the saints. This sort of encomium is a model of that at which you aspire; hence you often exclaim, speaking of your good departed friend, "Let me die his death, and let my last end be like his!" Numb. xxiii. 10. When you are seized with any illness that threatens your life, you put on all the exterior of religion. I see one minister after another sitting at your bed-side. I hear your constant sobs and groans. Here is nothing but weeping and sighing and holy ejaculations; but I stand listening to hear you utter one other word, that is, restitution, and that I never hear. I never hear you say, as Zaccheus said, "If I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold," Luke xix. 8. I never see your coffers disgorge the riches you have obtained by extortion; you never hear, or nev er feel the cries "of the labourers, which have reaped down your fields, whose hire is of you kept back by fraud, the cries of whom are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth," James v. 4. You choose rather to set at defiance all those terrible judgments which God hath denounced against extortioners than to part from your idol, gain; you would rather transmit your fortune under a curse to your posterity than restore what you and your ancestors have extorted. Ah! "Wo be to you! you pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin; but you omit the weightier matters of the law, judgment, faith, and mercy!"

My brethren, it is a deplorable thing, that when we treat of such an important subject as this, we are obliged to pay more attention to the delicacy of our

hearers than to the weight of the subject. But in the name of God, do you yourselves finish the list of those articles which timidity (or, shall I say, caution?) forbids me to extend. Go up to the origin of that disposition which I have been opposing. It must proceed from one of three principles; it must come from either narrowness of mind, or hypocrisy, or a criminal composition.

Perhaps it may proceed from littleness of mind. We are enslaved by external appearance. We determine ourselves by semblances. In the world more reputation is acquired by the shadow than by the substance of virtue. By habituating ourselves to this kind of imposition, we bring ourselves to believe that God will suffer himself to be imposed on in the same manner. "These things hast thou done," saith he by the mouth of a prophet, " and thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself," Psal. 1. 21. We insensibly persuade our selves, that, provided we lift our eyes to heaven, God will think our hearts are elevated thither; provided we kneel before the throne of God, he will think our hearts bow with our bodies; provided we mutter a few prayers, God will accept us as if we formed ideas and performed acts of love. This is littleness of mind.

Jesus
The

Sometimes it proceeds from hypocrisy. Christ reproached the Pharisees with this. Pharisees were attached to religion no further than as it acquired them reputation in the world. But I will not insist on this article. I freely acknowledge, I had almost said I lament, that hypocrisy is not the

vice of our age. Piety is now so little respected, that we need not much suspect people of aiming to acquire reputation by professing it; yea, perhaps, it may oftener happen that they who really have some degree of it conceal it in order to escape contempt, than that others who have none, affect to possess it in order to acquire public esteem.

Sometimes also this disposition of mind proceeds from a criminal composition. We have the face to compound with God. We are willing to perform the external part of religion, provided he will dispense with the internal part; we are ready to offer sacrifices provided he will dispense with obedience; we are willing to do what costs our depravity nothing, or next to nothing, if he will dispense with what would cost it much.

Let us finish. One maxim, which I intreat you to retain in memory, is the essence of my subject, and the spring that gives force to all the exhortations which I have addressed to you in the latter periods of this discourse. This maxim is, that a christian is obliged by his heavenly calling, not only to practise all virtues, but to place each in its proper rank; to give more application to such as merit more application, and to give most of all to such as require most of all.

On this principle, what an idea ought we to form of that mercy or benevolence, which my text places among the weightier matters of the law? You have heard the value of this in the body of this discourse. Such virtues as have God for their object are more important than others, which have our neighbour for

their object. But God, in order to engage us to benevolence, hath taught us to consider beneficence to our neighbours as one of the surest evidences of our love to himself. He unites himself with the poor; he clothes himself, as it were, with their miseries; and he tells us, inasmuch as ye do good unto one of the least of these, ye do it unto me, Matt. xxv. 40. What a sublime idea! From what a fund of love does such a benevolent declaration proceed! And, at the same time, what a motive to animate us to benevolence.

This virtue, to the practice of which we perpetually exhort you, ought to be extraordinarily exerted, my dear brethren, now that God visits us with a sort of judgment, I mean the excessive rigour of this winter. It is not a judgment upon you, rich men, God loads you with temporal blessings; but it falls upon you, miserable labourers, whose hands, benumbed with cold, are rendered incapable of working, the only way you have of procuring a morsel of bread for yourselves and your families: upon you, poor old people, struggling at the same time against the infirmities of old age and the rigours of the season: upon you, innocent victims to hunger and cold, who have no provision except cries and tears, and whom I see more dead than alive around a fire that emits less heat than smoke: upon you, wretched sick people, lodged in a hovel open on all sides to the weather, and destitute of both nourishment and clothing. Is it wrong to call a cause producing such tragical effects a judgment? Must I justify the term by reasons more con10

VOL. IV.

vincing? I am ashamed to allege them. Without pretending to answer for the fact, (it is an affair too mortifying for some of us to investigate,) we are assured, that some have perished with cold. I do not know who is in fault, but I recollect the complaint which St. Paul addressed to the Corinthians, when incest had been committed in their city. What! said he, have ye heard of this deed, and have ye not covered yourselves with mourning? 1 Cor. v. 1, 2. What! my dear brethren, in a christian society, do we see such events; do we behold the poor dying with cold, without being touched in our inmost souls, without inquiring into the cause of such a misfortune, without applying proper means to prevent such things in future?

With this pious design, the dispensers of your bounty will again humbly wait at the door of this church to receive your charitable contributions, in order to enable them to-day plentifully to supply the wants of such as perhaps may die to-day, if they be not relieved. With the same pious views, they have besought the magistrates to grant them an extraordinary collection, and next Wednesday they intend to conjure you by those shocking objects, with which their own minds are affected, and with which they have thought it their duty to affect ours, to afford such relief as may be necessary to prevent the many evils, with which the remainder of the winter yet threatens us.

If you accuse me of applying too often to you on this subject, I answer, my importunity is your glory. You have affectionately habituated me to