service and merit. To be attacked, and not defended, is the same as to be defeated. The adversary does, and will, attack it follows therefore, that we must either defend, or submit, and give a triumph to men who will not fail to vaunt it, to the great emolument of a scheme and cause we still think pernicious.

No one thing gives the declared enemies of Christianity so great an advantage against it, as our scandalous divisions on the essential articles of faith. Now, though these divisions are by no means owing to the obscurity of revela tion, but to the manifest obliquity, both of understanding and heart, in those pretended Christians, who, through pride, prejudice, and other vices, are not to be concluded by Scripture; yet, as long as these continue, the enemies of our religion will always charge them to the account of revelation; to that of reason, which they conceitedly adore, as all-sufficient, they never will. They will be as far from charging our disputes in points too important to be ob scurely revealed, on any irregularity of the human heart, wherein, blinded by a manifest sympathy with the intestine perverters of Christianity, they will see no corruption, no undue influence over the judgment of a deistical Christian.

To believe, as the Deists do, that our fundamental dif ferences are owing to the obscurity of revelation, is to give up the cause of Christianity; for we cannot believe this, and yet believe, that the Scriptures are the word of God, without a blasphemous denial of both his wisdom and goodness. That the contentions therefore of Christians, in regard to the very essentials of the religion they profess, may be no longer turned into an infamous reflection on that religion, it is necessary our sentiments on the fundamentals should be a little more conformable; in short, that we should have but one creed, and that this creed should be as ancient as the church of Christ; because the conformity of any one age with itself is not more requisite to this purpose, than the conformity of all ages with one another. He, whose labours are aimed at this end, serves the cause of Christianity as effectually, as he who endeavours to defend it against a general attack; first, because intestine dissensions are worse than foreign wars; and secondly, because

it is in vain to apologize for Christianity, till we shew what Christianity is, and have made it evident, that we have a common Christianity. If the new Jerusalem continues as much embroiled within itself, as the old, it is easy to foresee the success of its besiegers. The candid part of mankind now plainly perceive, the Deists can no longer, either maintain their own principles, nor any otherwise materially wound Christianity, than through the dissensions of its adherents. The Scriptures, they say, and we own it, command us to stand fast in the faith,' and tell us, 'the faith is one;' but this, they farther urge, cannot be the command of God, since the same Scriptures, from which we extract our various systems of faith, are found, in fact, and by experience, to be either too dark or too undeterminate, to give mankind any one system. Hence they insist, that 'the unity of faith,' spoken of in Scripture is unattainable; and consequently, the command, that all should stand fast in one faith impracticable and unreasonable. To prove that the Scripture is sufficiently decisive on the great articles of the religion it reveals, and therefore that the command is reasonable, and worthy of God, is the chief purport of the following discourses. How far the author hath succeeded in his attempt, you, gentlemen, will be the best able to judge. If by his poor endeavours it shall appear, to the satisfaction of a reader content to follow him through a work so short and summary, that the Scriptures are sufficiently clear and determinate on the great points of faith, though controverted among the professors of Christianity; the world will then know where to look for the source of its own disputes; and will be forced to find it in the violence of its own passions, which it will not subdue; in the blindness of its own prejudices, which it will not suspect; and in the imbecility of its own reason, which, though men may idolize to the full extent of their vanity, hath suffered them to differ as widely in all other branches of knowledge, wherewith interest or inclination hath had any opportunity of interfering. As to the command enforcing unanimity in the faith, the disobedience, in that respect, of persons professing Christianity, ought no more to derogate from the reasonableness of the injunction, than their disobedience to the decalogue is allowed to do from the goodness and

utility of its precepts. Indeed experience hath made it but too manifest, that the different degrees of latitude, taken by the professors of our religion, either in thinking or acting, proceed from the different degrees of indulgence, wherewith they treat their constitutional tempers, their own natural inclinations and aversions; and that they call that freedom of thinking, whatsoever it is, which licenses their liberty of acting as they please. If variety of interpretations, more or less remote from the simple interpretation of the words, are put on the doctrinal part of revelation; variety of interpretations, more or less deviating from the strictness of the expressions, are also put on its moral precepts. But whereas there is no receiving the doctrines of Christianity in their genuine purity, without, at the same time, receiving its injunctions in their utmost severity; a latitude of interpretation must therefore be found out, which may bend the former to our own reason, and the latter to our own inclination; and then, but not till then, we are our own teachers and lawgivers, our own masters and governors.

