our moral situation; and to do this, we must get properly acquainted with the following particulars:

First, With the law of our creation, and with our defection from it.

Secondly, In what degree, according to the constitution of the gospel, we must be restored to a conformity with this law, in order to our present peace and final happiness; and in what manner it is most usual for men to deceive themselves upon this subject.

What is the law of our creation, we may learn from the answer made by our Saviour to the scribe, who afked him, which was the firft commandment of all? To this Jesus replied, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength; which evidently implies an utter

exclusion of all other deitics, and an entire devotedness to the worship and service of the only true God. This, with the next great commandment, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, constitutes that law of perfection, which shone in man with a clear and convincing light, till, by the entrance of sin, his power of spiritual perception became so weakened and depraved, that the light has since mostly shone in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it

not.

This was eminently the condition of the heathen world, where the true God was either not known at all, or not known as the object of our entire devotion, gratitude, and dependence; where the vulgar were occupied with a multitude of fictitious deities, to whom they were taught to look up as to the only tutelar and avenging powers that presided over mankind, though described under characters so flagitious, that to resemble them, human nature must have sunk beneath its ordinary degree of

depravity. And this, in fact, was the deplorable consequence of a devotion to such dissolute and ferocious divinities as their Bacchus and Venus, their Mars and their Saturn; while the philosophers, instead of reclaiming the people from this base idolatry, helped to strengthen them in it, by their own conformity to the popular religion, and their recommendation of it to others. So far were the wisest, even among the Greeks, from any just acquaintance with the true God, and with their duty towards him, unless we will suppose them to have spoken and acted in opposition to their own secret sentiments, which would reflect still greater disgrace upon their name and character.

The second great commandment, which respects our neighbour, lies more within the comprehension of human reason; and a tolerable system of ethics, so far at least as our outward conduct is concerned, might perhaps be drawn from heathen philosophers and moralists, if taken collec

tively; for it does not appear that such a system could be extracted from any single individual. Plato himself failed greatly in several important points of practical morality; he prescribed a community of wives in his scheme of a perfect commonwealth, and in other respects gave much scope to the sensual passions; he allowed parents, in some cases, to destroy or expose their children; and, what is more directly to our present purpose, though he endeavoured to persuade his countrymen to be disposed towards one another as brethren of the same family, and as friends by nature, he used a different language when speaking of the barbarians, (that is, in the Grecian style of politeness, of all other nations) whom he held to be natural enemies, and the just objects of an implacable hostility *.

To such defective views it must be ascribed, that a Roman historian says of

Plato de Rep. lib. v.

Scipio Emilianus, the cruel conqueror of the brave city of Numantia *, that in the whole course of his life, he neither did, nor said, nor thought any thing but what was laudable; and that elsewhere he represents the second Cato as the very image of virtue, and, in the whole character of his mind, as approaching nearer to the gods than to men though we are informed by Plutarch, that this godlike Cato spent whole nights in drunken debauch, lent out his wife to the orator Hortensius, and at last laid violent hands upon himself. How to imagine such actions to be consistent with so high a character I know not, unless it be maintained with Seneca, that it would. be easier to prove drunkenness was no vice, than that Cato was vicious §; which would

*See Hooke's Rom. Hist. vol. v. p. 130-132.

Nihil in vitâ nisi laudandum, aut fecit, aut dixit, aut sensit. PATERCULUS, lib. i.

Homo virtuti simillimus, per omnia ingenio diis quàm hominibus propior. PATERC. lib. ii.

Catoni ebrietas objecta est: at faciliùs efficiet, quisquis objecerit, hoc crimen honestum, quàm turpem Catonem. SENECA de Tranq. Animi, cap. ult.