SERMON XXI.

MARK ii. 27.

The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.

THE two opposite characters of the hypocrite and the prophane are in no part of their conduct more conspi cuously distinguished, than by the opposite errors which they seem to adopt concerning the degree of attention due to the positive institutions of religion, whether of human or divine appointment. Under the name of po sitive institutions, we comprehend all those impositions and restraints, which not being suggested to any man by his conscience, and having no necessary and natural connection with the dictates of that internal monitor, seem to have no importance but what they may derive from the will of a superior who prescribes them. Of this sort, as far as we at present understand it, was the restriction laid upon our first parents in paradise-the prohibition of the use of blood for food, after the deluge—the rite of circumcision in Abraham's family-the whole of the Mosaic ritual--the sacraments of the Christian Church -the institution of the Sabbath—and, besides these, all ceremonies of worship whatsoever, of human appointment. All these things come under the notion of posi tive institutions; for although the expediency of things of the kind, in the several successive ages of the world, is sufficiently apparent, yet the particular merit of the

special acts enjoined, for which they might be preferable to other acts which might have been devised for the same purpose, is perhaps in none of the instances alleged very easy to be discovered. That men should assemble, at stated seasons, for the public worship of God, all must perceive to be a duty, who acknowledge that a ereature endowed with the high faculties of reason and intelligence owes to his Maker public expressions of homage and adoration: but that the assembly should recur every seventh, rather than every sixth or every eighth day, no natural sanctity of the seventh more than of the sixth or eighth persuades. That Christians, in their public assemblies, should commemorate that death by which death was overcome, and the gate of everlasting life set open to the true believer, no one who pretends to a just sense of the benefit received, and the sharpness of the pain endured, will dare to question: but the particular sanctity of the rite in use proceeds solely from our Lord's appointment. The same may be said of baptism. A rite by which new converts should be admitted into the church, and the children of Christian parents, from their earliest infancy, devoted to Christ's service in their riper age, is of evident propriety: but our Lord's solemn injunction of its constant use constitutes the particular sanctity of that which is employed. The like observations applied with equal force, in ancient times, to the particulars of the Mosaic service, to the rite of circumcision, to the prohibition of the use of blood, and to the abstinence from the fruit of a particular tree, exacted of Adam in paradise, for no other purpose perhaps but as a test of his obedience; and they are still applicable with much greater force to all ceremonies of worship appointed in any national church by the authority of its rulers. The fact is, that all ceremonies are actions, which, by a solemn appropriation of them to particular occasions, are understood to denote,

or are made use of to produce certain dispositions of the mind towards God: they acquire their meaning merely from the institution; and the necessity of making a choice of some one out of a variety of acts which naturally might be equally significant and equally fit to be made subservient to the intended purpose, will always produce, even in the ordinances of Divine appointment, an appearance at least of something arbitrary in the institution. Hence, it will of necessity come to pass, that these ordinances will be very differently regarded by different men, according as the particular cast of each man's temper and disposition-his natural turn to se riousness or gaiety-his acquired habits of sincerity or dissimulation-render either the importance of the ge neral end, or what there may seem to be of arbitrary authority in the particular institution, the object most apt to seize upon his attention; according as he is disposed to be scrupulous in his duty, or impatient of restraint-fair and open in his actions, or accustomed to seek his private ends in the fair show and semblance of a ready and exact submission to authority. With the hypocrite, therefore, the whole of the practical part of religion will consist in an ostentatious rigour in the ob servance of its positive precepts. With that thoughtless tribe which constitutes, it is to be feared, the far greater proportion of mankind, those who, without any settled principles of positive infidelity, and without any strong propensities to the excesses of debauchery, find, however, their whole occupation in the cares, and what may seem the innocent amusements of the world, and defer the consideration of the future life till they find the present drawing to a close,-with persons of this disposi tion, the duties of which I speak are for the most part totally neglected; insomuch, that an affected assiduity in the discharge of the positive precepts of religion on the one hand, and the neglect of them on the other,

may be considered as the discriminating symptoms of the two opposite vices of hypocrisy and profaneness: for the name of profaneness, you will observe, in strict propriety of speech, belongs not only to the flagrant and avowed impiety of the atheist and libertine, but to the conduct of him who, without any thing notoriously reprehensible in his morals-any thing to make him shunned and disliked by his neighbours and acquaintances, lives, however, without any habitual fear of God and sense of religion upon his mind.

The Mosaic law, as it was planned by unerring wis dom, was unquestionably admirably well contrived for the great purposes for which it was intended,-to maintain the knowledge of the true God among a particular people, and to cherish an opinion of the necessity of an expiatory sacrifice for involuntary offences, till the season should arrive for the general revelation. Nor is it to be supposed that it failed of the purpose for which it was so well contrived. The highest examples of consummate virtue and heroic piety which the ancient world knew were formed in that people, under the discipline of their holy law; nevertheless, the great stress laid upon ceremonial observances had, notwithstanding the continual remonstrances of the prophets-not from any defect in the law itself, but from the corruption of human nature-it had at least an ill effect upon the manners of the people. Notwithstanding the eminent instances of virtue and piety which from time to time arose among them -of virtue and piety, of which faith alone in the revelation which they enjoyed might be a sufficient foundation,-yet, if we look to the national character, especially in the later ages of the Jewish state, we shall find that it was rank hypocrisy, such as justifies what is said of them by a learned writer, that they were at the same time the most religious and the most profligate people upon the earth, the most religious in the hypocrite's

religion-the most regardless of what their own law taught them to be more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.

Strange as the assertion may seem, this depravity of the Jewish people, the effect, as has been observed, of an abuse of their divine law, was favourable (so active is the merciful providence of God to bring good out of evil),-this ill effect of the abuse of the divine law was favourable to that great end to which the law tended, the introduction of an universal revelation for the general reformation of the manners of mankind. It was favourable to this end, because it was favourable to our Saviour's method of instruction. Our Saviour's method of instruction was not by delivering a system of morality, in which the formal nature of the moral good should be traced to the original idea of the seemly and the fair the foundations of our duty discovered in the natural relations of things, and the importance of every particular duty demonstrated by its connection with the general happiness. This was not his method of instruction, because he well knew how long it had been followed with little effect; for abstruse speculations, whatever they may have at the bottom of solidity and truth, suit not the capacities of the many, and influence the hearts of none. The method of instruction which he chose, was to throw out general maxims respecting the different branches of human duty, as often as, in the course of an unreserved intercourse with persons of all ranks, characters, and conditions, he found occasion either to reprove the errors and enormities which fell under his observation, or to vindicate his, own conduct and that of his disciples, when either was unjustly arraigned by the hypocrites of the times. Had the manners of his contemporaries been less reprehensible, or their hypocrisy less rigid and censorious, the occasions of instruction by reproof and apology would have less