stances oblige us to mention, in spite of so many reasons for avoiding it; Moses, I say, after having forbidden all these excesses to the Israelites, positively declares that the Canaanites were guilty of them all: that the earth was weary of such execrable monsters; and that for these crimes, God had sent the Israelites to destroy them. Defile not yourselves,' says he in the book of Leviticus, xviii. 24, 25, (after an enumeration of the most shameful vices that can be imagined), 'Defile not yourselves in any of these things, for in all these, the nations are defiled which I cast out before you. Therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants, ver. 30. And again in the twelfth chapter of Deuteronomy, Take heed to thyself, that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee, and that thou inquire not ing, How did these nations say even so will I do likewise.' Such were the iniquities that God forbore to punish for many ages, and at last punished with a severity, in appearance, contrary to his equity: but there is nothing astonishing in it to those who consult the forementioned maxim, that is, that it is equitable in God to proportion the punishments of guilty nations to the time granted for their repentance. We observe lastly, that though God in his infinite mercy had determined to bear four hundred years longer with nations, unworthy of his patience, there was one sin excepted from this general goodness, there was one of their iniquities that drew down the most formidable preternatural punishments upon those who committed it, and forced divine justice to anticipate by a swift vengeance a punishment, which, in other cases, was deferred for four whole ages. St. Paul paints this iniquity in the most odious colours in the first of Romans, and it was constantly punished with death by the Jews. Read with a holy fear the nineteenth chapter of Genesis. The inhabitants of the cities of the plain were possessed with a more than brutal madness. Two angels in human forms are sent to deliver Lot from the judgments which are about to destroy them. The amiable borrowed forms of these intelligences strike the eyes of the inhabitants of Sodom, and excite their abominable propensities to sin. A crowd of people, young and old, instantly surround the house of Lot, in order to seize the celestial messengers, and to offer violence to them, and though they are stricken blind they persist in feeling for doors which they cannot see. Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, being inhabited by none but people of this abominable kind, are all given up to the vengeance due to their crimes. The Lord raineth fire and brimstone from the Lord,' Gen. xix. 24. The brimstone enkindled penetrates so far into the veins of bitumen, and other inflammable bodies of which the ground is full, that it forms a lake, denominated in Scripture the Dead Sea; and, to use the words of an apocryphal writer, 'the waste land that smoketh, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness, are even to this day a testimony of the wickedness of the five cities.' Wis. x. 7. In vain had Lot' vexed his righteous soul from day to day; 2 Pet. ii. 8. In vain had Abraham availed himself of all the interest that piety gave him in the compassion of a merciful God; in vain had the abundance of his fervent be nevolence said, 'Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, who am but dust and ashes: Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city; peradventure forty; peradventure twenty; peradventure ten: Gen. xviii. 27. 23, &c. The decree of divine vengeance must be executed. 'Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth, Ps. ii. 10. God grant that ye may never know any thing more of these terrible executions than what ye learn from the history just now related! I return to my subject, except to that part of it last mentioned, the sin of the cities of the plain. The iniquities of the Canaanites were suffered for more than four hundred years; so long would God defer the destruction of the Amorites by Israel, because till then their iniquity would not have attained its height. And why would he defer the destruction of these miserable people till their iniquities should have attained their height? This, as we said in the beginning, is the subject upon which we are going to fix your attention. God exercises his patience long towards the most wicked people; having borne with the rebellion of ancestors, he bears with the rebellion of their posterity, and whole ages pass without visible punishment: but, at length, collecting the rebellions of parents and children into one point of vengeance, ho poureth out his indignation on whole nations that have abused his patience; and, as I advanced before, and think it nesessary to repeat again, he proportioneth his vindictive visitations to the length of time that had been granted to avert them. I will judge that nation whom thy descendants shall serve, but it shall be in the fourth generation, because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.' The remaining time with which ye condescend yet to favour me, I shall employ in considering, I. The nature of this economy. II. The goodness and justice which characterize it. III. The terrors that accompany it. IV. The relation which it bears to our own dismal circumstances. Let us consider, I. The nature of this economy. Recollect an observation that has been made by most of those who have laid down rules to assist us in reasoning justly. That is, that we are sometimes to consider a nation in a moral light, as a person, consisting of a body, a soul, and a duration of life. All the people who compose this nation are considered as one body: the maxims which direct its conduct in peace or in