and pursued with impunity, are employed to cherish this worst, this most fatal of all evils. Houses of pollution in immense numbers are erected, allowed, and frequented. Abandoned women are brought forward to places of public and honourable resort; admitted without opposition to assemblies for amusement, made up of those who fill the upper spheres of life; seated at tables of distinction, and rolled on the wheels of splendour. Genius prostitutes its elevated powers to seduce the miserable victim, to varnish the guilt of pollution, to soothe, to torpor the wounded conscience, and to make the way to hell smooth, pleasant and unsuspected; forms and tunes the enchanting song, to imbrute the heedless mind; fashions and animates the marble into every form of temptation: traces on the canvass its lines of symmetry and beauty, and sheds the splendour of its colouring, only to corrupt and to ruin. The shop, to complete the havoc, publicly holds out the infamous book, the alluring image, and the fascinating picture, to every passenger; and in defiance of laws and magistrates, eagerly helps forward the work of destruction.

All these are chosen and customary pursuits of mankind. Those who follow them are immortal beings, who have souls to be saved, sins to be forgiven, and endless life to be secured. All of them have heard the gospel of salvation; have been exhorted to yield themselves to the Redeemer, and have been earnestly invited to enter into heaven.

The life of all is a vapour; the day of grace and of pardon is bounded by that momentary life; and each feels his time to be so short, that he cannot find even an hour to employ on the great work of repentance, and the salvation of his soul.

Such then are the pleasures of mankind. What, it may now be asked, are those employments of men, which wear a more serious aspect?

Among these, the first which strikes the mind of a serious investigator, is their general and wonderful profanation of the name of God. To this sin, it is generally acknowledged, there is hardly any temptation. Wickedness here assumes, therefore, the character of disinterestedness; and the sin is committed from the pure love of sinning. Yet how immensely extensive is this evil practice. The Heathen and the Moham

:

medan, the Jewish and the Christian nations, professing widely different views in other respects concerning the Ruler of all things, quietly unite in profaning his awful name. Men of all ages and characters, however discordant otherwise, harmonize here. The sage and the blockhead, the gentleman and the clown, the nobleman and the peasant, join their voices in unison and form one great chorus, not for the praise, but for the dishonour of God. The prince swears on his throne, and the beggar on his dunghill; the child lisps out the imperfec curse, and the tongue of the man of grey heirs trembles beneath the faltering blasphemy. From California to Japan, the general voice of mankind rises up to heaven, not as the odour of sweet incense,' but as one vast exhalation of impiety, infinitely disgraceful to our reason, immensely ungrateful, and immensely wicked.

The next dreadful effusion of this evil spirit is the multiform falsehood, which in such an astonishing manner clouds and disgraces this miserable world. Truth is the foundation of all virtue, and consequently of all happiness. Without it, society, in the proper sense, cannot exist. Even the dreadful bands of thieves and ruffians are proverbially acknowledged to be indebted to it for their own horrid union. But cast your eyes over this wide world, and mark how extensively truth has fallen in the streets' of cities, the solitary habitations of the country, and the wild retreats of the savage and barbarian. Mark how soon falsehood begins to blacken the tongue of the child, and how greatly to deepen its hue with the increase of years. Trace if you can, without intense mortification, the secret windings of the private slanderer; and behold if you can, without amazement, in endless multitudes, the impudent, unblushing lies of public newspapers. Survey with horror, for without horror you cannot survey, the perjuries of testimony, the perjuries of elections, the perjuries of the customhouse, and the perjuries of public office. Look, with still more amazement and regret, on the falsehoods of the great and powerful. Truth,' said king John of France, if banished from the rest of the world, ought still to find a mansion in the bosom of princes.' Yet how regularly from year to year, and from century to century, courts and legislatures assert and deny successively, the same facts, without a retraction, and

VOL. I.

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without a blush. Cast your eyes, and tell me, if they do not sicken while you cast them, on the mountainous mass of falsehood heaped up by insidious learning, and infidel philosophy, against the word of God, and against all the interest, virtue, and happiness of man. When you have done these things, finish the humiliating investigation by gazing at the whole nation of the French, swearing eternal hatred to royalty, and eternal fealty to six successive constitutions of government, adopted within little more than six successive years, and then bowing down quietly at the foot of a despot.

