SERMON I.*

1 Cor. vii. 31.

USE THIS WORLD AS NOT ABUSING IT, FOR THE FASHION OF THIS WORLD PASSETH AWAY.

SERIOUS and speculative persons have, in all ages, (amid their general researches after truth) made the use and `value of the world a principal object of their consideration, in order that they might proportion their esteem for it to its real and intrinsic worth; and the importance of the subject authorised their pains; for as this material world is the place allotted for our present abode, it is incumbent upon us that, next to forming right conceptions of that Supreme Being who placed us here, we should form right conceptions of that system of beings in which we are placed. Yet it must be confessed that, however diligent men may have been in searching after the truth on this question, their opinions have been various, and their conclusions sometimes contradictory. It would be no unentertaining disquisition (were this the proper place

* The following Sermons were all printed by the Author, but none of them were published by him except the 14th.

for it) to trace Philosophy through her several schools of antiquity, and to observe how, in each of them, she inculcated a different doctrine upon this point. Here we should find the haughty Stoic, wrapt in the idea of his own internal virtue, treating the world with disregard and indifference; while the churlish Cynic, from his real or pretended abhorrence of external vice, spurns it with contempt and detestation. Here the grave disciple of Pythagoras, looking upon it as an august drama, in which he is to perform various, and some important parts, beholds it with veneration and awe: and there the careless pupil of Epicurus, fancying it but a trifling farce, soon to be closed by the curtain of death, selects the most agreeable scenes he can find in it for his enjoyment, passing over the rest with a careless disregard. But, without searching into antiquity for instances of this dissimilitude of opinion, we may find them (where it will be more to our purpose to find them) amongst the speculative part of our own age.

By this term I would be understood to mean such persons as employ their studies in the search of moral and religious truths, and, in consequence of that search, form to themselves different modes of practical conduct. To separate these into their several classes, would he not only to enumerate all the sects into which Christianity is unhappily divided, but also to distinguish between the more unhappy, and almost as numerous, degrees of