of these are bound upon us, as duties, by this fingle precept of the teacher. It is our business to make the application to ourselves, and to profit by it to the utmost of our power. For my own part, I am convinced that a candid examination of the duties arising from this latter precept, with due reflection on our. own neglect in the performance of them, would lead to much inftruction, most important and most neceffary for us. Or, to put it in another way, more convenient, perhaps,. for fuch a view as we can take at prefent, let, us confider the religious evils of our actual fituation, and then enquire whether the duties here enjoined by the apoftle would not afford us the moft fure and efficacious remedy.

To know our real ftate is one great part of wisdom, and to know the means by which we may amend it, is yet a further advance: there is wanting beyond these, only the will to put the means in ufe; and this a proper statement of the former part may tend, perhaps, to excite.

It is, I think, but too undeniable, that in this age the spirit of religion has become extremely weak; far from being the exalted creatures which I have just described as real Chrif

B 3

Chriftians, the prefent Chriftians bear the name with very few of the diftinctive marks. Many, indeed, have renounced even the

name;

but among those who retain it, and make a general profeffion of the faith, to confider the negligence there is with respect to some duties, the total contempt of others, the general indifference about christian knowledge, the forgetfulness of chriftian hopes, and the violence of defire and contention with which all temporal advantages are fought, may lead our imaginations rather to that picture of creatures without religion, and devoid of future hopes, which I gave in the beginning of this discourse, than to any thing that properly displays the character of Chriftians.

From vices, however, and even from the vice of worldly-mindednefs, no times of Christianity have yet been wholly exempt: but this peculiar crime of indifference, rifing frequently into a total alienation from religion, and a fear of even feeming to profess it, has never, furely, been fo prevalent as within the prefent century.-The general cause of this has been the increase of fancied knowledge, and the pride of imaginary wisdom.The fact is not that real knowledge has not

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also increased, and that great and solid wifdom has not also appeared; but these good things, like every earthly advantage, have had fome counterbalance of attendant evil. Vanity and prefumption have always made a stride beyond the progress of real knowledge, and true wisdom; and while thefe have ftruck out discoveries of fome importance in the system of nature, and improvements in many arts, and gained a few steps in fcience, both moral and divine, thofe have hurried themselves with blind precipitation into the abyss of metaphyfics; and there, immersed in central darkness, have imagined that they discovered, and could demonftrate, whatever pernicious fancies the ruler of the darkness of this world thought it most expedient for his purposes to fuggeft.

The novelty, or at leaft, the apparent novelty, of these excurfions, with a certain brilliancy of genius by which the results were artfully set forth, together with the diffolute manners of fome corrupt courts, prevailed unhappily fo far as to give them currency, and to render irreligion fashionable. If we look back a very little further into history we shall find it otherwife; but thus it has been for

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fome

همه

some time, and the evil, I hope, has past its height.

A favourable period feems at length to have arrived for fhaking off this torpid malady. Those writings which for a time feduced fo many, have loft the grace of novelty, and have had their futility exposed; they are finking rapidly into oblivion ;-and religion, never filenced by reafon, but for a time apparently overborne by clamour, may now again be heard. In the conflict she has manifested a strength which to the end of time will be her glory; and her friends have only now to improve the good pofition in which she has established their force.

During the continuance of these disputes, amidst abundance of raillery and ridicule, which, though they could not move the wife who were few, yet caught the weak and unsteady who were many, and kept them greatly in awe of what some sophists would gladly have established as the final test of truth. In these circumstances, I fay, it became a kind of fashion to fupprefs religious fentiments, to fuffer them by all imaginable methods to be discountenanced in public, and to retain them, if at all, among the fecrets of

the

(

the heart, known only to him to whom all

hearts are open.

Not to expatiate upon the unchristian pufillanimity, and the guilt of fuch conduct, the effect of it upon the public morals has been alarming and destructive. They who judge chiefly by appearances, and are influenced very greatly by the example of their fuperiors, I mean the lower orders of society, seeing so little appearance of religion in those above them, and fo little anxiousness to preserve even an outward respect to it, have been tempted, in too many inftances, to throw it off entirely, and we are punished for our guilty negligence by an extended profligacy, which at length is felt and lamented, but which it must be the work of time, and of many serious efforts, to reprefs and to reform.

The great work is, however, begun; and the zeal with which some institutions of that tendency have been taken up and fupported, affords, at prefent, a pleafing symptom of amendment, and will, no doubt, in time produce its due effect.

But in the interval we are strongly called upon to quicken and extend our diligence, and, with the general attention which the

apostle