precept, regard, countenance, favour, compassion, forgiveness, instruction, advice, reproof, and a great variety of similar offices. Between equals, they are performed in the more familiar, but not less necessary, acts of friendship, esteem, civility, giving, lending, aiding, and a multitude of others. These, united, constitute a vast proportion of all that excellence, of which Intelligent beings are capable; and of all that duty, for which they are designed by their Creator. To enjoyment, kindness is no less necessary, than truth and justice. Truth begins, justice regulates, and kindness finishes, rational happiness. Truth is the basis, justice the measure, and kindness the substance. All are alike, and absolutely, indispensable; and of all, Benevolence is the soul, the essence, the

amount.

A world of kindness is a copy of heaven. A world without kindness is an image of hell. Eden originally derived its beauty and glory from the kind and amiable character of its inhabitants; and the verdure, the bloom, the splendour of all its ornaments, were merely a faint resemblance of the beauty of mind, the moral life and loveliness, which glowed in our first parents. Had they preserved this character; the world would still have continued to flourish with immortal life and beauty; and the character itself would have furnished one natural and desirable ingredient in the happiness of beings, like them, who by the nature of their dispositions, were capable of being happy.

Were the same character to revive in the present inhabitants of the world, now in ruins around us; the bloom and beauty of Paradise would spontaneously return. Three fourths of the miseries. of man are made by himself; and of these a vast proportion is formed by his unkindness. Were this malignant character banished; were sweetness and tenderness of disposition to return to the human breast, and benevolence once more to regulate human conduct; a lustre and loveliness, hitherto unknown, would be spread over the inanimate creation; and God would supply to our enjoyment all, which would then be lacking.

In the exercise of this disposition, Parents would be truly kind to their children; and would labour not to gratify their pride, avarice, and sensuality, but to do them real and universal good; to form their minds to virtue and happiness, to obedience and endless life, to excellence and loveliness in the sight of God. In the path of this true wisdom they would walk before; and their offspring, following cheerfully after them, would find it to be only pleasantness and peace. Brothers and sisters, under this happy influence, would become brothers and sisters indeed. In their hearts, and on their tongues, would dwell the law of kindness to each other, and of piety to their parents.. Every son would make a glød father; no daughter would be a heaviness to her mother. Every returning day would assume the peace and serenity of the

Sabbath; and every house would be converted into a little heaven.

From the house, this expansive disposition would enlarge the circuit of its benefactions so, as to comprehend the neighbourhood. Happy within, every family would delight to extend its happiness to all without, who are near enough to know, and to share, its kind offices. The beams of charity would shine from one habitation to another; and every hamlet and village would be formed into a constellation of beauty and splendour. Peace, the sister of Love, and Joy, the third in that delightful family, would be constant visitants at every fireside; and spread their smiles, and their influence, over every collection of human dwellings.

To the poor, the wanderer, and the stranger, every door would be open, to invite them in; every heart would welcome their entrance; and every hand, relieve their wants and distresses. The rich would be rich, only to bless; and the poor would be poor, only to be blessed. The great would employ their ten talents in gaining more; and the small, their one talent in the same honourable and profitable exchange. Kings and rulers would be, indeed, what they have been styled, but in many instances, without a claim to the character; the Fathers of their country. The iron rod of oppression would be finally broken, and cast away; and the golden sceptre of love, and peace, and charity, would be extended for the encouragement, and relief, of all who approached. Bribery, intrigue, caballing, and the whole train of public corruptors, would be hissed out of the habitations of men; and the courts of rulers become, not the scenes of guilt and mischief, but the residence of honour, dignity, and Evangelical example.

