charity; and who can comprehend and approve the principle of that calculation of their pious predecessors, which accounted it even one of the best provisions for their heirs to dedicate a portion of their property to God. How different therefore the feelings of a descendant of such a person as that late most excellent Christian and philanthropist of your city, whose name* the present topic has probably recalled to the minds of most in this assembly.

We cannot be unaware how many wellwishers to our cause must feel a severe limitation put upon their means of aiding it by the pressure of the public burdens, those burdens which oppress the energy and resources of every scheme for doing good. How often does the thought of such designs present itself to a benevolent man, at the moment of his being accosted with the peremptory demands on the public account, and make him look wishfully and regretfully at the sums he is thus surrendering, to be speedily followed, he knows, by more sums surrendered, from the profits of

* Reynolds.

his laborious industry, or the produce of his little property. How many implements for the holy war, he says to himself, how many bibles, or tracts, or school-manuals, in the languages of Asia, might have sprung from such sums; but this all-consuming body politic seems to know instinctively whatever good men are devising of gratuitous service to the welfare of their fellow creatures, and to take a pleasure in frustrating their designs, by coming upon their means as a spoil,—as if in revenge that they should seem to reproach the nation, by presuming to apply their little individual means to worthier purposes than those on which the grand public resources have been expended without limit.

It is indeed a melancholy and awful view that is presented to our contemplation. A great, Christian state, with every conceivable mode of beneficence placed within its sight and within its powers, has, throughout half an age, been stimulated to almost miraculous exertions, to an expenditure surpassing all the dreams of the golden empires of romance, a consumption of forces and of materials which

might seem to have been adequate, under some imaginable forms of application, to give a new character to the moral world; and when, after all this, the Christian philanthropist lookson the scene for the results, he finds that, excepting some hopeful commencements, made quite apart from the public system, and in spite of its insatiable requisitions, that which was to be done, remains still to be done, with a frightful addition of evils to the account; and to be done by the efforts of individuals, and those individuals suffering, from the course of national affairs, a lamentable diminution and alienation of their means.

In any large assembly, nevertheless, there

may be a considerable number of persons who have mainly approved that public course of things, of which they would plead the now oppressive consequences in excuse for contributing but slightly in aid of a concern like that under our contemplation. We are not taking upon us to arraign them for such approval, when we suggest that they should be discreet in using this plea. They should think again, before consequences which, as resulting natur

ally from a certain order of public measures, they were required in reason to foresee, at least to a considerable extent, when they deliberately gave their approbation to those measures, shall be alleged by them in exemption from assisting a work as evidently designed to promote the highest good as any undertaking in the history of the world. If they have been the professed servants of that Prince of Peace whose kingdom is not of this world, but nevertheless demands tribute from the worldly resources of its subjects, it must have been their acknowledged primary obligation to look to the advancement of that kingdom, as indeed they were admonished in the first petition of the prayer dictated to them in his own instructions. This sacred obligation they had to keep in memory, while considering what other expenditures of their property they should take the responsibility of approving the responsibility, we say; for, to abet and sanction a proceeding, is to incur the accountableness as completely as if the manifestation of an opposite opinion would prevent that proceeding; and it were an idle evasion to plead that the

course of measures in question would have been pursued, all the same, though disapprobation instead of coincidence had been avowed by these individuals. With this obligation resting on memory and on conscience, they could not, one should think, without alarm for their Christian principles, give their sanction to what must inevitably create speedy and large demands on their property, unless they had very solid ground for assurance of being left still competent to meet the claims peculiarly authoritative on them as Christians. They had to consider then what, in sober calculation, it was probable or possible there should at length be spared to them, by the voracity of such an enormous gulf as they saw swallowing up, year after year, the means of the community. We will presume that they did, as a matter of conscience, solemnly consider this question, and that through the progressive stages of experience they were still satisfied, as remaining constant in the assurance that their approval of the policy which caused such a tremendous consumption, did not involve their consent to an alienation from the