rected, and unrepented of, they fill the mind with inutterable remorse and horror,

When the sins of youth are seen in this light, it is not by giving them the soft name of infirmities, or by cloathing them with ideas of pleasure, that we shall be able to reconcile the mind to them. Such thin disguises will not conceal their true forms and natures from us. We shall still take them for what indeed they are, for sorcerers and assassins, the enchanters of our reason and the murderers of our peace.

The sum of all is comprised in that memorable advice of the Psalmist, so often quoted in this place (and, for once, let it have its effect upon us): Keep innocency, and take heed to the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last.

Or, if the scorner will not listen to this advice, it only remains to leave him to his own sad experience; but not till we have made one charitable effort more to provoke his attention by the caustic apostrophe of the wise man: Rejoice, O young man, in thy

* Ps. xxxvii. 38.

youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but KNOW THOU, that, for all these things, God will bring thee into judgment £.

f Eccles. c. xi. 9.

SERMON XXVIII.

PREACHED MAY 28, 1769.

ECCLESIASTES Vii. 21, 22.

Take no heed unto all words that are spoken, lest thou hear thy servant curse thee. For oftentimes, also, thine own heart knoweth, that thou thyself, likewise, hast cursed others.

THE royal author of this book has been much and justly celebrated for his wise aphorisms and precepts on the conduct of human life. Among others of this sort, the text may deserve to be had in reverence; which, though simply and familiarly expressed, could only be the reflexion of a man who had great

experience of the world, and had studied with care the secret workings of his own mind,

The purpose of it is, to disgrace and discountenance that ANXIOUS CURIOSITY (the result of our vanity, and a misguided self-love) which prompts us to inquire into the sentiments and opinions of other persons concerning us, and to give ourselves no rest till we understand what, in their private and casual conversations, they say of us.

"This curious disposition, says the preacher, is by all means to be repressed, as the indulgence of it is both FOOLISH and UNJUST; as it not only serves to embitter your own lives by the unwelcome discoveries ye are most likely to make; but at the same time to convict your own consciences of much iniquity; since, upon reflexion, ye will find that ye have, yourselves, been guilty at some unguarded hour or other, of the same malignity or flippancy towards other men."

In these Two considerations is comprised whatever can be said to discredit this vice: the one, you see, taken from the preacher's knowledge of human life; the other, from his intimate acquaintance with the secret depravity and corruption of the human heart.

Permit me, then, to enlarge on these two topics; and, by that means, to open to you more distinctly the WISDOM, and the EQUITY of that conduct, which is here recommended to us, of not giving a sollicitous attention to the frivolous and unweighed censures of other

men.

I. Take no heed, says the preacher, to all words that are spoken, LEST THOU HEAR THY SERVANT CURSE THEE. This is the FIRST reason which he assigns for his advice.

The force of it will be clearly apprehended, if we reflect (as the observing author of the text had certainly done) that nothing is more flippant, nothing more unreasonably and unaccountably petulant, than the tongue of man,

It is so little under the controul, I do not say of candour, or of good-nature, but of common prudence, and of common justice, that it moves, as it were, with the slightest breath of rumour; nay, as if a tendency to speak ill of others were instinctive to it, it waits many times for no cause from without, but is prompted as we may say, by its own restlessness and volubility to attack the characters of those who chance to be the subject of discourse, With