evidently struck at, most certainly, in every such crime, and therefore he would pursue it; it being the reason, in the ninth of Genesis, upon which the prohibition of murder is grounded; for in the image of God created he man: as if to attempt the life of a man had something in it peculiarly daring and audacious; not only shocking as to its consequence above all other crimes, but of personal violence and indignity against God, the author of our life and death. That it is the highest act of injustice to man, and which will admit of no compensation, I have said. But depriving a man of life does not comprehend the whole of his suffering: he may be cut off in an unprovided or disordered condition, with regard to the great account betwixt himself and his Maker. He may be under the power of irregular passions and desires. The best of men are not always upon their guard. And I am sure we have all reason to join in that affecting part of our Litany, that amongst other evils, God would deliver us from sudden death; that we may have some foresight of that period to compose our spirits, prepare our accounts, and put ourselves in the best posture we can to meet it; for, after we are most prepared, it is a terror to human nature.

The people of some nations are said to have a peculiar art in poisoning by slow and gradual advances. In this case, however horrid, it savours of mercy with regard to our spiritual state; for the sensible decays of nature which a sufferer must feel within him from the secret workings of the horrid drug, give warning, and show that mercy which the bloody hand that comes upon his neighbour suddenly, and slays him with guile, has denied him. It may serve to admonish him of the duty of repentance, and to make his peace with God, whilst he has time and opportunity. The speedy execution of justice, which, as our laws now stand, and which were intended for that end, must strike the greater terror upon that account. Short as the interval between sentence and death is, it is long, compared to the case of the murdered. Thou allowedst the man no time, said the judge to a late criminal, in a most affecting manner, -thou allowedst him not a moment to prepare for eternity; and to one who thinks at all, it is, of all reflections and self-accusation, the most insurmountable. That by the hand of violence, a man in a perfect state of health, whilst he walks out in perfect security, as he thinks, with his friends, perhaps whilst he is sleeping soundly, to be hurried out of the world by the assassin-by a sudden stroke-to find himself at the bar of God's justice, without notice and preparation for trial,-'tis most horrible!

Though he be really a good man (and it is to be hoped God makes merciful allowances in such cases), yet it is a terrifying consideration at the best; and as the injury is greater, there are also very aggravating circumstances relating to the

person who commits this act ;-as when it is the effect, not of a rash and sudden passion, which sometimes disorders and confounds reason for a moment, but of a deliberate and prepense design or malice; when the sun not only goes down, but rises upon his wrath; when he sleeps not till he has struck the stroke; when, after he has had time and leisure to recollect himself, and consider what he is going to do,-when, after all the checks of conscience, the struggles of huma nity, the recoilings of his own blood at the thoughts of shedding another man's,-he shall persist still, and resolve to do it. Merciful God! protect us from doing or suffering such evils. Blessed be thy name and providence, which seldom or never suffers it to escape with impunity. In vain does the guilty flatter himself with hopes of secrecy or impunity: the eye of God is always upon him. Whither can he fly from his presence? By the immensity of his nature, he is present in all places; by the infinity of it, to all times; by his omniscience, to all thoughts, words, and actions of men. By an emphatical phrase in Scripture, the blood of the innocent is said to cry to heaven from the ground for vengeance; and it was for this reason, that he might be brought to justice, that he was debarred the benefit of any asylum and the cities of refuge. For the elders of his city shall send and fetch him thence, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of blood, and their eye should not pity him.

The text says, Thou shalt take him from my altar that he may die. It had been a very ancient imagination that, for men guilty of this and other horrid crimes, a place held sacred, and dedicated to God, was a refuge and protection to them from the hands of justice. The law of God cuts the transgressor off from all delusive hopes of this kind; and I think the Romish Church has very little to boast of in the sanctuaries which she leaves open for this and other crimes and irregularities, sanctuaries which are often the first temptations to wickedness, and therefore bring the greater scandal and dishonour to her that authorizes their pretensions.

Every obstruction of the course of justice is a door opened to betray society, and bereave us of those blessings which it has in view. To stand up for the privileges of such places is to invite men to sin with a bribe of impunity. It is a strange way of doing honour to God, to screen actions which are a disgrace to humanity.

