fashion; but the merchant or the tradesman who avoids the payment of his bond, loses his honour and becomes a knave. The conqueror who overruns and desolates a kingdom will be named with respect or admiration by history, when, probably enough, God will look upon him with as much greater abhorrence than if he had robbed a hen-roost, as his crime is bloodier and more afflictive to the good of the world. How very respectable those learned impostors the Scribes, and those sanctimonious extortioners the Pharisees! How base those knavish tax-gatherers and sinners in low life! But Christ, who respected not the appearance, but judged righteous judgment, had a different opinion. It is not the show of a sin, my friends, which makes it base, but it is its interior quality—what it is in motive, feeling, thought. It is the gloat of inward passion, the stringent pinch of meanness, the foulness of inward desire and conception, the fire of inward malignity, the rot of lust and hypocrisy. It is not for me, as public inspector of sins, to pass on their relative quality, or fix the brand of their degree. I will only say that the outwardly-respectable look of them is no good test of their quality; leaving it, as a question between you and your God, whether, if all the inward shapes of your thought, motive, feeling, desire, and passion were brought out into the open sight of this community, and all the false and factitious rules of judgment accepted by us were swept away, it might not possibly appear that there are characters here, in this very respectable assembly, as base in real demerit as many that are classed among the outcasts of the town.

It is obvious, fifthly, that what I am calling respectable sin is commonly more inexcusable-not always, but commonly. Sometimes the most depraved and abandoned characters are those who have cast themselves down, by their perversity, from the highest standing of privilege. But, however this may be, it cannot be denied that the depraved and abject classes of society have, to a great extent, been trained up to the very life they lead; to be idle and beg, to be cunning, sharp, predatory, in one way or another, thieves; to look upon the base pleasures of self-indulgence and appetite as the highest rewards of existence. They are ignorant by right of their origin, brutal in manners and feeling, accustomed only to what is lowest in the possible range of human character. Sometimes, alas! the real

want of bread has made them desperate. I will not become the sponsor of their crime; enough that they are criminal, and consciously so. But who is there of you that does not pity their hard lot? who of you that, considering their most sad history, is not often more ready to weep over than to judge them? Is it incredible to you that, in your own respectable and decent life of sin, taken as related to your high advantages, there may even be a degree of criminality, which, as God estimates crime, is far more inexcusable than that for which many are doomed to suffer the severest and most ignominious penalties of public law?

I add a single consideration further-viz., that respectable sin is more injurious, or a greater mischief, than the baser and more disgusting forms of vicious abandonment. The latter create for us greater public burdens, in the way of charity and taxation for the poor, and of judicial proceedings and punishments for public malefactors. They annoy us more, too, by their miseries and the crimes by which they disturb the security and peace of society. And yet it is really a fair subject of doubt, whether, in a moral point of view, they have not a wholesome influence and are not a social benefit. They tempt no one. Contrary to this, they repel and warn away from vice every one that looks upon them. They hang out a flag of distress upon every shoal of temptation. They shew us the last results of all sin, and the colours in which they exhibit sin are always disgusting, never attractive. In this view they are really one of the moral wants of the world. We should never conceive the inherent baseness of sin, if it were not shewn by their experiment; revealed in their delirium, their rags, their bloated faces, and bleared eyes and tottering bodies, and, more than all, in the extinction of their human feeling, and the substitution of a habit or type of being so essentially brutal. We look down into this hell that vice opens, and with a shudder turn away! Meantime, respectable sin,-how attractive, how fascinating its pleasures. Its gay hours, its shows and equipages, its courteous society, its entertainments, its surroundings of courtly form and incident -how delicious to the inspection of fancy. Even its excesses seem to be only a name for spirit. The places of temptation, too, are not the hells and brothels, but the saloons of pleasure and elegant dissipation. Vice is the daughter of pleasure; all

unrespectable sin the daughter of respectable. Nay, if we go to the bottom, church-going sin is the most plausible form of sin that was ever invented, and, in that view, the most dangerous. For, if a man never goes to the place of worship, we take his sin with a warning, or at least with some little sense of caution; but, if he is regular at church, a respectful hearer of the Word, a sober, correct, thoughtful man, still, (though never a Christian,) a safe, successful, always respected, never-faltering character-then how many will be ready to imagine that there is one form of sin that is about as good as piety itself, and possibly even better than piety. And so this church-going sin gives countenance and courage to all other—all the better and more effective countenance because no such thing is intended. There is, in short, no such thing as taking away the evil of sin by making it respectable. Make it even virtuous, as men speak, and it will only be the worse in its power as regards the enticements it offers to evil. It will not shock any one by deeds of robbery and murder, it will not revolt any one by its disgusting spectacles of shame and misery, but how many will it encourage and shield in just that rejection of God which is to be their bitter fall and their eternal overthrow.

