment, there gathers upon his soul the rising generation and while we are told by complexion of a hardier and more deterour text, that, for such offences, there exists mined impiety-and conscience once stifled some deep and mysterious necessity-inso- now speaks to him with a feebler voicemuch, that it is impossible but that offences and the world obtains a firmer lodgement in must come yet let us not forget to urge on his heart-and, renouncing all his original every one sharer in this work of moral con- tenderness about Sabbath, and Sabbath emtamination, that never does the meek and ployments, he can now, with the thorough gentle Saviour speak in terms more threat- unconcern of a fixed and familiarised proseening or more reproachful, than when he lyte, keep equal pace by his fellows throughspeaks of the enormity of such misconduct. out every scene of profanation-and he who There cannot, in truth, be a grosser outrage wont to tremble and recoil from the freecommitted on the order of God's administra-doms of irreligion with the sensibility of a tion, than that which he is in the habit of little one, may soon become the most darinflicting. There cannot, surely, be a directer ingly rebellious of them all-and that Sabact of rebellion, than that which multiplies bath which he has now learned, at one time, the adherents of its own cause, and which to give to business, he at another, gives to swells the hosts of the rebellious. There unhallowed enjoyments-and it is turned cannot be made to rest a feller condemnation on the head of iniquity, than that which is sealed by the blood of its own victims, and its own proselytes. Nor should we wonder when that is said of such an agent for iniquity which is said of the betrayer of our Lord. It were better for him that he had not been born. It were better for him, now that he is born, could he be committed back again to deep annihilation. Rather than that he should offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. This is one case of such offences as are adverted to in the text. Another and still more specific is beginning, we understand, to be exemplified in our own city, though it And were we asked to state the dimenhas not attained to the height or to the fre- sions of that iniquity which stalks regardquency at which it occurs in a neighbouring lessly, and at large, over the ruin of youthmetropolis. We allude to the doing of week- ful principles--were we asked to find a place day business upon the Sabbath. We allude in the catalogue of guilt for a crime, the to that violence which is rudely offered to atrocity of which is only equalled, we unthe feelings and the associations of sacred-derstand, by its frequency--were we called ness, by those exactions that an ungodly to characterise the man who, so far from master lays at times on his youthful de- attempting one counteracting influence pendents-when those hours which they against the profligacy of his dependents, wont to spend in church, they are called issues, from the chair of authority on which upon to spend in the counting-house-when he sits, a commandment, in the direct face that day, which ought to be a day of piety, is turned into a day of posting and of penmanship-when the rules of the decalogue are set aside, and utterly superseded by the

into a day of visits and excursions, given up to pleasure, and enlivened by all the mirth and extravagance of holiday--and, when sacrament is proclaimed from the city pulpits, he, the apt, the well trained disciple of his corrupt and corrupting superior, is the readiest to plan the amusements of the com ing opportunity, and among the very foremost in the ranks of emigration-and though he may look back, at times, to the Sabbath of his Father's pions house, yet the retrospect is always becoming dimmer, and at length it ceases to disturb him-and thus the alienation widens every year, till, wholly given over to impiety, he lives without God in the world.

of a commandment from God-the man who has chartered impiety in articles of agreement, and has vested himself with a property in that time which only belongs to

the Lord of the Sabbath--were we asked to look to the man who could thus overbear the last remnants of remorse in a struggling and unpractised bosom, and glitter in all the ensigns of a prosperity that is reared on the violated consciences of those who are be-effect of all this on the young and yet unneath him-0! were the question put, to whom shall we liken such a man? or what is the likeness to which we can compare him? we would say, that the guilt of him who trafficked on the highway, or trafficked on that outraged coast, from whose weeping families children were inseparably torn, was far outmeasured by the guilt which could thus frustrate a father's fondest prayers, and trample under foot the hopes and the preparations of eternity.

