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meditate on these things day and night, and thereby make them familiar to our minds. We must not only know, but be intimately converfant with, the fcriptures, which are the only records of this great revelation, and feel an increafing fatisfaction in reading and meditating on their important contents. Otherwife, we shall be Christians in name only, and mere men of the world in reality.

It is not what we think of only occafionally, but what habitually occupies our thoughts, that forms the mind, and the character; and this will be difcovered by the mind involuntarily reverting to it, and taking pleasure to dwell upon it. Is the man of business, or the man of fcience, formed without much attention to his object, and taking pleasure in it? You know the contrary. Expect not then to become Chriftians in any other way. You must prize your religion above every thing else, and be ready to facrifice every thing else to it. It is only when we thus make religion our principal object, that the gospel will teach, and enable, us to deny all ungodliness

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and worldly lufts, and to live righteously, foberly, and piously, in this prefent world, fo as to encourage us to look forwards to that bleffed hope, even the glorious appearance of the great God, and of our Lord and Saviour Jefus Chrift, in that great and triumphant day, when corruption fhall put on incorrup tion, and this mortal put on immortality.

DISCOURSE

DISCOURSE II.

Revelation the only Remedy for Idolatry and Superstition.

The time of their ignorance God winked at.

ACTS, xvii. 30.

THE fufficiency of reason, or the light of nature, for the discovery of all useful truth, has been the great boast of unbelievers in divine revelation, But this idea has been the offspring of a conceit of the powers of the human intellect, in confequence of knowledge acquired in an advanced period of the world, without confidering by how flow degrees that knowledge was attained, and especially how much of it was, in reality, derived from that very revelation which they confider as unneceffary.

Without pofitive inftruction, mankind, in the earliest ages, must have been entirely ignorant of every thing on which their exiftence

iftence and happiness moft depended. Seeing nothing but effects, and unable to trace their true causes, they must have wandered in a boundless field of conjecture, of which we see the mind of man to be always exceedingly fertile. Soon finding that there is no effect without fome adequate cause, men, who have naturally but little patience of investigation (for it is only experience that teaches this) presently imagine fomething or other to be the cause of every thing that they obferve, and they acquiefce in this suppofed caufe till farther obfervation shall convince them of their miftake. But what is moft to be regretted, is, that an opinion of this kind once entertained, especially when it has been recommended by a derivation from remote antiquity, does not easily give way to better judgment.

Whoever were the firft of the human race, and by whatever means they came into existence, unless the courfe of nature was wholly different from what it is known to be now, they must have perished without foreign affiftance. Whether men were produced

produced in a state of infancy, or of perfect manhood, will make no difference; becaufe our ideas, the elements of all our knowledge, have no inlets befides the external fenfes, and these must be used and exercised before they can give us any information of things without us; and these ideas must be varioufly combined and compared, before we could, by their means, form any proper judgment of things, or take any proper and fafe measures for our conduct. A child left to itself would be more helpless than any other other young animal. It must neceffarily perish; and a grown man, with no more knowledge than a new-born child, would be as little able to take care of himfelf. Whenever, therefore, men were first produced, they must have had fome inftructions communicated to them by their maker; fo that what we may properly call divine revelation was abfolutely neceffary in the first stage of our existence.

It is agreeable, however, to the general plan of providence, that no more fuperna

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