From falsehood, the transition is almost necessary to fraud. On this subject however, as on all the remaining ones, I can dwell but a moment. The laws of all civilized nations have been chiefly employed in repressing this sin, and in repressing it with every suffering which ingenuity could devise, or human nature sustain. Yet in spite of the whip, the brand, the prison, and the galley; in spite of the gibbet and the cross, the rack and the faggot; what commodity, what kind of dealing is not the subject of fraud; and what child of Adam is not its mortified object? All kinds of money are counterfeited; all kinds of instruments for conveyance, or security, are forged. Vast multitudes of mankind gain their livelihood from cheating. The beggar cheats you in his tale of suffering, the man of business in his commodity, the statesman plunders the public, the prince defrauds his subjects by false representations of his wants, and false representations of his expenditures. In London only, a very corrupt, but far from being the most corrupt city in Europe, 115,000 human beings, among whom are 50,000 abandoned females, live, according to the sagacious and upright Colquhoun, either partly or wholly by customary fraud; and annually plunder their fellow men of Two millions Sterling: while on the River Thames a more systematized robbery has yearly wrested from individuals no less than 500,000 pounds of the same currency; and from the Crown, during a century, ten millions.

Duelling and Suicide present to our view two other kindred testimonies of enormous corruption. On these however I cannot, and need not dwell. Instead of expatiating on them, I will exhibit to you two official accounts of the moral state of

the capital of France. By a public return to the government, of births, deaths, &c. in Paris, in the year 1801, it appears

In the Republican year, ending Sept. 23. 1803, by the report of the Prefect of police to the Grand Judge for the district of Paris, the number of

Suicides was

Murdered persons

Divorces

Murderers executed

Condemned to the gallies

Condemned to hard labour and imprisonment

Branded with hot irons

Among the criminals executed were Seven fathers, who had poisoned their children: Ten husbands, who had murdered their wives: Six wives, who poisoned their husbands: and Fifteen children, who destroyed their parents.

During that year also 12,076 lewd women had been registered, and paid for the protection of the Police; 1552 kept mistresses were noted; and 308 public brothels licensed, by the Prefect of Police at Paris.

This tremendous recital admits no comment. The spectator shrinks from it with horror; and forced to acknowledge those, comprised in the story, to be human beings, wishes to deny that himself is a man.

2. The doctrine is dreadfully evinced in the Public Conduct of mankind.

On this part of the subject, copious and important as it is,

I shall make a very few observations only, under the following heads:

(1) Their government.

Under a righteous administration of government, the intense corruption of the human character is gloomfly manifested by subjects, in the violation of their allegiance, and their evasions or their transgressions of law. God has made it our duty to ' render tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; and honour to whom honour.' Nor has He permitted us to perform these duties with a less scrupulous exactness than any other. Compare with this precept the reluctant payment of reasonable taxes; the unceasing and immense smuggling; the innumerable frauds practised on the Customhouse; the murmurings, the seditions, the revolts, the malignant factions, and the furious civil discords, which have blackened the annals even of the freest and happiest nations; and you cannot want evidence of the depravity of that spirit, which has given birth to these enormities.

On the other hand, how often is the government itself no other than an administration of iniquity. The endless train of evils however, which have flowed in upon mankind from this source, have been here so long the ruling theme, both of conversation and writings; the oppression, fraud, plunder, baleful examples, and deplorable corruption of despotic princes, have been so thoroughly learned by heart; as to render a particular discussion of them, at the present time, unnecessary. But however frequently they have been repeated, they. are not on that account less real, or dreadful manifestations of human turpitude. I know that it is a common refuge of the objectors to this doctrine, to attribute both these kinds of evidence of human corruption to the form of the government, and not to the nature of man. But this complaisance to human nature is out of place. Kings and princes are mere men; and differ from other men, only because they are surrounded by greater temptations. Their nature and propensities are precisely the same with yours and mine. Their opportunities of doing good are, at the same time, immensely greater; and were they originally virtuous, would be seized, and employed, with an avidity proportioned to their extent, for this great purpose only. Were human nature pure, as is professed; were