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HULSEAN LECTURES

FOR 1820.

DISCOURSE I.

I

PROV. X. 7.

"The memory of the Just is blessed."

AM a believer in God, and in Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. This is the substance of my faith, the rock of my consolation, and my only hope, whether in time or eternity, for the attainment of that peace and happiness, which must be the ultimate desire of every being, who has the power to think, or the capacity to form a wish upon the subject of his own future destiny. That the kindness of Providence has cast the lot of my inheritance in a Christian land; but more especially, that it has granted me to draw the first breath of life under the influence of the Gospel in her purest form, and in a country, where she invi

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gorates the soul by the brightest beams of her unclouded excellence;-I look upon it as a great and unmerited blessing. I count it an equal mercy that, in days when theidol of unbelief had gathered round it the adoration of mankind, and a vain and earthly philosophy alone had power to scatter with unbounded profusion amongst her votaries, the senseless honours of human praise, there was yet piety enough in those to whom the formation of my early principles and the instruction of my maturer years were committed, to despise the idle applauses of the creature's tongue, and to refuse to burn the holy incense of their devotion before the unhallowed image which the madness of speculation had set up. It is necessary, indeed, but it is, at the same time, a very difficult duty, to glory in the shame of bowing before our Maker as the Lord of the Universe, at a moment when he is degraded or renounced by half the miserable worms that he has made. Nor is it a more easy task to cling with affection to our Redeemer in those seasons of infidelity, when his children do hide, as it were, their faces from him," and he is become again as of old, the "despised and rejected of men." I cannot, therefore, and I must not cease to thank the God of these my fathers for having preserved them pure in the midst of a general corruption, and for having been myself, through their instrumentality, so deeply imbued

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