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ture of the animating spirit, and assisting its most enlarged operations and incessant progress towards perfection. Here we are assured, that the righteous shall go into life everlasting; that they shall enter into the kingdom of the heavenly Canaan, where no ignorance shall cloud the understanding, no vice disturb the will. In these regions of perfection, nothing but love shall possess the soul; nothing but gratitude employ the tongue: there the righteous shall be united to an innumerable company of angels, and to the general assembly and church of the first born: there they shall see their exalted Redeemer at the right hand of Omnipotence, and sit down with him on his throne; there they shall be admitted into the immediate presence of the Supreme Fountain of life and happiness, and, beholding his face, be changed into the same image from glory to glory. Here language--here imagination fails me! It requires the genius, the knowledge, and the pen of an angel, to paint the happiness, the blissful scene of the new Jerusalem, which human eyes cannot behold till this mortal body shall be purified from its corruption and dressed in the robes of immortality; Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart to conceive the joys which God hath prepared for them that love him,-What is the Elysium of the Heathens, compared with the heaven of the Christians? The hope, the prospect of this is sufficient to reconcile us to all the difficulties that may attend our progress, sweeten all our labours, alleviate every grief, and silence every murmur, by impressing on our minds a meek acquiescence with the divine dispensations in the course of his providence.

But the libertine, in the gaiety of his heart, may possibly enquire, why there should be any difficulties or restraint at all? God hath male nothing in vain. The appetites he hath planted in the human breast are to be gratified: to deny, or to restrain them, is ignominious bondage; but to give full scope to every desire and passion of the heart, without check or controul, is true,

manly freedom, and only pursuing the dictates of na

ture.

In order to confute and expose this loose and careless way of reasoning, let it be considered, that the liberty of a rational creature doth not consist in an entire exemption from all controul, but in following the dictates of reason as the governing principle, and in keeping the various passions in due subordination. To follow the regular motion of those affections which the wise Creator hath implanted within us, is our duty; but as our natural desires in this state of trial are often irregular, we are bound to restrain their excesses, and not to indulge them, but in a strict subserviency to the integrity and peace of our minds, and to the order and happiness of human society established in the world. They who allow the supreme command to be usurped by sense and brutal appetite, may promise themselves liberty, but are truly and absolutely the servants of corruption to be vicious is to be enslaved. We behold with pity those miserable objects that are chained in the gallies, or confined in dark prisons and loathsome dungeons; but much more abject and vile is the slavery of the sinner! No slavery of the body is equal to the bondage of the mind: no chains press so closely or gail so cruelly as the fetters of sin, which corrode the very substance of the soul, fret every faculty, and degrade men below the brute part of the creation.

We must indeed confess, that there are some profligates so hardened by custom, as to be past all feeling; and, because insensible of their bondage, boast of this insensibility as a mark of their native freedom, and their happiness. Vain men: they might extol with equal propriety, the peculiar happiness of an apoplexy, the profound tranquility of a lethargy, or, we may add, the ideal paradise of a fool or a mad-man.

We have, in the foregoing observations, endeavoured to place in a plain and conspicuous light, some

of the peculiar excellencies of the christian religion; and from hence many useful reflections will naturally arise in the mind of every attentive reader. It is the religion of JESUS, that hath removed idolatry and superstition, and brought immortality to light, when concealed under a veil of darkness almost impenetrable. This hath set the great truths of religion in a clear and conspicuous point of view, and proposed new and powerful motives to influence our minds, and to determine our conduct. Nothing is enjoined to be believed but. what is worthy of God; nothing to be practised but what is friendly to man, All the doctrines of the gospel are rational and consistent; all its precepts are truly wise, just, and good. The gospel contains nothing grievous to an ingenuous mind; it debars us from no thing but doing harm to ourselves or to our fellow creatures; and permits is to range any where but in the paths of danger and destruction. It only requires us to act up to the dignity of the rational nature, and to prefer to the vanishing pleasures of sin, the smiles of a reconciled God, and an eternal weight of Glory and is this a rigorous exaction, a heavy burden not to be endured? How can sinful mortals harbour a thought so ridiculous and unworthy?

