guides men continually in their conduct one towards another. If favour is to be sought, or gratitude to be expressed, the request and the expression will be so framed, as to be most agreeable to him, to whom they are to be presented. His bias will be marked, and his partialities studied; and from them it will be determined how he can be most successfully approached. Man is quite the same being in Religion as in the common affairs of life; the object of his attention is changed, but he is actuated by the same motives, and guided by the same reasoning. Religion does not eradicate his passions, or plant in him other passions than those which he naturally possesses, but it restrains them within those bounds beyond which they were not originally intended to pass, and directs them into that channel in which they were originally intended to run: it does not endue him with a reason different in kind from that which belongs to his nature, but it enlightens and purifies the faculties of his soul, and thus makes him capable of better and larger views. As therefore in seeking the favour

of his fellow-creature, he will do so in the manner which he conceives may be most agreeable to him, so in seeking the favour of God, he will act precisely upon the same principles. He will approach the Almighty with that offering of duty with which he thinks such a Being will be best pleased; and in petitioning for those benefits which he may hope to receive from Him, he will take care so to frame his petition, as to render it most likely to be well received. But how shall he judge of this? How can he form any opinion as to what is likely to be acceptable to God? Most assuredly he will form his opinion on this question of Religion as he would on any similar question in his common affairs; he will form it according to the ideas he entertains of the Being whom he is to approach. Were he to address a fellow-creature, we have seen, he would consider his character, whether open and benevolent, or dark and churlish; whether a friend to virtue and justice, or easily induced to overlook any instance of moral delinquency. And thus will he judge of God also, and of

eous,

the service by which He may be best propitiated, according to the ideas he has conceived of his nature and attributes. If those ideas are pure and elevated; if they represent the Almighty to his mind, as a Being holy, just, and good, perfectly rightand inflexible in truth, and with whom no iniquity can find acceptance; such ideas cannot fail to produce a correspondent effect upon the service that may be offered; he who thinks thus of God must serve Him, if he serve Him at all, in a manner some way answerable to these ideas. No man could be so lost to common sense, as deliberately to offer an impure sacrifice to Him, who according to his own opinion was in his very nature essentially opposed to impurity; he could neither hope to obtain his future favour, nor acceptably to express his own gratitude for past benefits, by addressing Him in a manner which He must necessarily abhor. But if, on the other hand, different notions be entertained of this Supreme Being; if He be represented to the mind as subject to passion, and delighting in what is mean and vile;

if He be thought capricious and cruel, unjust and deceitful, and not free even from the baser appetites of men, what kind of worship, and what kind of service, is likely to be offered to such a Being? Surely, as is the God, so will be his rites, and such will be his votaries. They who serve a cruel God will serve him in a cruel manner; and it cannot be imagined, that any one who thinks that the Supreme Governor of the world is not averse to injustice or deceit, can have any real inducement to be honest, or possess any sincere regard for truth. Representing Him to his own mind as Supreme in power alone, which He uses for the more ample gratification of his own passions, he will draw near to Him in the way most likely to produce an immediate, though temporary, effect upon so capricious a Being; he will bend the knee before him with all the meanness of abject flattery, or sacrifice to his fancied rapacity the most costly of his possessions; he will

give the fruit of his body for the sin of "his soul," though he can have little in

b Micah vi. 7.

ducement to give up the sin itself, while he conceives that the God he worships is not free from impurity.

And not only does reason assure us, that so it must be, but the best authenticated history informs us, that so it has been. When the nations at large had in a great measure lost the knowledge of the true God, and had multiplied to themselves such counterfeit deities as best accorded with the degeneracy into which they had fallen, it is well known, that such as were their gods, such were also their worship and service. Those inhuman rites, in which innocent and tender infants were sacrificed to the dæmons of superstition; those detestable mysteries, in which carnal pollution was inculcated and practised as a ceremony of religion, show sufficiently to what a savage barbarity, and to what shocking impurity, Religion itself will degenerate, when the object to which it is offered is misconceived and misrepresented. The heathen deities were men in every respect, except that they were supposed to be endued with

c Minuc, Felic. Octavius, p. 62, &c.

E