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PRAYER.

O God, the kind universal parent, who art continually attentive to the work of thy hands, and who dost especially conduct all things that respect us, thy children of mankind, with an eye to our greatest happiness, which results from the knowledge of thee and obedience to thy righteous laws!

We desire to be thankful to thee for the example and instructions of the blessed Jesus, who hath opened to us the treasures of wisdom necessary to lead us to thee, and who hath himself gone before us in the narrow way, and encouraged thy faithful servants' with the pleasing hope of being for ever with him, our honoured and endeared Lord and Master, in the heavenly kingdom which thy goodness prepared for us from the beginning of the world.

Make these powerful and awakening considerations to have their due weight upon us, to cause us to attend to the whole extent of our duty with cheerfulness and alacrity, and to keep us steady in it during this our short pilgrimage and day of trial.

Preserve us from corrupting the sacred pages of thy truth with false and softening

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comments of our own device, which tend to make us careless and negligent of that purity which thou requirest of us; and to presume that we are high in thy favour, while we live in carnal security and disobedience to thy commands.

And suffer none of us to put off the great and necessary work of effectually turning to thee, O God, and acquiring a delight in thoughts of thee and in walking in thy holy ways, through the vain hope of repenting and having our dispositions changed at some future day but incline us to set about this chief business of our being, the present hour, because the next belongs not to us, and may never come; and we know the longer we put off what is now irksome to us, the more averse shall we become. to it.

And, O thou sovereign all-righteous disposer of all things! when the hour appointed by thee shall come, that we shall be no more in this world, but return to give account of ourselves to thee, from whom we all came: may we be found watchful and prepared, and having nothing to finish at that uncertain hour; but with our evidences for heaven and thy favour clear and certain; that, by thy blessing

blessing upon us, we may enjoy some portion of that calm and composed spirit and firm confidence in thy mercy, which many of thy true servants have experienced before us; and may lie down in the grave, the bed of all the living, with assured and pleasing hope of being raised in thy good appointed time to that perfect and endless felicity, which of thine infinite mercy and goodness thou hast promised us by our Lord Jesus Christ!

Now unto Thee, O Father, &c.

May 20, 1781.

SERMON

SERMON III.

MATT. v. 8.

Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.

Ir will always be a sure guide to us for the understanding of our Lord's discourses to consider the character and temper of his hearers; for if it be a dictate of ordinary prudence, he who spoke by a divine wisdom would always say what was proper and suitable to the case of those he addressed; to instruct, and also to reform and correct what was amiss and sinful in them.

Being then now surrounded for the first time with a vast multitude of people, who, from the declarations of John the Baptist concerning him, and from his own miracles which he wrought and the authority which he assumed, concluded him to be their great promised prophet, the Messiah; Christ, their king,

VOL. II.

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and under whom the greater part of them expected to enjoy riches and greatness, and the ease and indulgencies of this world:

That he might at once cast a total blank on these vain expectations and undeceive them, this divine teacher all at once, abruptly, as it were, but with great beauty and energy, begins with pronouncing those only approved of God and fit to become his disciples, who were of a mind and disposition entirely opposite to such things ;-" Blessed," (or rather happy) says he, "are the poor in spirit;-happy are they that mourn ;-happy are the meek ;" and so on, thus requiring, in all that would come to him, humble dispositions, sobriety and seriousness of spirit, to be exempt from ungoverned passions, and, in the words before us, instead of their outward local purity and ceremonies, on which they were wont to lay great stress, recommending inward purity of heart, to be free from hypocrisy, and particularly from all impure and sensual desires. Happy are the pure in heart.

And as the scribes, the expounders of their divine law, and the Pharisees their leading men, placed almost the whole of their religion in the

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