What Scripture and all civilised nations teach concerning the crime of taking away another man's life, is applicable to the wickedness of a man's attempting to bereave himself of his own. He has no more right over it than over that of others; and whatever false glosses have been put upon it by men of bad heads or bad hearts, it is at the bottom a complication of cowardice, and wickedness, and weakness; is one of the fatalest mistakes desperation can hurry a man

into; inconsistent with all the reasoning and religion of the world, and irreconcilable with that patience under afflictions, that resignation and submission to the will of God in all straits, which is required of us. But if our calamities are brought upon ourselves by a man's own wickedness, still has he less to urge,-Icast reason has he to renounce the protection of God when he most stands in need of it, and of his mercy.

But as I intend the subject of self-murder for my discourse next Sunday, I shall not anticipate what I have to say, but proceed to consider some other cases in which the law relating to the life of our neighbour is transgressed in different degrees; all which are generally spoken of under the subject of murder, and considered by the best casuists as a species of the same, and, in justice to the subject, cannot be passed here.

St. John says, Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer-it is the first step to this sin; and our Saviour, in his sermon upon the mount, has explained in how many slighter and unsuspected ways and degrees the command in the law, Thou shalt do no murder, may be opposed, if not broken. All real mischiefs and injuries maliciously brought upon a man, to the sorrow and disturbance of his mind, eating out the comfort of his life and shortening his days, are this sin in disguise; and the ground of the Scripture expressing it with such severity is, that the beginnings of wrath and malice, in event, often extend to such great and unforeseen effects as, were we foretold them, we should give so little credit to, as to say, Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing? And though these beginnings do not necessarily produce the worst (God forbid they should !), yet they cannot be committed without these evil seeds are first sown;-as Cain's causeless anger (as Dr. Clarke observes) against his brother, to which the Apostle alludes, ended in taking away his life ;and the best instructors teach us, that to avoid a sin, we must avoid the steps and temptations which lead to it.

This should warn us to free our minds from all tincture of avarice, and desire after what is another man's. It operates the same way, and has terminated too oft in the same crime. And it is the great excellency of the Christian religion, that it has an eye to this in the stress laid upon the first springs of evil in the heart; rendering us accountable not only for our words, but the thoughts themselves, if not checked in time, but suffered to proceed further than the first motions of concupiscence.

Ye have heard, therefore, says our Saviour, that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, 'Thou fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire. The interpreta

tion of which I shall give you in the words of a great scripturist, Dr. Clarke, and is as follows:That the three gradations of crimes are an allusion to the three different degrees of punishment in the three courts of judicature amongst the Jews. And our Saviour's meaning was, that every degree of sin, from its first conception to its outrage, every degree of malice and hatred, shall receive from God a punishment proportionable to the offence; whereas the old law, according to the Jewish interpretation, extended not to these things at all-forbade only murder and outward injuries. Whosoever shall say, 'Thou fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire. The sense of which is not that, in the strict and literal acceptation, every rash and passionate expression shall be punished with eternal damnation (for who then would be saved?), but that, at the exact account in the judgment of the great day, every secret thought and intent of the heart shall have its just estimation and weight in the degrees of punishment which shall be assigned to every one in his final state.

There is another species of this crime which is seldom taken notice of in discourses upon the subject, and yet can be reduced to no other class; and that is, where the life of our neighbour is shortened, and often taken away as directly as by a weapon, by the empirical sale of nostrums and quack medicines, which ignorance and avarice blend. The loud tongue of ignorance impudently promises much, and the ear of the sick is open. And as many of these pretenders deal in edge tools, too many, I fear, perish with the misapplication of them.

So great are the difficulties of tracing out the hidden causes of the evils to which this frame of ours is subject, that the most candid of the profession have ever allowed and lamented how unavoidably they are in the dark. So that the best medicines, administered with the wisest heads, shall often do the mischief they were intended to prevent. These are misfortunes to which we are subject in this state of darkness; but when men without skill, without education, without knowledge either of the distemper or even of what they sell, make merchandise of the miserable, and, from a dishonest principle, trifle with the pains of the unfortunate, too often with their lives, and from the mere motive of a dishonest gain,-every such instance of a person bereft of life by the hand of ignorance can be considered in no other light than a branch of the same root. It is murder in the true sense; which, though not cognisable by our laws, by the laws of right every man's own mind and conscience must appear equally black and detestable.

