rites is not yet full. Here, my brethren, a detail would be horrid, for so great were the excesses of these people, that we should in some sense partake of their crimes, by attempting to give an exact list of them. So excessive was the idolatry of the Canaanites, that they rendered the honors of supreme adoration not only to the most mean, but even to the most impure and infamous creatures. Their inhumanity was so excessive that they sacrificed their own children to their gods. And so monstrous was their subversion, not only of the laws of nature, but even of the common irregularities of human nature, that a vice, which must not be named, was openly practised; and in short, so scandalous was the depravation of religion and good manners, that Moses, after he had given the Israelites laws against the most gross idolatry, against incest, against beastiality, against that other crime, which our dismal circumstances oblige us to mention, in spite of so many reasons for avoiding it; Moses, I say, after having forbidden all these excessses 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, chap. xviii. 24, 25. Defile not yourselves, says he in the book of Leviticus (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. And again in the 12th chapter of Deuteronomy, ver. 30. 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 . . saying, How did these

nations Such were the iniquities which 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 fore-mentioned maxim, that is, that it is equitable in God to proportion the punishments of guilty nations to the time granted for their repentance.

even so will I do likewise.

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 colors 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 striken 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, Wisdom 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 benevolence 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. 23, 27, &c. The decree of divine vengeance must be executed. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth, Psal. ii. 10. God grant you may never know any thing more of these terrible executions than what you 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 iniquites 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 exercised his patience long toward 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, he poureth out his indignation on whole nations that have abused his patience; and, as I advanced before, and think it necessary 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 you condescend yet to favor me, I shall employ in considering

I. The nature of this oeconomy.

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 hath 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, the same nation was delivered from bondage in Egypt in the reign of Pharoah, 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 Pharoah, they who lived in the time of Moses, and they 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 they 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. "Woe unto you: for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them, chap. xi. 47; 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