Much might be added in support of the argument of the following Sermon. But to have taken up more of the time and attention of those who were to hear it might have been improper: and I have not thought myself at liberty, now, to alter or enlarge it. evil. ROMANS Xiii. 3, 4. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. THERE is scarcely any question which can be asked upon the subject of morals, to which a reply in substance and principle may not be found in the Gospel. And there is no question that can be raised upon any one great interest of life, public or private, which does not come within the compass of some part of the various information afforded us in the inspired volume. If we wish to know our duty, it is there if we wish to estimate things, a measure and standard of them is there given our own nature, and the scene of life around us, being equally the subject of Divine Revelation; and the improvement of the one being designed by every light thrown upon the constitution of the other. The same Revelation is moreover a series of truths at once the most mysterious and the most perspicuous. And this observation, if it hold good of the Scriptures at large, is especially to be made upon the Epistle from which my text is taken, the Epistle to the Romans; a book of Scripture in which a view of the Gospel is set forth in all its extent, with a more exact system and method, and a larger compass of doctrine, than is to be found perhaps in any other single book of the New Testament. Beginning with the principles of the Gospel, it concludes with its morals: those principles in which are included some of the eternal counsels of the Almighty, and morals by which the Christian life is built up to that practical holiness, which is the effectual working of the Gospel upon earth, the very evidence of its having come from God to man. If the Epistle present to us some doctrines of a kind to exercise our faculties with a stronger sense of adoration than of knowledge, in subjects which may be dark to us with excess of light; it leaves us not without matter of another kind; having instruction so obviously measured to our wants and use and most intelligible character, that we may perceive that the same inspired teacher, who was taken up into heaven, and there heard things above man's utterance, returned from thence charged also with tables written with the finger of God in his hand, simple and literal, suited in explanation to the closest view of the frame of our present state, and lending the most direct guidance to us both in judgment and action. The depth of doc trine on the one side shewing that it has reference to the ways of the Almighty: the perspicuity, the practical and cogent information on the other, shewing that it has reference to the ways of man. Let it not be thought that these few general remarks are a departure from that precise subject to which the words of my text, and the occasion of this day's service, would direct me. They are, if they are just, not inapplicable to the most severe use we could make of the more limited subject. For they may remind us how the Doctrines of Revelation always have their issue in some practical, simple result, in immediate contact with our habits of life and condition; and they may point out, reciprocally, the importance of each of those simpler truths, by the very fact of their being associated with the highest doctrines of our Faith. In the midst of the provision of practical Doctrine made in this Epistle, we find some of the Institutions of Civil Life brought forward to be explained, and have their value stated. And since in point of fact these Institutions have a great sway upon life, and challenge, by their very agency and interference, the interested attention of men, it becomes a matter of the nearer concern, that we should know how to regard them; whether as right, and useful, and acceptable in the eyes of God, or as the mere contrivances of men, and therefore of usurped, or doubtful authority. Along with the general instituted powers of |