6

sporting in profane oaths and curses with the tremendous name of the Supreme Being. Because of swearing the land mourneth,' said a Prophet, thousands of years ago; and what land even in Christendom, yea, what parish in this Reformed island mourns not, or ought not to mourn, for the same provoking crime?-—a crime, which is the hellish offspring of practical atheism and Heathenish insolence-a crime, that brings neither profit, honour, nor pleasure to the profane wretch who commits it-a crime, for which he may be put to open shame, forced to appear before a magistrate, and sent for ten days to the house of correction, unless he pays an ignominious fine; and what is more awful still,—a crime, which, if persisted in, will one day cause him to gnaw his impious tongue in the severest torments. Surely man, who drinks this insipid, and yet destructive, iniquity like water, must have his moral taste strangely vitiated, not to say, diabolically perverted.

2ndly. The most ridiculous sins. In what country, town, or village, do not women betray their silly vanity? Is it not the same foolish disposition of heart, which makes them bore their ears in Europe, and slit their noses in America, that they may unnaturally graft in their flesh pieces of glass, shining pebbles, glittering gold, or trinkets of meauer metal? And when female Hottentots fancy they add to the importance of their filthy person, by some yards of the bloody intestines of a beast, twisted round their arms or necks, do they not evidence the very spirit of the ladies in our hemisphere, who too often measure their dignity by the yards of coloured silk bands, with which they crown themselves, and turn the grave matron into a pitiful May-queen?

3dly. The most inhuman sins. "A hundred thousand mad animals, whose heads are covered with hats," says Voltaire," advance to kill, or to be killed by, the like number of their fellow-mortal, covered with turbans. By this strange procedure they want, at best, to decide whether a tract of land, to which none of them all lays any claim, shall belong to a certain man whom they call Sultan, or to another whom they name Cæsar,

neither of whom ever saw, or will see the spot so furiously contended for: And very few of those creatures, who thus mutually butcher one another, ever beheld the animal for whom they cut each other's throats! From time immemorial this has been the way of mankind almost all over the earth. What an excess of madness is this! And how deservedly might a superior being crush to atoms this earthly ball, the bloody nest of such ridiculous murderers!"

The same author makes elsewhere the following reflections, on the same melancholy subject: "Famine, pestilence, and war, are the three most famous ingredients of this lower world. The two first come from God; but the last, in which all three concur, comes from the imagination of princes or ministers.-A king fancies that he has a right to a distant province. He raises a multitude of men, who have nothing to do, and nothing to lose; gives them a red coat and a laced hat, and makes them wheel to the right, wheel to the left, and march to glory. Five or six of these belligerent powers sometimes engage together, three against three, or two against four: But whatever part they take, they all agree in one point, which is, to do their neighbour all possible mischief. The most astonishing thing, belonging to their infernal undertaking, is, that every ringleader of those murderers, gets his colours consecrated, and solemnly blessed in the name of God, before he marches up to the destruction of his fellowcreatures. If a chief warrior has had the good fortune of getting only two or three thousand men slaughtered, he does not think it worth his while to thank God for it: But if ten thousand have been destroyed by fire and sword, and if, to complete this good fortune, some capital city has been totally overthrown; a day of public thanksgiving is appointed on the joyful occasion. Is not that a fine art which carries such desolation through the earth; and, one year with another, destroys forty thousand men out of a hundred thousand?" 4thly. The most impious sins; for instance that of idolatry: "Before the coming of Christ," says a late

divine, "all the polite and barbarous nations among the Heathens, plunged into it with equal blindness. And the Jews were so strongly wedded to it, that God's miraculous interposition, both by dreadful judgments and astonishing mercies, could not for eight hundred years restrain them from committing it in the grossest manner."

Nor need we look at either Heathens or Jews to see the proneness of mankind to that detestable crime : Christians alone can prove the charge. To this day, the greatest part of them pray to dead men and dead women; bow to images of stone, and crosses of wood; and make, adore, and swallow down, the wafer-God: And those, who pity them for this ridiculous idolatry, till converting grace interposes, daily set up their idols in their hearts,' and, without going to the plain of Dura, sacrifice all to the king's 'golden image.'

