and revelling in delight, yet overborne by ungovernable desires of increasing their acquisitions; and breaking through the boundaries of religion, to pile heaps on heaps, and add one superfluity to another, to obtain only nominal advantages and imaginary pleasures.

For these we see friendships broken, justice violated, and nature forgotten; we see crimes committed, without the prospect of obtaining any positive pleasure, or removing any real pain: we see men toiling through meanness and guilt, to obtain that which they can enjoy only in idea, and which will supply them with nothing real which they do not already abundantly possess.

If men, formed by education and enlightened by experience, men whose observations of the world cannot but have shown them the necessity of virtue, and who are able to discover the enormity of wickedness, by tracing its original, and pursuing its consequences, can fall before such temptations, and, in opposition to knowledge and conviction, prefer to the happiness of pleasing God the flatteries of dependents, or the smiles of power; what may not be expected from him who is pushed forward into sin by the impulse of poverty, who lives in continual want of what he sees wasted by thousands in negligent extravagance, and whose pain is every moment aggravated by the contempt of those whom nature has subjected to the same necessities with himself, and who are only his superior by that wealth which they know not how to possess with moderation or decency?

How strongly may such a man be tempted to declare war upon the prosperous and the great!

With what obstinacy and fury may he rush on from one outrage to another, impelled on one part by the pressure of necessity, and attracted on the other by the prospect of happiness; of happiness, which he sees sufficient to elevate those that possess it above the consideration of their own nature, and to turn them away from their own flesh; that hap piness, which appears greater by being compared with his own misery, and which he admires the more because he cannot approach it. He that finds in himself every natural power of enjoyment, will envy the tables of the luxurious, and the splendor of the proud he who feels the cold of nakedness, and the faintness of hunger, cannot but be provoked to snatch that bread which is devoured by excess, and that raiment which is only worn as the decoration of vanity. Resentment may easily combine with want, and incite him to return neglect with violence.

Such are the temptations of poverty; and who is there that can say, that he has not, sometimes, forsaken virtue upon weaker motives? Let any man reflect upon the snares to which poverty exposes virtue, and remember how certainly one crime makes way for another, till at last all distinction of good and evil is obliterated; and he will easily discover the necessity of charity to preserve a great part of mankind from the most atrocious wickedness.

The great rule of action, by which we are directed to do to others whatever we would that others should do to us, may be extended to God himself: whatever we ask of God, we ought to be ready to bestow on our neighbour: if we pray to

be forgiven, we must forgive those that trespass against us; and is it not equally reasonable, when we implore from Providence our daily bread, that we deal our bread to the hungry? and that we rescue others from being betrayed by want into sin, when we pray that we may not ourselves be led into temptation?

Poverty, for the greatest part, produces ignorance; and ignorance facilitates the attack of temptation for how should any man resist the solicitations of appetite, or the influence of passion, without any sense of their guilt, or dread of the punishment? How should he avoid the paths of vice, who never was directed to the way of virtue ?

For this reason, no method of charity is more efficacious than that which at once enlightens ignorance and relieves poverty; that implants virtue in the mind, and wards off the blasts of indigence that might destroy it in the bloom. Such is the charity of which an opportunity is now offered; charity, by which those who would, probably, without assistance, be the burdens or terrors of the community, by growing up in idleness and vice, are enabled to support themselves by useful employments, and glorify God by reasonable service.

Such are the general motives which the religion of Jesus affords to the general exercise of charity, and such are the particular motives for our laying hold of the opportunity which Providence has this day put into our power for the practice of it; motives, no less than the hope of everlasting happiness, and the fear of punishment which shall never end. Such incitements are surely sufficient to quicken the slowest, and animate the coldest; and

if there can be imagined any place in which they must be more eminently prevalent, it must be the place where we now reside. The numerous frequenters of this place constitute a mixed assemblage of the happy and the miserable. Part of this audience has resorted hither to alleviate the miseries of sickness, and part to divert the satiety of pleasure; part because they are disabled, by diseases, to prosecute the employment of their station, and part because their station has allotted them, in their own opinion, no other business than to pursue their pleasures: part have exhausted the medicines, and part have worn out the delights of every other place; and these contrary conditions are so mingled together, that in few places are the miseries of life so severely felt, or its pleasures more luxuriously enjoyed.

To each of these states of life may the precepts of charity be enforced with eminent propriety, and unanswerable arguments. Those whose only complaint is a surfeit of felicity, and whose fearless and confident gaiety brings them hither, rather to waste health than to repair it, cannot, surely, be so intent upon the constant succession of amusements which vanity and affluence have provided, as not, sometimes, to turn their thoughts upon those whom poverty and ignorance have cut off from enjoyment, and consigned a prey to wickedness, to misery, and to want. If their amusements afford them the satisfaction which the eager repetition of them seems to declare, they must certainly pity those who live in sight of so much

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happiness, which they can only view from a distance, but can never reach; and those whom they pity, they cannot, surely, hear the promises made to charity, without endeavouring to relieve. But if, as the wisest among the votaries of pleasure have confessed, they feel themselves unsatisfied and deluded; if, as they own, their ardour is kept up by dissimulation, and they lay aside their appearance of felicity, when they retire from the eyes of those among whom they desire to propagate the deceit, if they feel that they have wasted life without possessing it; and know that they shall rise to-morrow to chase an empty good which they have often grasped at, but could never hold; they may surely spare something for the purchase of solid satisfaction, and cut off part of that expense by which nothing is procured, for the sake of giving to others those necessaries which the common wants of our being demand, and by the distribution of which, they may lay up some treasures of happiness against that day which is stealing upon them, the day of age, of sickness, and of death, in which they shall be able to reflect with pleasure on no other part of their time passed here, but that which was spent in the duties of charity: but, if these shall harden their dispositions, if these shall withhold their hands, let them not amuse them. selves with the general excuses, or dream that any plea of inability will be accepted from those who squander wealth upon trifles, and trust sums, that might relieve the wants of multitudes, to the skill of play, and the uncertainties of chance.

To those to whom languishment and sickness have shown the instability of all human happiness,