duties nearer home. Let us of the ministry give heed to ourselves and to our flocks;-let us give an anxious and diligent attention to their spiritual concerns. Let us all-but let the younger clergy more especially, beware how they become secularized in the general cast and fashion of their lives. Let them not think it enough, to maintain a certain frigid decency of character, abstaining from the gross scandal of open riot and criminal dissipation, but giving no farther attention to their spiritual duties than may be consistent with the pursuits and pleasures of the world, and may not draw them from a fixed residence in populous cities, at a distance from their cures, or a wandering life in places of public resort and amusement, where they have no call, and where the grave dignified character of a parish priest is ill exchanged for that of a fashionable trifler. We know the charms of improved and elegant society. Its pleasures in themselves are innocent; but they are dearly bought, at the expense of social and religious duty. If we have not firmness to resist the temptations they present, when the enjoyment is not to be obtained without deserting the work of the ministry, in the places to which we are severally appointed, because our lot may have chanced to fall in the retirement of a country town, or perhaps in the obscurity of a village, the time may come, sooner than we think, when it shall be said, Where is now the church of England? Let us betimes take warning. "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten," said our Lord to the church of Laodicea, whose worst crime it was, that she was "neither hot nor cold." "Be zealous, therefore, and repent. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches."

SERMON XIV.

1 CORINTHIANS ii. 2.

For I have determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.*

AMONG various abuses in the Corinthian church, which this epistle, as appears from the matter of it, was intended to reform, a spirit of schism and dissension, to which an attempt to give a new turn to the doctrines of Christianity had given rise, was in itself the most criminal, and in its consequences the most pernicious. Who the authors of this evil were, is not mentioned, and it were idle to inquire. They were run after in their day, but their names have been long since forgotten; nor is any thing remembered of them, but the mischief which they did. The general character of the men, and the complexion of their doctrine, may easily be collected from this and the subsequent epistle. They were persons, who, without authority from heaven, had taken upon themselves to be preachers of the gospel. The motive from which they had engaged in a business for which they were neither qualified nor commissioned, was not any genuine zeal for the propagation of the truth, or any charitable desire to reclaim the profligate, and to instruct the ignorant; but the love of gain-of power

Preached in the Cathedral Church of Gloucester, at a Public Ordination of Priests and Deacons.

and applause, the desire, in short, of those advantages which ever attend popularity in the character of a teacher. A scrupulous adherence to the plain doctrine of the gospel had been inconsistent with these views, since it could only have exposed them to persecution. Whatever, therefore, the Christian doctrine might contain offensive to the prejudice of Jew or Gentile, they endeavoured to clear away by figurative interpretations, by which they pretended to bring to light the hidden sense of mysteri ous expressions, which the first preachers had not explained. While they called themselves by the name of Christ, they required not that the Jew should recognize the maker of the world, the Jehovah of his fathers, in the carpenter's reputed son; nor would they incur the ridicule of the Grecian schools, by maintaining the necessity of an atonement for forsaken and repented sins, and by holding high the efficacy of the Redeemer's sacrifice.

Such preaching was accompanied with no blessing. These pretended teachers could perform no miracles in confirmation of their doctrine: it was supported only by an affected subtlety of argument, and the studied ornaments of eloquence. To these arts they trusted, to gain credit for their innovations with the multitude. Not that the Corinthian multitude, more than the multitude of any other place, were qualified to enter into abstruse questions-to apprehend the force, or to discern the fallacy of a long chain of argument-or to judge of the speaker's eloquence; but they had the art to persuade the people that they excelled in argument and rhetoric. They told the people, that their reasoning was such as must convince, and their oratory such as ought to charm: and the silly people believed them, when they bore witness to themselves. St. Paul they vilified, as a man of mean abilities, who either had not himself the penetration to discern I know not what hidden meaning of the

revelation of which he was the minister, or had not the talents of a teacher in a sufficient degree to carry his disciples any considerable length, and, through his inability, had left untouched those treasures of knowledge which they pretended to disclose.

This sketch of the characters of the false teachers in the Corinthian church, and of the sort of doctrine which they taught, is the key to the apostle's meaning, in many passages of this epistle, in which, as in the text, he may seem to speak with disparagement of wisdom, learning, and eloquence, as qualifications of little significance in a preacher of the gospel, and as instruments unfit to be employed in the service of divine truth. In all these `passages, a particular reference is intended to the arro gant pretensions of the false teachers,-to their affected learning, and counterfeit wisdom. It was not that, in the apostle's judgment, there is any real opposition between the truths of revelation and the principles of reason-or that a man's proficiency in knowledge can be in itself an obstacle in the way of his conversion to the Christian faith-or that an ignorant man can be qualified to be a teacher of the Christian religion; which are the strange conclusions which ignorance and enthusiasm, in these later ages, have drawn from the apostle's words: but he justly reprobates the folly of that pretended wisdom, which, instead of taking the light of revelation for its guide, would interpret the doctrines of revelation by the previous discoveries of human reason; and he censures the ignorance of that learning, which imagines that the nature of the self-existent Being, and the principles of his moral government of the world, are in such sort the objects of human knowledge, as, like the motions of the planets, or the properties of light, to be open to scientific investigation: and he means to express how little is the amount, and how light the authority of the utmost wisdom that may be acquired in the schools

of human learning, in comparison of that illumination which was imparted to him by the immediate influence of the Divine Spirit, the fountain of truth and knowledge, on his mind.

That this is the true interpretation of what the apostle says, or hath been supposed to say, in disparagement of human learning, may appear from this consideration,— We have, in the twelfth chapter of this epistle, a distinct enumeration of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, which were nine, it seems, in number. In a subsequent part of the same chapter, we have an enumeration of ecclesiastical offices,-nine also in number. The nine gifts, and the nine offices, taken in the order in which they are mentioned, seem to correspond; the first gift belonging to the first office, the second to the second, and so on:* only, it is to be supposed, that as the authority of all inferior offices is included in the superior, so the higher and rarer gifts contained the lower and more common. At the head of the list of offices, as the first in authority, stand apostles and prophets; by which last word are meant xpounders of the Scriptures;for, that the exposition of Scripture was the proper office of those who were called prophets in the primitive church, is a thing so well understood, and so generally acknowledged, that any particular proof of it upon the present occasion may be spared. Corresponding to these two offices, at the head of the catalogue of gifts, stand "the word of wisdom," and "the word of knowledge." The word of wisdom seems to have been a talent of arguing from the natural principles of reason, for the conviction and conversion of philosophical infidels. This was the proper gift of the apostles, who were to carry the glad tidings of salvation to distant nations, among which the light of revelation had either never shone, or

* Vide Appendix.