It is scarcely possible, in closing this very serious subject, to name and duly set forth all the applications of which it is capable, or which it even presses on our attention.

With how little reason, for example, are Christian people, and indeed all others, cowed by the mere name and standing of men who are living still under the power of sin, and resisting or neglecting still the grace of their salvation. Doubtless, it is well enough to look on them with respect and treat them with a just deference, but however high they may seem, allow them never to overtop your pity. For what is the fair show they make but a most sorrowful appeal to your compassions and your prayers? How can a true Christian, one who is consciously ennobled by the glorious heirship in which he is set, ever be intimidated, or awed, or kept back in his approaches or his prayers by respect to that which is only respectable sin? If he goes to God, entering even into the holiest with boldness, how much more will he be able to stand before these princes of name, and title, and power, and speak to them of Christ and

His great salvation. To falter in this boldness, brethren, is even a great wrong to our Master's gospel, which puts us, even the humblest of us, in a higher plane of dignity, far, far above any most honoured sinner of mankind.

Again, it is impossible, in such a subject as this, not to raise the question of morality-what it is, and is worth, and where it will land us in the great allotments of eternity. Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved or wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it any more than there is in the worst of felonies. It is the very same thing as respects the denial of God, or the state of personal separation from God, that distinguishes all the most reprobate forms of character. Á correct, outwardly virtuous man is the principle of sin well dressed and respectably kept-nothing more. And will that save you? You can, I am sure, be in no great danger of believing that. A far greater danger is that the decent, outwardly respectable manner of your sin will keep you from the discovery of its real nature as a root of character in you. If we under. take to set forth the inherent weakness and baseness of sin, to open up the vile and disgustful qualities which make it, as the Scriptures declare, abominable and hateful to God; if we speak of its poisonous and bitter effects within, and the inevitable and awful bondage it works in all the powers of choice and character, who of you can believe what we say? Such representations you will think, if you do not openly say, partake of extravagance. What can you know of sin, what can you feel of your deep spiritual need when you are living so respectably and maintain, in the outward life, a show of so great integrity and even so much of refinement often in what is called virtue? True conviction of sin, how difficult is it, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions!

If, then, we are right in this estimate of morality and the very great dangers involved in it, how necessary is it, for a similar

reason, that every man out of Christ, not living in any vicious practice, should set himself to the deliberate canvassing of his own moral state. Make a study of this subtle, cunningly veiled character, the state of reputable sin, and study it long enough to fathom its real import. Look into the secret motives and springs of your character; inspect and study long enough really to perceive the strange, wild current of your thoughts; detect the subtle canker in your feeling; comprehend the deep ferment of your lusts, enmities, and passions; hunt down the selfish principle which instigates, and misdirects, and turns off your whole life from God, setting all your aims on issues that reject Him; ask, in a word, how this respectable sin appears when viewed inwardly; how, if unrestrained by pride, and the conventional rules of decency and character, it would appear outwardly. Fathom the deep hunger of your soul, and listen to its inward wail of bondage, its mournful, unuttered cry of want after God. Ask it of the enlightening Spirit of God, that He will open to your view yourself, and make you know all that is inmost, deepest, most hidden, in the habitually veiled deformity of your sin. Make it your prayer even to God, "Search me, O God, and try me!"

You have a motive also in making this inquest that is even more pressing than many of you will suspect. For no matter how respectable your sin is, you never can tell where it will carry you, how long it will be respectable, or where it will end. Enough to know that it is sin, and that the principle of all sin is one and the same. In its very germ you have, potentially, whatever is abhorrent, abominable, disgusting; and when the fruit is ripe, no man can guess into what shape of debasement and moral infamy, or public crime, it may finally bring him. If he hears of a murder, like that of Webster, for example, he may be very confident that, in his particular and particularly virtuous case of unreligious living, there is no liability to any such result. And perhaps there is not. Perhaps the danger is different. Avoiding what is bloody, he may fall into what is false or lowsome damning dishonesty or fraud, some violation of trust, some falsification of accounts, some debauchery of lust or appetite, some brutality which makes his very name and person a