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VOL. V.

that uncharitableness with which we hurl down the reputation of other men, who with talents as improved, and with intentions as upright as our own, have fallen into mistakes without the guilt of rashness. What the Deity has kept back from our view is sufficient to make us humble; what he has shewn to us is equally sufficient to make us pious, if our hearts be rightly disposed; and alas! if this best source of virtue be once contaminated, it is not only difficult but useless to refine our opinions from the grossest adhesions of error. The understandings of the Scribes were doubtless convinced at the moment by the stupendous exertion of Christ's mercy in the cure of the paralytic, but their moral habits, I fear, were not corrected. Though the clearest light had shone upon them, they soon relapsed into the dominion of their inveterate prejudices. We have at least every reason to imagine that they did not embrace Christianity cordially, sincerely, and, though a miracle had been worked in its support, they were not persuaded to adopt it as the rule of their actions and the foundation of their hopes.

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SERMON V.

MATTHEW ix. 5.

"For whether is easier to say, thy sins be forgiven thee; or, Arise and walk."

WHEN I first addressed you on these words, I explained to you the circumstances of the story recorded by the Evangelist, and examined the principles of the reasoning which our Lord employed against the scribes. I afterwards applied those reasonings to the management of every abstruse speculation, in which religion is concerned, and among other uses to which they are subservient I had occasion to throw out some introductory remarks on the subject of miracles.

The intention of this discourse is to shew, that miracles, considered as deviations from the ordinary course of things, are not impossible, and therefore as attestations to the truth of any religion are not useless, and consequently not incredible. When these general positions are established, the peculiar evidences of Christianity may be investigated with more exactness. For what God can perform by his own immediate agency, it involves no contradiction to say that he may enable a created being to perform; and it implies no absurdity to imagine that

either interposition may be distinguished by proofs equally convincing, and be intended for purposes equally beneficial. At present I mean only to lay before you a regular series of my own observations on this interesting question, and to fix the foundation of those answers which I may hereafter give to such objections as are most eminent for their popularity, or most formidable for their strength.

There once flourished a sect of philosophers, who professedly excluded the Deity from all concerns in the affairs of this lower world. The plea which they urged in defence of this daring but comfortless tenet was, that exertion in the human soul always implied want-always produced pain, and must therefore be derogatory to the dignity, and inconsistent with the happiness, of the Divine nature. Upon a similar principle, though perhaps it be scarce suspected by those whom it influences, there are many persons who, while they admit, and even because they admit, the doctrine of a general providence, most pertinaciously resist every attempt that is made to convince them of miraculous interpositions. Such interposition carries with it an appearance of some imperfection in the works of God. It betrays, say they, an original weakness, or a subsequent variableness in the workman himself.

For the errors of the Epicurean, it may be pleaded that metaphysics were in those ages a train of subtle deductions from unauthorized, obscure assumptions, and that physics were but a mass of conjectures without reasoning, and reasonings with

out facts. But it is not so easy to excuse the mistakes of those who have lived in later and in better times, when revealed religion has gradually led men into clearer notions of the doctrines that relate to natural, and when philosophy, founding system upon experiment, has conducted them into a more enlarged and correct view of the rules by which the world in which we are to act is regulated. The Epicurean consistently shut out that divine energy from the government of the universe, which he did not think essential to the creation of it. We, on the contrary, admit that energy in the creation, though we have no distinct conception of the manner in which it operated, and then limit the uses of it in the government of the world, by our own shallow and precarious notions of fitness.

Much of the perplexity that entangles our thoughts on this topic, has arisen from the unavoidable deficiency of human language, where the divine operations are concerned-from the applica→ tion of familiar terms to ideas not yet familiar-from the negligence of disputants in adopting ambiguous words, or their obstinacy in not receding from those which have been already misapplied. Thus miracles have been called violations of the laws of naturewhere violation is confounded with suspension; and, in a case where the cause ought not to be overlooked, the laws of nature are considered as effects with a careless or a studied inattention to the cause.

Again, the course of nature has been first applied to the general order of events, and then followed up by consequences, which belong only to

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its most extended signification, as including the gregate of God's appointments; and sometimes the question has been petulantly begged, and such a meaning industriously affixed to the term, as excluded all interposition whatsoever. For my part I do not wish to cavil at an expression so familiarized by custom, and so dignified by the authority of those who use it, if it always has a reference and a proportionate one to its objective realities in the works of God. But those works themselves are differently conceived by different men; where they are with some exactness understood, they are understood in different degrees of extent; and in the most extensive are partially known-known so partially as to supply no positive proof against the existence of miracles, either as they are recorded in the Scriptures, or as they are explained by those persons, who, in the ablest and most impartial manner have vindicated the credibility, and illustrated the doctrines of revelation. The laws of the material world, which operate without the concurrence of magnetism and electricity, do not disprove the use or the appointment of other laws, in which their concurrence is necessary. In the same manner the moral dispensations of God, as they are carried on by natural religion, may yet leave room for other ends, which revealed only can answer. Though it be true that human agency is often successful in the gradual removal of inveterate and acute disorders, it is not therefore false, that the divine agency has in some cases been visibly employed to remove them instantaneously.

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