of the importance of the attainments to which it is promised.

If any one imagines he can be actuated by principles more disinterested than these, he forgets that he is a man and not a god. Happiness must be a constant object of desire and pursuit to every intelligent being,-that is, to every being, who, besides the actual perception of present pleasure and present pain, hath the power of forming general ideas of happiness and misery as distinct states arising from different causes. Every being that hath this degree of intelligence is under the government of final causes; and the advancement of his own happiness, if it be not already entire and secure, must be an end. It is impossible, therefore, that any rational agent, unless he be either sufficient to his own happiness, which is the prerogative of God, or hath some certain assurance that his condition will not be altered for the worse, which will hereafter be the glorious privilege of the saints who overcome,-but without this prerogative or this privilege, it is impossible that any rational being should be altogether unconcerned about the consequences of his moral conduct, as they may affect his own condition. In the present life, the advantages are not on the side of virtue: all comes alike to all-" to him that sacrificeth and him that sacrificeth not-to him that sweareth and to him that feareth an oath :" and if a constitution of things were to continue for ever in which virtue should labour under disadvantages, man might still have the virtue to regret that virtue was not made for him; but discretion must be his ruling principle; and discretion, in this state of things, could propose no end but immediate pleasure and present interest. The gospel, extending our views to a future period of existence, delivers the believer from the uneasy apprehension that interest and duty may possibly be at variance. It delivers him from that distrust of Providence, which the present face of things, without some certain prospect of futurity, would be too apt to create; and sets him at liberty to pursue virtue, with all

that ardour of affection which its native worth may claim, and gratitude to God, his Maker and Redeemer, may excite.

It is true, the alternative which the gospel holds out is endless happiness in heaven or endless suffering in hell; and the view of this alternative may well be supposed to operate to a certain degree on base and sordid minds,— on those who, without any sense of virtue, or any preference of its proper enjoyments as naturally the greatest good, make no other choice of heaven than as the least of two great evils. To be deprived of sensual gratifications, they hold to be an evil of no moderate size, to which they must submit in heaven; but yet they conceive of this absence of pleasure as more tolerable than positive torment, which they justly apprehend those who are excluded from heaven must undergo in the place of punishment. On minds thus depraved, the view of the alternative of endless happiness or endless misery was intended to operate; and it is an argument of God's wonderful mercy, that he has been pleased to display such prospects of futurity as may affect the human mind in its most corrupt and hardened state, that men in this unworthy state, in this state of enmity with God, are yet the objects of his care and pity, -that "he willeth not the death of a sinner, but that the sinner should turn from his way and live." But, to imagine that any one whom the warnings of the gospel may no otherwise affect than with the dread of the punishment of sin,-that any one in whom they may work only a reluctant choice of heaven as eligible only in comparison with a state of torment, does, merely in those feelings, or by a certain pusillanimity in vice, which is the most those feelings can affect, satisfy the duties of the Christian calling, to imagine this, is a strange misconception of the whole scheme of Christianity. The utmost good to be expected from the principle of fear is that it may induce a state of mind in which better principles may take effect. It may bring the sinner to hesitate between self-denial here with heaven in reversion, and gratification here with

future sufferings. In this state of ambiguity, the mind. deliberates while the mind deliberates, appetite and passion intermit: while they intermit, conscience and reason energize. Conscience conceives the idea of the moral good reason contemplates the new and lovely image with delight; she becomes the willing pupil of religion; she learns to discern in each created thing the print of sovereign goodness, and in the attributes of God descries its first and perfect form. New views and new desires occupy the soul. Virtue is understood to be the resemblance of God: his resemblance is coveted, as the highest attainment: heaven is desired, as the condition of those who resemble him; and the intoxicating cup of pleasure is refused, not that the mortal palate might not find it sweet, but because vice presents it. When the habit of the mind is formed to these views and these sentiments, then, and not before, the Christian character, in the judgment of St. Paul, is perfect; and the perfective quality of this disposition of the mind lies principally in this circumstance, that it is a disinterested love of virtue and religion as the chief object. The disposition is not the less valuable nor the less good, when it is once formed, because it is the last stage of a gradual progress of the mind which may too often perhaps begin in nothing better than a sense of guilt and a just fear of punishment. The sweetness of the ripened fruit is not the less delicious for the austerity of its cruder state: nor is this Christian righteousness to be despised, if, amid the various temptations of the world, a sense of the danger, as well as the turpitude of a life of sin, should be necessary not only to its beginning but to its permanency. The whole of our present life is but the childhood of our existence: and children are not to be trained to the wisdom and virtues of men without more or less of a compulsive discipline; at the same time that perfection must be confessed to consist in that pure love of God and of his law which casteth out fear.

We have now seen, that the perfective quality which

the apostle ascribes to the Christian's desire of improvement consists much in these two properties,--that it is boundless in its energies, and disinterested in its object. A third renders it complete; which is this,—that this appetite of the mind (for such it may be called, although insatiable, and, in the strictest sense of the word, disinterested) is nevertheless rational; inasmuch as its origin is entirely in the understanding, and personal good, though not its object, is rendered by the appointment of Providence, and by the promises of the gospel, its certain consequence. Upon the whole, it appears that the perfection of the Christian character, as it is described by the apostle, consists in that which is the natural perfection of the man,—in a principle which brings every thought and desire of the mind into an entire subjection to the will of God, rendering a religious course of life a matter of choice no less than of duty and interest.

SERMON XXIX.

The matter is by the decree of the Watchers, and the demand by the word of the Holy Ones; to the intent that the living may know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.*-DANIEL iv. 17.

THE matter which the text refers to the "decree of the Watchers," and "the demand of the Holy Ones," is the judgment which, after no long time, was about to fall upon Nebuchadnezzar, the great king of whom we read so much in history, sacred and profane. His conquest of the Jewish nation, though a great event in the history of

Preached in the Cathedral Church of St. Asaph, on Thursday, December 5, 1805; being the day of public thanksgiving for the victory obtained by Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, over the combined fleets of France and Spain, off Cape Trafalgar.

the church, was but a small part of this prince's story. The kingdom of Babylon came to him by inheritance from his father. Upon his accession, he made himself master of all the rest of the Assyrian empire; and to these vast dominions he added, by a long series of wars of unparalleled success, the whole of that immense tract of country which extends from the banks of the Euphrates westward to the sea-coasts of Palestine and Phoenicia and the border of Egypt. Nor was he more renowned in war than justly admired in peace, for public works of the highest utility and magnificence. To him the famous city of Babylon owed whatever it possessed of strength, of beauty, or convenience, its solid walls with their hundred gates, immense in circuit, height, and thickness-its stately temple and its proud palace, with the hanging gardens-its regular streets and spacious squares-the embankments, which confined the river, the canals, which carried off the floods-and the vast reservoir, which in seasons of drought (for to the vicissitudes of immoderate rains and drought the climate was liable) supplied the city and the adjacent country with water. In a word, for the extent of his dominion, and the great revenues it supplied-for his unrivalled success in war-for the magnificence and splendour of his courtand for his stupendous works and improvements at Babylon, he was the greatest monarch, not only of his own times, but incomparably the greatest the world had ever seen, without exception even of those whose names are remembered as the first civilizers of mankind-the Egyptian Sesostris and the Indian Bacchus. But great as this prince's talents and endowments must have been, his uninterrupted and unexampled prosperity was too much for the digestion of his mind. His heart grew vain in the contemplation of his grandeur: he forgot that he was a man; and he affected divine honours. His impious pride received indeed a check, by the miraculous deliverance of the three faithful Jews from the furnace to which they had been condemned. His mind at first was much affected by