Can any man who is a real friend to the cause of vir tue, and to the interest of mankind, ever be an enemy to Christianity, if he truly understands it, and seriously reflects on its wise and useful tendency! Impossible, for it conducteth us to our journey's end by the plainest and securest path, where the steps are not straightened, and where he that runneth stumbleth not. Let us who live under this last and most gracious dispensation of God to mankind, count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord; and not suffer ourselves, by the slight cavils of unbelievers, to be moved away from the hope of the gospel. Let us demonstrate, that we believe the superior excellency of the Christian dispensation, by conforming to its precepts. Let us shew that we are Christians in deed and in truth; not by VOL. ii.

endless disputes about trifles, and the transports of a blind zeal, but by practising that universal, that exalted goodness, our holy religion recommends, and by abounding in those fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.

Phil. i. 11.

We may clearly perceive, from what has been said, how groundless all those prejudices are which some conceive against religion, as if it was a peevish, morosc scheme, burdensome to human nature, and inconsistent with the truc enjoyment of life. Such sentiments are too apt to prevail in the heat of youth, when the spirits are brisk and lively, and the passions warm and im. petuous but it is wholly a mistake, and a mistake of the most dangerous tendency. The truth is, there is no pleasure like that of a good conscience, no real peace but what results from the practice of virtue; this enobles the mind, and can alone support it under all the various and unequal scenes of the present state of trial; this lays a sure foundation of an easy, comfortable life, of a serene, peaceful death, and of eternal joy and happiness hereafter: whereas vice is ruinous to all our most valuable interests; it spoils the native beauty, and subverts the order of the soul; it renders us the scorn of man, the rejected of God, and, without timely repentance, will rob us of a happy eternity. Religion is the health, the liberty, and the happiness of the soul; sin is the disease, the servitude, and destruction of it, both here and for ever.

If these arguments be not sufficient to convince you, let me lead vou into the chamber of an habitual rioter, the lewd debauchee, worn out in the cause of iniquity, his bones full of the sins of his youth, that from his own mouth, as he lies on his expiring bed, you may learn that the way of transgression is hard; and that however sweet sin may be in the commission, it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Prov. xxiii. 32. This awful truth is exemplified in a very strong point

of view, by the late celebrated Dr. Young, in his Centaur not Fabulous, page 149-161, where he draws a most awful picture of the last scene of an abandoned profligate, who had despised religion, and led a life of pleasure and dissipation. The relation is as follows:

"I am going, Reader, to represent to thee the last moments of a person of high birth and spirit, of great parts and strong passions, every way accomplished, not the least in iniquity: his unkind treatment was the death of a most valuable wife, and his monstrous extravagance in effect, disinherited his only child. And surely the death-bed of a profligate is next in horror, to that abyss to which it leads: it has the most of hell that is visible upon earth, and he that has seen it has more than faith to confirm him in his creed. I see it now, says the worthy divine from whom I shall borrow this relation, for who can forget it? Are there in it no flames and furies?--You are ignorant then, of what a sacred imagination can figure, what a guilty heart can feel! How' dismal is it! The two great enemies of soul and body, sickness and sin, sink and confound his friends; silence and darkness the shocking scene; sickness exIcludes the light of heaven, and sin its blessed hope. Oh, double darkness! more than Egyptian! accutely to be felt!

"The sad evening before the death of that noble youth, whose last hours suggested these thoughts, I was with him. No one was there but his physician, and an intimate acquaintance whom he loved and whom he had ruined. At my coming, he said, "you and the physician are come too late. I have neither life nor hope. You both aim at miracles. You would raise the dead."

"Heaven, I said was merciful.-Or I could not been thus guilty. What has it not done to bless, and to save me?—I have been too strong for Omnipotence: plucked down rujn."

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