your neighbours, rather giving a higher colour to them than endeavouring to soften them down? Are you never lightly moved to angry and reproachful expressions, never guilty of falsehood in your conversation, deceit in your dealings, insincerity in your professions? Yet all these are sins, and pardonable only through the mediation of our Redeemer.

But I have confined myself as yet to sins of commission, to the doing of that which ought not to be done; this is but the half. What sad arrears our omissions present! Let me direct you how to question yourselves on this head.-"Are we diligent in the discharge of all our duties to God and man? Are we good and faithful servants, turning to account the several talents committed to our charge, and making interest upon them, that we may be able to return them with usury"? Or are we "unprofitable servants," who have hidden our Lord's talent in the earth, or laid it up in a napkin? Do we make a proper use of all the good gifts of God, or do we make no use of them at all? Is our time of any real benefit to ourselves or our fellow creatures, or is it squandered away and wasted? Ask the same questions concerning your money; the same concerning your authority and example; the same concerning your reason; the

same concerning all the blessings you have received from the hand of a bountiful Creator, which properly used (used as he intended and requires) might be made the instruments of great good?

Moreover, the means of grace, and the calls of a religious life that are within your reach, and fall under your constant notice-the bible, the sabbath, the ordinances of religion, the mercies of God, the judgments of God, the warnings of God-do you convert all these to the ends for which they were bestowed? Or do you neglect and despise them, and live with as little consideration of them as if they had not been bestowed at all?

I think that your honest answers to these questions must convince you that you have many deficiencies, which need forgiveness; and although you may thus learn a truth which will be disagreeable at first, yet you will learn a truth, without the knowledge of which I do not see how you can clearly understand, or effectually receive the doctrines of the gospel; a truth which alone made it necessary that a Saviour should die for the world, and which they who do not perceive and acknowledge, will never be led to seek for eternal life in the only way in which it is offered, namely, through his merits, who has undertaken

to make satisfaction for the sins under the weight of which we are all oppressed, but which we could never expiate for ourselves.

But there still remains a class of sins, from the guilt of which we surely can none of us escape, however free we may fancy ourselves to be from those which have been already enumerated, -I mean the sins of the heart. On this subject, beware that you do not deceive yourselves, because you are able to deceive your fellow creatures. Your lives others can examine, but the secrets of your hearts are known only to yourselves and to God. He is greater than your hearts, and knoweth all things. At this very moment he observes the course of your thoughts; and however fair you may appear, and however easily you may now impose on those who can see only the outside, yet the day will come when all secrets shall be revealed before the assembled world.

I have high authority for giving a bad character of the human heart. Almighty God, by the mouth of his prophet Jeremiah,* has said, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?" One who did know it well, has confirmed this general accusation, by giving a more particular account • Chap. xvii. 9.

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of its wickedness: "Out of the heart of man," said our Saviour, "proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness." Look into your own hearts, and see if you can discover any of these things there. Does no part of the charge apply to them? Are they clean and pure from

all these foul stains? Are they simple and innocent, like the bosom of a new born infant? Are there no evil passions tormenting and agitating them like the troubled sea, "when it cannot rest?" Does no lust rage within them, and set your blood in a flame? Does not malice "fill them with the gall of bitterness?" Does no anger make Does no uncharitable

them boil and ferment?

ness shut them up? Does no hypocrisy lurk within them? Does no pride exalt them? Does no sensuality debase them? Do they contain no aversion to God and religion? No hatred to man? No idolatry of yourselves? No love of sin? No inordinate affection of the world? Go through the catalogue of all the vices that exist, and see if the seeds of some of them be not within your bosoms. "He that looketh upon a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart;" see if your hearts be not adulterous. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a

murderer;"-see if your hearts be not murderers. "Covetousness is idolatry; "-see if your hearts be not idolaters. See, if in your secret thoughts and inclinations, you are not breakers of many of those commandments which you think you have most strictly observed. If you search into your breasts impartially, I am persuaded you will find evidence enough to prove the doctrine which the scripture so positively asserts; and to justify its language when it says that we are "shapen in wickedness and conceived in sin; " and that the "whole world lieth in wickedness."

I hope, my brethren, you will not look upon me as a mere reviler of the human species. I have said nothing at random. Nothing that I do not think to be warranted by fact;-nothing but what I believe your own experience may tell you to be true. I have referred you to your own selves, to your own lives, and to your own hearts, for the truth of my assertions. You have the proofs about you, and within you, in your memories and in your consciences: do not close your eyes and ears against them, merely because they are humiliating to reflect upon. You will not be the better for thinking lightly of your sins; your nature will not be the less corrupt for your trying to think it pure. A wound is still a wound, and equally bad, though false shame hide it from the