Whether the world, according to the fastidious maxim of some men, is really overstocked with sermons, &c. or not, the clergy, nevertheless, go on making new ones every day, and preaching them, on a supposition, it seems, that they are not absolutely unnecessary. If the neglect of them only is considered, all that are already in being may be burnt, without a very sensible loss, at least to the objectors, who would disrelish even a novel, were it entitled a sermon. But if the expediency of such compositions, as means of instruction and reformation, is to be estimated by the ignorance, the errors, and vices, of mankind, it may be modestly enough presumed, we are not, to this day, sufficiently furnished. Are the clergy, because one part only in four of the seed falls on good ground, and the other three on bad, to sow no more? or, in case the methods, whereby conviction and persuasion were effected in one age, do not succeed in another, of a quite different turn and genius, are our teachers to shut up their mouths, and lay aside their pens, rather than attempt the great work they are intrusted with, in a method more suitable to the present times? Epictetus tells us, every thing hath two handles; one,

whereby it may be easily seized and managed; and another, of which the contrary is true. The same may be said of every man; nay, of every age of men. Two centuries ago, there was no convincing any man, although on points that now seem too obvious to need a demonstration, but by mode and figure; whereas, at present, an argument in that form would be taken for a spell by some, and for a nonsensical piece of affectation by others. We, who are old, can remember the time, when it was customary with the clergy successfully to persuade men by the terrors of the Lord;' but the ears of this age are too delicate, or our consciences too raw, to endure with patience an application so caustic; and therefore we say to our teachers, as the Israelites did to Isaiah and the other prophets, 'Prophesy not unto us right things; speak unto us smooth things; prophesy deceits.' But what saith God to that prophet, in reference to this very people? Cry aloud, spare not; lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins.' How exactly parallel is our case to that of the Israelites! We call for smooth things, and deceits, as they did; but where is the trumpet loud enough to rouse us, unless that which shall raise the dead? For some time past, not only the controversy about morality, but the disputes also between Christian and Deist, and between the Orthodox and Ariaus, have been shamefully abandoned to the futilities of a feebler philosophy, than even the false wisdom exploded by Christianity of old. The dictates of God himself have been preposterously submitted to the weak reasonings, and even to the vicious prejudices of men, pretending to believe the Scriptures, although they suffer the contents of the sacred volumes to interfere, at best, but as seconds to their own opinions. In the mean time, every one, having dressed out religion in a garb of his own fancying, hath given his opposites an occasion to tear it in pieces, while they pretended to tear away the disguise only. Out of this confusion have arisen, first, doubts and diffidence; from thence infidelity, and a contempt of all things sacred; and from thence again, such a universal scene of pollution and wickedness, as shocks the eyes of one, who is but moderately criminal, to survey: for what is to be seen in it, but kingdoms given

up to faction and ambition; estates, to gaming and sharping; oaths, to bribery and corruption; and the consciences and persons of both sexes, to prostitutions too flagitious to be named? ، Shall not God visit for these things ? or, till he does, shall not his ministers cry aloud against them, as well in the principle as the practice, if, speaking in a lower voice, they have not been heard? Shall they not 'set their faces like a flint,' and whet their words to daggers, when an age like this is to be reproved? Will splitting of hairs, or going half the way, with heretics, a method too long tried, resettle us all in the truth? Or will feebly moralizing on the beauty of virtue, and the deformity of vice, in pursuit of the present affected practice, reform a generation so hardened in wickedness?

No, Gentlemen ; such expedients, you are sensible, can never answer the ends proposed. Success is not to be hoped for on all occasions, from the pursuit of any one method. If there is any good to be done by preaching, although the principles are not to be changed, yet surely the manner must be diversified, according as the genius and disposition of mankind vary. The errors and vices of one age differ so widely, either in substance or circumstance, from those of another, that to reason always on the same points, and from the same topics; or to attempt persuasion, on all occasions, in the same strain; is to talk wide of those we address to; is to speak to them in a language they either do not understand, or feel. Is there a possibility, I mean with any prospect of success, of accommodating the same species of admonition to those who tremble, and to those who presume? Or, is a debate, especially on a religious subject, to be managed in the same manner with a modest and candid inquirer after truth, and with a still impudent, though detected, sophister? We should, I humbly conceive, neither presumptuously dictate to the former, nor meanly waste our arguments on the latter. The first merits all our affection, be his present opinións never so detestable in our eyes. But it is our duty to drag out the last from the coverture of his impious arts, and to scourge him with scorpions in the sight of his deluded admirers, that, if they did not choose him for a guide, because they previously knew him to be a deceiver, they may learn to