Nor would this great bond of perfectness merely unite the members of a single community with each other; but extending its power, like the attraction of the sun, would join all nations in one common union of peace and good-will. No more would the trumpet summon to arms; no more would the beacon kindle its fires, to spread the alarm of invasion; no more would the instruments of death be furbished against the day of battle. The sword would be literally beaten into a ploughshare, and the spear into a pruning hook; nation would no more lift up sword against nation; nor kingdom against kingdom; neither would they learn war any more. The human wolf, forgetting all his native ferocity, would cease to thirst for the blood of the lamb; and cruelty, slaughter, and desolation, to lay waste the miserable habitations of men. The walls, within and without which, violence resounded, and ravaged, would be called SALVATION; and the gates, before which destruction frowned at the head of an invading host, would be surnamed PRAISE.

V. The same disposition would manifest itself in universal and unceasing piety to God.

VOL. III.

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The Infinite Mind is the Infinite Benefactor of the Universe. As the Source and Centre of all existence; as the great Benefactor of all beings; as the Subject of divine blessedness, and excellence; God would be regarded by such a disposition with supreme benevolence and complacency. Piety is nothing but this disposi tion, directed to this great and glorious Being. The love, which is the fulfilling of the second command of the moral Law, is also perfect obedience to the first, which is like unto the second. Without love, fear becomes a base and pernicious passion, totally destitute of amiableness, and excellency; united with love, or in a mind where love reigns, it is changed into the sublime character of Reverence; the proper and filial regard to God from his children. Dependence without love, is nothing. Without love, Confidence cannot exist. Hope and Joy equally spring from it. Gratitude is but one manner, in which it is exercised.

He, who loves his neighbour, on any account, with the benevolence of the Gospel, will, and must, of course, love his Creator. If he exercises evangelical confidence at all; he cannot but exercise it supremely in God. If he be grateful to a human benefactor; he must be beyond measure, more grateful to the divine Benefactor. If he love moral excellence at all; he must, more than in all other excellence, delight in that, which glows with unceasing glory in the Eternal Mind.

In God, therefore, this desirable disposition would find the highest object of all its attachments, the supreme end of all its conduct. To him the devotion of such a spirit would be complete, unceasing, and endless. To please, obey, and glorify him would be the instinctive, and the commanding, aim of the man, in whom it was found; and, in the case supposed, in all men. All men would be changed into children of God. The earth would become one universal temple, from which prayer, and praise, and faith, and love, would ascend before the throne of God and the Lamb, every morning and every evening. Time, hitherto a period of sense and sin, of impiety, and rebellion, would be converted into an universal sabbath of peace and worship. Holiness to the Lord would be written on all the pursuits and employments of mankind. Zion, the city of our God, would extend its walls from the rising to the setting sun; and comprehend all the great family of Adam within its circuit; while on its gates would be inscribed in immortal characters, JEHOVAH IS HERE.

Let me now ask, whether the Love of the Gospel, the spirit of doing good, is not in the view of all, who hear me, a disposition more desirable, than the present disposition of Man? Think what the world now is; and what, since the apostacy, it ever has been. Call to mind the private wretchedness, guilt, and debasement, which, within and without you, deform the human character, and destroy human happiness. Call to mind the public sins, which have blackened the world from the beginning; and the public

miseries, which have rung with groans, and shrieks, throughout the whole reign of time, and from one end of heaven to the other. What a vast proportion of these evils has man created for himself, and his fellow-creatures! How small a portion has God created! and how mild and proper a punishment has this been for the authors of the rest! Of this complication of guilt and wo, every man is, in some degree, the subject, and the author. All men are daily employed in complaining of others; and none, almost, in reforming themselves. Were each individual to begin the task of withdrawing from the common mass the evils which he occasions, the work would be easily done. Those, produced by men, would be annihilated, and those, occasioned by God, would cease; because, where there were no transgressions, God would not exercise his strange work of punishment.

How mighty would be the change! Benevolence would take place of malignity, friendship of contention, peace of war, truth of falsehood, and happiness of misery. This dreary world would become a Paradise. The brutal, deformed character of man, would give place to the holiness and dignity of angels, and all the perplexed, melancholy, and distressing scene of time would assume the order, beauty, and glory, of the celestial system.

