from the world, and most decidedly in with busy politics of his corporation, triumphs in those of their own cast and their own de- the consciousness of that sagacity by which nomination; and yet, in fact, there may he has baffled and overpowered the devices be individuals, even of such a body as this, of his many antagonists. But take him to who instead of looking upwards to the the high theatre of Parliament, and bring Being with whom they have to do, are him into fellowship with the man who has looking no further than to the testimony there won the mighty game of superiority, and example of those who are immediately and he will feel abashed at the insignifiaround them; who count it enough that cance of his own tamer and homelier prethey are highly esteemed among men; who tensions. The richest individual of the feel no earnestness, and put forth no strength district struts throughout his neighbourin the pursuit of a lofty sanctification; who hood in all the glories of a provincial emiare not living as in the sight of God, and nence. Carry him to the metropolis of the are not in the habit of bringing their con- empire, and he hides his diminished head duct into measurement with the principles under the brilliancy of rank far loftier than of that great day, when God's righteousness his own, and equipage more splendid than shall be vindicated in the eyes of all his that by which he gathers from his surcreatures; who, satisfied, in short, with the countenance of the people of their own communion, come under the charge of my text, that measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves among themselves, they are not wise.

Now, though this habit of measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves among ourselves, be charged by the Apostle, in the text, against the professors of a strict and peculiar Christianity; it is a habit so universally exemplified in the world, and ministers such a deep and fatal security to the men of all characters who live in it, and establishes in their hearts so firm a principle of resistance against the humbling doctrines of the New Testament, that we trust we shall be excused if we leave out, for a time, the consideration of those who are within the limits of the Church, and dwell on the operation of this habit among those who are without these limits; and going beyond that territory of observation to which the words now read would appear to restrict us, we shall attend to the effects of that principle in human nature which are there adverted to, in as far as it serves to fortify the human mind against an entire reception of the truths and the overtures of the Gospel.

rounding tributaries, the homage of a respectful admiration. The principle of all this vanity was seen by the discerning eye of the Apostle. It is put down for our instruction in the text before us. And if we, instead of looking to our superiority above the level of our immediate acquaintanceship, pointed an eye of habitual observation to our inferiority beneath the level of those in society who are more dignified and more accomplished than ourselves, such a habit as this might shed a graceful humility over our characters, and save us from the pangs and the delusions of a vanity which was not made for man.

And let it not be said of those, who, in the more exalted walks of life, can look to few or to none above them, that they can derive no benefit from the principle of my text, because they are placed beyond the reach of its application. It is true of him who is on the very pinnacle of human society, that standing sublimely there, he can cast a downward eye on all the ranks and varieties of the world. But, though in the act of looking beneath him to men, he may gather no salutary lesson of humility-the lesson should come as forcibly upon him as upon any of his fellow mortals, in the act of looking above him to God. Instead of comIt may be remarked, by way of illustra-paring himself with the men of this world, tion, that the habit condemned in the text is an abundant cause of that vanity which is founded on a sense of our importance. If, instead of measuring ourselves by our companions and equals in society, we brought ourselves into measurement with our superiors, it might go far to humble and chastise our vanity. The rustic conqueror on some arena of strength or of dexterity, stands proudly elevated among his fellow-rustics who are around him. Place him beside the returned warrior, who can tell of the hazards, and the achievements, and the desperations of the great battle in which he had shared the renown and the danger; and he will stand convicted of the humility of his own performances. The man who is most keen, and, at the same time, most skilful in the

let him leave the world and expatiate in thought over the tracts of immensity,-let him survey the mighty apparatus of worlds scattered in such profusion over its distant regions; let him bring the whole field of the triumphs of his ambition into measurement with the magnificence that is above him, and around him,--above all, let him rise through the ascending series of angels, and principalities, and powers, to the throne of the august Monarch on whom all is suspended, and then will the lofty imagination of his heart be cast down, and all vanity die within him.