such a proportionate abatement of truth, as goes to extend most fearfully the condemnation that is due to all liars, who shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone. And who can compute the practised observer? Who does not see, that it must go to reduce the tone of his principles; and to involve him in many a delicate struggle between the morality he has learned from his catechism, and the morality he sees in the counting-house; and to obliterate, in his mind, the distinctions between right and wrong; and, at length, to reconcile his conscience to a sin, which, like every other, deserves the wrath and the curse of God; and to make him tamper with a direct commandment, in such a way, as that falsehoods and frauds might be nothing more in his estimation, than the peccadilloes of an innocent compliance with the current practices and moralities of the world? Here then is a point, at which the way of those who conform to this world, diverges from the way of those peculiar people who are redeemed from all iniquity, and are thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Here is a grievous occasion to fall. Here is a competition between the service of God and the service of Mammon. Here is the exhibition of another offence, and the bringing forward of another temptation, to those who are entering on the business of the world, little. adverted to, we fear, by those who live in utter carelessness of their own souls, and never spend a thought or a sigh about the immortality of others--but most distinctly singled out by the text as a crime of fore most magnitude in the eye of Him who judgeth righteously.

There is another way whereby in the employ of a careless and unprincipled master, it is impossible but that offences must come. You know just as well as we do, that there are chicaneries in business; and, so long as we forbear stating the precise extent of them, there is not an individual among you who has a title to construe the assertion into an affronting charge of criminality against himself. But you surely know as well as we, that the mercantile profession, conducted, as it often is, with the purest integrity, and laying no resistless necessity whatever for the surrender of principle on any of its members; and dignified by some of the noblest exhibitions of untainted honour, and devoted friendship, and magnificent generosity, that have ever been recorded of our nature; you know as well as we, that it was utterly extravagant, and in the face of all observation, to affirm, that each, and every one of its numerous competitors, stood clearly and totally exempted from the sins of an undue selfishness. And, accordingly, And before we quit the subject of such there are certain commodious falsehoods offences as take place in ordinary trade, let occasionally practised in this department of us just advert to one example of it-not so human affairs. There are, for example, cer- much for the frequency of its occurrence, tain dexterous and gainful evasions, whereby as for the way that it stands connected in the payers of tribute are enabled, at times, principle with a very general, and, we beto make their escape from the eagle eye of lieve, à very mischievous offence, that takes the exactors of tribute. There are even cer- place in domestic society. It is neither, tain contests of ingenuity between individual you will observe, the avarice nor the seltraders, where in the higgling of a very keen fishness of our nature, which forms the only and anxious negociation, each of them is obstruction in the way of one man dealing tempted in talking of offers and prices, and plainly with another. There is another the reports of fluctuations in home and obstruction, founded on a far more pleasing foreign markets, to say the things which are and amiable principle-even on that delinot. You must assuredly know, that these, cacy of feeling, in virtue of which, one man and such as these, then, have introduced a cannot bear to wound or to mortify another. certain quantity of what may be called shuf- It would require, for instance, a very rare, fling, into the communications of the trad- and, certainly, not a very enviable degree ing world-insomuch, that the simplicity of of hardihood, to tell another, without pain, yea, yea, and nay, nay, is in some degree that you did not think him worthy of being exploded; there is a kind of understood tole- trusted. And yet, in the doings of merration established for certain modes of ex-chandise, this is the very trial of delicacy pression, which could not, we are much afraid, stand the rigid scrutiny of the great day; and there is an abatement of confidence between man and man, implying, we doubt,

which sometimes offers itself. The man with whom you stand committed to as great an extent as you count to be advisable, would like, perhaps, to try your confi

which carries wrath, and tribulation, and anguish, in its train--O! how it should confirm every Christian in his defiance to the authority of fashion, and lead him to spurn at all its folly, and at all its worthlessness.

dence in him, and his own credit with you, the sufferings of others, should thus be aca little farther; and he comes back upon cessary to the second and more awful death you with a fresh order; and you secretly of her own domestics-that one who looks have no desire to link any more of your the mildest and the loveliest of human beproperty with his speculation; and the dif-ings, should exact obedience to a mandate ficulty is, how to get the application in question disposed of; and you feel that by far the pleasantest way, to all the parties concerned, would be, to make him believe that you refuse the application, not because you will not comply, but because you cannot-for that you have no more of the article he wants from you upon hand. And it would only be putting your own soul to hazard, did you personally, and by your self, make this communication: but you select, perhaps, as the organ of it, some agent or underling of your establishment, who knows it to be false; and to avoid the soreness of a personal encounter with the man whom you are to disappoint, you devolve the whole business of this lying apology upon others; and thus do you continue to shift this oppressive burden away from you-or, in other words, to save your own delicacy, you count not, and you care not, about another's damnation.