With the nature and effects of the present human character, the selfishness of man, so fondly, proudly, and obstinately cherished by every human breast, you are all, at least in some degree, acquainted. It is scarcely necessary, that I should recall to your minds the universal corruption of the antediluvian world; and the violence and pollution, which rendered this earth too impure, and deformed, to be any longer seen by the perfect eye of JEHOVAH. It is scarcely necessary to remind you of the premature apostacy, which followed the deluge; the brutal idolatry, which, like a cloud from the bottomless pit, darkened this great globe to the four ends of heaven; the putrid infection, which tainted Sodom and Gomorrah; the rank and rotten growth of sin, which poisoned and destroyed the nations of Canaan; the deplorable defections of Israel and Judah; the bloody oppressions of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia; the monstrous ambition, and wild ravages, of Alexander; the base treacheries, and deformed cruelties, of his followers; the iron-handed plunder, butchery, and devastation of Rome; the terrible ravages of Mohammed and his disciples; or the fearful waste of man by Alaric, Attila, and their barbarous companions in slaughter. As little necessity is there to detail the wars, and ruins, of modern EUROPE; the massacres of the Romish Hierarchy, the tortures of the Inquisition, the absolutions and indulgencies issued from the Vatican, to pardon sin, and to sanction rebellion against God. Your minds must be familiarized to the lamentable degradation, the amazing miseries, the death-like slavery of the nations, which fill the continent of Africa. You cannot be unacquainted with the swinish brutism of the Chinese; the more brutal deformi

ty, the tiger-like thirst for blood, of the Hindoos and of the strangers, who have successively invaded Hindostan; the fell and fiendlike cruelty that has made modern Persia a desert; the stupid, but furious superstition, and the tainted impurity of Turkey. To these monstrous corruptions, these wonderful sins of nations claiming, generally, the name of civilized, add the crimes of the savage world; and fasten your eyes for a moment on the wolfish rage, which reigns, and riots, in the human animals, prowling, regularly,

for blood and havoc around the deserts of America and Asia: and you will be presented with an imperfect, but for my purpose a sufficient, exemplification of the spirit, which rules the heart of man, and actuates the vast family of Adam.

But this spirit is unnecessary to man. The disposition, which I have described, might just as easily inform the mind, and control the conduct. We might as easily be benevolent, as selfish; virtuous as sinful. No new faculties are necessary; and no change is required, but of the disposition. How superior is the disposition, here illustrated, to that, whose effects have been so uniformly dreadful! Hitherto I have used the language of supposition only; and have declared, that, if such were the character of our race, such also would be the state of this unhappy world. Now I inform you, that such, one day, will be the true character and state of man.

The period will one day arrive: the period is now on the wing: the day will certainly dawn: the morning-star is, perhaps, even now ascending in the east, of that day, in which Christ will return, and reign on the earth. I neither intend, nor believe, that he will appear in person, until the great and final day, which the Scriptures emphatically call his second coming; for the heavens must receive him until the times of the restitution of all things. But he will appear in his Providence, and by his Spirit, to renew the face of the earth. A new heart and a right spirit will he create within them. His law he will write in their hearts; and his fear will he put in their minds; and their sins, and their iniquities, will he remember no more. This new heart, this right spirit, will be no other than the disposition, which has been here considered; the very obedience of the Law, which will be thus written; the new creation, which is thus promised.

By the implantation of this holy character in the soul, a change will be accomplished, which is exhibited in the Scriptures in terms of hyperbolical and singular sublimity. In their present state of Apostacy, mankind are considered in this sacred volume, as being all buried in a death-like sleep. From this benumbing lethargy, hopeless and endless, unless removed by Almighty power, they are represented as roused anew to consciousness, to feeling, and to action, by the awakening voice of God. In the present state, they are declared to be madmen; groping in the gloom, wantoning in the excesses, and venting the rage, of Bedlam In the new one,