all these ideas. It allows, indeed, that ye were born with as many rights as your predecessors, and one more, a right to enjoy this invaluable religion but it requires you to renounce your notions of government, and to submit in all cases whatever to your civil rulers for the time being. If the emperor allow you to live, bless his clemency; if he unjustly cut off whole families, and depopulate whole provinces, you must not even attempt to restrain him; if he, contrary to your laws, imprison or banish your persons, take away and expend your property, reduce you from the first city in the world to the lowest of all states, you may feel your miseries: but you must not complain; you complain, you must not be allowed to do more; in no case may you redress your own grievances, no, not though providence and the constitution have put the means of redress amply in your own power."...... According to this account, the old Romans would have been put into a worse condition by Jesus Christ than they had been in before his coming, and to have gone from paganism to christianity would have been like going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, falling among thieves, to be stripped of raiment, wounded, and left half dead.

'or if

Christianity is so far from sinking the dignity and felicity of man, that it conducts him to a pinnacle of glory. It teaches him a class of moral virtues, such as industry, frugality, equity, and so on. It excites him to practise these by revealing the strongest motives, such as the love of God,

the example and the death of Jesus Christ, a state of future rewards and punishments. The practice of these virtues is the way to acquire property, and property in the hand is power of civil resistance. When it is proper to make use of this power, and in what manner, we will not presume at present to inquire; suffice it to say, it must be legal, constitutional and good, otherwise it would not be the resistance of which we have been speaking.

Let us conclude. Out of our subject three re flections naturally arise, each exciting a different emotion. The first stirs up pity and horror, the second gives us pleasure, the last affects us with a mild sensibility, for which we have no name.

1. Who can help lamenting, in the first place, the deplorable condition of mankind in respect of good government. On the one hand, thousands, in all countries, destitute of all governing abilities, are aspiring to dominion, or, having obtained it, calling authority government, and confounding power to do good with a sort of indefeasible right to do wrong. On the other hand, millions of intelligent creatures devoid of all pride of nature and sense of shame, bartering the noblest rights of our species for a smile, and a bauble, and a luxury for a day.-Hence folly is set in dignity, and the rich sit in low place.-Hence the tears of such as are oppressed, who have no comforter, for on the side of their oppressors there is power.-Hence is seen under the sun the place of judgment, that wicked

ness is there, and the place of righteousness that iniquity is there.-Hence oppressions making wise men mad. Hence, in a word, the ills that blast religion and learning, labour and commerce, and all the other efforts of the few to make the many happy. Can ye conceive, brethren, a lower degree of wretchedness than that, with which a prophet formerly upbraided his countrymen: ye have sold yourselves for nought! Ah! would to God this were the utmost that sordid men could do! Cruel Jews! had ye sold yourselves alone, ye would have suffered, and we might have profited by your example: but your guiltless countrymen, your wives, your children, your innocent posterity yet unborn, must they be all involved in your punishment as if they had perpetrated your crime! ...... Here we feel the want of a religion, that opens to our faith a future state, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

2. Great God! First and best of beings! Permit our weeping eyes to look to thee as the God of order, the patron and protector of all who endeavour to gather up right notions, and to re-establish that fitness, which sin had subverted, and wantonly thrown in shattered ruins all over the globe! Christians, the empire of God is an empire of order, and the gospel of Christ is intended to diffuse it among all ranks and degrees of men. The perfections of the Great Supreme are engaged to give this noble design effect. Have they, think ye, spent all their force? Turn from this present scene of confusion and woe-enter into your clo

sets-fix your attention on the King of Kings, who disdains to reign by power alone, and who makes judgment and justice the bases of his throne. Behold! HE condescends to treat his intelligent creatures like men, and makes them judges between him and his vineyard.* The Son, too, the express image of the Father, intends to deliver up the kingdom, and to display the rectitude of his government of it, in the sight of angels and men. Then every eye shall see him, and, although they, who resisted his wise and benevolent plan, shall wail and mourn, yet he will persevere in his first design, he will cause every one to give account of his deeds done in the body, and he will render to all their dues, honour to whom honour, and shame to whom shame is due. Thus will he assort mankind, and cause in a future state universal justice through everlasting ages to reign. Delightful prospect! Believer! fill thine eye with this object, and catch a flame, that shall never go out.

In the present momentary state, Providence, indeed, sometimes permits society to fall into dreadful disorders, which, like floods, first overflow the low grounds, and at last roll back, sap and subvert the proud mountains whence they fell, mixing all in one general confusion; for despotical principles are as fatal to thrones as to cottages, a while they afflict the last, but in the end they ne ver fail to crumble the first into ruins. Fear no

thing, then, my countrymen, from foreign foes. The thrones of Bourbon are not the powers we * Isa. ▼. + 1 Cor. xv.

choose, they are thrones of iniquity, shall they have fellowship with God? So many lives as they have unjustly cut off, so much publick property as they have misapplied, so much liberty as they have taken from mankind, so many upright consciences as they have oppressed, so much fraud and violence as they have practised, so much human felicity as they have destroyed, just so much guilt have they acquired, and so much punishment, sooner or later, will the Omnipotence, that supports the just order of the universe, inflict on them. I fear nothing from their arms; but their principles, their maxims of government I fear. Ah! should my countrymen ever imbibe the errors of their government (so they call their power,) and the vices that give those errors effect, we should be poisoned in our vitals, and then, who could help exclaiming, Britain is falling, is falling? ....Oh! no, my country must not fall... or, if it fall, let me fall with it, and be intombed in its ruins! Let me have the honour of entering the world of order struggling for what gives that world all its beauty and glory,

3. Finally, we reflect with an emotion made up of pleasure, gratitude, hope and fear, on the recovery to order, civil and sacred, begun in civil government by right reason in the world, and in the hearts of good men by christian faith. Our ancestors, like others, were sunk in stupidity and sin; half were tyrants and half were slaves: but on them the light of reason and the religion of Jesus Christ shone, and we, my brethren, we are