that it is intrusion; that they yield to it as they might to any other tyranny, but do from their hearts deprecate and abjure it.  This seems the least that can be done: unless we would have our children’s children say, “There was once here a glorious Church, but it was betrayed into the hands of Libertines for the real or affected love of a little temporary peace and good order.”

July 22, 1833.

1 Samuel xii. 23.

As for me, Godforbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the right way.

On public occasions, such as the present, the minds of Christians naturally revert to that portion of Holy Scripture, which exhibits to us the will of the Sovereign of the world in more immediate relation to the civil and national conduct of mankind.  We naturally turn to the Old Testament, when public duties, public errors, and public dangers, are in question.  And what in such cases is natural and obvious, is sure to be more or less right and reasonable.  Unquestionably it is a mistaken theology, which would debar Christian nations and statesmen from the instruction afforded by the Jewish scriptures, under a notion, that the circumstances of that people were altogether peculiar and unique, and therefore irrelevant to every other case.  True, there is hazard of misapplication, as there is whenever men teach by example.  There is peculiar hazard, from the sacredness and delicacy of the subject; since dealing with things supernatural and miraculous as if they were ordinary human precedents, would be not only unwise, but profane.  But these hazards are more than counterbalanced by the absolute certainty, peculiar to this history, that what is there commended was right, and what is there blamed, wrong.  And they would be effectually obviated if men would be careful to keep in view this caution:—suggested every where, if I mistake not, by the manner in which the Old Testament is quoted in the New:—that, as regards reward and punishment, God dealt formerly with the Jewish people in a manner analogous to that in which He deals now, not so much with Christian nations, as with the souls of individual Christians.

Let us only make due allowances for this cardinal point of difference, and we need not surely hesitate to avail ourselves, as the time may require, of those national warnings, which fill the records of the elder church: the less so, as the discrepancy lies rather in what is revealed of God’s providence, than in what is required in the way of human duty.  Rewards and punishments may be dispensed, visibly at least, with a less even hand; but what tempers, and what conduct, God will ultimately reward and punish,—this is a point which cannot be changed: for it depends not on our circumstances, but on His essential, unvarying Attributes.

I have ventured on these few general observations, because the impatience with which the world endures any remonstrance on religious grounds, is apt to shew itself most daringly, when the Law and the Prophets are appealed to.  Without any scruple or ceremony, men give us to understand that they regard the whole as obsolete: thus taking the very opposite ground to that which was preferred by the same class of persons two hundred years ago; but, it may be feared, with much the same purpose and result.  Then, the Old Testament was quoted