Now, if all this be obviously true of that vanity which is founded on a sense of our importance, might it not be as true of that complacency which is founded on a sense

I. The folly of measuring ourselves by ourselves is a lesson which admits of many

of our worth. Should it not lead us to suspect the ground of this complacency, and to fear lest a similar delusion be misleading us illustrations. The habit is so universal. it into a false estimate of our own righteous- is so strikingly exemplified, even among the ness? When we feel a sufficiency in the most acknowledged outcasts from all that act of measuring ourselves by ourselves, is worthy, and all that is respectable in and comparing ourselves among ourselves, general estimation. There is not a congreis it not the average virtue of those around gated mass of human beings, associated in us that is the standard of measurement? Do one common pursuit, or brought together we not at the time, form our estimate of by one common accident, among whom human worth upon the character of man as there is not established either some tacit or it actually is, instead of forming it upon the proclaimed morality, to the observance of high standard of that pure and exalted law which, or to the violation of which, there is which tells us what the character ought to awarded admiration or disgrace, by the be? Is it not thus that many are lulled into voice of the society that is formed by them. security, because they are as good or better You cannot bring two or more human than their neighbours? This may do for beings to act in concert without some conearth, but the question we want to press is, ventional principle of right and wrong will it do for heaven? It may carry us arising out of it, which either must be prac through life with a fair and equal character tically held in regard, or the concert is disin society, and even when we come to die, sipated. And yet it may be altogether a it may gain us an epitaph upon our tomb-concert of iniquity. It may be a concert stones. But after death cometh the judgment; and in that awful day judgment is laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet, every refuge of lies will be swept away, and every hiding-place of security be laid open.

of villany and injustice against the larger interests of human society. It may be a banded conspiracy against the peace and the property of the commonwealth; and there may not be a member belonging to it who does not carry the stamp of outlawry Under the influence of this delusion, upon his person, and who is not liable, and thousands and tens of thousands are posting rightly liable, to the penalties of an outtheir infatuated way to a ruined and un- raged government, against which he is biddone eternity. The good man of society ding, by the whole habit of his life, a daily lives on the applause and cordiality of his and systematic defiance. And yet even neighbours. He compares himself with his among such a class of the species as this fellow-men; and their testimony to the an enlightened observer of our nature will graces of his amiable, and upright, and ho- not fail to perceive a standard of morality, nourable character, falls like the music of both recognized and acted upon by all its paradise upon his ears. And it were also individuals, and in reference to which mo the earnest of paradise, if these his flatterers rality, there actually stirs in many a bosom and admirers in time were to be his judges amongst them a very warm and enthusi in the day of reckoning. But, alas! they astic feeling of obligation,—and some will will only be his fellow-prisoners at the bar. you find, who, by their devoted adherence The eternal Son of God will preside over to its maxims, earn among their compathe solemnities of that day. He will take nions all the distinctions of honour and of the judgment upon himself, and he will virtue,-and others who, by falling away conduct it on his own lofty standard of ex- from the principles of the compact, become amination, and not on the maxims or the the victims of a deep and general execra habits of a world lying in wickedness. Otion. And thus may the very same thing ye deluded men! who carry your heads so high, and look so safe and so satisfied amid the smooth and equal measurements of society,-do you ever think how you are to stand the admeasurement of Christ and of his angels? and think you that the fleeting applause of mortals, sinful as yourselves, will carry an authority over the mind of your judge, or prescribe to him that solemn award which is to fix you for eternity?

be perceived with them, that we see in the more general society of mankind—a scale of character, and, corresponding to it, a scale of respectability, along which the members of the most wicked and worthless association upon earth may be ranged according to the gradation of such virtues as are there held in demand, and in reverence; and thus there will be a feeling of complacency, and a distribution of applause, and a conscious superiority of moral and personal attain In the prosecution of the following dis-ment, and all this grounded on the habit of course, let us first attempt to expose the folly of measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves amongst ourselves; and then point out the wisdom opposite to this folly, which is recommended in the gospel.

measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves amongst themselves The first case of such an exhibition which we offer to your notice, comes so aptly in for the purpose of illustration, that homely and familiar as it is, we cannot resist the

never think of the ignominy. They will enjoy the praise they have one of another, and care not for the distant blame that is cast upon them by the public voice. They will carry in their bosoms the swelling consciousness of worth, and be regaled by the home testimony of those who are about them; and all this at the very time when, to the general community, they offer a spectacle of odiousness; all this at the very time, when the power and the justice of an incensed government are moving forth upon them.