In doing what is wrong, we stand chargeable with all the bad consequences which arise from the action, whether foreseen or not. And as the principal view of the empiric in those cases is not what he always pretends-the good of the

public, but the good of himself, it makes the action what it is. Under this head it may not be improper to comprehend all adulterations of medicines wilfully made worse through avarice. If a life is lost by such wilful adulterations, and it may be affirmed that, in many critical turns of an acute distemper, there is but a single cast left for the patient, the trial and chance of a single drug in his behalf, if that has wilfully been adulterated and wilfully despoiled of its best virtues, what will the vendor answer?

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May God grant we may all answer well for ourselves, that we may be finally happy. Amen.

XXXVI-SANCTITY OF THE APOSTLES. Blessed is he that shall not be offended in me.'

MATT. XI. 6.

THE general prejudices of the Jewish nation concerning the royal state and condition of the Saviour who was to come into the world, was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to the greatest part of that unhappy and prepossessed people when the promise was actually fulfilled. Whether it was altogether the traditions of their fathers, or that the rapturous expressions of their prophets, which represented the Messiah's spiritual kingdom in such extent of power and dominion, misled them into it; or that their own carnal expectations turned wilful interpreters upon them, inclining them to look for nothing but the wealth and worldly grandeur which were to be acquired under their deliverer: whether these, or that the system of temporal blessings helped to cherish them in this gross and covetous expectation, it was one of the great causes for their rejecting him. This fellow, we know not whence he is,' was the popular cry of one part; and they who seemed to know whence he was, scornfully turned it against him by the repeated query, 'Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses, and of Juda and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.' So that, though he was prepared by God to be the glory of his people Israel, yet the circumstances of humility in which he was manifested were thought a scandal to them. Strange! that he who was born their king should be born of no other virgin than Mary, the meanest of their people (for he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden), and one of the poorest too-for she had not a lamb to offer, but was purified, as Moses directed in such a case, by the oblation of a turtle-dove ;-that the Saviour of their nation, whom they expected to be ushered amidst them with all the ensigns and apparatus of royalty, should be brought forth in a stable, and answerable to distress-subjected all his life to the lowest conditions of humanity; -that whilst he lived he should not have a hole

to put his head in, nor his corpse in when be died, but his grave, too, must be the gift of charity. These were thwarting considerations to those who waited for the redemption of | Israel, and looked for it in no other shape than | the accomplishment of those golden dreams of temporal power and sovereignty which had ' filled their imaginations. The ideas were not | to be reconciled; and so insuperable an obstacle was the prejudice on one side to their belief on the other, that it literally fell out, as Simeon prophetically declared of the Messiah, that he was set forth for the fall, as well as the rising again, of many in Israel. I

This, though it was the cause of their infidelity, was, however, no excuse for it. For, whatever their mistakes were, the miracles which were wrought in contradiction to them brought conviction enough to leave them without excuse; and besides, it was natural for them to have concluded, had their preposses sions given them leave, that he who fed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes could not want power to be great; and therefore needed not to appear in the condition of poverty and meanness, had it not, on other scores, been more needful to confront the pride and vanity of the world, and to show his followers what the temper of Christianity was by the temper of its first institutor;-who, though they were offered, and he could have commanded them, despised the glories of the world, took upon him the form of a servant, and, though equal with God, yet made himself of no reputation, that he might settle, and be the example of, so holy and humble a religion, and thereby convince his disciples for ever that neither his kingdom, nor their happiness, were to be of this world. Thus the Jews might have easily argued; but when there was nothing but reason to do it with on one side, and strong prejudices, backed with interest, to maintain the dispute, upon the other, we do not find the point is always so easily determined. Although the purity of our Saviour's doctrine, and the mighty works be wrought in its support, were demonstratively stronger arguments for his divinity than the unrespected lowliness of his condition could be against it, yet the prejudice continued strong: they had been accustomed to temporal promises, so bribed to do their duty, they could not endure to think of a religion that would not promise as much as Moses did, to fill their | basket, and set them high above all nations;- ! a religion whose appearance was not great and splendid, but looked thin and meagre, ani whose principles and promises, like the curses of their law, called for sufferings, and promised persecutions.

