SERMON XVIII.

MATTHEW xiv. 12.

At that time Herod the Tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus, and said unto his servants, "This is John the Baptist: he is risen from the dead; and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him."

In a former discourse I explained to you the etymological import of the English word conscience. I set before you the terms which are employed to designate the faculty in some other languages; I made some general remarks upon the power of the principle, which the Deity has implanted within us for the regulation of our moral conduct. I examined, and I hope refuted, some ingenious but dangerous paradoxes upon the subject of remorse; I explained the feeling, and vindicated the term, in opposition to some ingenious but dangerous paradoxes, which sprang out of the celebrated controversy upon Necessity and Liberty, as they are respectively predicated of moral agents. I endeavoured to illustrate those remarks either by direct quotations, or by recorded instances from writers, profane or sacred; and I announced to you my tention to take an early opportunity of throwing

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additional light upon the subject, by a series of observations upon the circumstances, which peculiarly marked the case of Herod, as contained in the chapter whence the text is taken. I therefore shall proceed to execute the purpose just now mentioned to you.

As several transactions of several persons named Herod are related in the New Testament; and as the differences between them may not be generally known, I shall lay before you the history of that Herod who is mentioned in the text.

He was one of the sons of Herod the Great. His name was Herod Antipas. His eldest brother, Antipater, had been engaged in a conspiracy against his father, had been discovered and disappointed; and afterwards, upon an attempt to murder him, and for himself to be made king, he was seized by the guards, and ultimately slain. Herod the Great survived this nefarious attempt five days, in the course of which he disinherited his eldest son Antipater before he had been put to death, and divided his dominions thus. He gave the kingdom to Archelaus. He gave Gaulonitis, Trachonitis, and Batanæa to Philip, the nephew of Archelaus, and a grandson of Herod the Great; he gave the provinces of Galilee and Peræa to Herod Antipas. There had been another Philip, father of the Philip just now mentioned, and a son of Herod the Great. This Philip had married Mariamne, a daughter of the Jewish high priest, and as she was concerned in the conspiracy of Antipater, his father disinherited Philip the elder. This elder Philip then

married Herodias, grandchild to Herod the Great, by whom he had a daughter named Salome. When Herodias, and her brother-in-law Herod Antipas, for political purposes, were on a journey to Rome, he conceived for her a criminal passion; he proposed marriage to her; and the proposal was accepted on the condition that he should violently divorce his first unblamed, and even unsuspected wife, daughter of the king of Arabia. This outrage produced a war, in which Antipas was ignominiously defeated; and the Jews, forgetting their national partiality for a while, considered this disaster as a just punishment of the Tetrarch for having taken away the life of their countryman, John the Baptist.

In his regal capacity, Herod Antipas, like many other worldlings, united obsequiousness with ambition, and levity with insensibility. He was careless of the interests, and treacherous to the rights of his subjects. In order to gain favour from the emperor of Rome, he placed himself at the head of a courtly and venal sect, who were called from him Herodians, because instigated by his persuasions, and emboldened by his example, they endeavoured to win over the Jews to the payment of an odious and galling tax.

In private life, he avowed the loose tenets of the Sadducees, who denied a future state of retribution; and, like other men in high stations, he abandoned himself to shameless licentiousness, and, day after day, he felt no restraint from the fear of God or the fear of man.

His connexion with Herodias, you see, was facilitated originally by a gross and cruel insult to his first wife; his intercourse with the second was at once adulterous and incestuous; and surely such crimes justified the indignant reproofs of a teacher so wise and so holy as John the Baptist, who had preached to the Jews about two years before his imprisonment.

Herodias, like her husband, was addicted to voluptuousness, and ambitious of power. As Herod Agrippa was a king, and Herod Antipas only a tetrarch, she was jealous of the superiority, and endeavoured to obtain a similar dignity for her husband from the Roman emperor. But her hopes were frustrated; and, probably, her restless disposition and licentious habits were not unknown to the prince, from whom she solicited a very splendid, but very unmerited favour. Herod Antipas was not exalted to a kingdom; he was deprived of the tetrarchite bequeathed to him by his father, and afterwards he, together with his worthless consort, was banished into Spain, or, as others say, to Lyons, where they died in obscurity and misery.

Now, in the sunshine of prosperity he had called his grandees to a birth-day feast; he was charmed with the graceful dancing of Salome, daughter to his first and injured wife, and he promised to grant whatsoever she might ask. With fatal credulity, she consulted the wicked stepmother, and by her was prevailed upon to ask the head of John the Baptist, who had given offence, not to herself, but

to her adviser; and who, by censuring the crimes of Herodias, had, in fact, asserted the cause of Salome's persecuted mother. The promise was claimed; the claim was admitted; the admission of it led to the murder of John; and that murder was followed by the terrors of Herod, whose guilty conscience induced him to believe that John had risen from the dead.

Here is suggested to us a lesson, which cannot be too earnestly inculcated by those who preside over the education of princes, or officially "keep," as it is called, "the conscience of kings." You may be successful in your endeavours to trample on the rights, and to break down the spirits of your people; you may join province to province, and fortress to fortress; you may vanquish the most skilful leaders and the most valiant hosts; you may hear assembled statesmen, warriors, judges, and nobles, join in loud pæans of applause; you may exult when they, who bend the knee at the sacred altar of Jesus Christ, bow with base obsequiousness before the master, who violates every duty which they are commissioned to enforce. You may be deaf to the groans of the oppressed, and the remonstrances of the virtuous; "the harp and the viol, the tabret and pipe, and wine may be in your feasts;" you may seldom reflect that the eye of Heaven is over you; and you may gradually acquire some portion of insensibility to conscience; but the time will arrive, when experience shall justify the language of a great poet to a great sovereign