would answer the sole purpose of augmenting the natural aversion which you have to him; and that nature hath placed within us hatreds and likings, conformities and aversions, for which she alone is to be answerable.
To this I might at once answer, by establishing the foundations of the Christian doctrine upon loving our brethren. Is that man, in consequence of displeasing, and being disagreeable to your fancy, less your brother, child of God, citizen of heaven, member of Jesus Christ, and inheritor of the eternal promises? Doth his humour, his character, whatever it may be, efface any one of those august traits which he hath received upon the sacred font, which unite him to you by divine and immortal ties, and which ought to render him dear and respectable to you? When Jesus Christ commands us to love our brethren as ourselves, doth he mean to make a precept which costs nothing to the heart, and in the fulfilment of which we found neither difficulty nor hardship? Ah! what occasion hath he to command us to love our brethren, if, in virtue of that commandment, we were obliged to love only those for whom we feel a natural fancy and inclination. The heart hath no occasion, on this point, for precept; it is its own law. The precept then supposes a difficulty on our part: Jesus Christ hath, therefore, foreseen that it would be hard upon us to love our brethren; that we should find within us antipathies and dislikes which would withdraw us from them; and behold why he hath attached so much merit to the observance of this single point, and hath so often declared to us, that, to observe it, was to observe the whole law. Aversion to our brethren, far, then, from justifying our estrangement from them, renders to us, on the contrary, the obligation of loving them more precise, and places us personally in the case of the precept.
But besides, ought a Christian to be regulated by fancy and humour, or by the principles of reason, of faith, of religion, and of grace? And since when is the natural fancy, which we are commanded by the gospel to oppose, become a privilege which dispenses us from its rules? If the repugnance felt for duties were a title of exemption, where is the believer who would not be quit of the whole law, and who would not find his justification and his innocency, in proportion as he felt a greater degree of corruption in his heart? Are our fancies our law? Is religion only the support, and not the remedy of nature? Is it not a weakness, even in the eyes of the world, to regulate our steps and our sentiments, our hatreds and our love toward men, merely upon the caprices of a fancy for which we can give no reason ourselves? Do men of this description do great credit, I do not say to religion, but to humanity? And are they not, even to the world itself, a spectacle of contempt, of derision, and of censure? What a chaos would society be, if fancy alone were to decide upon our duties, and upon reciprocal attentions, and if men were to be united by no other law! Now, if the rules, even of society, exact, that fancy alone be not the sole principle of our conduct toward the rest of men, should the gospel be more indulgent on that point? — the gospel, which
