The Evils of False Security

JEREMIAH VI. 14.

“« They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my: +.people slightly, saying, Peace, Peace; when there is no peace.”

We must have all remarked, on what a slight and. passing consideration people will dispose of a question which relates to the interest of their eternity; and how strikingly this stands contrasted with the very deep, and earnest, and long sustained attention, which they bestow on a question that relates to their interest, or their fortune, in this world. Ere they embark, for example, on an enterprize of trade, they will look at all the sides, and all the possibilities of the speculation; and every power of thought within them, will be put to its busiest exercise, and they will enter upon it with much fearfulness, and they will feel an anxious concern in every step, and every new evolution, of such an undertaking. Compare this with the very loose and summary way in which they make up their minds, about the chance of happiness in another world. See at how easy a rate they will be satisfied with some maxim of security, the utterance of which serves asa bar against all further prosecution of the subject. Behold the use they make of some hastily assumed principle in religion, — not for the purpose of fastening their minds upon it, but for the purpose, in fact, of hurrying their minds away from it. For it must be observed of the people to whom we allude, that, in spite of all their thoughtlessness about the affairs of the soul, they are not altogether without some opinion on the matter; and in which opinion there generally is comprised all the theology of which they are possessed. Without some such opinion, even the most regardless of men might feel themselves in a state of restlessness; and therefore it is, however seldom they are visited with any thought. about eternity, and however gently this thought touches them, and however quickly it passes away, to be replaced by some of the more urgent vanities and interests of time, yet, with most men, there is something like an actual making up of their minds, on this awfully important subject. ‘There is a settlement they have come to about it, which, generally speaking, serves them to the end of their days; — and on the strength of which, there are many who can hush within them, every alarm of conscience, and repel from without them, the whole force of a preacher’s demonstration, and all that. power of disquietude which lies in his faithful and impressive warnings.

We speak in reference to a very. numerous set of individuals, among the upper and middling classes of: society. There is a class of what may be called slender and sentimental religionists, who do profess a reverence for the

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SERMON Xv. 39y

matter, and maintain many of its outward decencies, and .are visited with occasienal thoughts, and occasional. feelings of tenderness about death, and duty, and eternity, and would be shocked at the utterance of an infidel opinion; and with all these symptoms of a religious inclination about them, have their minds very comfortably made up, and altogether free from any apprehension, either of present wrath, or of coming vengeance., Now, on examining the ground of their tranquillity, we are at a loss to detect a single ingredient of that peace and joy in believing, which we. read of among the Christians of the New ‘Testament. It is not that Christ is set forth a propitiation for. their sins, — it is not. that they stagger not at the promise of God, because of unbelief, — it is not that the love of him is shed abroad. in their hearts, by the Holy Ghost, — it is not that they carry along with them any consciousness whatever, of a growing conformity to the image of the Saviour, — it is not that their calling and their election are made sure to them, by the successful diligence with which they are cultivating the various accomplishments of the Christian character ; — there is not one of these ingredients, we will venture to say, which enters into the satisfaction that many feel with their own prospects, and into the complacency they have in their own attainnients, and into their opinion, that God is looking to them with indulgence and friendship. .With most of them, there is not only an ignorance, but a positive disgust, about these things. They associate with them the charges of methodism, and mysticism, and fanaticism; and meanwhile cherish in their own hearts, a kind of impregnable confidence, resting entirely on some other foundation. kia) eit RAD Maat, ol

We believe the real cause of their tranquillity to be, just that eternity is not seen nearly enough, or ungently enough, to disturb them. It stands so far away on the back ground of their contemplation, that they are almost entirely taken up with the intervening objects. Any glimpse they have of the futurity which lies on the other side of time, is so famt. and so occasional, that its concerns never come to them with the urgency of a matter on hand. it is not so much because they think in a particular way on this topic, that they feel themselves to beat peace. It is rather because they think so little of it. Still, however, they do have a transient and occasional thought, and it is all on the side of tranquillity; and could this thought be exposed as a minister of deceitful complacency to the heart, it may have the effect of working in it a salutary alarm, and of making the possessor of it see the nakedness of his condition, and of undermining every other trust but a trust in the offered salvation of the gospel, and of unsettling the blind and easy confidence of his former days, and of prompting him with the question, “* What shall I do to be saved?” and of leading him to try this question by the light of revelation, and to prosecute it to a scriptural conclusion, till he came to the answer of, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