war, in commerce or in religion, constitute what we call the spirit, or soul of this body. The ages of its continuance are considered as the duration of its life. This parallel might be easily enlarged. Upon this principle, we attribute to those who compose a nation now, what, properly speaking, agrees only with those who formerly composed it. Thus we say that the same nation was delivered from bondage in Egypt in the reign of Pharaoh, which was delivered from slavery in Babylon in the reign of Cyrus. In the same sense, Jesus Christ tells the Jews of his time, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven,' John vi. 32; not that the same persons who had been delivered from Egypt were delivered from Babylon; nor that the Jews to whom Moses had given manna in the desert were the same to whom Jesus Christ gave bread from heaven: but because the Jews who lived under the reign of Cyrus, and those who lived in the time of Pharaoh, those who lived in the time of Moses, and those who lived in the time of Jesus Christ, were considered as different parts of that moral body, called the Jewish nation. On this principle (and this has a direct view to our subject) we attribute to this whole body, not only those physical, but even those moral actions, which belong only to one part of it. We ascribe the praise, or the blame of an action to a nation, though those who performed it have been dead many ages. We say that the Romans, who had courage to oppose even the shadow of tyranny under their consuls, had the meanness to adore tyrants under their emperors. And what is still more remarkable, we consider that part of a nation which continues, responsible for the crimes of that which subsists no more. A passage in the gospel of St. Luke will clearly illustrate our meaning. Wo unto you for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them; and ye say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Truly ye bear witness, that ye allow the deeds of your fathers for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres. Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; from the blood of Abel, unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation,' Luke xi. 47; Matt. xxiii. 30. We will not inquire now what Zacharias is here spoken of. Interpreters are not agreed. Some say it is the same person who is spoken of in the second book of Chronicles, who was extraordinarily raised up to stem that torrent of corruption with which the Jews were carried away after the death of the high priest Jehoiada, 2 Chron. xxiv. 20, 21. He succeeded his father Jehoiada in his zeal, and fell a victim for it, for he was stoned to death in the porch of the temple, by those whom he endeavoured to reform. Others say that it is a Zacharias, mentioned by the historian Josephus, whose virtue rendered him formidable to those madmen, who are known by the name of zealots; they charged him unjustly with the most shocking crimes, and put him to death as if he had actually committed them. A third opinion is, that it is he whom we call one of the lesser prophets. But not to detain you on this subject, which perhaps may not • Bell. Jud. iv. 19. ૨ be easily determined, we may observe in our Saviour's words the manner of considering a nation as a moral person, who is responsible at one time for crimes committed at another, who has been borne with, but has abused that forbearance, and, at length, is punished both for committing the crimes, and for abusing the forbearance that had been granted. Verily I say unto you, upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel, unto the blood of Zacharias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.' The Amorites in my text must be considered, in like manner, as a moral person, whose life God had resolved, when he spoke to Abraham, to prolong four hundred years; who, during that four hundred years, would abuse his patience; and at last would be punished for all the crimes which should be committed in that long period. And that nation whom they shall serve will I judge but in the fourth generation they shall come hither again; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.' This is the nature of this economy of Providence. We shall see, in a second article, the perfections of God which shine in it; and, in particular, that goodness, and that justice, which eminently characterize all his actions. II. It is extremely easy to distinguish the goodness of this economy, and, as we are under a necessity of abridging our subject, we may safely leave this article to your own meditation. To exercise patience four hundred years towards a people who worshipped the most infamous creatures; a people who sacrificed human victims; a people abandoned to the most enormous crimes; to defer the extinction of such a people for four hundred years, could only proceed from the goodness of that God, who, is long suffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,' 2 Pet. iii. 9. It is more difficult to discover the justice of God in this economy. What! the Jews, who lived in the time of Jesus Christ, could they be justly punished for murders committed so many ages before their birth? What! Could they be responsible for the blood of the prophets, in which their hands had never been imbrued? What! Could God demand an account of all this blood of them? How! The Canaanites of Joshua's time, ought they to be punished for all the abomi. ions of four hundred years? What! Ought we to terrify you to-day, not only with your own sins, but with all those that have been committed in your provinces from the moment of their first settlement? I answer, If that part of a nation which subsists in one period has no union of time with that which subsisted in another period, it may have