But this is not the case. Nothing more is attempted, nor can more, indeed, be done, than to give them that instruction in the doctrines and duties of religion, to which a claim of common right is in some sort constituted in a Christian country, by the mere capacity to profit by it; and to furnish them with those first rudiments of what may be called the trivial literature of their mother-tongue, without which they would scarce be qualified to be subjects even of the lowest class of the free government under which they are born,-a government in which the meanest citizen the very mendicant at your doors, unless his life or his franchises have been forfeited by crime to public justice, hath his birth-rights, and is intrusted with a considerable share of the management of himself. It is the peculiarity, -and this peculiarity is the principal excellence of such governments, that as the great have no property in the labour of the poor, other than what is acquired for a time by a mutual agreement, the poor man, on the other hand, hath no claim upon his superior for support and maintenance, except under some particular covenant, as an apprentice, a journeyman, a menial servant, or a labourer, which entitles him to the recompense of his stipulated service, and to nothing else. It follows, that, in such states, every man is to derive a support for himself and his family, from the voluntary exertions of his own industry, under the direction of his own genius, his own prudence, and his own conscience. Hence, in these free governments, some considerable improvement of the understanding is necessary even for the lowest orders of the people; and much strength of religious principle is requisite to govern the individual in those common concerns of his private life in which the laws leave the meanest subject, equally with his betters, master of himself. Despotism,sincere, unalloyed, rigid despotism,-is the only form of government which may with safety to itself neglect the education of its infant poor. Where it is the principle of government that the common people are to be ruled as mere animals, it might indeed be impolitic to suffer them to acquire the moral discernment and the spontaneity of man; but in free states, whether monarchical, or of whatever form, the case is exactly the reverse. The schemes of Providence and Nature are too deeply laid to be overthrown by man's impolicy. It is contrary to the order of Nature, it is repugnant to the decrees of Providence, and therefore the thing shall never be, that civil liberty should long maintain its ground among any people disqualified by ignorance and profligacy for the use and enjoyment of it. Hence the greatest danger threatens every free constitution, when, by a neglect of a due culture of the infant mind, barbarism and irreligion are suffered to overrun the lower orders. The barriers which civilized manners naturally oppose against the encroachments of power, on the one hand, and the exorbitance of licentiousness, on the other, will soon be borne down; and the government will degenerate either into an absolute, despotic monarchy, or, what a subsisting example proves to be by infinite degrees a heavier curse, the capricious domination of an unprincipled rabble. Thus would ignorance and irreligion, were they once to prevail generally in the lower ranks of society, necessarily terminate in one or the other of these two dreadful evils, the dissolution of all government, or the enslaving of the majority of mankind: while true religion, on the contrary, is the best support of every government; which, being founded on just principles, proposes for its end the joint advancement of the virtue and the happiness of the people; and by necessary consequence, co-operates with religion in the two great purposes of exalting the general character, and of bettering the general condition of man. Of every such government, Christianity, by consent and concurrence in a common end, is the natural friend and ally; at the same time that, by its silent influence on the hearts of men, it affords the best security for the permanence of that degree of orderly, definite liberty, which is an essential principle in every such constitution. The Christian religion fosters and protects such liberty, not by supporting the absurd and pernicious doctrine of the natural equality of men,-not by asserting the sovereignty is originally in the multitude, and that kings are the servants of their people,-not by releasing the conscience of the subject from the obligations of loyalty, in every supposed case of the sovereign's misconduct, and maintaining what, in the new vocabulary of modern democracy, is named the sacred right of insurrection,—not by all, or by any of these detestable maxims, Christianity supports that rational liberty which she approves and cherishes; but by planting in the breast of the individual powerful principles of selfgovernment, which render greater degrees of civil freedom consisting with the public safety. The patrons, therefore, of these beneficent institutions in which the children of the poor are trained in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, have no reason to apprehend that true policy will disapprove the pious work which charity hath suggested. Thousands of children of both sexes, annually rescued by means of these charitable seminaries, in various parts of the kingdom, from beggary, ignorance, and vice, are gained as useful citizens to the state, at the same time that they are preserved as sheep of Christ's fold, Fear not, therefore, to indulge the feelings of benevolence and charity which this day's spectacle awakens in your bosoms. It is no weakness to sympathize in the real hardships of the inferior orders: it is no weakness to be touched with an anxiety for their welfare,—to feel a complacency and holy joy in the reflection, that, by the well-directed exertions of a godly charity, their interests, secular and eternal, are secured: it is no weakness to rejoice, that, without breaking the order of society, religion can relieve the condition of poverty from the greatest of its evils, from ignorance and vice: it is no weakness to be liberal of your worldly treasures, in contribution to so good a purpose. The angels in heaven participate these holy feelings. Our Father, which is in heaven, accepts and will reward the work, provided it be well done, in the true spirit of faith and charity; for of such as these-as these who stand before you, arrayed in the simplicity and innocence of childhood, in the humility of poverty,-of such as these, it was our Lord's express and solemn declaration, "of such is the kingdom of God!" SERMON X. And they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.-MARK vii. 37. It is matter of much curiosity, and affording no small edification, if the speculation be properly pursued, to observe the very different manner in which the various spectators of our Lord's miracles were affected by what they saw, according to their different dispositions. We read in St. Luke, that our Lord " was casting out a devil, and it was dumb; and it came to pass, that when the devil- was gone out, the dumb spake;" and the and the populace that were witnesses of the miracle" wondered." They wondered, and there was an end of their speculations upon the business. They made no farther inquiry, and their thoughts led them to no farther conclusion than that the thing was very strange. These seem to have been people of that stupid sort, which abounds too much in all ranks of society, whose notice is attracted by things that come to pass, not according to the difficulty of accounting for them, -a concern which never breaks their slumbers, but according as they are more or less frequent. They are neither excited, by any scientific curiosity, to inquire after the established causes of the most common things, nor, by any pious regard to God's providential government of the world, to inquire after him in the most uncommon. Day and night succeed each other in constant vicissitude; the seasons hold - their unvaried course; the sun makes his annual journey through the same regions of the sky; the moon runs the circle of her monthly changes, with a motion ever varying, yet subject to one constant law and limit of its variations; the tides of the ocean ebb and flow; heavy waters are suspended at a great height in the thinner fluid of the air, they are collected in clouds, which overspread the summer's sky, and descend in showers to refresh the verdure of the earth, -or they are driven by strong gales to the bleak regions of the north, whence the wintry winds return them to these milder climates, to fall lightly upon the tender blade in flakes of snow, and form a mantle to shelter the hope of the husbandman from the nipping frost. These things are hardly noticed by the sort of people who are now before us: they excite not even their wonder, though in themselves most wonderful; much less do they awaken them to inquire by what mechanism of the universe, a system so complex in its motions and vicissitudes, and yet so regular and orderly in its complications, is carried on. They say to themselves, "These are the common occurrences of nature," and they are satisfied. These same sort of people, if they see a blind man restored to sight, or the deaf and dumb suddenly endued, without the use of physical means, with the faculties of hearing and of speech, wonder; that is, they say to themselves, "It is uncommon,"-and they concern themselves no farther. These people discover God neither in the still voice of nature, nor in the sudden blaze of miracle. They seem hardly to come within that definition of man which was given by some of the ancient philosophers, -that he is an animal which contemplates the objects of its senses. They contemplate nothing. Two sentences, "It is very common," or "It is very strange," make at once the sum and the detail of their philosophy and of their belief, and are to them a solution of all difficulties. They wonder for a while; but they presently dismiss the subject of their wonder from their thoughts. Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curisoity, is the source of all |