confidence to those who, with the fairest appearances, are accustomed to act not unto the Lord, but unto men. He that devours widows' houses may from artifice, or pride, as well as compunction, be induced to build a sanctuary. He that betrays his trust towards a helpless orphan, may endow an hospital. He that is welcomed with shouts for his plausible harangues, or profuse donations in behalf of some public institution, may yet be a contentious neighbour, an imperious master, an unfaithful husband, or an unfeeling father.

But further. In the pursuit of worldly praise, men are neither ashamed nor afraid of going into the most opposite extremes. View the vain-glorious man in the society of the wise and good, with what effort does he assume the semblance of those qualifications, which he values only as the present means of acquiring esteem-with what anxiety does he torture his invention for those virtuous sentiments to which his heart is secretly a strangerwith what ostentation will he sometimes display even actions, which in the judgment of God derive their intrinsic and sole merit from the sincerity of our motives. Let us however pass with the same man into other scenes, where the wise are no longer to be deluded, and the good are no longer to be conciliated. There we shall behold this advocate of innocence, this panegyrist of virtue, this admirer of every intellectual and moral excellence, changed in a moment. We shall behold him rioting in the gross intemperance of a tavern, or wallowing in the impure excesses of a brothel. Amidst all this

diversity, or I should rather say apparent contrariety in the means to which he has recourse, he has the inward consciousness of pursuing the same end. Whether he speaks truth or falsehood—whether he extols virtue or palliates vice, it is not necessary for him to believe what he utters. Sufficient it is for such a skilful and systematic deceiver, that in the real or pretended faith of other men—in their right or wrong notions of duty-in their sympathetic vanity or sympathetic profligacy, he can meet with ready and fit instruments for the accomplishment of his own designs, and it is in either their better or their worse qualities he discovers what, under different circumstances, he may employ to equal advantage. When you behold a man in whom the love of praise in various situations produces such various effects, impossible it is for you not to be at once disgusted at his glaring inconsistency, and shocked at his complicated guilt. Yet to the picture which I have just been drawing, it may be objected that the colouring is too strong. Were such a man to exist, I might be told, his detection would be certain. The most consummate art is insufficient to support such a complicated and discordant system of wily hypocrisy and unblushing licentiousness. Such a deceiver would be spurned alike by the virtuous and the vicious-by the virtuous, because he had degraded the dignity of their cause, and applied to the worst purposes appearances which, if accompanied by realities, would have facilitated the very bestby the vicious, because having once excited their admiration as the declared enemy of decorum, tem

perance, and moral rectitude, he had shrunk from danger, and abandoned his associates in guilt, more consistent and more bold than himself. If then such characters are very rare, little, you may say, is it to be dreaded from their example; and why should the Christian instructor point his indignation against offences which are but ideal, if measured by his description of them, or which, if they ever do occur, cannot long escape detection?

Now to objections of this kind I should calmly oppose the testimony of experience. Is there any impartial and serious observer, who has not met with characters very strongly resembling and very nearly approaching that which I have described to you? What security can we have, that he who today assumes by effort the appearance of virtue, may not to-morrow venture upon the appearance and the reality too of vice? If the applause of mankind be adopted as his favourite principle, what bounds shall be prescribed to the operation of such a motive? If for the purpose of gratifying vanity he sometimes will practise virtue, why should he abstain from vice, when the same vanity urges him to rush into it? Virtue also, be it remembered, requires great exertions of self-command and self-denial; but vice is surrounded by numberless allurements, and in yielding to them, he by one process secures for himself more than one gratification; for he indulges not only his habitual pride, but his carnal appetites and his selfish affections. Hence they who are acquainted with the weakness and deceitfulness of the human heart, will not be surprised

at any flagrant excesses or any seeming inconsistencies into which that offender may be led, who looketh unto man, and not unto the Lord.

But if we really be actuated by the spirit of our holy religion, doubtless we shall experimentally find, that to be what we appear is not merely the better, but the easier part; for surely the most delightful sensation of a rational being must be the consciousness of believing every tenet which he professes, of deserving every praise which he receives-the consciousness of gradually acquiring the mastery over every inveterate prepossession, over every latent and dangerous propensity, and every early and criminal habit-the consciousness of going on from strength to strength, till he attain the fulness of the stature of the man of God. With the satisfaction thus enjoyed by himself he will often compare the misery to which the hypocrite is exposed-alarmed as that hypocrite must be by the dread of discovery, the very excess of dissimulation has a tendency to betray him. Grant, however, that by a concurrence of favourable circumstances he for a season escapes detection, what, I beseech you, must be his feelings when he reviews the occurrences of the day that has past, and reclining on his pillow in solicitude and silence, he communes however involuntarily with his own heart? His long-desired and much-boasted reputation will serve only to aggravate his sufferings, by calling to his recollection the inglorious means by which he had acquired it. The commendations of a deluded world cannot then be heard, and when remembered they will speak the language

of reproof to his conscience, by reminding him that they are wholly undeserved. Even in this world the same conscience will visit him with the severest chastisement-it will inflict upon him the mortification of abasement-it will subject him to abasement without the delicacy of shame, and to the pangs of remorse without the ultimate solace of security in amendment-it will compel him to feel at length the intrinsic and inestimable value of that virtue which he had so often professed to reverence without one endeavour to practise it heartily, by laying open to him the deformity of those vices which he had presumed to commit in order to quiet compunction, and thus to obtain the praise of the most contemptible, or the most hateful of his fellow-creatures.

But to conclude. The full turpitude of such a man's guilt, and the terrible severity of his punishment, will be more apparent when I consider, as I intend to do, in a second discourse, the offence which such a sinner commits against the Supreme Being. From the observations, however, which I have already adduced, my brethren, you must see the weakness and the wickedness, the short-sighted craft, and the daring presumption of those deluded transgressors, who would follow the rules of virtue itself with eye-service only, and who being, as St. Paul calls them, men-pleasers, are prepared to be alike ostentatious in right and wrong-not from any commendable regard to their essential differences, but from the corrupt desire of worldly profit, or worldly applause. You will perceive the useful