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No 57. SATURDAY, JUNE 15.

Semper ego auditor tantum nunquamne reponam?
Still must I hear, and never answer make?

SERMON TO A CLERICAL CONGREGATION.

"How was he honoured in the midst of the people, on his coming out of the sanctuary!

"When he put on the role of honour, and was clothed with the perfection of glory, when he went up to the altar, he made the gar ment of holiness honourable."

Eccl. ch. 50.

It is now a long time that the privilege has been yours, of counselling, correcting, exhorting, admonishing, and reproving myself and the rest of my countrymen, without danger of interruption or reply; and, upon the whole, I have no great fault to find with your doctrines, which, in the main, have been salutary and well-intended. But it is the great mischief attendant upon the office you have undertaken, that, while a man is employed in exposing the errors and reprehending the vices of his fellow-creatures, he is apt to make a tacit reserve in his own favour, and, in the ardour of his preceptive zeal, to forget the necessity of practice, and the power of example. The corruption of the clergy in earlier times, was the effect of this self-partiality. Their eagerness to make converts, swallowed up this attention to their own conduct; and if their consciences became importunate and troublesome, the sophistry of the pas

sions was always at hand, to suggest that their private vices were only the result of their public zeal; that, in our present state of imperfection, a great and unlimited scope of exertion must necessarily multiply particular failures, and that these particular failures drew a kind of honour to themselves, from the alliance they claimed with an universal activity and unbounded zeal in the great cause of religion.

This argument, if true of one man, must be true of another; pursue it whither it leads, and we shall find it will operate its own overthrow, and prove nothing by proving too much. Let every man adopt it, and let every man neglect himself in the pursuit of a general good; where will be the advantage of lessons and instructions, and what kind of general good will that be, which fastens upon no individual ? Such palliatives of private and particular vices, are absurd and dangerous in the extreme; since the end of our creation, the interests of humanity, and the law of nature, require that a man's self should be his first care, and that his own practice should be the measure of his worth.

If there were men, however, formerly, who could satisfy themselves with these hollow excuses, even these have now lost every shadow of foundation. The age of church-errantry is over-missionaries, legates, crusaders, and reformers, have long gone off the stage; and the range of our parochial clergy is sufficiently confined, to give them the needful time for attention to their own conduct, and the discharge of their personal duties. On the contrary, I conceive that the great leisure they enjoy, comparatively with the generality of professional men, imposes on them a severer obligation, in respect to all the rules of social virtue, as well as the principles and practices of religion and morality whereas, amidst the nu

merous calls and interruptions that arise in all secular professions, that collectedness of principle, that steady march of virtue, which are the fruits of much reasoning with one's self, and the tacit victories of the heart, are hardly to be expected in any eminent degree, from men immersed in interested pursuits and habituated to look upon worldly advantage as the great concern of their being.

If some of our teachers are more engaged than others; if some are even loaded with occupation; yet this occupation, however great, is always, or should be always, calculated to season their minds with wholesome lessons, to supply matter for the highest contemplations, and to purify, whether it be little or much, the leisure they enjoy.

I consider that our Creator has made us all stewards in different departments, and of different trusts; that one is a steward of his riches, another of his health, another of his faculties, and that thus one will be more particularly responsible on one account than on another. The clergy are stewards of their leisure, in as much as they, for the greater part, possess more of it than other men. To him, therefore, who has husbanded well this leisure, it may perhaps be said, when the moment of retribution shall arrive—-" Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over thy portion of time: I will make thee partaker of eternity!"

The space, it is true, is circumscribed, in which this leisure is to be exerted: and this I will allow to be a most honourable ground of complaint, in those who have exhausted all the opportunities of doing good, which the limits of their station afford; who have silenced every call of misery; removed every aching doubt; adjusted every family dissension; and performed every part of their commission within the

reach of their ability, to the extent of their parochial charge. But I cannot admit that the space for their labours to move in is too confined to nourish that dignified love of praise, and that wholesome ambition, which, they may fairly contend, is a very principal and commendable spring of virtuous actions. The indeterminate admiration of crowds, where few can give any better reason for their applause than because those about them applaud, may satisfy a coarse appetite for praise, and an avidity that excludes preference; but a noble mind values admiration for the spirit in which it is bestowed; and is more flattered by the eulogies of humble gratitude, and the unsuborned testimonies of rustic veneration, than the senseless shouts of staring multitudes, that have nothing but noise and number to enforce their applause. It was wisely said to Alexander, in reproof of his extravagant thirst of fame, that but little more than Greece was sufficient to render Hercules a demigod, while all the world was not sufficient to render Alexander a Hercules.

The want of room, therefore, in their several spheres, for the exertion of their industry and talents, supplies no excuse to clergymen for that deviation, too common among them, from the paths of their profession, and the adoption of new and strange characters. As every man who deserts his character, forfeits the esteem and credit attached to it, so some men can repair this loss by their new acquisitions and collateral attainments; but a clergyman is a double loser, who departs out of his own province, in search of remote excellence: he is contemptible for what he has abandoned, and ridiculous for what he assumes. When I see, therefore, a minister of the gospel straining every nerve to shine in the beau monde, and pass for a choice spirit, I look upon such

a person as the most miserable of all dupes to his vanity; and such a conduct as no bad comment on that energetic line of the poet's,

"Guilt's blunder, and the loudest laugh of Hell."

A grave and modest carriage in a young clergyman is so well rewarded, and there is yet remaining in our country such a disposition to venerate a virtuous parish priest, that one cannot but wonder, that a description of men can prevail upon themselves to forfeit this pre-eminence, for the sake of a profane distinction in characters and attainments, which in others are indecorous and unamiable; in them' preposterous and criminal. There is, in life, à contrast between certain professions, and certain manners, which deepens the scandal of small obliquities and irregularities of conduct. Thus, in one who is reverend by his profession, levity is laxness of principle, wantonness is wickedness, intemperance is debauchery, violence is outrage, vanity is vice, obscenity is profanation, idleness is desertion, mimicry is buffoonery, and swearing is blaspheming.

There certainly is, in the mass of mankind, a natural and general feeling of physical and moral proportion, which no logic can subvert; they will continue as long as the present system holds, in spite of all our reasoning and declamation, to look with ridicule upon the man who on the Sunday is expounding the gospel in the pulpit, on Monday cutting capers in a ball-room, singing glees at a club-dinner on the Wednesday, riding after a fox on the Thursday, on Friday betting on a race-ground, acting Falstaff at a private theatre on the Saturday, and again, on the Sunday, expounding the gospel, to which the same commentary succeeds during the week following.

A prelate was taken prisoner in France, by Richard

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