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DISCOURSE.

II. SAMUEL, I, 19.

NOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN !

THE occasion explains the choice of my subject. A subject on which I enter in obedience to You have assembled to express your request. your elegiac sorrows, and sad and solemn weeds cover you.

Before such an audience, and on such an occasion, I enter on the duty assigned me with trembling. Do not mistake my meaning. I tremble indeed---not, however, through fear of failing to merit your applause; for what have I to do with that when addressing the dying and treading on the ashes of the dead---Not through fear of failing justly to pourtray the character of that great man who is at once the theme of my encomium and regret. He needs not eulogy.-His work is finished, and death has removed him beyond my censure, and I would fondly hope, through grace, above my praise,

You will ask then, why I tremble? I trembleto think that I am called to attack from this place a crime, the very idea of which almost freezes one with horror-a crime too which exists among the polite and polished orders of society, and which is accompanied with every aggravation; committed with cool deliberation-and openly in the face of day!

But I have a duty to perform.

And difficult and awful as that duty is, I will not shrink from

it.

Would to God my talents were adequate to the occasion. But such as they are, I devoutly proffer them to unfold the nature and counteract the influence of that barbarous custom, which, like a resistless torrent, is undermining the foundations of civil government-breaking down the barriers of social happiness, and sweeping away virtue, talents and domestic felicity in its desolating

course.

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Another and an illustrious character a father-a general a statesman-the very man who stood on an eminence and without a rival among sages and heroes, the future hope of his country in dangerthis man, yielding to the influence of a custom, which deserves our eternal reprobation, has been brought to an untimely end.

That the deaths of great and useful men should be particularly noticed is equally the dictate of

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