a union of another kind, it may have even four different unions, any one of which is sufficient to justify Providence: there is a union of interest; a union of approbation; a union of emulation; and (if ye will allow the expression) a union of accumulation. A union of interest, if it avail itself of the crimes of its predecessors; a union of approbation, if it applaud the shameful causes of its prosperity; a union of emulation, if it follow kind. When they had the courage faithfully to reprove the excesses of its princes, they were accused of opposing the regal authority itself; when they ventured to attack errors, that were in credit with the ministers of religion, they were taxed with resisting religion itself; and, under these pretences they were fre quently put to death. Witness the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, the apostle St. James, and Jesus Christ himself. such examples as ought to be detested; a its mistakes, and to reform its morals: but it union of accumulation, if, instead of making had risen up against them as enemies of sociamends for these faults, it rewards the deprav-ety, who came to trouble the peace of manity of those who commit them. In all these cases, God inviolably maintains the laws of his justice; when he unites in one point of vengeance the crimes which a nation is committing now, with those which were committed many ages before, and pours out those judgments on the part that remains, which that had deserved who had lived many ages ago. Yes, if men peaceably enjoy the usurpations of their ancestors, they are usurpers, as their predecessors were, and the justice of God may make these responsible for the usurpations of those. Thus it was with the Jews, who lived in the time of Jesus Christ: thus it was with the Amorites who lived four hundred years after those of whom God spake to Abraham: and thus we must expect it to be with us, for we also shall deserve the punishments due to our ancestors, if we have any one of the unions with them which has been mentioned. Your meditation will supply what is wanting to this article. It sometimes falls out in this economy, that the innocent suffer while the guilty escape but neither this, nor any other inconvenience that may attend this economy, is to be compared with the advantages of it. The obligation of a citizen to submit to the decision of an ignorant, or a corrupt judge, is an inconvenience in society: however, this inconvenience ought not to free other men from submitting to decisions at law; because the benefits that society derive from a judicial mode of decision, will exceed, beyond all comparison, the evils that may attend the perversion of justice in a very few cases. Society would be in continual confusion, were the members of it allow ed sometimes to resist the decisions of their lawful judges. Private disputes would never end; public quarrels would be eternal; and administration of justice would be futile and useless. Beside, Providence has numberless ways of remedying the inconveniences of this just economy, and of indemnifying all those innocent persons who may be involved in punishments due to the guilty. If, when God sends fruitful seasons to a nation to reward their good use of the fruits of the earth, an individual destitute of virtue, reap the benefit of those who are virtuous, an infinitely wise Providence can find ways to poison all his pleasures, and to prevent his enjoyment of the prosperity of the just. If an innocent person be involved in a national calamity, an infinitely wise Providence knows how to indemnify him for all that he may sacrifice to that justice, which requires that a notoriously wicked nation should become a notorious example of God's abhorrence of wickedness. Having established these principles, let us apply them to the words of Jesus Christ, which were just now quoted, and to the text. The Jewish nation, considered in the just light of a moral person, was guilty of an innumerable multitude of the most atrocious crimes. It had not only not profited by the earnest exhortations of those extraordinary men, whom heaven had raised up to rectify God had often exhorted that nation to repent, and had urged the most tender and the most terrible motives to repentance: one while he loaded it with benefits, another while he threatened it with punishments. Sometimes he supported the authority of his messages by national judgments; sermons were legible by lightning, and thunder procured attention; doctrines were reiterated by pestilence and famine, and exhortations were re-echoed by banishment and war. All these means had been ineffectual; if they had produced any alteration, it had been only an apparent or a momentary change which had vanished with the violent means that produced it. The Jewish nation were always the same; always a stiff-necked nation; always inimical to truth, and infatuated with falsehood; always averse to reproof, and athirst for the blood of its prophets. What the Jews were in the times of the prophets, that they were in the times of Jesus Christ, and his apostles; they were full as barbarous to Jesus Christ as to Zacharias the son of Barachiah. A time must come in which divine justice ought to prevent the fatal consequences of a longer forbearance; a time in which the whole world must be convinced that God's toleration of sinners is no approbation of sin; a time when general vengeance must justify Providence, by rendering to all the due reward of their deeds. Such a time was at hand when Jesus Christ spoke to the Jews; and, foreseeing the miseries that would overwhelm Judea, he told them that God would require an account, not only of the blood of all the prophets which they had spilt, but of all the murders that had been committed on the