Church of Rome, and many faults in its discipline among our forefathers, might have been forgiven or disregarded by the greater part of the laity, if at the æra of the Reformation the morals of the clergy had not been notoriously dissolute, and furnished a plea for rapacious men to seize upon the treasures, which seduced their possessors into riotous and shameless voluptuousness. Those errors have been corrected, and that discipline has been happily reformed in the Church of England. But if the teachers should ever be such as to give general alarm, and to rouse the indignation of wise and good men, the very excellence of our ecclesiastical constitution would rise up against us, and we should stand convicted of conducting ourselves inconsistently with a better system, and of having become wicked with fewer temptations to wickedness. They who oppose our opinions, and secretly entertain no favourable wishes to our order, may be kept under some restraint by the regularity of our morals. On the Continent, one of the ablest champions of the modern philosophy, when he is enumerating the effects of progressive science and diffused civilization, has with equal sagacity and candour observed, that they had given to society a decent class of clergy. Very bad men may employ as instruments for very bad purposes their impious tenets against religion itself, accompanied by vague and common-place declamations against what they call the craft and tyranny of the priesthood. But, if the accuser be silent on the neglect of temperance, honesty, charity, decorum, and professional duties among the teachers of Christianity,

their silence affords a strong presumption that suspicion however vigilant, and malignity however active, were unable to find any materials for just or even plausible accusation. Whatsoever then may have been the causes of the numerous and scandalous outrages, which desolated a neighbouring kingdom, we, as Christians, have abundant reason to rejoice that the advocates for infidelity brought no railing accusation against the purity or the decorum of their established clergy, and in a calmer order of things, under which, by the goodness of Providence, we are ordained to live, there is reason to hope that the same praiseworthy behaviour, which adorns the Church may, among other consequences, tend to preserve the best interests of the State.

But farther, as the precept to avoid the appearance of evil carries with it a direct reference to hu man opinion, it evidently follows that we cannot have too large or too correct a view of every local and every temporary circumstance by which that opinion, as turned towards our own behaviour, can be actuated. The various causes, let us remember, by which the peace of communities is disturbed, are now in a state of peculiar activity, and it is unnecessary for me to remind this audience that effects very pernicious arise from intellectual perversions, which at first sight are the most opposite.

A neighbouring country, as I have just now been observing, has been deeply injured by the licentiousness of infidelity. But much of the danger by which we seem to be surrounded, may be found in another quarter. It is possible for men to avoid

the appearance of evil without abstaining from the reality. It is possible for men to set such excessive and ostentatious value upon duties which are easily performed, as may induce a suspicion that they have entered into a kind of compromise with their conscience for the neglect of those weightier matters, which require frequent self-examination, painful self-denial, and self-command unwearied and inflexible. It is possible for men, while they preserve the strictest appearance of religion in external things to be destitute of that spirit, which can alone fulfil the gracious purposes of its author, and to inculcate opinions which have no warrant from the authority of his instructions, or the example of his life.

Fanaticism, the movements of which till within these few years were secret and desultory, is now advancing with rapid strides, and executing its purposes with all the regularity of system, and all the confidence of increasing success. Unfortunately it has a cause, which secretly and indirectly borrows aid from sects professedly hostile to the national Church; and yet more unfortunately, it has found too much countenance from those, who introduce into our. pulpits not only unseasonable and unscriptural tenets, which our forefathers would have rejected, but contemptuous and acrimonious invectives against those persons who were ordained to the same office with their accusers, who worship at the same altar, who have, and, I am sure, are conscious of having the saine awful responsibility to government and civilized society in this world, and to an 2 c

VOL. V.

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.