What is the. way, then, in which they do actually make up their minds upon this subject? There is, in the first place, a pretty general admission, that we are sinners, though along with this, there is a disposition to palliate the enormity of sin, and to gloss it over with the gentle epithet of an infirmity. «It is readily. allowed, then, that we have our infirmities; and then to make all right, and secure, and-comfortable, the sentiment with which they bring the matter round again, is that, though we have our infirmities, God is a merciful God, and he will overlook them. This vague, and general, and indistinct apprehension of the attribute of mercy is the anchor of their hope; not a very sure and steadfast one certainly, but just as sure and as steadfast, as, in their peaceful state of unconcern, they have any demand for. A vessel in smooth water needs not be very strongly fastened in her moorings; and really any convictions of sin they have, agitate them so gently, that a very slender principle indeed, uttered occasionally by the mouth, and with no distinct or perceptible hold upon the heart, is enough to quiet and subdue all that is troublesome within them. A slight hurt needs but a slight remedy, and how- ever virulent the disease may be, yet, if the patient be but gently alarmed, a gentle application is enough to pacify him in the mean time. Now, a tasteful and a tender sentiment about the goodness of God, is just such an application. He will not be severe upon our weaknesses; he will not cast a glance of stern and unrelenting indignation upon us. It is true, that there is to be met with, among the vilest dregs and Tefuse of society, a degree of profligacy, for which it would really be too much

to expect forgiveness. The use of hell is for

the punishment of such gross and enormous wickedness as this. But the people who are so very depraved, and so very shocking, stand far beneath the place which we occupy in the scale of character. We, with our many amiable, and good, and neighbourlike points and accomplishments, are fair and benefitting subjects for the kindness of God. When we err, we shall betake ourselves to a trust in that indulgence, which gives to our religion the aspect of so much cheerfulness; and we will school down all that is disquieting, by a sentiment of confidence in that mercy which is soothing to our hearts, and which we delight to hear expatiated upon, in terms of tastefulness, by the orators of a genteel and cultivated piety.

Under this loose system of confidence, then, by which the peace of so many a sinner is upheld, it is the general mercy of God on which he rests. I shall, therefore, in the first place, endeavour to prove the vanity of such a confidence; and, in the second place, the evils of it.

I. ‘There is one obvious respect, in which this mercy that is so slenderly spoken of, and so vaguely trusted in, is not in unison with truth; and that is, it is not the mercy which has been made the subject of an actual offer from God to man, in the true message that he has been pleased to deliver to the world. In this message, God makes a free offer of his mercy, no doubt; but he offers it on a particular footing, and on that footing only, will he haye it to be received... Along with the revelation he makes of his attribute of mercy, he bids us look to the particular way, in which he chooses that attribute to be put forth. “The man who steps forward to relieve you of your debts, by an act of gratuitous kindness, may surely reserve the privilege of doing it in his own way; and whether it be by a present in goods, or by a present in money, or by an order upon a third person, or by the appointment of one whom he makes the agent of his beneficence, and whom he asks you to correspond with and to draw upon, it would surely be most preposterous in. you to quarrel with his generosity, because it would have been more to your taste, had it come to you through a different channel of conveyance. He has fair right of insisting upon his own way of it; and if you will not acquiesce in this way, and he. leaves you under your burden, you have nothing to complain of. You might have liked it better, had he authorised you to draw upon himself, rather than on the agent he has fixed upon. But no; he has his reasons, and he persists in his own way of it, and you must either go along with this way, or throw yourself out of the benefit of his generosity altogether. It is conceivable that, in spite of all this, you may be so very perverse as to draw upon himself, instead of drawing upon the authorized agent. Well, the effect is, just that your draft is dishonoured, and your debt still lies upon you; and you, by your wilful resistance to the plan of relief laid down, are left to remain under the full weight. of your embarrassments. And so of God. He may, and he actually has stepped forward, to relieve us from that debt of sin under which we lie. But he has taken his own way of it. He has not left us to dictate the matter to. him, — but he himself has found out.a ransom. He offers us eternal life; but he tells us. where this is to be found, even in his Son, and he bids us look unto him, and be saved; and he says, that he who hath the Son hath life, and that he who believeth not the Son, the wrath of God abideth on him. To restrain, as it were, our immediate approaches to himself, he reveals an agent, a Mediator between God and man, — and he lets us know, that no: one cometh unto the Father, but by him. He makes a free offer of salvation, — but it is in and through Jesus Christ, to whom the whole revealed word of God directs our eye, as the prime agent in the recovery of a guilty world. ‘To say that we have our infirmities, but God is merciful, is like drawing direct upon God himself. But God tells us that he will not be so drawn upon. He chooses, and has he not the right of choosing, to bestow all his favours upon a guilty world, in and through his Son Christ Jesus? If you choose to object to this way, you must just abide by the consequences. The offer is made. God sets him- - self forward as merciful. But he lets you know, at the same time, the particular way in which he chooses to be so. This way may be an offence to you. You would perhaps kave liked better, had there been no Christ, no preaching of his cross, nothing said about his cleansing, and peace-speaking blood, — in a word, nothing of all that which forms the burden of methodistical sermons, and which, if met with in the New Testament at all, is only to be found in what you may think its dark and

