SERMON I.

PSALM lxxiv. 22.

Arise, O God, plead thine own cause: remember how the foolish man reproacheth thee daily.

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THAT it has pleased Almighty God to reveal his will to mankind, "at sundry "times and in divers manners a," is a truth clearly proved by the most direct evidence, of which such a subject is capable. He who denies this must, to be consistent with himself, disbelieve every thing which is not an immediate object of his senses. To him the page of history is a blank. All the important records of past ages, all the bright examples of virtue which they exhibit, and all the clear warnings against vice, which they hold out in the various instances of its punishment, are to him as if they were

a Heb. i. 1.

not; they neither enlighten his understanding nor interest his affections. Nay, even modern events, and the eminent characters of the age in which he lives, are to him equally lost. His ideas are alike confined in space as in time. Rejecting, as he does, credible testimony, the only evidence of which past actions and remote occurrences are capable, he is necessarily circumscribed within the narrow sphere of his own unassisted observation; he knows nothing, at least in reason he should not profess to know any thing, beyond that poor pittance of information with which his own eyes and ears and hands supply him; and being himself but the creature of a day, he must inevitably perish in an unprofitable ignorance, uninstructed by the wisdom of his ancestors, and having no hope of benefiting his posterity. Useless alike to all his kind, he sinks, unblessing and unblessed, into the fathomless abyss of perdition. Few indeed, if any, of those, who have perversely withstood the evidence of revelation, have chosen to be thus consistent with themselves; they have claimed a right,

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b

most unfairly, of acting in regard to religion by a different set of principles from those which guide men in the ordinary affairs of life; and the gross inconsistency of this conduct has proved, that their objection to revealed religion was derived from a source which had little connection with the deficiency of its evidence. They were partial" in their minds; and while they admitted upon slight grounds what their inclination was not averse to, they would not allow any weight to the strongest testimony, when brought in support of what they had already looked upon with an unfavourable eye. The same evidence has been in one case received without hesitation, and in another, to which it was equally applicable, rejected with inflexible pertinacity. A strange perverseness this,

b Quæ est igitur ista philosophia, quæ communi more in foro loquitur, in libellis suo? Cicero De Fin. lib. ii. 24. iv. 8.

c James ii. 4.

d Bishop Wilkins's Principles of Natural Religion, p. 20, &c. Dr. Webster's Discourse on the Duty of Preaching the whole Law, in Weekly Miscellany. Butler's Analogy, p. ii. c. 6.

surely, and a present proof, how much the human mind has fallen from its original uprightness and integrity! For looking at the subject independently of all testimony in its favour, Divine Revelation seems to be peculiarly entitled to a ready admission into the mind of man, because nothing seems more natural, than that God should make some revelation of himself. Supposing that he is, and that he stands in the relation of a Creator to mankind, it follows as a necessary consequence of that relation, that man derives from Him all the faculties which he possesses, and owes Him all the duty which by his nature he is capable of performing. There can therefore be no difficulty in conceiving, that He, who endued the soul and the body with every sense and every power, should be able to reveal his Will to the work of his own hands in any way which to Him may appear best: nor ought there to be any greater difficulty in allowing, that what has appeared best to Him must be best in itself. And as the probability of a Revelation is thus easily admissible in regard to God, so with re