all those who receive it unworthily, let no man approach the table of the Lord, without repentance of his former sins, stedfast purposes of a new life, and full confidence in his merits, whose death is represented by it.
SERMON XXIII.
[PREACHED ON THE THIRTIETH OF JANUARY.]
"Where envying and strife is, there is confusion." James iii. 16.
That the life of man is unhappy, that his days are not only few, but evil, that he is surrounded by dangers, distracted by uncertainties, and oppressed by calamities, requires no proof. This is a truth, which every man confesses, or which he that denies it, denies it against conviction. Accordingly we find the miseries of our present state lamented by writers of every class, from the inspired teachers of religion, who admonish us of our frailty and infelicity, that they may incite us to labour after a better state, where "there is fulness of joy, and pleasures for evermore," to the vainest and loosest author, whose design is to teach methods, not of improving, but of wasting time, and whose doctrine St. Paul, speaking in a borrowed character, has well expressed in one short sentence, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."
When such is the condition of beings, not brute and savage, but endowed with reason, and united in society, who would not expect that they should join in a perpetual confederacy against the certain, or fortuitous, troubles to which they are exposed? that they should universally cooperate in the proportion of universal felicity? that every man should easily discover that his own happiness is connected with that of every other man? that thousands and millions should continue together, as partakers of one common nature? and that every eye should be vigilant,