But another case, still more picturesque, and, what is far better, still more subservient to the establishment of the lesson of our text, may be taken from another set of adventurers, hardier, and more ferocious, and more unprincipled than the former. We allude to the men of rapine; and who, rather than that their schemes of rapine should be frustrated, have so far overcome all the scruples and all the sensibilities of nature, that they have become men of blood. They live as commoners upon the world; and, at large from those restraints, whether of feeling or of principle, which hold in security together the vast majority of this world's families, they are looked at by general society with a revolting sense of terror and of odiousness. And yet, among these mon

introduction of it We allude to the case of smugglers. These men, in as far at least as it respects one tie of allegiance, may be considered as completely broken loose from the government of their country. They have formed themselves into a plot against the interests of the public revenue, and it may be generally said of them, that they have no feeling whatever of the criminality of their undertaking. On this point there is utterly wanting the sympathy of any common principle between the administrators of the law and the transgressors of the law, and yet it would be altogether untrue to nature and to experience to say of the latter, that they are entire strangers to the feeling of every moral obligation. They have a very strong sense of obligation to each other. There are virtues amongst them which serve to signalize certain members, and vices amongst them which doom to infamy certain other members of their own association. In reference to the duties which they owe to government, they may be dead to every impression of them. But in reference to those duties, on the punctual fulfilment of which depends the success, or even the continuance, of their system of operations, they may be most keenly and sensitively alive. They may speak of the informer who has abandoned them, with all the intensity of moral hatred and con-sters of the cavern, and practised as they tempt; and of the man, again, who never once swerved from his fidelity; of the man, who, with all the notable dexterity of his evasions from the vigilance that was sent forth to track and to discover him, was ever known to be open as day amongst the members of his own brotherhood; of the man, who, with the unprincipledness of a most skilful and systematic falsehood, in reference to the agents and pursuers of the law, was the most trusty, and the most incorruptible, in reference to his fellows of the trade; of the man who stands highest amongst them in all the virtues of pledged and sworn companionship ;-why, of such a man will these roving mountaineers speak in terms of honest and heartfelt veneration; and nothing more is necessary, in order to throw a kind of chivalric splendour over him, than just to be told, along with his inflexible devotedness to the cause, of his hardy adventures, and his hair-breadth miracles of escape, and his inexhaustible resources, and of the rapidity of his ever-suiting and ever-shifting contrivances, and of his noble and unquelled spirit of daring, and of the art and activity by which he has eluded his opponents, and of the unfaltering courage by which he has resisted them. We doubt not, that even in the history of this ignominious traffic, there do occur such deeds and characters of unrecorded heroism; and still the men who carry it on, measuring themselves by themselves, may X

are in all the atrocities of the highway, will you find a virtue of their own, and a hightoned morality of their own. Living as they do, in a state of emancipation from the law universal, still there is among them a law isoterical, in doing homage to which, the hearts of these banditti actually glow with the movements of honourable principle; and the path of their conduct is actually made to square with the conformities of right and honourable practice. Extraordinary as you may think it, the very habit of my text is in full operation among these very men, who have wandered so far from all that is deemed righteous in society; and disowning, as they do, our standard of principle altogether, they have a standard among themselves, on which they can adjust a scale of moral estimation, and apply it in every exercise of judgment on the character of each individual who belongs to them. In reference to every deviation that is made by them from the general standard of right, there is an entire obliteration of all their sensibilities,-and this is not the ground on which they ever think either of reproaching themselves, or of casting any imputation of disgrace on their companions. But, in reference to their own particular standard of right, they are all awake to the enormity of every act of transgression against it,and thus it is, that measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves amongst themselves, there is just with them

in the relation of a condemned malefactorfeels, how preposterous it were, if, on the plea of being the most innocent of the whole assemblage, he was to claim, not merely exemption from punishment, but the reward of some high and honourable distinction at the hands of the magistrate. He is fully aware of the gap that lies between him and the administrators of justice,-is sensible, that though he deserves to be beaten with fewer stripes than others, yet still, that, in the eye of the law, he deserves to be beaten; and that he stands at as hopeless a distance, as the most depraved of his fellows, from a sentence of complete

