melancholy, soothe our endless anguishes, and enable us to find a certain degree of sweetness even in the evils incident to our nature. It is that which renders retirement sweet, and enables us to enjoy repose, far from the world and its amusements; it is that which makes days pass quickly, and occupies in peace and tranquillity every moment; and though apparently it allows us more leisure than a worldly life, yet it leaves a much smaller portion to weariness.
Great God! what honour does not the world unintentionally pay to thy service! What an affecting eulogium on the destiny of the upright is the lot of sinners! How well, my God, thou knowest to extort glory and praise from even thy enemies! and how little excuse thou leavest to those souls who depart from thy paths, since, in order to draw them from virtue, thou makest a resource to them even of their crimes, and employest their wants to recall them to thy eternal mercies.
Now to God, &c.
SERMON IV.
THE UNCERTAINTY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IN A STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS.
" And he arose out of the synagogue, and entered into Simon's house: and Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever; and they besought him for her." — Luke iv. 38.
Nothing more naturally represents the situation of a languid and lukewarm soul, than the state of infirmity in which the gospel here describes Peter's mother-in-law to have been. It may be said, that coldness and indolence in the ways of God, though otherwise accompanied with a life free from enormities, is a kind of secret and dangerous fever, which gradually undermines the powers of the soul, changes all its good dispositions, weakens its faculties, insensibly corrupts its inward parts, alters its propensities, spreads a universal bitterness through all its duties, disgusts it with every thing proper, with all holy and necessary nourishment; and finishes, at last, by a total extinction and an inevitable death.
This languor of the soul, in the path of salvation, is so much the more dangerous as it is less observed.
Our exemption from open irregularity gives us confidence. The external regularity of conduct, which attracts from men those praises due only to virtue, flatters us; and the secret comparison we make of our morals with the excesses of those avowed sinners whom the world and their passions govern, unites to blind us. We regard our situation as a state, less perfect indeed, but always certain of salvation; seeing our conscience can only reproach us with indolence and negligence in the discharge of our duties; too
