SERMON I.*

1 Cor. vii. 31.

USE THIS WORLD AS NOT ABUSING IT, FOR THE FASHION OF THIS WORLD PASSETH AWAY.

SERIOUS and speculative persons have, in all ages, (amid their general researches after truth) made the use and value of the world a principal object of their consideration, in order that they might proportion their esteem for it to its real and intrinsic worth; and the importance of the subject authorised their pains; for as this material world is the place allotted for our present abode, it is incumbent upon us that, next to forming right conceptions of that Supreme Being who placed us here, we should form right conceptions of that system of beings in which we are placed. Yet it must be confessed that, however diligent men may have been in searching after the truth on this question, their opinions have been various, and their conclusions sometimes contradictory. It would be no unentertaining disquisition (were this the proper place

The following Sermons were all printed by the Author, but none of them were published by him except the 14th,

for it) to trace Philosophy through her several schools of antiquity, and to observe how, in each of them, she inculcated a different doctrine upon this point. Here we should find the haughty Stoic, wrapt in the idea of his own internal virtue, treating the world with disregard and indifference; while the churlish Cynic, from his real or pretended abhorrence of external vice, spurns it with contempt and detestation. Here the grave disciple of Pythagoras, looking upon it as an august drama, in which he is to perform various, and some important parts, beholds it with veneration and awe: and there the careless pupil of Epicurus, fancying it but a trifling farce, soon to be closed by the curtain of death, selects the most agreeable scenes he can find in it for his enjoyment, passing over the rest with a careless disregard. But, without searching into antiquity for instances of this dissimilitude of opinion, we may find them (where it will be more to our purpose to find them) amongst the speculative part of our own age.

By this term I would be understood to mean such persons as employ their studies in the search of moral and religious truths, and, in consequence of that search, form to themselves different modes of practical conduct. To separate these into their several classes, would be not only to enumerate all the sects into which Christianity is unhappily divided, but also to distinguish between the more unhappy, and almost as numerous, degrees of

Scepticism and Infidelity; a task on both parts alike disagreeable and unnecessary. But it may not be amiss slightly to examine the extremes of both, and to give, in a contrasted view, the tenets and practice of two parties the most opposite to each other, that of enthusiastic Bigotry, and sceptical Free-thinking. This, perhaps, with the assistance of the rule in the text, will lead us to discover that opinion which the rational Christian ought to maintain.-To begin with the ENTHUSIASTIC BIGOT.

Gloomy ideas of God and nature, carly imbibed with the rest of the prejudices which attend an ill-tutored infancy, or caught afterwards from the cant of some wild enthusiast, have taught him to behold every object around him in the darkest and most unpleasing point of view; the beauties which arise from the simplicity of nature, or from the symmetry of art; the curious researches of abstract reasoning, or the creative efforts of the imagination, have no charms to attract his soul: "Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!" That aphorism of Solomon, ill understood, is his favourite tenet, his perpetual exclamation: and what, from texts of the Old Testament he finds occasion thus to stigmatize with the title of Vanity, he quickly learns from texts of the New, equally misapplied, to brand with the name of Sin. Thus the most innocent pleasures are immediately converted into unpardonable crimes; and not content to

abstain from them himself, he expects that the rest of mankind should do the same; and those who do not he is ever ready, with much self-complacency, to condemn to everlasting reprobation.

Where a mind is enveloped by so dark a gloom of prejudice, we must in vain seek for any of the gentle, the humane, the social qualities in its composition. It is not to be expected that the man who finds nothing amiable or useful to himself in the system of Nature, should ever endeavour to render himself an useful or amiable part of it: and, in fact, we find that persons of this sort generally seclude themselves from the rest of the world, and contract all their interests as much as may be towards their own centre; nay, their very charity takes the same confined cast, and parcels itself out in small, unmeaning, ineffectual alms; without any thing of the true, masculine, diffusive nature of Christian benevolence, which extends itself from individuals to families, from families to our country, from our country to the whole race of mankind.

By the lines which I have sketched out of this character, I would not be thought to describe every Bigot or Enthusiast, for of these there are various and almost infinite degrees; my meaning was to shew the effects of this temper in its extreme; and I should wish to be understood in the same manner with respect to what I