ment to our country, if each individual could but see and feel, how large a part of his innocence he owes to his birth, breeding, and residence in Great Britain. The administration of the laws; the almost continual preaching of moral prudence; the number and respectability of our sects; the pressure of our ranks on each other, with the consequent reserve and watchfulness of demeanor in the superior ranks, and the emulation in the subordinate; the vast depth, expansion and systematic movements of our trade; and the consequent inter-dependence, the arterial or nerve-like net-work of property, which make every deviation from outward integrity a calculable loss to the offending individual himself from its mere effects, as obstruction and irregularity; and lastly, the naturalness of doing as others do:-these and the like influences, peculiar, some in the kind and all in the degree, to this privileged island, are the buttresses, on which our foundationless well-doing is upheld, even as a house of

C

cards, the architecture of our infancy, in which

each is supported by all.

Well then may we pray, give us peace in our time, O Lord! Well for us, if no revolution, or other general visitation, betray the true state of our national morality! But above all, well will it be for us if even now we dare disclose the secret to our own souls! Well will it be for as many of us as have duly reflected on the Prophet's assurance, that we must take root downwards if we would bear fruit upwards; if we would bear fruit, and continue to bear fruit, when the foodful plants that stand straight, only because they grow in company; or whose slender surface-roots owe their whole stedfastness to their intertanglement; have been beaten down by the continued rains, or whirled aloft by the sudden hurricane! Nor have we far to seek for whatever it is most important that we should find. The wisdom from above has not ceased for us!" The principles of the oracles of God" (Heb. v. 12.)

INTRODUCTION.

are still uttered from before the altar! ORACLES, which we may consult without cost! Before an ALTAR, where no sacrifice is required, but of the vices which unman us! no victims demanded, but the unclean and animal passions, which we may have suffered to house within us, forgetful of our baptismal dedication—no victim, but the spiritual sloth, or goat, or fox, or hog, which lay waste the vineyard that the Lord had fenced and planted for himself.

I have endeavored in a previous discourse to persuade the more highly gifted and educated part of my friends and fellowchristians, that as the New Testament sets forth the means and conditions of spiritual convalescence, with all the laws of conscience relative to our future state and permanent Being; so does the Bible present to us the elements of public prudence, instructing us in the true causes, the surest preventives, and the only cures, of public evils. The authorities of Raleigh, Clarendon and Milton must at least exempt me from the blame of singularity, if

undeterred by the contradictory charges of paradoxy from one party and of adherence to vulgar and old-fashioned prejudices from the other, I persist in avowing my conviction, that the inspired poets, historians and sententiaries of the Jews, are the clearest teachers of political economy: in short, that their writings

are the STATESMAN'S BEST

* To which I should be tempted with the late Edmund Burke to annex that treasure of prudential wisdom, the Ecclesiasticus. I not only yield, however, to the authority of our Church, but, reverence the judgment of its founders in separating this work from the list of the Canonical Books, and in refusing to apply it to the establishment of any doctrine, while they caused it to be "read for example of life and instruction of manners." Excellent, nay, invaluable, as this book is in the place assigned to it by our Church, that place is justified on the clearest grounds. For not to say that the compiler himself, candidly cautions us against the imperfections of his translation, and its no small difference from the original Hebrew, as it was written by his grandfather, he so expresses himself in his prologue as to exclude all claims to inspiration or divine authority in any other or higher sense than every writer is entitled to make, who having qualified himself by the careful study of the books of other men had been drawn on to write something himself. But of still greater weight, practically, are the objections derived from certain passages of the Book, which savour too plainly of the fancies and prejudices of a jew of

MANUAL, not only as containing the first principles and ultimate grounds of state-policy whether in prosperous times or in those of danger and distress, but as supplying likewise the details of their application, and as being a full and spacious repository of precedents and facts in proof.

Well therefore (again and again I repeat

Jerusalem: ex. gr. the 25th and 26th verses of chapter L; and of greater still the objections drawn from other passages, as from chapter 41st. which by implication and obvious inference are nearly tantamount to a denial of a future state, and bear too great a resemblance to the ethics of the Greek poets and orators in the substitution of posthumous fame for a true resurrection, and a consequent personal endurance; the substitution in short, of a nominal for a real immortality, and lastly from the prudential spirit of the maxims in general, in which prudence is taught too much on its own grounds instead of being recommended as the organ or vehicle of a spiritual principle in its existing worldly relations. In short, prudence ceases to be wisdom when it is not to the filial fear of God, and to the sense of the excellence of the divine laws, what the body is to the soul! Now, in the work of the son of Sirach, prudence is both body and soul.

It were perhaps to be wished, that this work, and the wisdom of Solomon had alone received the honor of being accompaniments to the inspired writings, and that these should, with a short precautionary preface and a