Would they not give " a great sum" for "this freedom?" Alas! they gave the sum of all their moral feeling, and all their religious faith; they threw into one extravagant heap all the pillars on which human society is reared, and all the ornaments by which it is graced: they even raised their impious hand against the majesty of Heaven itself, and would have torn down the eternal throne, and piled it on the costly ruins which their madness had accumulated!" Verily, verily,

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they have had their reward!" And they now stand forth "an ensample" to men, that where the national mind is corrupt, there no seeds of freedom will grow; that, from the polluted hearts of a people, the waters of public, as well as of private bitterness flow; and that, from this unseen source, they at length come into open day, and burst into a deluge red with human blood, and sweeping before

it all the mounds of the security and happiness of nations.

Let us now contemplate the reverse of this picture; we shall find it in the history of a nobler people-in the history of those illustrious men who delivered to us the inheritance of freedom. They, too, had their seasons of civil and religious excesses, yet, in the midst of these, they were never abandoned by principle : they might err, indeed, for they were men, but theirs were the errors of high and pure minds. It was never from throwing off, but in drawing, perhaps, too tight, the fetters of religion, that they were sometimes to be blamed: and the God whom they feared forgave them their excesses, and blessed their virtuous toils, till at length they reared on the rock of the British constitution, that church which they revered, and that liberty which they loved. They, too, gave "a great sum" for "this

"freedom :" but it was the sum of patient thought, and of persevering exertion, the sum of unbending faith, and of uncorrupted integrity; the sum of a loyalty, which only hard necessity could shake, and of obedience to law, which not even the love of that freedom could overcome !—They likewise "have had their reward!" They have left behind them the noblest monument of legislative wisdom which the world has yet beheld: they have left names which will live as long as the memory of virtue remains among men: and now, from those celestial seats, where they are crowned with immortal wreaths, they look down upon their free-born sons, and tell them, in this hour of peril, that the inheritance of freedom can only be preserved by the same uncorrupted principles by which it was won.

Go, then, in obedience to this holy call, my brethren, and say not, that in

your private stations you can be of no service to your country. Go to your own hearts, and root out from them every thing that is base, and degenerate, and infirm. Look to the ancestors from whom you are sprung, and walk in the steps of their faith and their integrity: Go to the volume of salvation, which they left in your hands, and draw from its pure fountains the streams of inspiring hope and unpolluted righteousness. Do this for yourselves, and do it for your children. When we examine the course of great men, we forget the simple beginnings from which it rose: Yet it was in the shades of domestic privacy that our Abercrombies and our Nelsons first listened to the call of duty; and at this hour, when a venerable mother is weeping over her heroic son,* whose name, alas! has too soon been classed with

* Sir John Moore.

theirs, while all the gratitude of his Country, mingling its tears with hers, will scarcely avail to calm her sorrows, she will yet feel one exulting throb when she remembers that from her lips he first heard the sacred name of VIRTUE!

Among the moral qualities, there is one disposition of mind which the present circumstances of our country and of mankind call upon me particularly to recommend to your cultivation: I mean FORTITUDE,-fortitude to act, and fortitude to suffer. When we look forward into futurity, no prospect whatever appears of any speedy termination to the miseries of the world: That hope which we were lately so willing to indulge is now, to say the least, heavily overcast. The generous sympathy which led us to support the struggles of a gallant people has only involved ourselves in deeper calamities: The tide of atro