facilities which the rank, to which, through Providence, you are born, presents to your discharge of the duties of a Christian life.
Great temptations, I confess, are attached to your station; but it has likewise as great resources. People of rank are born, it would seem, with more passions than the rest of men; yet have they also the opportunity of practising more virtues: their vices are followed with more consequences; but their piety becomes also more beneficial: in a word, they are much more culpable than the people, when they forget their God; but they have likewise more merit in remaining faithful to him.
My intention, therefore, at present, is to represent to you the extensive good, or the boundless evils, which always accompany your virtues or vices; to convince you of what influence the elevated rank to which you are born, is toward good, or toward evil; and, lastly, to render irregularity odious to you, by unfolding the inexplicable consequences which your passions drag after them; and piety amiable, through the unutterable benefits which always follow your good examples. It would matter little to point out the dangers of your station, were the advantages of it not likewise to be shown. The Christian pulpit declaims in general against the grandeurs and glory of the age; but it would be of little avail to be continually speaking of your complaints, were their remedies not held out to you at the same time. These are the two truths which I mean to unite in this Discourse, by laying before you the endless consequences of the vices of the great and powerful, and what inestimable benefits flow from their virtues.
Part I. — " A sore trial shall come upon the mighty, says the Spirit of God; for mercy will soon pardon the meanest; but mighty men shall be mightily tormented."'
It is not, my brethren, because he is mighty himself, that the Lord, as the Scriptures say, rejects the great and the mighty, or that rank and dignity are titles hateful in his eyes, to which his favours are denied, and which, of themselves, constitute our guilt. With the Lord there is no exception of persons: he is the Lord of the cedars of Lebanon, as well as of the humble hyssop of the valley: he causes his sun to rise over the highest mountains, as well as over the lowest and obscurest places: he hath formed the stars of heaven, as well as the worms which crawl upon the earth: the great are even more natural images of his greatness and glory, the ministers of his authority, the means through which his liberalities and generosity are poured out upon his people. And I come not here my brethren in the usual language, to pronounce anathemas against human grandeurs, and to make your station a crime, since that very station comes from God, and that the object in question is not so much to exaggerate the perils of it, as to point out the infinite ways of salvation attached to that rank to which, through the will of Providence, you have been born.
But, I say, that the sins of the great and powerful have two characters of enormity which render them infinitely more punish-