And 5thly. The most diabolical sin; persecution, that favourite offspring of Satan transformed into an angel of light. Persecution, that bloody, hypocritical monster, which carries a Bible, a Liturgy, and a bundle of Canons in one hand; with fire faggots, and all the weapons invented by cruelty in the other; and with sanctified looks, distresses, racks, or murders men, either because they love God, or because they cannot all think alike.

Time would fail to tell of those, who, on religious accounts, have been stoned and sawn asunder by the Jews, cast to the lions and burned by the Heathens, strangled and impaled by the Mahometans, and butchered all manner of ways by the Christians.

Yes, we must confess it, Christian Rome hath glutted herself with the blood of martyrs, which Heathenish Rome had but comparatively tasted: And when Protestants fled from her bloody pale, they brought along with them too much of her bloody spirit. Prove the sad assertion, poor Servetus! When a Romish Inquisition had forced thee to fly to Geneva, what reception didst thou meet with in that Reformed city? Alas! the Papists had burned thee in effigy; the Protestants

burned thee in reality, and Moloch triumphed to see the two opposite parties agree in offering him the human sacrifice.

So universally restless is the spirit of persecution which inspires the unrenewed part of mankind, that when people of the same religion have no outward opposer to tear, they bark at, bite, and devour one another. Is it not the same bitter zeal, that made the Pharisees and Sadducees among the Jews, and now makes the sects of Ali and Omar among the Mahometaus, those of the Jausenists and Molinists among the Papists, and those of the Calvinists and Arminians among the Protestants, oppose each other with such acrimony and virulence?

But let us look around us at home: When persecuting Popery had almost expired in the fires, in which it burned our first church-men, how soon did those who survived them commence persecutors of the Presbyterians? When these, forced to fly to New England for rest, got there the staff of power in their hand, did they not in their turn fall upon, and even hang the Quakers? And now that an act of toleration binds the monster, and the lash of pens consecrated to the defence of our civil and religious liberties, makes him either afraid or ashamed of roaring aloud for his prey; does he not show, by his supercilious looks, malicious sneers, and settled contempt of vital piety, what he would do, should an opportunity offer? And does he not still, under artful pretences, go to the utmost length of his chain, to wound the reputation of those, whom he cannot devour, and inflict at least academic death* upon those whose persons are happily secured from his rage?

O ye unconverted among mankind, if all these abominations every where break out upon you; what cages of unclean birds, what nests swarming with cruel vipers, are your 'deceitful and desperately wicked hearts!'

* See Pietas Oxoniensis.

TWENTY-FIFTH ARGUMENT.

How dreadfully fallen is man, if he has not only a propensity to commit the above-mentioned sins, but to transgress the divine commands with a variety of shocking aggravations!—Yes, mankind are prone to sin :

1. Immediately, by a kind of evil instinct: As children, who peevishly strike the very breast they suck; and betray the rage of their little hearts, by sobbing aud swelling, sometimes till, by forcing their bowels out of their place, they bring a rupture upon themselves; and frequently till they are black in the faces, and almost suffocated.-II. Deliberately, as those, who, having life and death clearly set before them, wilfully and obstinately choose the way that leads to certain destruction.-III. Repeatedly: Witness liars, who, because their crime costs them but a breath, frequently commit it at every breath.-IV. Continually, as rakes, who would make their whole life one uninterrupted scene of debauchery, if their exhausted strength, or purse, did not force them to intermit their lewd practices; though not without a promise to renew them again at the first convenient opportunity.-V. Treacherously, as those Christians, who forget divine mercies, and their own repeated resolutions, break through the solemn vows and promises made in their sacraments, and sinning with a high hand against their profession perfidiously fly in the face of their conscience, the church, and their Saviour.-VI. Daringly, as those who steal under the gallows, openly insult their parents or their king, laugh at all laws human and divine, and put to defiance all that are invested with power to see them executed.-VII. Triumphantly, as the vast number of those who glory in their shame, sound aloud the trumpet of their own wickedness, and boast of their horrid, repeated debaucheries, as admirable and praiseworthy deeds.-VIII. Progressively, till they have filled up the measure of their iniquities, as individuals: Witness Judas, who, from covetousness, proceeded to hypocrisy,