Let us, last of all, go along with these malefactors to the scene of their banishment. Let us view them as the members of a separated community; and we shall widely mistake it, if we think, that in this settlement of New South Wales, there is not the same shading of moral variety, there is not the same gradation of character, there is not the same scale of reputation, there is not the same distribution of respect, there is not the same pride of loftier principle, and debasement of more shameful and abandoned profligacy, there is not the same triumph of conscious superiority on the one hand, and the same crouching sense of unworthiness on the other, which you find in the more decent, and virtuous, and orderly society of Europe.

as varied a distribution of praise and of obloquy as is to be met with on the face of any regular and well-ordered commonwealth. And who, we would ask, is the man among all these prowling outcasts of nature, on whom the law of his country would inflict the most unrelenting vengeance? He who is most signalized by the moralities of his order,-he who has gained by fidelity, and courage, and disinterested honour, the chieftainship of confidence and affection amongst them,-he, the foremost of all the desperadoes, on whose character perhaps the romance of generosity and truth is strangely blended with the stern barbarities of his calling,-and who, the most ad-justification. mired among the members of his own brotherhood, is, at the same time, the surest to bring down upon his person all the rigours and all the severities of the judgment-seat. Let us now follow with the eye of our observation, a number of these transgressors into another scene. Let us go into the place of their confinement; and, in this receptacle of many criminals, with all their varied hues of guilt and of depravity, we shall perceive the habit of my text in full and striking exemplification. The murderer stands lower in the scale of character than the thief. The first is worse than the second-and you have only to reverse the terms of the comparison, that you may be enabled to see how the second is better than the first. Thus, even in this repository of human worthlessness, we meet with grada- Within the limits of this colony there extions of character; with the worse and the ists a tribunal of public opinion, from which better and the best; with an ascending and praise and popularity, and reproach, are a descending scale, which runs in conti- awarded in various proportions among all nuity, from the one who stands upon its the inhabitants. And without the limits of pinnacle, to the one who is the deepest and this colony there exists another tribunal of most determined in wickedness amongst public opinion, by the voice of which an them. It is utter ignorance of our nature unexpected stigma of exclusion and disgrace to conceive that this moral gradation is not is cast upon every one of them. Insomuch, fully and frequently in the minds of the that the same individual may by a nearer criminals themselves,-that there is not, judgment, be extolled as the best and the even here, the habit of each measuring most distinguished of all who are around himself with his fellow-prisoners around him, and by a more distant judgment, he him, and of some soothed by the conscious- may have all the ignominy of an outcast ness of a more untainted character, and laid upon his person and his character He rejoicing over it with a feeling of secret may, at one and the same time, be regaled elevation. They, in truth, know themselves by the applause of one society, and held in to be the best of their kind,-and this know- rightful execration by another society. In ledge brings a complacency along with it, the former, he may have the deference of a and, even in this mass of profligacy, there positive regard rendered to him for his swells and kindles the pride of superior at- virtues,-while, from the latter, he is justly tainments. But there is at least one delu- exiled by the hateful contamination of his sion from which one and all of them stand vices. And in him do we behold the inexempted. The very best of them, how-structive picture of a man, who, at the bar ever much he may be regaled by the in- of his own neighbourhood, stands the ward sense of his advantage over others, highest in moral estimation,-while, at a knows, that in reference to the law, he is higher bar, he has had a mark of foulest not on a footing of merit, but on a footing ignominy stamped upon him. of criminality,-knows, that though he will be the most gently dealt with, and that on him the lightest penalty will fall, yet still he stands to his judge and to his country,