mystical passages. It would have been more congenial to your taste, perhaps, had you been left to the undisturbed enjoyment of your own soothing and elegant conceptions, — could you just have gone direct to God himself, whom the eye of your imagination had stripped of all tremendous severity against sin, of all the pure and holy jealousies of his nature, of all that is majestic in the high attributes of truth and righteousness. A God singly possessed of tenderness, in virtue of which, he would smile connivance at all our infirmities, and bend an indulgent eye over the waywardness of a heart, devoted with all its affections to the vanities and pleasures of time, — this would be a God highly suited to the taste and ‘convenience of a guilty world. But, alas! there is no such God. To trust in the mercy of such a Being as this, is to lean on a nonentity of your own imagination. It is to be led astray, by a fancy picture of your own forming. There is no other Gocd to whom you can repair for mercy, but God in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, and not imputiag unto them their trespasses. And if you resist the preaching of Christ as foolishness, — if you will not recognise him, but persist in your hoping, and your trusting, on the general ground: that God is merciful, you are just wrapping yourselves up in a delusive confidence, and pleasing yourselves with your own imagination; and the only real offer that ever was, or will be, made to sinful man, you are putting away from you. The mercy upon which you rest, is in disunion with truth. It is a spark of your own kindling, and if you continue to walk in it, it will lead you into a path of darkness, and bewilder you to your final undoing.

II. The evils of such a confidence as we have been attempting to expose, are mainly reducible to two, which we shall consider in order.

First, this delusive confidence casts an aspersion on the character of God. It would inflict a mutilation upon that character. It is confidence in such a mercy as would dethrone the lawgiver, and establish the anarchy of a wild misrule, over his fallen and dishonoured attributes. We may lightly take up with the conception that God is all tenderness, and nothing else, and thus try to accommodate the character of the Eternal, to the standard of our own convenience, and our own wishes. We, instead of looking to the immutability of the Godhead, and taking our fixed and permanent lesson from such a contemplation, may fancy of the Godhead, that he is ever assuming a new shape, and. a new character, according to the frail and fluctuating eaprices of human opinion. Instead of God making man according to his pleasure, man would form God in the mould of his own imagination. He forgets that, in the whole range of existence, he can only meet with one object who is inflexibly and everlastingly the same, and that is God, — that he may sooner think of causing the everlasting hills to recede from their basis, than of causing an infringement on the nature of the unalterable Deity, or on the designs and maxims which support the method of his administration, — that to assume a character tor him in our own mind, instead of learning what the character is from himself, is in fact to. - make the foolish thought of the creature, paramount to the eternal and immutable constitution of the Creator.’ Let us therefore give up our own conceptions, and look steadily to that light in which God hath actually put himself forth to us. He has dealt out a variety of communications respecting his own ever-during character and attributes, to the children of men; and he tells us, that he is a God of truth, and that he is jealous of his honour, and that he will not be mocked, and that heaven and earth shall pass away, ere any of his words pass away. Let us just attend to some of these words. He who continues not in the whole book of this law, is accursed. The whole world is guilty before God. He will by no-means clear the guilty. Without shedding of blood, there is no remission. ‘These are the words of God. He has put them into a record. Every one of us may read them, and compare the sayings of God, with the doings of God, and if they do not correspond, the one with the other, we may charge him with falsehood in the face of his insulting enemies, and lift the voice of mockery against him, and feel the triumph which rebels feel, when they witness the timidity of a feeble monarch, who does not, or dares not, carry his threats into accomplishment. And is it possible, that the throne of the eternal God ean rest on a basis so tottering, — or that, if ever he shall descend to the manifestatioh of mercy,-he will not give the maifestation of his

