even with an improper look.-Under whatever levity and dissipation of heart such objects catch our eyes, they catch likewise our attentions, collect and call home our scatter'd thoughts, and exercise them with wisdom. A transient scene of distress, such as is here sketched, how soon does it furnish materials to set the mind at work! how necessarily does it engage it to the consideration of the miseries and misfortunes, the dangers and calamities to which the life of man is subject! By holding up such a glass before it, it forces the mind to see and reflect upon the vanity, the perishing condition and uncertain tenure of every thing in this world. From reflections of this serious cast, how insensibly do the thoughts carry us farther!-and, from considering what we are,-what kind of world we live in, and what evils befall us in it, how naturally do they set us to look forwards at what possibly we shall be ! -for what kind of world we are intended, -what evils may befall us there,-and what provision we should make against them here, whilst we have time and opportunity.

If these lessons are so inseparable from the house of mourning here supposed, we shall find it a still more instructive school of wisdom when we take a view of the place in that more affecting light to which the wise man seems to confine it in the text; in which, by the house of mourning, I believe, he means that particular scene of sorrow, where there is lamentation and mourning for the dead.

Turn in hither, I beseech you, for a moment. Behold a dead man ready to be carried out; the only son of his mother, and she a widow! Perhaps a more affecting spectacle:-a kind and indulgent father of a numerous family lies breathless; snatched away in the strength of his age;-torn in an evil hour from his children and the bosom of a disconsolate wife!

Behold much people of the city gathered together to mix their tears, with settled sorrow in their looks, going heavily along to the house of mourning, to perform that last melancholy office, which, when the debt of nature is paid, we are called upon to pay to each other.

If the sad occasion which leads him there has not done it already, take notice to what a serious and devout frame of mind every man is reduced the moment he enters this gate of affliction. The busy and fluttering spirits, which in the house of mirth were wont to transport him from one diverting object to another, see how they are fallen! how peaceably they are laid! In this gloomy mansion, full of shades and uncomfortable damps to seize the soul,-see, the light and easy heart, which never knew what it was to think before, how pensive it is now! how soft! how susceptible! how full of religious impressions! how deeply it is smitten with a sense and with a love of virtue! Could we, in this crisis, whilst this empire of reason and religion lasts, and the heart is thus exercised with wisdom and busied with Heavenly contemplations, could we see it naked as it is,-stripped of its passions, unspotted by the world, and regardless of its pleawe might then safely rest our cause upon this single evidence, and appeal to the most sensual, Whether Solomon has not made a just determination here in favour of the house of mourning?-not for its own sake, but as it is fruitful in virtue, and becomes the occasion of so much good. Without this end, sorrow, I own, has no use but to shorten a man's days;-nor can gravity, with all its studied solemnity of look and carriage, serve any end but to make one half of the world merry, and impose upon the other.

sures,

his

Consider what has been said; and may God of mercy bless you! Amen.

SERMON III.

PHILANTHROPY RECOMMENDED.

LUKE X. 36, 37.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell amongst the thieves?—And he said, He that showed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him,-Go, and do thou likewise.

IN the foregoing verses of this chapter, the Evangelist relates, that a certain lawyer stood up and tempted Jesus, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?-To which inquiry our Saviour, as his manner was, when any ensnaring question was put to him, which he saw proceeded more from a design to entangle him, than an honest view of getting information,-instead of giving a direct answer, which might afford a handle to malice, or at best serve only to gratify an impertinent humour,he immediately retorts the question upon the man who asked it, and unavoidably puts him upon the necessity of answering himself;-and, as in the present case, the particular profession of the inquirer, and his supposed general knowledge of all other branches of learning, left no room to suspect he could be ignorant of the true answer to this question; and especially, of what every one knew was delivered upon that head by their great Legislator; our Saviour therefore refers him to his own memory of what he had found there in the course of his studies: What is written in the law, how readest thou?-Upon which the inquirer, reciting the general heads of our duty to God and Man, as delivered in the 18th of Leviticus and the 6th of Deutero

nomy;-namely,- "That we should worship the Lord our God with all our hearts, and love our

neighbour as ourselves;" our blessed Saviour tells him, he had answered right; and if he followed that lesson he could not fail of the blessing he seemed desirous to inherit.- "This do, and thou shalt live." But he, as the context tells us, willing to justify himself, willing possibly to gain more credit in the conference, or hoping, perhaps, to hear such a partial and narrow definition of the word neighbour as would suit his own principles, and justify some particular oppressions of his own, or those of which his whole order lay under an accusation,-says unto Jesus, in the 29th verse,-" And who is my neighbour?"-Though the demand at first sight may seem utterly trifling, yet was it far from being so in fact. For, according as you understood the term, in a more or less restrained sense,-it produced many necessary variations in the duties you owed from that relation.-Our blessed Saviour, to rectify any partial and pernicious mistake in this matter, and to place at once this duty of the love of our neighbour upon its true bottom of philanthropy and universal kindness, makes answer to the proposed question, not by any far-fetched refinement, from the schools of the Rabbies, which might have sooner silenced than convinced the man,-but by a direct appeal to human nature, in an instance he relates of a man falling amongst thieves, left in the greatest distress imaginable, till by chance a Samaritan, an utter stranger, coming where he was, by an act of great goodness and compassion, not only relieved him at present, but took him under his protection, and generously provided for his future safety.

On the close of which engaging account,-our Saviour appeals to the man's own heart, in the first verse of the text,-" Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell amongst the thieves?"-and instead of drawing the inference himself, leaves him to decide in favour of

so noble a principle so evidently founded in mercy. -The lawyer, struck with the truth and justice of the doctrine, and frankly acknowledging the force of it, our blessed Saviour concludes the debate with a short admonition, that he would practise what he had approved, and go, and imitate that fair example of universal benevolence which it had set before him.

In the remaining part of the discourse I shall follow the same plan; and, therefore, shall beg leave to enlarge first upon the story itself, with such reflections as will arise from it; and conclude, as our Saviour has done, with the same exhortations to kindness and humanity which so naturally falls from it.

A certain man, says our Saviour, went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his raiment, and departed, leaving him half dead.-There is something in our nature which engages us to take part in every accident to which man is subject, from what cause soever it may have happened; but in such calamities as a man has fallen into through mere misfortune, to be charged upon no fault or indiscretion of himself, there is something then so truly interesting, that, at the first sight, we generally make them our own, not altogether from a reflection that they might have been or may be so, but oftener from a certain generosity and tenderness of nature which disposes us for compassion, abstracted from all considerations of self: so that, without any observable act of the will, we suffer with the unfortunate, and feel a weight upon our spirits we know not why, on seeing the most common instances of their distress. where the spectacle is uncommonly tragical, and complicated with many circumstances of misery, the mind is then taken captive at once, and, were it inclined to it, has no power to make resistance;

But