66 for "O my child, thou art now left exposed to a wide and vicious world, too full of snares and temptations for thy tender and unpractised age." Perhaps a parent's love may magnify those dangers – "But when I consider thou art driven out naked into the midst of them without friends, without fortune, without instruction, my heart bleeds beforehand for the evils which may come upon thee. God, in whom we trusted, is witness, so low had his providence placed us, that we never indulged one wish to have made thee rich, virtuous we would have made thee; thy father, my husband, was a good man, and feared the Lord, and though all the fruits of his care and industry were little enough for our support, yet he honestly had determined to have spared some portion of it, scanty as it was, to have placed thee safely in the way of knowledge and instructionBut alas! he is gone from us, never to return more, and with him are fled the means of doing it: For, Behold the creditor is come upon us, to take all that we have." Grief is eloquent, and will not easily be imitated. But let the man, who is the least friend to distresses of this nature, conceive some disconsolate widow uttering her complaint even in this manner, and then let him consider, if there is any sorrow like this sorrow, wherewith the Lord has afflicted her? or whether there can be any charity like that, of taking the child out of the mother's bosom, and rescuing her from these apprehensions? Should a heathen, a stranger to our holy religion and the love it teaches, should he, as he journeyed, come to the place where she lay, when he saw, would he not have compassion on her? GOD forbid a christian should this day want it! or at any time look upon such a distress, and pass by on the other side. Rather, let him do, as his Saviour taught him, bind up the wounds, and pour comfort into the heart of one, whom the hand of GoD has so bruised. Let him practise what it is, with Elijah's transport, to say to the afflicted widow, See, thy son liveth!-liveth by my charity, and the bounty of this hour, to all the purposes which make life desirable, - to be made a good man, and a profitable subject: on one hand, to be trained up to such a sense of his duty, as may secure him an interest in the world to come; and with regard to this world, to be so brought up in it to a love of honest labour and industry, as all his life long to earn and eat his bread with joy and thankfulness. "Much peace and happiness rest upon the head and heart of every one who thus brings children to CHRIST! May the blessing of him that was ready to perish come seasonably upon him!- The Lord comfort him, when he most wants it, when he lies sick upon his bed make thou, O GOD! all his bed in his sickness; and for what he now scatters, give him, then, that peace of thine which passeth all understanding, and which nothing in this world can either give or take away.' Amen.* * In republishing this Sermon in 1760, Sterne prefixed the following Advertisement. ADVERTISEMENT. THIS Sermon, with the read by very few; it is there- SERMON VI PHARISEE AND PUBLICAN IN THE TEMPLE I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. - LUKE xviii. 14, First Part. TH HESE words are the judgment which our SAVIOUR has left upon the behaviour and different degrees of merit in the two men, the Pharisee and the Publican, whom he represents, in the foregoing parable, as going up into the temple to pray; in what manner they discharged this great and solemn duty, it will best be seen from a consideration of the prayer, which each is said to have addressed to GoD on the occasion. The pharisee, instead of an act of humiliation in that awful presence before which he stood, —with an air of triumph and selfsufficiency, thanks GOD that he had not made him like others- extortioners, adulterers, unjust, or even as this publican. -The publican is represented as standing afar off, and with a heart touched with humility from a just sense |