293

SERMON XVIII,

(Preached at Ashbourn.)

I CORINTHIANS, CHAPTER VI. VERSE 8.

Nay, you do wrong and defraud, and that your

brethren.

To subdue passion and regulate desire is the great task of man, as a moral agent; a task, for which natural reason, however assisted and enforced by human laws, has been found insufficient, and which cannot be performed but by the help of religion.

The passions are divided by moralists into irascible and concupiscible; the passions of resentment, and the passions of desire. The danger of the irascible passions, the mischiefs of anger, envy, and revenge, every man knows, by evil which he has felt, or evil which he has perpetrated. In their lower degrees, they produce brutality, outrage, contumely, and calumny; and, when they are inflamed to the utmost, have too often risen to violence and bloodshed.

Of these passions the mischief is sometimes great, but not very frequent; for we are taught to watch and oppose them from our earliest years. Their malignity is universally known, and as universally dreaded. The occasions that can raise them high do not often occur; and when they are raised, if there be no immediate opportunity of gratifying them, they yield to reason and persuasion, or subside by the soothing influence of time.

Of the irascible passions, the direct aim and present purpose, is the hurt or misery of another; of the concupiscible passions the proper motive is our own good. It is, therefore, no reproach to human nature that the concupiscible passions are more prevalent; for, as it is more natural, it is more just, to desire our own good than another's evil.

The desire of happiness is inseparable from a rational being, acquainted, by experience, with the various gradations of pain and pleasure. The knowledge of different degrees of happiness seems necessary to the excitement of desire, and the stimulation of activity. He that never felt pain would not fear it, nor use any precaution to pre vent it. He who had been always equally at ease, would not know that his condition admitted any improvement, and therefore

could have no end to pursue or purpose to prosecute. But man, in his present state, knowing of how much good he is capable, and to how many evils he is exposed, has his mind perpetually employed, in defence or in acquisition; in securing that which he has, or in attaining that which he believes he either does or shall want.

He that desires happiness must necessarily desire the means of happiness, must wish to appropriate, and accumulate, whatever may satisfy his desires. It is not sufficient to be without want: he will try to place himself beyond the fear of want; and endea vour to provide future gratifications for future wishes, and lay up in store future provisions for future necessities.

It is by the effect of this care to provide against the evils, and to attain the blessings of life, that human society has its present form. For this purpose, professions are studied, and trades learned; dangers are encountered, and labour endured. For this reason every man educates his son in some useful art, which, by making him necessary to others, may oblige others to repay him what is necessary to himself. The general employment of mankind is to increase pleasure or remove the pressure of pain. These

are the vital principles of action that fill ports with ships, shops with manufactures, and fields with husbandmen, that keep the statesman diligent in attendance, and the trader active in his business.

It is apparently the opinion of the civilized world that he who would be happy must be rich. In riches the goods of life are compendiously contained: they do not enlarge our own personal powers; but they enable us to employ the powers of others for our advantage. He who cannot make what he wants, will, however, easily procure it, if he can pay an artist. He who suffers any remediable inconvenience, needs not to suffer it long, if he can reward the labour of those who are able to remove it. Riches will make an ignorant man prudent by another's wisdom, and a weak man vigorous by another's strength: it can, therefore, be no wonder that riches are generally desired; and that almost every man is busy, through his whole life, in gaining or in keeping them for himself or his posterity.

As there is no desire so extensive, or so continual in its exertion, that possesses so many minds, or operates with such restless activity, there is none that deviates into

greater irregularity, or more frequently corrupts the heart of man, than the wish to enlarge possessions and accumulate wealth.

In a discourse, intended for popular instruction, it would be of little utility to mention the ambition of kings, and display the cruelty of conquerors. To slaughter thousands in a day, to spread desolation over wide and fertile regions, and to carry rapine and destruction indiscriminately from one country to another, can be the crime only of. those few who have sceptres in their hands; and, even among them, the wantonness of war is not very common in our days: but it is a sufficient evidence of the power of interest, that such acts should ever have been perpetrated; that there could ever be any man willing to augment his wealth or extend his power by slaughter and devasta tion, or able to persuade himself that he might purchase advantages, which he could enjoy only in imagination, at the expense of the lives of thousands of his subjects as well as his adversaries; of adversaries that never had injured or offended him, and of subjects whom it was his duty and his engagement to preserve and to protect.

Nor is it necessary to mention crimes which are commonly found amongst the low