many positive precepts obedience to which was physically impossible to the great mass of mankind, and others, the observance of which if not absolutely impossible, yet is irreconcileable with the general habits and customs, and the established laws and governments of nations in other climates. need not expatiate upon the peculiarities of the laws of marriage, of divorce, of inheritance, of religious ceremonies and solemnities, of war and peace, of daily intercourse and daily occupations: Almost every part of the Mosaical code attests the locality of the dispensation; and the miserable expedients which the Jews of the present day are obliged to resort to, when they wish to preserve some form of obedience to the ritual they profess, might alone be a sufficient proof to them, that the universality of temporal dominion ascribed by them to their still expected Messiah, is utterly impossible. We may remark farther, that every part of ALLES their ceremonial law in its most obvious, for I do not here refer to its typical meaning, tended to keep them entirely separate and

distinct

he has given, contains nothing which does not harmonize with the great act of mercy and goodness from which it originated; nothing that does not suppress terror and encourage confidence, that does not awaken love and soften apprehension, that does not enkindle gratitude and enliven hope. I am indebted, he might say, to God, for life and being, in the midst of a world stored with every thing adapted to the wants and happiness of my nature, and for a rule of life tending as well to secure that happiness as to exalt my gratification in the enjoyment of all the temporal blessings around me. But what would he say then, if after thus far soothing his benevolence, and thus far kindling his piety, we were also to tell him, that his rational enjoyment of temporal blessings will ruin his eternal happiness? That they are scattered indeed around him with a bounteous hand, but that he must touch not, taste not, handle not. That he may see the birds exulting in their liberty, the beasts bounding over the plains, the fish sporting in the waters, the whole face of nature smiling

smiling in grateful testimony of its Creator's love; but that he alone must grieve for his unworthiness in voluntary and mysterious gloom, that the senses, with which his Creator has framed him, are but the instruments of his ruin in the hand of the tempter, and that his desires, which are the natural and only spurs to action, are to be subdued into supine indifference and listless insensibility. Tell him farther, that when he has done and willed to do all that man is capable of doing; when, by a life of mortification and melancholy and entire abstraction from all worldly interest, he has wrought himself into habitual and invincible apathy; when he has accustomed himself to look with sullen and sour disgust upon the pleasures, and with carelessness, or, it may be, with scorn, upon the employments, and, as I should call them, the duties of social life, his labour, even in the Lord, may yet have been in vain; that as to him, Christ may in vain have shed hist blood upon the cross, and that the God, whose mercy is over ALL his works, may have secretly and irrevocably doomed him,

even before his birth, to everlasting perdition, from which no contemplations, however serious, upon the attributes and works of the Deity, no belief, however sincere, in his revealed word, no thanksgivings for mercies already received, no prayers for protection and succour, no remorse for sins past, no resolutions or efforts for amendment in time to come CAN rescue, I had almost said the hopeless, helpless, guiltless. victim: -and that nothing but certain tumultuous, irresistible, inexplicable intimations can afford him any safe and well grounded assurance of pardon or reward:

Who is there, gifted with the faculty of reason and the feelings of humanity, that would not shrink from such doctrine when first addressed to his understanding, and from such discipline imposed upon all his instincts, appetites, and affections? Yet for the existence, and even the prevalence of such doctrine, and for the vindication and praise of such discipline, I need appeal only to the observation of those who now hear

me.

me. No man who views the daily increase of Puritanism (which in its root and branches, in its tenets and effects, resembles the Pharisaical system of the Jews); no man who compares its late and present progress with events which the history of our own nation has recorded in dark and blood-stained characters; no man who has remarked the subtlety, and restlessness, and impetuosity, of spiritual pride, when united by opportunities favourable for action, with the inordinate and insatiable lust of temporal power, can look without alarm and dismay to consequences, which not only exercise the sagacity of the philosopher in his closet, but, in truth, force themselves upou the most common observer of human nature, as unfolded in the events of daily life.

If the great and characteristic blessing of the reformation, was the removal of needless and burthensome ceremonies, of an usurped dominion over the minds and consciences of men, of authority bearing down right, and of dogmatism putting reason to C 2 silence

+ An exaggerates, and unfair, tid of wit is called the evangelical School.