truth and his righteousness along with it? 28*

Now, those. who, without any reference to Christ, find their way to comfort on the strength of their own general confidence in God’s mercy, make no account whatever of his truth, or his righteousness. What becomes of the threatenings of God? What becomes of the immutability of his purposes? What becomes of the unfailing truth of all his communications? What becomes of the solemnity of his warnings? and how is it possible to be at all impressed by them, — if they are ever and anon done away by a weak and capricious system of connivance? What becomes of the wide and everlasting distinctions, between obedience and sin? What becomes of the holiness of the Deity? What becomes of reverence for his name, among the wide circle of angels, and archangels, and seraphim, and cherubim, who have all heard his awful-proclamations against the children of iniquity, — if they see that any one of them may, by a mere act of confidence in his mercy, turn all that has been uttered against them into an unmeaning parade? Where, in a word, are all those sanctions and securities which can alone make the government of the Deity, to be a government at all? These are all questions which the people to whom we allude, never think of entertaining; nor do they feel the slightest concern about them; and they count it quite enough, if they can just work themselves up into such a tolerable feeling of security, as that they shall not be disturbed in the quiet enjoyment of the good things of this life, which form all in fact that their hearts long after, and which if only permitted to retain in peace, they positively care not for the glory of God, or how it shall be kept inviolate. This is not their affair. The engrossing desire of their bosoms, is just a selfish desire after their own ease; and the strange preparation for that heaven, the unceasing song of which is, Holy and righteous are thy judgments, O thou King of Saints, is such a habit of confidence, as lays prostrate all the majesty of these high and unchangeable perfections. And yet if you examine these people closely, you will obtain their consent to the position, that there is a law, and that the human race are bound to obedience, and that the authority of the law is supported by sanctions, and that’ the truth, and justice, and dignity of the Supreme Being, are involved in these sanctions being enforced and executed. They do not refuse the tenet, that man is an accountable subject, and that God is a judge and a lawgiver. All that we ask of them, then, is, to examine the account which this subject has to render, and they will find, in characters too glaring to be resisted, that, with the purest and most perfect individual amongst us, it is a wretched account of guilt and of deficiency. That law, which is held to be in full authority and operation over us, has been most unquestionably violated. Now, what is to be made of this? Is the subject to rebel, and disobey every hour, and the king, by a perpetual act of indulgence, to efface every character of truth and dignity from his government? Do this, and you depose the legislator from his throne. Youreduce the sanctions of his law to aname,anda mockery. You bring down the high economy of heaven, to the standard of human convenience. You pull the fabric of God’s moral government to pieces; and unsubstantiate all the solemnity of his proclaimed sayings. — all the lofty annunciations of the law, and of the prophets, — all- that is told of the mighty apparatus of the day of judgment, — all that revelation points to,-or conscience. can suggest, of a living and a reigning God, who will not let himself down to be affronted, or trampled upon by the creatures whom he - has formed.

- They who, in profession, admit the truth of God, and yet take comfort from his mercy, without looking to him who bare in his own person, the accomplishment of all the threatenings, do in fact turn that truth into a hie. ‘They who, in profession, admit the justice of God, and yet trust in the remission of their sins, without any distinct acknowledgment of him on whom God has laid the burden of their condemnation, do in fact prove, that in their mouths justice is nothing but an unmeaning articulation. They who, in profession, admit the authority of those great and unchanging principles, which preside over the whole of God’s moral administration, and yet assign to him such a loose and easy connivance at iniquity, as by a mere act of tenderness, to recal the every denunciation that he had uttered against it, do in fact put forth a sacrilegious hand to the pillars of that immutability, by which the government of creation is upheld and perpetuated. Let them rest assured, that there is no way of reconciliation, but such a way as shields all the holy, and pure, and inflexible attributes of the Divinity, from degradation and contempt. Out of that, hiding-place which is made known in the gospel, all that is just, and severe, and inflexible in the perfections. of God, stands in threatening array against every ‘son and daughter of the species. And if they wil not look to God as he sets himself forth teus in the New Testament, — if they refuse to look unto him as God in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, and not imputing unto them their trespasses, — if they set aside all that is said about the blood of the everlasting covenant, and the new and living way of access, and the manner in which the mediatorship of Christ hath repaired all the indignities of sin, and shed a glory over the truth and justice of the lawgiver. — if they will still persist in locking to him through another channel than that of his own revelation; he will persist in looking to them with the aspect of a stern and unappeased enemy. He will not let down the honours of his inflexible character, for the sake of those who refuse his way of salvation. He will not fall in with the delusions of those who profess to revere this character, and then shake the whole burden of conscious guilt and infirmity away from them, by the presumption, that in some way or other, the mercy of God will interpose to defend them from the vengeance of his more.severe and unrelenting perfections. The one and the only way, in which he dispenses mercy, is through the atonement of Christ, — and if your confidence be laid in any other quarter, he will put that confidence to shame. He will not accept the prayers of those, who can thus make free with the unchangeable attributes which belong to him. He will not descend with such to any intercourse of affection whatever. He will not own the approaches, nor will ‘he deal out any boon from the storehouse of his grace, to those who profess a general confidence in his mercy — when, instead of a mercy which guards, and dignifies, and keeps entire the whole glory and character of God, it is a mercy which belies his word, which invades his other perfections, which spoils the divine image’ of its grandeur, which breaks up the whole fabric of his moral government, and would make the throne of heaven the seat of an unmeaning pageant, the throne of an insulted and degraded sovereign.

