posed to cherish-the sanguinary rage of persecution. It has sweetened the comforts of domestic life, curbed the licentiousness of polygamy and divorce, and mitigated the rigours of that unsocial and unnatural servitude, to which, among the polite citizens of Athens, as well as the rude foresters of Germany, the fierce and haughty despotism of the stronger sex had condemned the weaker. It has extirpated the hideous custom of exposing children, which the most celebrated states of antiquity openly permitted, and their ablest writers have expressly recommended. In some measure, it has checked that false patriotism which tramples upon the most sacred rights of mankind, and which justifies every artifice however perfidious, every outrage however unprovoked, under the specious pretences of national prosperity and national glory. It has called up a spirit of indignation against those brutal indulgences which nature shudders even to name, but which were practised by the most civilized nations, without a pang and without a blush.

Much, far too much, has been said, in the undistinguishing eagerness of panegyric, concerning the urbanity and politeness of Greece and Rome. The untempered acrimony of their satirists, the scurrilous violence of their orators, and the gross indelicacy of their comic writers, present to an impartial mind no very amiable picture of their manners. He, indeed, that would accept the advantages of all their boasted elegance, in exchange for the endearments and the embellishments of modern life, may be charged almost with the depraved taste of the

Hottentot, who, upon his return to his native land, shook off the European dress, nauseated European food, and wallowed in all the filthy and abominable excesses of his countrymen.

There are, I know, some persons who would derive the improvements of these later ages from our civilization and our laws. But by whom are these laws enacted? By Christians. Among whom is that civilization established? Among Christians. From what source proceed either the equitable and humane spirit of those laws, or the elegancies and comforts of that civilization? They proceed from the silent but real efficacy of the Gospel itself, which corrects every selfish affection, purifies every sensual appetite, and restrains every ferocious passion. Unquestionably, if the great refinements of the antients be justly ascribed to reason alone, the greater refinements of the moderns may with equal justice be ascribed to religion, as a powerful and a constant, though it be not the only cause.

Many errors are yet maintained by believers; they are, however, less offensive to good sense, and less injurious to good morals than the monstrous tenets of those ancient religions, by which their deities were represented in the most degrading employments, and worship was prescribed to the vilest of reptiles, and the most abandoned of men. Many indefensible ceremonies are yet retained in a Church that styles itself Christian. But it were unjust to place the fantastic pageantries of popery upon a level with that mass of Roman superstition, from which many of them were borrowed-with the

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rile extravagances of Ægyptian and Zabian idolatry -with the lewd excesses that were practised openly in honour of Venus at Babylon, and secretly in the mysteries of Cotytto at Athens.

Among the rational, and, I am happy to add, not an inconsiderable part of believers, the essentials of religion are no longer confounded with points of subordinate moment or temporary obligation: lines of distinction are drawn between factitious and real difficulties; and mankind are daily learning to rest their hopes of salvation, not upon punctilious attachment to exterior forms, but upon a steady adherence to genuine morality. To these changes in the opinions and the actions of Christians, let me add the blessed spirit of toleration which is widely diffusing itself through all ranks of citizens, and all sects of Christians. That spirit must finally give new dignity and new stability to the cause of truth, as it fosters the freedom of inquiry, as it tempers the zeal which darkens knowledge, and stimulates the industry which acquires it, and, above all, as it enlarges the sphere of Christian charity, that celestial virtue, which, in religious concerns, where it claims the pre-eminence, has been too long cramped and depressed, and of which every solitary instance, in times less enlightened, was lamented as a weakness, or condemned as a crime.

To this favourable representation of our present state the irreligion and luxury of the age will be opposed. In respect to the first charge, the poison of infidelity has, I fear, spread too far. But the progress of it has, in some degree, been stopped, and the virulence of it assuaged by the labours

of those men who have defended with ability the evidences of that Revelation, the doctrines of which they have examined with impartiality. Indeed it well deserves our notice, that the fundamental principles of natural religion have been more accurately investigated, and more consistently explained in those countries, where the sacred authority of revealed religion has been longer established, and oftener attacked.

But our defence is not to be rested only even upon this honourable ground; for if the remote causes of our infidelity be deeply explored, we shall have less room to take the alarm, either in regard to the safety, or the credit of our religion. Those causes are to be found in the peculiar tendency of our studies, and the unwearied activity with which they are pursued; in the profound researches which men are making into the works of nature, and in the clear and correct habits of thinking which they have transferred from philosophy, where those habits were first acquired, to other subjects. Hence the truths of Revelation have been examined with unprecedented, and, in some respects, perhaps an unwarrantable severity; and hence they have been exhibited by the contending parties in such points of view as were unknown to past generations. It has often been observed that the alacrity of infidels is eventually serviceable to the Gospel, by keeping alive the vigilance of Christians. There is equal reason to imagine that the success of Christians has sharpened the eagerness of infidels, and that the vigorous and skilful preparations of our enemies are

to be in part imputed to their apprehensions of our increasing strength.

Investigation, whether of the critical or philosophical kind, when it has been unexpectedly successful, always awakens a spirit of resistance among the indolent, who are unwilling to be disturbed in the repose of opinion long ago adopted; among the envious, who are zealous to crush the growing popularity of discoveries, which themselves have not made; and among the vain, who, in order to display their own sagacity, oppose new errors to new truths. The same motives operate with peculiar intenseness, when any uncommon improvement has been made in religious knowledge. It is, therefore, no mean subject of consolation, and even of triumph, to the friends of the Gospel, that the new arts of opposition employed against it by its adversaries were provoked by the new modes of defence which its advocates had recently found out, and that the seeming danger of Revelation is, in reality, both a sign and a consequence of its safety.

The reasons here assigned for the prevalence of incredulity in an age when there is the surest foundation for a rational faith, will probably bring back to your recollection the remarks I made in the opening of this discourse, concerning the similarity which pervades the whole of the Divine Government, as it is administered in the affairs of this world. In the religious, as well as in the natural and moral parts of that government, every evil is secretly or openly accompanied by some good, which indirectly springs from that specific evil, and