unerring Judge in a world to come.

But it is impossible for us not to observe that even infidels have, in some instances, done to our morals that justice, which fanaticism withholds from us. It is impossible for us to forget that the self-appointed Reformers of our Church have declared their solemn assent to it, as a system which constitutes a pure and already reformed part of Christ's holy Catholic Church.

It were unworthy of us, as partakers in civilization, and as men peculiarly furnished with opportunities for the cultivation of our understandings, to inculcate doctrines which professedly and indiscriminately depreciate the best exercise of our reason, and which, upon this very account, are at once more flattering to the vanity, and more dangerous both to the faith and morals of the illiterate. Above all, it becomes us to recollect that the propagation of the tenets, to which I advert, is at variance with one part of my text, and seems to indicate a temper of mind not very friendly to the private or public quiet of communities, and therefore not very likely to proceed from the God of Peace.

To conclude: Upon our own duty, whether the observance of it be required by general principles, or by the particular signs of the times, no wise and honest teacher can have the smallest doubt. We rank moderation mingled with sincerity among the characteristic excellencies of our ecclesiastical establishment, and we consider ourselves as avoiding the appearance of evil, when we draw off the attention of our hearers from obscure and visionary interpre

tations of holy writ, and endeavour to impress upon their reason and their conscience the observance of temperance and practical righteousness as duties strictly Christian, and as preparations indispensibly necessary for a judgment to come.

That precepts may have the aid of correspondent practice, it becomes us "to be sober, putting on the breast-plate of faith and love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation." It becomes us not only to warn the unruly, to comfort the feeble-minded, and to support the weak, but ever to follow that which is good, both among ourselves and to all men-to abstain from all appearance of evil, and so to regulate our hearts and our lives, that by the influence of our example peace may succeed to confusion, and they who have been in danger of being seduced and corrupted by the artifices of men may in future be wholly sanctified, by the abundant and most efficacious grace of God.

SERMON XVI.*

ON CONSCience.

MATTHEW xiv. 12.

At that time Herod the Tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus,

and said unto his servants, “This is John the Baptist: he is risen from the dead; and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him.

LAST autumn I delivered in this sanctuary a very instructive discourse on the power of conscience, as illustrated in the history of Herod, when he put John the Baptist to a violent death. I now and then intermingled some remarks of my own, but for the greater part of that discourse you are indebted to a contemporary writer, whose high reputation for science and erudition I have more than once noticed in your hearing. On the present occasion, and in other sermons which will follow this, I shall in my own words lay before you a series of remarks into which I was led by further meditation upon the same subject.

I mean, however, to take a wider range; I shall

* 1821.

endeavour to sound the depth of the human mind in the motives to action, whether the causes be near or remote; and I shall trace out the influence which events, whether slight or important in appearance, may have in generating or blending those motives, and in facilitating or obstructing the proper efficacy of conscience.

The history of Herod will hereafter be directly resumed, and minutely investigated, but the practical inferences to be drawn from it will to-day be supported by other statements, and other observations of a similar tendency.

As all these discourses are intended to display to you fully the power of conscience, it may not be amiss, at the opening, to elucidate the origin and the complex signification of a word so often introduced into the judgments which we form both of ourselves and of other men, as moral agents.

Conscience then means not merely knowledge, but knowledge with. It suggests, as it were, the notion of two parties, the knower, and the known; and accordingly, in the Latin language, but not in the English, it sometimes denotes the person, who perceives what is done by another man, as well as what is done by himself.

But in Latin generally, and in Greek and English uniformly, conscience has a reflex sense, and the operations of it seem, as I told you, to represent two parties, the agent and the observer, while in reality they are the same person. Yesterday I did a certain action, to-day I remember it, and the

remembrance of it is accompanied by a feeling of blame or approbation; and with a consciousness of identity, not according to any metaphysical subtleties, but in the more obvious, and, as it is called, forensic sense of the word-personal responsibility. The term, though familiar to our ears, is even philosophically proper, and it must have been introduced when man had more or less acquired a habit of looking into himself; when differences of right or wrong were more or less accurately observed; and when language had made some advance from simplicity to refinement, or from vagueness to pre

cision.

The Hebrew language is very inartificial; and instead of supplying for conscience any appropriate or literal word, it furnishes us only with a metaphorical one, L E B, the heart, considered primarily, as the seat of all mental operations; in Hebrew therefore, we must sometimes understand it in the limited sense of feeling, which, in its figurative sense it always bears in our own tongue, as contrasted with the head, and sometimes for the reasoning faculty, as you may learn from many passages in the Proverbs of Solomon. In Latin,* as in Hebrew, the same word is occasionally used both for our feelings, and the exercise of our intellect. In

* Egregie cordatus homo Caius Æliu' sextus.-ENNIUS. Non tu corpus eras sine pectore.-HORACE.

Oculis ea pectoris hausit.

OVID'S Metam. on Pythagoras, Last Book.