for we have no right to charge our ancestors with having provoked them by crimes greater than our own.
Let us, therefore, be warned by the calamities of past ages; and those miseries which are due to our sins, let us avert by our penitence. "Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him, and to our God, and he will abundantly pardon."
SERMON XXIV.
"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice." Prov. xxix. 2.
That the institutions of government owe their original, like other human actions, to the desire of happiness, is not to be denied; nor is it less generally allowed, that they have been perverted to very different ends from those which they were intended to promote. This is a truth, which it would be very superfluous to prove by authorities, or illustrate by examples. Every page of history, whether sacred or profane, will furnish us abundantly with instances of rulers that have deviated from justice, and subjects that have forgotten their allegiance; of nations ruined by the tyranny of governours, and of governours overborne by the madness of the populace. Instead of a concurrence between governour and subjects for their mutual advantage, they seem to have considered each other, not as allies or friends, to be aided or supported, but as enemies, whose prosperity was inconsistent with their own, and who were, therefore, to be subdued by open force, or subjected by secret stratagems.
Thus have slavery and licentiousness succeeded one another, and anarchy and despotick power alternately prevailed. Virtue has, at one time, stood exposed to the punishments of vice; and vice, at another time, enjoyed
