The following is the only SERMON in this Volume which has been previously published: It was occasionally preached in York Cathedral, on Sunday the 27th of January, 1788, to promote a Petition to Parliament, then under signature, for the Abolition of the AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE; and was printed at the request of Sir William Milner, Bart. then Lord Mayor, and of the Gentlemen of the Corporation of the City of York, to whom it was inscribed.

SERMON XIV.

Acts xvii. 28.

-FOR WE ALSO ARE HIS OFFSPRING.*

THIS quotation from a Greek, and consequently a heathen Poet, the eloquent Apostle of the Gentiles condescended to use, when he was endeavouring to convert the greatest masters of human wisdom, from the greatest proof of human folly, the worship of idols; when he was asserting the unity of that supreme first cause, which they so little understood, as to erect an altar to him under the appellation of the unknown God. This universal source of life, breath, and all created beings, he declares to them," made of one blood, all men to dwell on the face "of the earth," and determined, by his divine Prescience, both the times of their existence, and the bounds of their habitation.

Of these two fundamental truths, upon which not only natural but revealed religion is founded, the existence of a first cause, and the deduction thence of all created * Τὸ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἔσμεν. ARATUS.

beings, it is clear from the text that the heathens themselves were apprised, though they failed to draw from them that consequence, which, of all others, seems the most natural, that created beings, of the same species, must of necessity possess the same inherent rights; and that the human species, in particular, being, as the Apostle phrases it, of the same blood, had all of them the same pretensions to the equal blessings of nature, being formed by the same hand, and endued with the same faculties for enjoying pleasure, and suffering pain; that though the place or climate in which they happened to be born, and the time of their birth, or, to speak more accurately in the words of St. Paul," the times which "God had appointed them, and the bounds of their "habitation," might occasion some accidental difference as to the cultivation of those faculties, and the modes of those pleasures and pains, yet the original capacity for all of them was still the same; and that all being alike human creatures, there was neither gift nor faculty bestowed on the nature of humanity that belonged of right more to one than another of the human species.

To the divine mission of St. Paul nothing was more necessary than the establishment of this primary truth; he was the professed Apostle of the Gentiles, and under that character had as many prejudices to overcome, as if, like St. Peter, he had only been the Apostle of the Jews and their proselytes. The Jews, deeming them