earth from the death of Abel to the slaughter of Zacharias. Thus it was with the Amorites: and thus it will be with your provinces, if ye avail yourselves of the crimes of your predeces sors, if ye extenuate the guilt; if ye imitate the practice, if ye fill up the measure of their iniquities; then divine justice, collecting into one point of vengeance all the crimes of the nation, will inflict punishments proportional to the time that was granted to avert them. Thus we have sufficiently prov. ed the justice of this economy. III. Let us remark the terrors that accompany this dispensation. But where can we find expressions sufficiently sad, or images sufficiently shocking and gloomy to describe those terrible times? The soul of Moses dissolved in considering them; by thy wrath we are troubled; thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance, Pa. xc. 7, 8. Every thing that assuages the anger of the Judge of the world is useless here. The exercise of prayer, that exercise which sinners have sometimes used with success to the suspending of the anger of God,to the holding of his avenging arm, and to the disarming him of his vindictive rod, that exercise has lost all its efficacy and power; God covereth himself with a cloud that prayer cannot pass through,' Lam. iii. 44. The intercession of venerable men, who have sometimes stood in the breach, and turned away his wrath, cannot be admitted now; though Moses and Samuel stood before God, yet his mind could not be toward this people,' Jer. xv. 1. Those sanctuaries which have been consecrated to divine worship, and which have so often afforded refuges in times of danger, have lost their noble privilege, and are themselves involved in the direful calamity; 'The Lord casteth off his altar, abhorreth his sanctuary, giveth up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces, and they make a noise in the house of the Lord as in the day of a solemn feast,' Lam. ii. 8. The cries of children which have sometimes melted down the hearts of the most inflexible enemies, those cries cannot now excite the mercy of God, the innocent creatures themselves fall victims to his displeasure; the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city, they say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine? The hands of pitiful women seethe their own children, they are their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people,' Lam. ii. 12; iv. 10. The treasures of grace which have been so often opened to sinners, and from which they have derived converting power, in order to free them from the executions of justice, these treasures are now quite exhausted; God says, I will command the clouds that they rain no rain upon my vineyard: Go, make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and convert, and be healed,' Isa. v. 6; vi. 9, 10. | O God! thou consuming fire! O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, how fearful a thing is it to fall into thy hands!' Deut. iv. 14; Ps. xciv. 1. How dreadful are thy footsteps, when, in the cool fierceness of thine indignation, thou comest to fall upon a sinner! The blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, shall be required of this generation from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacharias; verily I say unto you, it shall be required of this generation.' IV. To conclude. We have proved that there is a fatal period, in which God will unite the sins of a nation in one point of venveance, and will proportion the punishments, which he used to exterminate them, to the length of time that he had granted for preventing them. And from this principle, which will be the ground of our exhortations in the close of this discourse, I infer, that as there is a particular repentance imposed on every member of society, so there is a national repentance, which regards all who compose a nation. The repentance of an indi vidual does not consist in merely asking pardon for his sins, and in endeavouring to correct the bad habits that he had formed; but it requires also, that the sinner should go back to his first years, remember, as far as he can, the sins that defiled his youth, lament every period of his existence, which, having been signalized by some divine favour, was also signalized by some marks of ingratitude; it requires him to say, under a sorrowful sense of having offended a kind and tender God, 'I was shapen in iniquity: and in sin did my mother conceive me. O Lord, remember not the sins of my youth. Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro? Wilt thou pursue the dry stubble? Thou makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth!' Ps. li. 5; Job. xiii. 25, 26. In like manner, the repentance of a nation does not consist in a bare attention to present disorders, and to the luxury that now cries to the Judge of the world for vengeance: but it requires us to go back to the times of our ancestors, and to examine whether we be now enjoying the wages of their unrighteousness, and whether, while we flatter ourselves with the opinion, that we have not committed their vices, we be not now relishing productions of them. Without this we shall be responsible for the very vices which they committed, though time had almost blotted out the remembrance of them; and the justice of God threatened to involvo us in the same punishments: 'The blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, shall be required of this generation: from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacharias: verily I say unto you, it shall be required of this generation.' Dreadful thought! my brethren. A thought that may very justly disturb that shameful security, into which our nation is sunk. I tremble, when I think of some disorders which my eyes have