claimed from the abominations of idolatry; and hath taught us to loathe and execrate the rites whereby our forefathers sought the favour of their devils (for they were not gods), the impure rites of human sacrifice and public prostitution; things which it were unfit to mention or remember, but that we may the better understand from what a depth of corruption the mercy of God hath raised us. Blindness, it must

be confessed, is at present upon Israel; but the time shall come when they shall turn to the Lord, and when we shall unite with them in the pure worship of God, and in the just praises of the Lamb. "Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord:" Then shall the Lord Jesus come again, to execute what remains of the Messiah's office to absolve and to condemn. God God grant that every one here may be enabled to "abide the day of his coming, and to stand when he appeareth!"

SERMON XXXIV.

LUKE, i. 28.

Hail, thou that art highly favoured! The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.

*

THAT she who in these terms was saluted by an angel should in after ages become an object of superstitious adoration, is a thing far less to be wondered, than that men professing to build their whole hopes of immortality on the promises delivered in the sacred books, and closely interwoven with the history of our Saviour's life, should question the truth of the message which the angel brought. Some nine years since, the

Christian church was no less astonished than offended, by an extravagant attempt to heighten, as it was pretended, the im

* Preached on Christmas day.

portance of the Christian revelation, by overturning one of those first principles of natural religion which had for ages been 'considered as the basis upon which the whole superstructure of revelation stands. The notion of an immaterial principle in man, which, without an immediate exertion of the Divine power to the express purpose of its destruction, must necessarily survive the dissolution of the body the notion of an immortal soul-was condemned and exploded, as an invention of heathen philosophy: Death was represented as an utter extinction of the whole man; and the evangelical doctrine of a resurrection of the body in an improved state, to receive again its immortal inhabitant, was heightened into the mystery of a reproduction of the annihilated person. How a person once annihilated could be reproduced, so as to be the same person which had formerly existed, when no principle of sameness, nothing necessarily permanent, was supposed to enter the original composition, how the present person could be interested in the future person's fortunes, why I should be at all concerned for the happiness or misery

of the man who some ages hence shall be raised from my ashes, when the future man could be no otherwise the same with me than as he was arbitrarily to be called the same, because his body was to be composed of the same matter which now composes mine, -these difficulties were but ill explained. It was thought a sufficient recommendation of the system, with all its difficulties, that the promise of a resurrection of the body seemed to acquire a new importance from it (but the truth is, that it would lose its whole importance if this system could be established; since it would become a mere prediction concerning a future race of men, and would be no promise to any men now existing); and the notion of the soul's natural immortality was deemed an unseemly appendage of a Christian's belief, — for this singular reason, that it had been entertained by wise and virtuous heathens, who had received no light from the Christian, nor, as it was supposed, from any earlier revelation.

It might have been expected, that this anxiety to extinguish every ray of hope

which beams not from the glorious promíses of the gospel would have been accompanied with the most entire submission of the understanding to the letter of the written word the most anxious solicitude for the credit of the sacred writers the warmest zeal to maintain every circumstance in the history of our Saviour's life which might add authority to his precepts and weight to his promises, by heightening the dignity of his person : But so inconsistent with itself is human folly, that they who at one time seemed to think it a preliminary to be required of every one who would come to a right belief of the gospel, that he should unlearn and unbelieve what philosophy had been thought to have in common with the gospel (as if reason and revelation could in nothing agree), upon other occasions discover an aversion to the belief of any thing which at all puts our reason to a stand: And in order to wage war with mystery with the more advantage, they scruple not to deny that that Spirit which enlightened the first preachers in the delivery of their oral instruction, and rendered them infallible teachers of the age in which they lived,