The religion of nature, — or the religion of unaided demonstration, — or the religion of our most fashionable and philosophical schools, leaves this question totally undisposed of; — and at the same time, till the question be resolved, all the hopes of the human soul are in a state of the most fearful uncertainty. This religion makes God the subject of its demonstrations, and it draws out a list of attributes, and it makes the justice of God to be one of these attributes, and the placability of God to be another of them, and it admits that it is In virtue of the former perfection. of his nature, that he makes condemnation and punishment to rest on the head of those who violate his law, and that it is in virtue of the latter perfection that he looks conniyance, and extends pardon to such violations. Now, the question which the disciples of this religion haye never settled, is, how to strike the compromise between these attributes. They cannot dissipate the cloud of mystery, which hangs over the Ime of demarcation that is’ between them. They cannot tell in how far the justice of God will insist on its exactions and its claims, or what the extent of that disobedience is, over, which the placability of God will spread the shelter of a generous forgiveness. There is a dilemma here, out of which they cannot unwarp themselves, — a question to which they can give no other answer, than the expressive answer of their silence — and it is such a silence, as leaves our every apprehension unquelled, and the whole burden of our unappeased doubts and difficulties as insupportable as before. What we demand is, that they shall lay down the steady and unalterable position of that limit, at which the justice of God, and the placability of God, cease their respective encroachments on each other. If they cannot tell this, they ean tell nothing that is of any consequence, either to the purpose of comfort, or of direction. The sinner wishes to know on which side of this unknown and undetermined limit, his degree of sinfulness is placed. He wishes to know whether his offences are such as come under the operation of justice, or of mercy, — whether the one attribute will exact from him the penalty, or the other will smile on him connivance. It is in vain to say, that if he repent and turn from them, mercy will claim him as her own, and recover him from the dominion of justice, and spread over all his sins the mantle of an everlasting oblivion. ‘This may still be saying nothing, — for the work of repentance is a work, which, though he should be always trying, he always fails in; and in spite of his every exertion, there is a sin and a shortness in all his services. And when he casts his eye along the scale of character, he sees the better and the worse on each side of him; and the difficulty still recurs, how far down in the scale does mercy extend, or bow far up on this scale does justice carry its fiery sentence of condemnation. And thus it is, that he feels no fixed security, which he can lay hold of, — no solid ground on which he can lay the trust of his acceptance with God. And this religion, which has left the whole problem of the attributes undetermined, which can furnish the sinner with no light, by which he may be made to perceive how justice can be displayed, but at the expense of mercy, or how mercy can be displayed, but by breaking in upon the entireness of justice; this hollow, baseless, unsupported system, which, by mangling and deforming the whole aspect of the Deity, has virtually left man without God, — has also, by the faint and twilight obscurity, or rather by the midnight darkness in which it has involved the

uestion about the point of sinfulness, at which the one attribute begins the exercise: of its rigour, and the other ceases its indulgence, not only left man without God, but also left him without any solid hope in the world.

But, Secondly, the confidence we have been attempting to expose, is hostile to the cause of practical righteousness in the world.