seen during the course of my ministry among you. I do not mean the sins of individuals, which would fill a long and a very mortifying list: I mean public sins, committed in the face of the sun; maxims, received in a manner, by church and state, and which loudly cry to heaven for vengeance against this republic. In theso degenerate times, I have seen immorality and infidelity authorized by a connivance at scandadous books, which are intended to destroy the distinctions of vice and virtue, and to make the difference between just and unjust appear a mere chimera. In these degenerate days, I have seen the oppressed church cry in vain for succour for her children, while the reformation of the church was sacrificed to the policy of the state. In this degenerate age, I have seen solemn days insolently profaned by those, whom worldly decency alone ought to have engaged to observe them. In these days of depravity, I have scen hatred and discord lodge among us, and labour in the untoward work of reciprocal ruin. In these wretched times, I have seen the spirit of intolerance unchained with all its rage, and the very men who incessantly exclaim against the persecutions that have affected themselves, turn persecu tors of others: so that, at the close of a religious exercise, men, who ought to have remembered what they had heard, and to have applied it to themselves, have been known to exercise their ingenuity in finding heresy in the sermon, in communicating the same wicked industry to their families, and to their children, and, under pretence of religion, in preventing all the good effects that religious discourses might have produced. In this degenerate age But this shameful list is already too long. Does this nation repent of its past sins? Does it lament the crimes of its ancestors? Alas! far from repenting of our past sins, far from lamenting the crimes of our ancestors, does not the least attention perceive new and more shocking excesses? The wretched age in which providence has placed us, does it not seem to have taken that for its model, against which God displayed his vengeance, as we have been describing in this discourse? Were Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, destroyed by fire from heaven for sins unknown to us? And God knows, God only knows, what dreadful discoveries the formidable but pious vigilance of our magistrates may still make. O God, 'Behold now I have taken upon me to speak unto thee, although I am but dust and ashes. Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous among us? peradventure forty? peradventure thirty? peradventure twenty? peradventure ten?' Gen. xviii. 25, &c. My brethren, God yet bears with you, but how long he will bear with you, who can tell? And do not deceive yourselves, his forbearance must produce, in the end, either your conversion your or destruction. The Lord grant it may produce your conversion and 'so iniquity shall not be your ruin,' Ezek. xviii. 30. Amen. SERMON XI. THE LONGSUFFERING OF GOD WITH INDIVIDUALS. ECCLESIASTES viii. 11, 12. Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. For the sinner doth evil a hundred times, and God prolongeth his days.* THE Wise Man points out, in the words of the text, one general cause of the impenitence of mankind. The disposition to which he attributes it, I own, seems shocking and almost incredible: but if we examine our 'deceitful and desperately wicked hearts,' Jer. xvii. 9. we shall find, that this disposition, which at first sight, seems so shocking, is one of those, with which we are too well acquainted. The heart of the sons of men is fully set to do evil. Why? Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily.' This shameful, but too common, inclination, we will endeavour to expose, and to show you that the long suffering, which the mercy of God grants to sinners, may be abused either in the disposition of a devil, or in that of a beast, or in that of a philosopher, or in that of a man. He who devotes his health, his prosperity, and his youth, to offend God, and, while his punishment is deferred, to invent new ways of blaspheming him; he, who follows such a shameful course of life, abuses the patience of God in the disposition of a devil. He, who enervates and impairs his reason, either by excessive debauchery, or by worldly dissipations, by an effeminate luxury, or by an inactive stupidity, and pays no regard to We have followed the reading of the French Bible in this passage. the great end for which God permits him to live in this world, abuses the patience of God in the disposition of a beast. He who from the longsuffering of God infers consequences against his providence, and against his hatred of sin, is in the dispo sition, of which my text speaks, as a philoso pher. He, who concludes because the patience of God has continued to this day that it will always continue, and makes such a hope a motive to persist in sin, without repentance or remorse, abuses the patience of God in the disposition of a man. As I shall point out these principles to you, I shall show you the injustice and extravagance of them. I. To devote health, prosperity, and youth, to offend God, and to invent new ways of blaspheming him, while the punishment of him who leads such a shameful life is deferred, is to abuse the longsuffering of God like a devil. The majesty of this place, the holiness of my ministry, and the delicacy of my hearers. forbid precision on this article; for there would be a shocking impropriety in exhibiting a well-drawn portrait of such a man. But, if it is criminal to relate such excesses, what must it be to commit them? It is but too certain, however, that nature sometimes produces such infernal creatures, wo, with the bodies of men, have the sentiments of |