Now, what we call upon you to mark, is the perfect identity of principle between this case of making a brother to offend, and another case which obtains, we have heard, to a very great extent, among the most genteel and opulent of our city families. In this case, you put a lie into the mouth of a dependent, and that, for the purpose of protecting your substance from such an application as might expose it to hazard or diminution. In the second case, you put a lie into the mouth of a dependent, and that, for the purpose of protecting your time from such an encroachment as you would not feel to be convenient or agreeable. And, in both cases, you are led to hold out this offence by a certain delicacy of temperament, in virtue of which, you can neither give a man plainly to understand, that you are not willing to trust him, nor can you give him to understand that you count his company to be an interruption. But, in both the one and the other example, look to the little account that is made of a brother's or of a sister's eternity; behold the guilty task that is thus unmercifully laid upon one who is shortly to appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; think of the entanglement which is thus made to beset the path of a creature who is unperishable. That, at the shrine of Mammon, such a bloody sacrifice should be rendered by some of his unrelenting votaries, is not to be wondered at; but that the shrine of elegance and fashion should be bathed in blood-that soft and sentimental ladyship should put forth her hand to such an enormity-that she who can sigh so gently, and shed her graceful tear over

And it is quite in vain to say, that the servant whom you thus employ as the deputy of your falsehood, can possibly execute the commission without the conscience being at all tainted or defiled by it; that a simple cottage maid can so sophisticate the matter, as, without any violence to her original principles, to utter the language of what she assuredly knows to be a downright lie; that she, humble and untutored soul, can sustain no injury when thus made to tamper with the plain English of these realms; that she can at all satisfy herself, how, by the prescribed utterance of "not at home," she is not pronouncing such words as are substantially untrue, but merely using them in another and perfectly understood meaning-and which, according to their modern translation, denote, that the person of whom she is thus speaking, instead of being away from home, is secretly lurking in one of the most secure and intimate of its receptacles. You may try to darken and transform this piece of casuistry as you will; and work up your own minds into the peaceable conviction that it is all right, and as it should be. But be very certain, that where the moral sense of your domestic is not already overthrown, there is, at least one bosom within which you have raised a war of doubts and difficulties; and where, if the victory be on your side, it will be on the side of him who is the great enemy of righteousness. There is, at least, one person along the line of this conveyance of deceit, who condemneth herself in that which she alloweth; who, in the language of Paul, esteeming the practice to be unclean, to her will it be unclean; who will perform her task with the offence of her own conscience, and to whom, therefore, it will indeed be evil: who cannot render obedience in this matter to her earthly superior, but by an act, in which she does not stand clear and unconscious of guilt before God; and with whom, therefore, the sad consequence of what we can call nothing else than a barbarous combination against the principles and the prospects of the lower orders, isthat as she has not cleaved fully unto the Lord, and has not kept by the service of the one master, and has not forsaken all at His bidding, she cannot be the disciple of Christ.

The aphorism, that he who offendeth in

particular offence, a mischief may be done equivalent to the total destruction of a human soul, or to the blotting out of its prospects for immortality.

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 deliberately 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?

one point is guilty of all, tells us something more than of the way in which God adjudges condemnation to the disobedient. It also tells us of the way in which one individual 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 ma- the mischief which they themselves have lignity to each of the separate offences on originated. It is the temporal part of the which we have now expatiated. It is this punishment which they have to bear for the which so multiplies the means and the pos- sin of our text, but not the whole of it; far sibilities of corruption in the world. It is the better for them that both person and thus that, at every one point in the inter-property were cast into the sea, than that course of human society, there may be they should stand the reckoning of that day, struck out a fountain of poisonous emana- when called to give an account of the souls tion on all who approach it; and think not, that they have murdered, and the blood of therefore, that under each of the examples so mighty a destruction is required at their we have given, we were only contending hands. 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

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 outcry 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