If we take this key along with us through the New Testament, it will let us into the spirit and meaning of many of our Saviour's replies in his conferences with his disciples and

others of the Jews;-so particularly in this place, Matthew xi., when John had sent two of his disciples to inquire, Whether it was he that should come, or that they were to look for another? our Saviour, with a particular eye to this prejudice, and the general scandal he knew had risen against his religion upon this worldly account, after a recital to the messengers of the many miracles he had wrought, as that the blind received their sight, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the dead raised, all which characters, with their benevolent ends, fully demonstrated him to be the Messiah that was promised them,-he closes up his answer to them with the words of the text, And blessed is he that shall not be offended in me. Blessed is the man whose upright and honest heart will not be blinded by worldly considerations, nor hearken to his lusts and prepossessions in a truth of this moment. The like benediction is recorded in the seventh chapter of St. Luke, and in the sixth of St. John. When Peter broke out in that warm confession of their belief, Lord, we believe, we are sure that thou art Christ, the Son of the living God, the same benediction is uttered, though couched in different words: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it, but my Father which is in heaven. Flesh and blood-the natural workings of this carnal desire, the lust and love of the world-have had no hand in this conviction of thine; but my Father, and the works which I have wrought in his name, in vindication of this faith, have established thee in it, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

This universal ruling principle, and almost invincible attachment to the interests and glories of the world, which we see first made so powerful a stand against the belief of Christianity, has continued to have as ill an effect, at least, upon the practice of it ever since; and therefore there is no one point of wisdom that is of nearer importance to us than to purify this gross appetite, and restrain it within bounds, by lowering our high conceit of the things of this life, and our concern for those advantages which misled the Jews. To judge justly of the world, we must stand at a due distance from it, which will discover to us the vanity of its riches and honours in such true dimensions as will engage us to behave ourselves towards them with moderation. This is all that is wanting to make us wise and good: that we may be left to the full influence of religion; to which Christianity so far conduces, that it is the great blessing, the peculiar advantage we enjoy under its institution, that it affords us not only the most excellent precepts of this kind, but also it shows us those precepts confirmed by most excellent examples. A heathen philosopher may talk very elegantly about despising the world, and, like Seneca,

may prescribe very ingenious rules to teach us an art he never exercised himself; for, all the while he was writing in praise of poverty, he was enjoying a great estate, and endeavouring to make it greater. But if ever we hope to reduce those rules to practice, it must be by the help of religion. If we would find men who by their lives bore witness to their doctrines, we must look for them amongst the acts and monuments of our Church, amongst the first followers of their crucified Master; who spoke with authority, because they spoke experimentally, and took care to make their words good, by despising the world, and voluntarily accounting all things in it loss, that they might win Christ. O holy and blessed Apostles! blessed were ye indeed, for ye conferred not with flesh and blood-for ye were not offended in him through any considerations of this world; ye conferred not with flesh and blood, neither with its snares and temptations. Neither the pleasures of life nor the pains of death laid hold upon your faith, to make you fall from him. Ye had your prejudices of worldly grandeur in common with the rest of your nation,-saw, like them, your expectations blasted; but ye gave them up, as men governed by reason and truth. As ye surrendered all your hopes in this world to your faith with fortitude, so did ye meet the terrors of the world with the same temper. Neither the frowns nor discountenance of the civil powers, neither tribulation, nor distress, nor persecution, nor cold, nor nakedness, nor famine, nor the sword, could separate you from the love of Christ. Ye took up your crosses cheerfully, and followed him ;-followed the same rugged way, trod the wine-press after him; voluntarily submitting yourselves to poverty, to punishment, to the scorn and the reproaches of the world, which ye knew were to be the portion of all of you who engaged in preaching a mystery so spoken against by the world, so unpalatable to all its passions and pleasures, and so irreconcilable to the pride of human reason. So that though ye were, as one of ye expressed, and all of ye experimentally found, made as the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things, upon this account, yet ye went on as zealously as ye set out. Ye were not offended, nor ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Wherefore should ye? The impostor and hypocrite might have been ashamed; the guilty would have found cause for it: ye had no cause, though ye had temptation. preached but what ye knew, and your honest and upright hearts gave evidence, the strongest, to the truth of it; for ye left all, ye suffered all, ye gave all that your sincerity had left you to give. Ye gave your lives at last, as pledges and confirmations of your faith and warmest affection for your Lord. Holy and blessed men! ye gave all, when, alas! our cold

Ye