A worse evil, a mischief, attending the severity, the salutary severity upon the whole, of our dealing with the lapsed female, is this,-that it proves an obstacle almost insurmountable to her return into the paths of virtue and sobriety, from which she hath once deviated. The first thing that happens, upon the detection of her shame, is, that she is abandoned by her friends, in resentment of the disgrace she hath brought upon her family; she is driven from the shelter of her father's house; she finds no refuge in the arms of her seducer,— his sated passion loathes the charms he hath enjoyed; she gains admittance at no hospitable door; she is cast a wanderer upon the streets, without money, without a lodging, without food: in this forlorn and hopeless situation, suicide or prostitution is the alternative to which she is reduced. Thus, the very possibility of repentance is almost cut off; unless it be such repentance as may be exercised by the terrified sinner in her last agonies, perishing in the open streets, under the merciless pelting of the elements, of cold and hunger and a broken heart. And yet the youth, the inexperience, the gentle manners once, of many of these miserable victims of man's seduction, plead hard for mercy, if mercy might be consistent with the safety of the treasure we so sternly guard. We have high authority to say, that these fallen women are not of all sinners the most incapable of penitencenot the most unlikely to be touched with a sense of their guilt-not the most insusceptible of religious improvement; they are not of all sinners the most without hope, if timely opportunity of repentance were afforded them: sinners such as these, upon John the Baptist's first preaching, found their way into the kingdom of heaven, before the Pharisees, with all their outward show of sanctity and self-denial.

This declaration of our Lord justifies the views of this charitable institution, which provides a retreat for these wretched outcasts of society,-not for those only who by a single fault, seldom without its extenuations, have

forfeited the protection of their nearest friends; but even for those, generally the most unpitied but not always the most undeserving of pity among the daughters of Eve, whom desperation, the effect of their first false step, hath driven to the lowest walks of vulgar prostitution. In the retirement of this peaceful mansion-withdrawn from the temptations of the world---concealed from the eye of public scorn-protected from the insulting tongue of obloquy— provided with the necessaries of life, though denied its luxuries-furnished with religious instruction, and with employment suited to their several abilities-they have leisure to reflect on their past follies; they are rescued from despair, that worst enemy of the sinner's soul; they are placed in a situation to recover their lost habits of virtuous industry-the softness of their native manners, and to make their peace with their offended God.

The best commendation of this charity is the success with which its endeavours, by God's blessing, have been crowned. Of three thousand women admitted since the first institution, two-thirds, upon a probable computation formed upon the average of four years, have been saved from the gulf in which they had well nigh sunk, restored to the esteem of their friends, to the respect of the world, to the comforts of the present life, and raised from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness and the hope of a glorious immortality.

Happier far their lot than that of their base seducers! who, not checked, like these, in their career of guilty pleasure, by any frowns or censures of the world, "have rejoiced themselves in their youth" without restraint— "have walked," without fear and without thought, “in the ways of their heart, and in the sight of their eyes"and at last perhaps solace the wretched decrepitude of a vicious old age with a proud recollection of the triumphs of their early manhood over unsuspecting woman's frailty; nor have once paused to recollect, that "God for these things will bring them into judgment." But

with Him is laid up the cause of ruined innocence: he hath said, and he will make it good, "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay."

SERMON XLIV.

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.-Romans xiii. 1.*

THE freedom of dispute, in which for several years past it hath been the folly in this country to indulge, upon matters of such high importance as the origin of government and the authority of sovereigns,-the futility of the principles which the assertors, as they have been deemed, of the natural rights of men, allege as the foundation of that semblance of power which they would be thought willing to leave in the hands of the supreme magistrate (principles rather calculated to palliate sedition than to promote the peace of society and add to the security of government),-this forwardness to dispute about the limits of the sovereign's power, and the extent of the people's rights, with this evident desire to set civil authority upon a foundation on which it cannot. stand secure, argues, it should seem, that something is forgotten among the writers who have presumed to treat these curious questions, and among those talkers who, with little knowledge or reflection of their own, think they talk safely after so high authorities: it surely is forgotten, that whatever praise may be due to the philosophers of the heathen world, who, in order to settle, not to confound the principles of the human conduct, set themselves to investigate the source of the obligations of morality and law,-whatever tenderness may

* Preached before the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, January 30, 1793; being the Anniversary of the Martyrdom of King Charles the First.

be due to the errors into which they would inevitably fall, in their speculations concerning the present condition of mankind, and the apparent constitution of the moral world

-of which, destitute as they were of the light of revelation, they knew neither the beginning nor the end,—the Christian is possessed of a written rule of conduct delivered from on high, which is treated with profane contempt if reference be not had to it upon all questions of duty, or if its maxims are tortured from their natural and obvious sense to correspond with the precarious conclusions of any theory spun from the human brain; it hath been forgotten, that Christians are possessed of authentic records of the first ages, and of the very beginning of mankind, which for their antiquity alone, independent of their Divine authority, might claim to be consulted in all inquiries, where the resolution of the point in question depends upon the history of man.

From these records it appears, that the Providence of God was careful to give a beginning to the human race, in that particular way which might for ever bar the existence of the whole or of any large portion of mankind in that state which hath been called the state of nature. Mankind from the beginning never existed otherwise than in society and under government: whence follows this important consequence,-that to build the authority of princes, or of the chief magistrate under whatever denomination, upon any compact or agreement between the individuals of a multitude living previously in the state of nature, is in truth to build a reality upon a fiction. That government, in various forms, is now subsisting in the world, is a fact not easily to be denied or doubted: that the state of nature ever did exist, is a position of which proof is wanting: that it existed not in the earliest ages, the pretended time of its existence, is a fact of which proof is not wanting, if credit may be given to the Mosaic records: but to derive governments which now are from a supposed previous condition of mankind

which never was, is, at the best, an absurd and unphilosophical creation of something out of nothing.

But this absurdity is in truth but the least part of the mischief which this ill-conceived theory draws after it. Had what is called the state of nature,-though a thing so unnatural hath little title to the name, but had this state been in fact the primeval condition of mankind; that is, had the world been at first peopled with a multitude of individuals no otherwise related than as they had partaken of the same internal nature and carried the same external form-without distinct property, yet all possessing equal right to what they might have strength or cunning to appropriate each to himself of the earth's common store-without any governor, head, or guardian, -no government could ever have been formed by any compact between the individuals of this multitude, but what their children in the very next generation would have had full right to abolish, or any one or more of those children, even in opposition to the sense of the majority, with perfect innocence, though not without imprudence, might have disobeyed: insomuch, that if such compact be the true foundation of sovereign authority, the foundation is weaker than these republican theorists themselves

conceive.

The whole foundation of government, in their view of it, is laid in these two assumptions,-the first, that the will of a majority obliges the minority; and the second, that the whole posterity may be bound by the act and deed of their progenitors. But both these rights, that of the many to bind the few, and that of the father to make a bargain that shall bind his unborn children,— both these rights, though sacred and incontrovertible in civil society, are yet of the number of those to which civil society itself gives birth; and out of society they could have no existence. The obligations on the minority and on the child to stand by the resolutions of the majority and the engagements of the father, arise not from any thing in the nature of man individually consi