We want not to shock the pride or the delicacy of your feelings. But on a question so high as that of your eternity, we want to extricate you from the power of

objects of Heaven's most righteous execra-
tion.
But is this the real place, it may be asked,

mony of the Bible, when it tells us that however fair some may be in the eyes of men, yet that all are guilty before God; that in his eyes none are righteous, no not one: that he, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, finds out iniquity in every one of us; that there is none who understandeth, and none who seeketh after "God; that however much we may compare ourselves amongst ourselves, and found a complacency upon the exercise, yet that we have altogether gone out of the way; that however distinctly we may retain, even in the midst of this great moral rebellion, oùr relative superiorities over each other, there is a wide and a general departure of the species from God; that one and all of us have deeply revolted against him: that the taint of a most inveterate spiritual disease has overspread all the individuals of all the families upon earth; insomuch, that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and the imaginations of his thoughts are only evil, and that continually.

every vain and bewildering delusion. We want to urge upon you the lesson of Scripture, that this world differs from a prison-house, only in its being a more spa-that our world occupies in the moral unicious receptacle of sinners,-and that there verse of God? The answer to this question is not a wider distance, in point of habit may be obtained either out of the historical and of judgment, between a society of con- informations of Scripture, or out of a survicts, and the general community of man-vey that may be made of the actual charackind, than there is between the whole com- ter of man, and a comparison that may be munity of our species, and the society of instituted between this character and the that paradise, from which, under the apos-divine law. We can conceive nothing more. tacy of our fallen nature, we have been uniform and more decisive than the testidoomed to live in dreary alienation. We refuse not to the men of our world the possession of many high and honourable virtues; but let us not forget, that amongst the marauders of the highway, we hear, too, of inflexible faith, and devoted friendship, and splendid generosity. We deny not, that there exists among our species, as much truth and as much honesty, as serve to keep society together: but a measure of the very same principle is necessary, in order to perpetuate and to accomplish the end of the most unrighteous combinations. We deny not, that there flourishes on the face of our earth a moral diversity of hue and of character, and that there are the better and the best who have signalized themselves above the level of its general population; but so it is in the malefactor's dungeon; and as there, so here, may a positive sentence of condemnation be the lot of the most exalted individual. We deny not, there are many in every neighbourhood, to whose character, and whose worth, the cordial tribute of admiration is awarded; but the very same thing may be witnessed The fall of Adam is represented, in the amongst the outcasts of every civilized ter- Bible, as that terribly decisive event, on ritory, and what they are, in reference to which took place this deep and fatal unthe country from which they have been hingement of the moral constitution of our exiled, we may be, in reference to the whole species. From this period the malady has of God's unfallen creation. In the sight of descended, and the whole history of our men we may be highly esteemed,-and we world gives evidence to its state of banishmay be an abomination in the sight of an- ment from the joys and the communicagels. We may receive homage from our tions of paradise. Before the entrance of immediate neighbours for all the virtues of sin did God and man walk in sweet comour relationship with them,-while our re-panionship together, and saw each other lationship with God may be utterly dis-face to face in the security of a garden. A solved, and its appropriate virtues may nei- little further down in the history, we meet ther be recognized nor acted on. There with another of God's recorded manifestamay emanate from our persons a certain tions. We read of his descent in thunder beauteousness of moral colouring on those upon mount Sinai. O what a change from who are around us,--but when seen through the free and fearless intercourse of Eden! the universal morality of God's extended God, though surrounded by a people whom and all-pervading government, we may look he had himself selected, here sits, if we as hateful as the outcasts of felony,-and may use the expression, on a throne of living, as we do, in a rebellious province, awful and distant ceremony; and the liftthat has broken loose from the community ing of his mighty voice scattered dismay of God's loyal and obedient worshippers, among the thousands of Israel. When he we may, at one and the same time, be sur-looked now on the children of men, he rounded by the cordialities of an approving looked on them with an altered countefellowship, and be frowned upon by the su-nance. The days were, when they talked preme judicatory of the universe. At one together in the lovely scenes of paradise as and the same time, we may be regaled by one talketh with a friend. But, on the top the incense of this world's praise, and be the of Sinai, he wraps himself in storms, and