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only ferve, by ftirring up difcontent, to excite infubordination.

He refpects every, order and degree among them for the Lord's fake; and, if a cafe fhould occur in which he cannot honour the man, he will honour his office. If called on for his opinion as to any defect, his cenfures are difcreet; if not called upon, he is filent. But if his cenfures, when juft, are temperate; his commendations, when merited, are cordial. Above all, he holds the practice to be equally dishonest, difingenuous and vulgar, to make communities and bodies answerable for the faults and errors of individuals; while he never commends or vindicates any thing decidedly wrong, either in individuals or in communities.

03

CHAP. XXVI.

The established Chriftian.

WE have it on the authority of a fine writer, that, not to know what occurred

before we were born, is to be always a child. Yet while the intellect may be improved to the highest pitch by this antecedent knowledge, the will and the paffions may, notwithstanding our study of the most elabo rate difcuffions on their nature and effects, remain in the fame ftate of childifh imbecility. Hiftory and philofophy, though they inform the understanding, and affift the . judgment, cannot rectify the obliquities of the heart.

The experience of all paft ages has produced fuch an accumulated mass of disappointment, fuch a long unbroken series of mortification, fuch a reiterated conviction of the emptiness of this world, and of the infuf

ficiency

ficiency of its power to confer happiness, that one would be ready to imagine, that to every fresh generation, nay, to every period of the life of every individual in every generation, wisdom would not have all her admonitions to begin over again. One would not think that the fame truths require, not only to be afresh preffed upon us, but to be again unfolded; to be repeated as if all previous experiment had never been tried, as if all foregoing admonition had either never been given, or had been completely obliterated; as if the world were about to begin on a fresh stock of materials, to fet out on an untried fet of principles, as if it were about to enter on an original course of action of which preceding ages had left no precedent; on a line of conduct of which our forefathers had bequeathed no instances of failure, had experienced no defeat of expectation.

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We read perpetually of multitudes, who lived in the long indulgence of unbounded appetite, who, in the gratification of every defire,

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defire, had drained the world to its laft dregs; but does the narrative of ages record a fingle instance, that the end proposed and followed up in the fervent purfuit, I mean happiness, was ever attained? We contemplate these recorded examples, we lament the disgusts, and pity the mortifications of the difappointed; but who applies the knowledge to any practical ufe, to any perfonal purpofe? We are informed, but we are not inftructed. We refolve, in full confidence of our own wifdom, and complete contempt for that of our predeceffors, to make the experiment for ourfelves. We,' too, pursue the fame end, and probably by the fame path; fecure that we shall escape the mistakes into which others have fallen, affured that we fhall avoid the evils which they have incurred, evils which we attribute to their ignorance, or their neglect, to their error, or their indifcretion.

We set out fresh adventurers in the old track. We weary our wits, we waste our fortune, we exhaust our fpirits. Still we

are

are perfuaded that we have devised the expedient of which our precurfors were ignorant; that we have hit on the very discovery which had eluded their fearch; that we have found the ingredient, which they, in mixing up the grand compound, earthly hap pinefs, had overlooked.

The natural and preffing object of our defire is prefent enjoyment; those, therefore, who gratify our wayward fancies, or remove from us any immediate inconvenience, are fure of our favour. On them we feize as inftruments for promoting our schemes of gratification, forgetting that they have schemes of their own to promote; that they are equally looking to us for our inftrumentality; and that, if they are making any undue facrifices to us, it is but in order to the furtherance of those schemes. Such is mere worldly friendship. As the intellectual eye feldom runs along the whole train of confequences, which is the only true way of taking our measure of things, the fame principle which attaches us to the friend who

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