such advocates within. Yet you are arrived at this pitch of, what shall I call it? imprudence, or ignorance. I am often ready to think, an evil genius possesseth you. You have brought yourselves to give these miserable, these perfidious wretches a hearing, some of whom, dare not disown the character I give them. It is not enough to hear them, whether it be envy, or malice, or an itch for satire, or whatever be the motive, you order them to mount the rostrum, and taste a kind of pleasure as often as their outrageous railleries and cruel calumnies rend in pieces reputations the best established, and attack virtue the most respectable." Such an orator, my brethren, merits the highest praise. With whatever chastisements God may correct a people, he hath not determined their destruction, while he preserveth men, who are able to shew them in this manner the means of preventing it.

VI. Finally, the last order of persons, interested in the words of my text, consists of pastors of the church. And who can be more strictly engaged not to sell truth than the ministers of the God of truth? A pastor should have this precept in full view in our public assemblies, in his private visits, and particularly when he attends dying people.

1. In our public assemblies all is consecrated to truth. Our churches are houses of the living and true God. These pillars are pillars of truth, 1. Tim. iii. 15. The word, that we are bound to announce to you, is truth, John xvii. 17. Wo be to us, if any human consideration be capable of making us disguise that truth, the heralds of which we ought to be; or if the fear of shewing you a disagreeable light induce us to put it under a bushel! True, there are some mortifying truths; but public offences merit public reproofs, whatever shame may

cover the guilty, or however eminent, and elevated, their post may be. We know not a sacred head, when we see the name of blasphemy written on it, Rev. xiii. 1. But the ignominy of such reproof, say ye, will debase a man in the sight of the people, whom the people ought to respect, and will disturb the peace of society. But who is responsible for his disturbance, he, who reproves vice, or he who commits it? And ought not he, who abandons himself to vice, rather to avoid the practice of it, than he, who censures such a conduct, to cease to censure it? If any claim the power of imposing silence on us, on this article, let him produce his right; let him publish his pretensions; let him distribute among those who have been chosen to ascend this pulpit, lists of the vices, which we are forbidden to censure: let him signify the law, that commands the reproving of the offences of the poor, but forbids that of the crimes of the rich? that allows us to censure men without credit, but prohibits us to reprove people of reputation.

2. A pastor ought to have this precept before his eyes in his private visits. Let him not publish before a whole congregation a secret sin but let him paint it in all its horrid colors with the same privacy with which it was committed. To do this is the principal design of those pastoral visits, which are made among this congregation to invite the members of it to the Lord's supper. There a minister of truth ought to trouble that false peace, which impunity nourisheth in the souls of the guilty. There he ought to convince people, that the hiding of crimes from the eyes of men cannot conceal them from the sight of God. There he ought to make men tremble at the idea of that eye, from the penetration of which neither the darkness of