For what is the real and experimental effect of the obscurity in question on the practice of mankind? The question about our interest with God, is felt to be unresolvable; and, under this feeling, no genuine attempt is made to resolve it. Man eases himself of the difficulty by putting it away from him; and, as he cannot find the point of gradation in the seale of character, on the one side of which, there lies acceptance with God, and on the other side of it, “condemnatioa, — he just upholds’ himsélf in tranquillity at any one point, and throughout every one variety of this gradation. aes

Let the question only be put, How far down, in the scale of character, may this loose system of confidence be carried’? and where is the limit between those sins, to which forgiveness may be looked for, and those sins from which it is withheld? and you will seldom find the man who gives an answer againsthimself. ‘The world, in fact, is so much the home and the resting-place of every natural man, that you will not get him so to press, and so to prosecute the question, as to come to any conclusion, that is at all likely to alarm him. He will not barter his present peace, for a concern that looks so distant to him as that of his eternity. ‘The question touches but lightly on his feelings, and an answer conceived lightly, and given lightly, ‘will be enough to pacify him. Go to the man, whose decent and unexceptionable proprieties make him the admiration of all his acquaintances, and even he will allow that he has his infirmities; but he can smother all his apprehensions, and regale his fancy with the smile of an indulgent God. ‘Take, now, a descending step in the scale of character; and do you think there is not to be met with there, the very same process of conscious infirmity on the one hand, and of vague, general, and bewildering confidence on the other? Will the people of the lower station not do the very same thing with the people above them ? — Compare themselves with them- ‘selves, and find equals to keep them in countenance, and share in the average respect that circulates around them, and take comfort in the review of their very fair and neighbourlike ac — complishments, and with the allowance of being just such sinners as they are in the daily habit of associating with, get all their remorse, and all their gloomy anticipations disposed of, by throwing the whole burden of them, in a loose and general way, on the indulgence of God? And where, in the name of truth and of righteousness, will this stop? We can answer that question. It will not stop at all. It will describe the whole range of human character; and we challenge you to put your finger on that point where it is to terminate, or to find out the place where a barrier is to be raised, against the progress of this mischievous security. It will go downwards and downwards, till it come to the very verge of the malefactor’s dungeon. Nay, it will enter there; and we doubt not that an enlightened discerner may witness, even in this receptacle of outcasts, the operation of the very sentiment, which gives such peace and such buoyancy to him, whose moral accomplishments throw around him the lustre of a superior estimation. But this lustre will not impose on the eye of God. The Discerner of the heart sees that one and all of us are alienated from him, and strangers to the obligation of his high and spiritual requirements. He declares the name of Christ to be the only one given under heaven, whereby men can be saved; and after this, every act of confidence, disowning his name, is an expression of the most insulting impiety. On the system of general confidence, every man is left to sin just as much as he likes, and to take comfort just as much as his powers of delusion can administer to him. At this rate, the government of God is unhinged, — the whole earth is broken loose from the system of his administration, — — he is deposed from his supremacy altogether, — peace, when there is no peace, spreads its deadly poison over the face of society, — and one sentiment, of deep and fatal tranquillity about the things of God, takes up its firm residence in a world, which, from one end to the other of it, sends up the cry of rebellion against him.

This is a-sore evil. ‘The want of a fixed and clearly perceptible line between the justice and -placability of the divine nature, not only buries. in utter darkness the question of our acceptance with God; but, by throwing every thing loose and undetermined, it opens up the range of a most lawless and uncontrolled impunity for the disobedience of man, up from its gentler deviations, and down to its most profligate and daring excesses. If there be no intelligible line to separate the exercise of the justice of God from the exercise of his placability, every individual will fix this line for himself; and he will make these two attributes to be yea and nay, or fast and loose with each other; and he will stretch out the placability, and he will press upon the justice, just as much as to accommodate the standard of his religious principles to the state of his religious practice; and he will make every thing to square with his own existing taste, and wishes, and convenience; and his mind will soon work its own way to a system of religious opinions which gives him no disturbance; and the spirit of a deep siumber will lay hold of his deluded conscience; and thus, from the want of a settled line, — from the vague, ambiguous, and indefinite way in which this matter is taken up, and brought toa very loose and general conclusion, — or, in other words, ‘from that very way in which natural religion, whether among deists, or our more slender professors of Christianity, leaves the whole question, about the limit of the attributes, unentered upon, — will every man take comfort in the imagined tenderness of God, just as much as he stands in need of it, and experiment on the patience of God just as far as his natural desires may carry -him, — so that when we look to the men of the world, as they pass smoothly onward, from the cradle to the grave, do we see each of them i ina: state of profound security as to his interest with God; each of them solacing himself with his own conception about the slenderness of his guilt, and the kindness of an indulgent Deity; each of them in a state of false and fancied peace with Heaven, while every affection of the inner man, and many of the doings of the outer man, bear upon them the stamp of rebellion against Heaven’s law; each of them walking without uneasiness, and without terror, while, at the same time, each and all of them do in fact walk in the counsel of their own hearts, and: after mre sight of their own eyes.