recommended to your practice, but includes also every tender sentiment that the human mind is constituted to feel, every benevolent action that the human powers have an ability to perform. SERMON VII. 1 Cor. vii. 23. YE ARE BOUGHT WITH A PRICE; BE NOT YE THE SERVANTS OF MEN. In the chapter preceding this, it is observable that the Apostle draws another conclusion from the same premises: "Ye are bought," says he, " with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and your spirit which are God's." These two passages seem to have a reference to one another; I shall, therefore, have them both in my view in the following discourse. The former propositions, as I have said, are in both arguments the same, and, as addressed to the people of Corinth, allude, with propriety, to the custom common in that city, with the rest of Greece, of dealing in slaves; connected, therefore, together, they will admit the following paraphrase: "God has purchased you with the precious blood of his Son; but the nature of the purchase, the price given, and the dignity of the purchaser are such, that you must not look upon yourselves as bought to serve and obey him in such a manner as might fulfil the duty you owe to a human master. You must do more than this, you must glorify him; that is, you must improve your moral faculties, and advance them to as high a pitch as your nature is capable of reaching, in order to render yourselves fit servants of such a master, whose sole property you are, by a double title, not only by the right of creation, but redemption. This being the point of view in which you are to look upon yourselves with respect to your Maker, take heed that you do not depreciate yourselves by any mean servility to your fellow-creatures; but in your commerce with the world preserve that spirit of freedom and independence which is your birth-right as men, and which is not lessened but improved by your becoming Christians." On a presumption that what I have here delivered is just and consonant explication of the Apostle's meaning, which, according to his usual manner, he has expressed with a nervous conciseness, I hope it will appear from the sequel of this discourse, how incapable any man is of promoting the glory of God, who suffers himself to be drawn into a state of worldly dependence, and who either servilely submits to the unjust commands, or meanly adopts the fashionable vices, of those whom fortune only has made his superiors. For the dependence which I would condemn, and which the Apostle certainly means, when he exhorts his |