hence, what your best friends with you to be, and what your maker has intended, fitted, and enabled you to be.

If

Above all things, be careful to improve and make use of the reason which God has given you, to be the guide of your lives, to check the extravagance of your paffions, and to affift you in acquiring that knowledge, without which your rational powers will be of no advantage to you. you would distinguish yourselves as men, and attain the true dignity, and proper happiness of your natures, it must be by the exercise of those faculties which are peculiar to you as men. If you have no higher object than the gratification of your animal appetites and paffions, you rank yourfelves with the brute beafts; but, as you will still retain that reflection,

In

which they have not, you will never have that unallayed enjoyment of a fenfual life which they have. fact, you are incapable of the happinefs of brute animals. Afpire, therefore, to thofe fuperior pursuits and gratifications for which you were formed, and which are the prerogative and glory of your natures.

Let me urge you, my younger hearers, to a more than ordinary attention to regularity and propriety of behaviour, becoming men and chriftians, that your conduct may be no disgrace to the rational and liberal fentiments, which I trust you have imbibed. Let it be feen, that when God is confidered as the proper object of reverence, love, and confidence, as the benevolent Father of all his offspring of mankind, and their righteous and impartial moral

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gover

nor,

nor, the principle of obedience is the most ingenuous and effectual. Cherifh the most unfeigned gratitude to the Father of lights, that your minds are no longer bewildered with the gloom and darkness, in which our excellent religion was, for fo many ages, involved; but let this confideration be a motive with you to walk as becomes fo glorious a light. If your conduct be fuch as, instead of recommending your own generous principles, furnishes an excufe to others, for acquiefcing in their prejudices and errors, all the dishonour which is thereby thrown upon God, and the injury which will be done to the pure religion of Jefus Chrift, by keeping it longer in a corrupted state at home, and preventing its propagation abroad, will be your peculiar guilt, and greatly aggravate your condemnation.

Value the fcriptures, as a treasury of divine knowledge, confifting of books which are eminently calculated to inspire you with juft fentiments, and prompt you to right conduct; and confider them alfo as the only proper authority in matters of faith.

In a thing fo interefting to you as the business of religion, affecting the regulation of your conduct here, fo as to prepare you for immortal happiness hereafter, refpect no human authority whatever. Submit to those who are invested with the fupreme power in your country, as your lawful civil magiftrates; but if they would prescribe to you in matters of faith, say that you have but one Father even God, and one Mafter even Christ, and Land faft in the liberty with which he

has made you free.

you free.

Refpect a parliamentary king, and chearfully pay all

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parliamentary

parliamentary taxes; but (with a refpectable member of the British house of Commons, in the debate relating to the act of William and Mary, which makes it confifcation of goods and imprisonment for life, to deny the doctrine of the Trinity) have nothing to do with a parliamentary religion, or a parliamentary God.

Religious rights, and religious liberty, are things of ineftimable value. For these have many of our ancestors fuffered and died; and shall we, in the funshine of profperity, defert that glorious cause, from which no storms of adverfity or perfecution could make them fwerve. Let us confider it as a duty of the first rank with respect to moral obligation, to tranfmit to our posterity, and to provide, as far as we can, for tranfmitting, unimpaired, to the latest generations, that generous

zeal

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