SERMON XIX.

ON THE FAST, FEBRUARY 1811.

ROMANS, xii. 21.

"Be not overcome of evil; but overcome evil with good."

AGAIN, my brethren, we are assembled by the command of the Throne, in one of the most solemn of our religious duties; to humble ourselves before the God of the universe, and, in the midst of national calamity, to implore His blessing upon our councils and our arms. Year follows year, but none of them brings with

it any promise of peace, or any pause from the miseries of war; and the wings of time, heavily as they pass by us, are still wet with human tears, and still drop with human blood.

There are yet more striking circumstances, which the hours in which we meet bring almost involuntarily into our remembrance.

The whole Christian world are, at this season, united in the common service of penitence and meditation ;—the gates of every church are open to the contrite and the sorrowful;-from a thousand languages, one uniform voice of prayer and of repentance reaches the ear of Heaven ;and it is in this sacred season that ambition is preparing its plans, and war meditating its progress ;—and that, to gratify the insatiable avidities of conquest, every guilt and every woe is to be let loose upon the unoffending race of man, and

"the earth again to be covered with vio "lence and blood." It is at this season,

too, that the spring of nature is returning; that the sun is rising in his strength; and that the breath of Heaven is blowing to awaken, over the universe, all the various family of its love;-and it is at this beneficent season, that man is advancing to the work of desolation ;-that no sympathy with Heaven softens his ruthless heart;-that the march of armies is to tread upon all the prodigality of Providence ;-and that the dark atrocity of ambition relents not (while it calculates its numbers) at the thousands of human souls whom it is to send, ere the season expires, to their final and their unprepared account.

If, of such miserics, we, my brethren, were the authors;-if it were our ambition or injustice which created this dark catalogue of crime;-if it were the dread

Justs of power, or of wealth, which now unsheathed the sword of this country, whatever might be the triumphs that the vulgar tongue might tell, or the vulgar ear receive, the language of this place at least, must ever have been of a different kind. The voice of the Gospel mingles with hesitation with the voice of war, and when the avarice or ambition of nations sends forth, amid a peaceful world, "the flame of the sword, and the

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lightning of the spear," the only language in which religion can express itself, is the plaintive, but awful language of the prophet. "Blow the trumpet in "Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn as"sembly. Gather the people; sanctify "the congregation; assemble the elders, " and the children, and they that suck the "breast and let the priests, and the "ministers of the Lord, weep between the "porch and the altar, and let them say,

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Spare thy people, O Lord, and give "not thy heritage to reproach;" and even, while the world was resounding with the shouts of victory and of triumph, the only prayer which religion could pronounce, would be the melancholy one of contrition and of sorrow. "Turn thou us, O God of goodness, and “we shall be turned. Be yet favourable "to thy people, who turn to thee in "weeping, and fasting, and prayer."Turn us, O God of hosts, from all the " evil of our ways; shew the light of thy "countenance, and we shall yet be whole."

It is, however, I trust, my brethren, under very different circumstances that we are now assembled; and that it is with a less trembling voice, that we may now present our prayers unto Heaven. Whatever was the occasional origin of that war in which we have so long been engaged-whatever were the views of