tremble- It shall come to pass, if thou wilt 'not hearken unto the voice of the lord, thy

God, to observe to do all his commandments

and his statutes, that all these curses shall 'come upon thee, and overtake thee. Cursed 'shalt thou be in the city; and cursed shalt 'thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy

Cursed shall be the

'basket and thy store. 'fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, 'the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be, when thou comest in; and cursed shalt thou be, when 'thou goest out. The lord shall send upon 'thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke in all, 'that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, ' until thou be destroyed.' And yet this is but the commencement of a frightful detail of woes, which extends through fifty verses, and predicts all the calamities of the Israelitish people, as the certain consequence of transgressing the commands of God.

But, to satisfy ourselves of the displeasure of God against every breach of his law, we need not look further than to the second chapter of the book of Genesis.

In that succinct narrative of the formation of our first parents, and of their condition in Paradise, a specific penalty is denounced against the violation of one single commandment, and that too a commandment, of the transgression of which many profane persons are tempted to think lightly. The lord, God, commanded the man, saying-Of the tree ' of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt 'not eat of it; for in the day, that thou eatest 'thereof, thou shalt surely die.'

:

Thus death was made the penalty of transgression and lest, we should imagine, that the death of men was part of the original plan of our creator, and is therefore no decisive proof of his present displeasure against our offences, the commentary of the apostle in the twelfth verse of the fifth chapter to the Romans cuts off all evasion. By one man (says he) sin entered into the world, and ' death by sin; and so death passed upon all

6

Nor yet may we believe, that the mere separation of soul and body, which is what constitutes natural death, will satisfy the severity

duties to discharge to one fellow-creature, as our child, or parent, or tried friend, which cannot be claimed from us by strangers. But we must have a love for them, which would prompt us to befriend them to the same extent, if their situation and ours made it proper and contingencies do sometimes arise to call for such an exercise of universal philanthropy, as sudden danger levels all distinctions, and gives to every individual the claim of a brother; and then, as in a wreck for instance, but more especially (I would say, if you were prepared to admit it) in that moral wreck, which has befallen the species, it is seen, whether we do or do not love our neighbour, as ourselves.

But, if this be the case, I fear, it follows, as an undeniable truth, that none of you keepeth the law. I say to you in the words of the text without fear, that any of you will be disposed in his heart to contradict me,'Did not Moses give you the law? and yet 'none of you keepeth the law.' He gave you a law, by the observance of which you might live and yet none of you keepeth the law.

This indeed is the unvarying doctrine of scripture. Men have received a perfect law from the hands of their maker; and they have not kept it. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in the sight of God.

Moreover, if I may be allowed to advance one step further into the subject, for this universal defection from the pure and holy law of God the scripture assigns an origin and a cause. It describes the original righteousness of our nature, when it says, that God formed our first parent in his own image and likeness. It describes also its original sin, when the man, whom he had created upright, ventured to transgress that single command, which was his only restriction in Paradise. That first transgression was an inlet to all corruption. It changed the condition of our nature. It rendered it a sinful nature, as a single grain of arsenic will render a wholesome draught poisonous. The human mind had then consented to disregard a positive law of its maker: and it could thenceforward no longer stand upright in

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On the violation of the divine law.

its integrity, but became liable to all those motions of sin, which now work in our members. I do not say, that the sinfulness of Adam was imputed to his descendants. But it has been copied by them. All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Even little children soon betray symptoms of a nature, which has fallen from its primitive purity, and manifest dispositions, very different from that love of others without selfpreference, in which the essence of conformity to the divine law may be said to consist, and which was no doubt exhibited in perfection by the holy child, Jesus. I do not now however contend for doctrines. I appeal to facts: and I fear, that none, who are guided in their judgment by a real attention to the facts of experience or history, and have well weighed the reasonings, which have been addressed to you, can deny or doubt the conclusion, that we have all received a law, perfect, holy, suited to our intellectual nature, and conducive to our happiness and perfection, and that we have not kept it.