when Periander was asked, where liberty worthy of a rational and moral agent was to be found;when Socrates was asked, what is the source of real tranquillity, every one of them gave to the same important question the same explicit and decisive answer-a good conscience.

It is my prayer and my hope, that every man who hears me has, on some occasion or other, felt the pure and exquisite satisfaction which arises from an applauding conscience. But the history of Herod more immediately directs our thoughts to the causes of an evil conscience, and to that subject will the remainder of my present, and the whole of my future discourses be confined, for the purpose of showing you the diversified forms and degrees in which, having transgressed our duty, we are always in danger of being upbraided by our own hearts. The justness of this position no man will controvert, and the importance of it will be felt by every man who attends to the proofs which I intend, in my next discourse, to produce from writings both ancient and modern.

Now religion, either natural or revealed, is addressed to many, and among them, some may have their doubts upon the evidences and the rules of both, and to others, the view of them may, in some points, be imperfect and confused; perhaps too, the multiplied distinctions of Christian casuists have not been less pernicious to good morals than the plausible fallacies of heathen sophists. By vague and artificial rules, by multiplied exceptions, by shadowy discriminations, by intricate arrangements,

by circuitous deductions, by the arbitrary use, and the insidious abuse of technical terms, by swelling little things into great, and crumbling great things into little, by shifting from rhetoric to logic and from logic to rhetoric, by entwining scholastic jargon with scriptural phraseology, by confounding fictitious cases with real and real with fictitious, by distorting intelligible ethics into unintelligible metaphysics, and by misapplying similar principles to dissimilar times, causes, and circumstances, the misplaced ingenuity of casuists has obscured the subjects which they profess to elucidate, and it has provided a large stock of palliatives for vice, which the vicious have eagerly welcomed, and anxiously applied. But the wisdom of the Deity has not left as without such resources as the great bulk of mankind may find easily, and employ safely; he has implanted in the heart of every man some knowledge of his will; he has imparted to that knowledge the authority of law, and he has disposed the mind to ascend from the law itself to the Divine Lawgiver. As to human laws, they may be darkened by the interpretations of those who administer them; they may be seen dimly by those who are to obey them; but the law of God comes home at once to every man, and leaves him no doubts upon its wisdom, its justice, and its utility. Following abstruse speculations in the stillness of the closet, we may suffer our understandings to dwell upon the difficulties, which must accompany all researches into the moral government of God-we, as observers of the general system, may be led into

temporary or partial scepticism-we may explain away the force of obligation upon this or that part of our duty. Indulging our fondness for singularity, and gratifying our vanity by the habit of starting doubts, which we suppose to defy solution from ourselves and others, we may experience the worst effects of a predilection for paradox about sacred things, in a relaxed and unsettled state of the mind upon the importance of virtue. But the voice of nature will sometime or other be heard, as it was intended by the great Author of Nature that we should hear it; the subtleties of philosophy are put to flight by personal experience, when the betrayer of innocence, the plunderer of property, or the destroyer of life looks back upon his own conduct.

The consciousness of guilt seldom fails to be attended by more or less distinct apprehensions of punishment, near or remote, and hence have arisen some erroneous opinions upon the manner in which punishment is to be inflicted in the present world. A heathen poet tells us, that he would not venture to sail in the same vessel, or to sit under the same roof, with a wretch who had presumptuously revealed the hallowed secrets of the Eleusinian Mys teries. The Jews supposed that blindness, lameness, palsy, and other bodily infirmities, were the consequences of sin in the sufferer, or in his progenitors; and to these notions the language of our Lord is now and then accommodated. Christians speak of those signal misfortunes which befal men notoriously wicked, as the judgments of Heaven.

Correct and enlarged views of the moral world, and of the Christian religion would, indeed, assist us in discovering and correcting these errors; but the frequency with which they recur, and the deep impressions which they make upon our minds, decidedly prove the activity of conscience, in pointing out to us the guilt and the danger attendant upon the violation of the laws of God.

In tracing the operations of conscience, we meet with some remarkable circumstances. Self-delusion is favourable to insensibility; but insensibility may exist without self-delusion. Both, indeed, are fatal to innocence; and the proper remedy which nature has supplied for both is, remorse. It is therefore of high importance for me to clear up some difficulties, which recently have risen upon the subject from the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition. There probably is no human being, virtuous or vicious, who on some occasion or other, or in some degree or other, has not felt remorse. Whatsoever may be our speculative opinions upon liberty and necessity, and whatsoever may be the attempt of some men to alter the common course of human language, we have the feeling itself. It is a painful feeling. It may not come upon us immediately after the commission of a wrong action; but a thousand reasons, as I shall endeavour to prove in the course of my sermons upon the text, may occur to excite it.

It has not escaped my notice, that they who deny the feeling, and of course reject the term, as it is commonly understood, have not yet been fortunate enough to substitute any specific word for the com

plex feeling which they allow to exist. They are content with telling us that remorse is a fallacious feeling, and they ground their assertion upon the principle of necessity. Every cause, independently of our will, must have its effect. Every prevailing motive is a cause, say they, over which the agent can have no control. In the same circumstances past and in the same circumstances future, there must be the same results, and as those results are unavoidable, the agent can have no reasonable ground for blaming himself when he has done that which, from the unalterable constitution of his mind, he could not but do. How then can there be any room for remorse? It proceeds, we may be told, from a fallacious feeling of freedom in our choice of action. But we are engaged in action, day after day. The external circumstances in which we are placed, are different. Our talents, our education, our natural dispositions, our acquired habits, are different; and yet, in every variety of climate, under different forms of government, under different discipline and tenets of religion, in different forms of society, in different classes of individuals living under the same form; our common experience, before we act, and after we have acted, is accompanied by a consciousness of volition; and such volition as leaves no room for us to charge our measures to the account of an irresistible necessity in cases, where our worldly interests, our reputation, our peace of mind, and our belief of responsibility in a future life, would induce us to welcome such a plea of self-acquittal.

Remorse always implies disapprobation. But is