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 Foster, John, 1770-1843. 
 An essay on the importance i 
 of considering the subject! 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 iVIic/rosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/essayonimportancOOfost 
 
AN ESSAY 
 
 ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSIDERING THE 
 
 SUBJECT OF RELIGION, 
 
 ADDRESSED PARTICULARLY TO MEN OF EDUCATION. 
 
 BY JOHN FOSTER, 
 
 AUTHOR OF ESSAYS ON DECISION OF CHARACTER, d&9. 
 
 5e6ond Amdrioan Edilion. 
 
 i5oston: 
 
 0BLISHED BY CROCKER 6c BREWSTER, 
 
 No. 47, Washington-Street, 
 
 NEW YORK:— JONATHAN LEAVITT. 
 
 182, Broadwa/. 
 
 1S28. 
 
ESSAY. 
 
 There are more ways to derive instruction from 
 books, than the direct and chief one, of applying the 
 aJ.tention to what they contain. Things connected 
 with them, by natural or casual association, will 
 sometimes suggest themselves to a reflective and 
 imaginative reader, and divert him into secondary 
 trains of ideas. In these the mind may, indeed, 
 float along in perfect indolence, and acquire no good, 
 but a serious disposition might regulate them to a 
 profitable result. 
 
 Of these extraneous ideas, the most obviously 
 occurring, as being the most directly associated with 
 the book, may be some recollections or conjectures 
 concerning the author. Perhaps the most remark- 
 able circumstances of his life, and qualities of his 
 character, are well known. Some of these may 
 come on the reader's mind, suspend his attention to 
 the written thoughts, and draw him away into medi- 
 tation on the person, perhaps now no longer on earth, 
 who once thought them, and deliberately put them 
 in the words just seen on the page. 
 
 And the reminiscences, which thus bring what the 
 author was into conjunction with what he has writ- 
 1* 
 
THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 ten, display the relation between them, greatly vary- 
 ing in character in the different instances. The 
 book, we will suppose, teaches genuine wkdom, and 
 forcibly inculcates the best principles ; and it may be 
 that the author is remembered or recorded to have 
 been worthy of his doctrine, an example of the vir- 
 tues of which we are admiring him as the advocate, 
 and one of the excellent of the earth. In this case, 
 we have a pleasing reflection from his character shed 
 on his pages. It is the whole man, faithfully affirm- 
 ing to us, with his heart and life, all that his lan- 
 guage expresses in testimony to truth and goodness. 
 The living spirit and practice of the man have left 
 an evidence and a power to animate these sentences 
 of the now silent instructer. If, at his happy de- 
 parture, his " works followed him," they still also 
 follow his words. And thus the reader feels the 
 benefit of that principle of association, by which his 
 thoughts, at some moments, pass from the writing to 
 the author. 
 
 But a very different case is too possible, in which 
 a dark haunting of the author's memory shall at 
 times cast a shade over sentences bright witli intelli- 
 gence, strong in the assertion, perhaps in the vindi- 
 cation, of important principles of truth and virtue, 
 and expressed with all the appearance of sincere 
 respect for them. The idea of him may intervene 
 with the effect of a counteracting malignant genius, 
 to blast the fairest, and enervate the strongest, forms 
 of thought which he has presented to please and in- 
 struct us. They cannot speak to us without our 
 
OF RELIGION. 7 
 
 seeming to hear an under voice, as if mocking the 
 attention and complacency which we were beginning 
 to give to them. There may have been left such 
 memorials of the author's character, as to force upon 
 us a doubt whether he was honest in what he wrote ; 
 whether the principles which he displayed so much 
 ability in maintaining were his own sincere convic- 
 tions. Or, where there may not be cause for so 
 grave a suspicion, it may be too probable or evident 
 that his exertions were applied in a mere profes- 
 sional capacity, on a calculation of distinction and 
 advancement, and without any cordial sense of the 
 value of truth. Or, while we may be convinced 
 that we are reading the honest dictates of his judg- 
 ment, and that he did really feel, at the time of 
 writing, a concern about their application to his own 
 conduct, v^e may have the mortification to know 
 that the tenor of his life, or many circumstances in 
 it, were in melancholy contrariety to his book. It 
 is even related of a man of genius, of dissipated 
 habits, that he published a book of piety, written by 
 him in perfect good faith, and for the very purpose 
 of imposing a, restraint on his own follies and vices, 
 by this expedient of combining with the testimony 
 of his conscience, a formal pledge to the public, — 
 and that he did it in vain. 
 
 This dark obtrusion of the author's character 
 may tend, in its immediate elTect, to lessen the force 
 of the sentiments and arguments by which he seemed 
 to be training us to right judgment and practice. 
 If a man who could think with such clear intelli- 
 
b TUE IMPORTANCE 
 
 gence, could reason so convincingly, could estimate 
 the quality of things, as it would appear to us, so 
 impartially and justly, and could advise and inculcate 
 with such gravity, and semblance of being in earn- 
 est, — if such a man might, nevertheless, be even 
 sceptical respecting the very principles which he 
 seems to prove, or might, while believing them, 
 maintain them with no better intention than that of 
 making a display of his ability, in order to advance 
 himself in fame or lucre, or might feel a sincere 
 esteem for the truths and precepts which he taught, 
 and yet allow himself to act in flagrant violation of 
 them, — can there be any real authority, any solid 
 importance, in the instructions we are receiving from 
 his book ? But this inauspicious relation of the 
 author to his writings may turn to the reader's bene- 
 fit, if he will be quite serious. It wiil force on his 
 view another exposure and exemplification of the 
 sad disorder into which our nature has fallen ; it will 
 show him of how little avail is a mere intellectual 
 exercise of the mind on important truth ; and how 
 much more is indispensable to the salutary effect of 
 right principles, than a bare assent of the judgment, 
 however decided. It will admonish him that the 
 efficacy of truth depends on a habitual communica- 
 tion of the soul with the God of truth. He has the 
 author revisiting him, as from the dead, to apprize 
 him by example, that truths the most important may 
 pass in the train of his thoughts, or may be retained 
 in his judgment as his fixed opinions, all in vain, 
 unless they be brought and kept in contact with his 
 
OF RELIGION. 
 
 conscience, and his conscience be kept habitually 
 reverent to the Supreme Authority. And shall our 
 Lord's declaration respecting a real intervention of 
 one from the departed be verified in this case too ; 
 so that it shall be entirely unavailing for this gloomy 
 apparition to the readers's mind, to warn him against 
 trifling with the serious instructions in the book, as 
 he that wrote them had trifled, and adding one more 
 to the number of those who have deliberately gone 
 the way to ruin, bearing a lamp lighted by heaven in 
 their hand ? 
 
 This representation of the secondary advantage 
 derivable from books, supposes them to be read. 
 But, even in the most cursory notice of them, when 
 the attention is engaged by no one in particular, 
 ideas may be started of a tendency not wholly for- 
 eign to instruction. A reflective person, in his 
 library, in some hour of intermitted application, when 
 the mind is surrendered to vagrant musing, may 
 glance along the ranges of volumes, with a slight re- 
 cognition of the authors, in long miscellaneous array 
 of ancients and moderns. And that musing may 
 become shaped into ideas like these : What a num- 
 ber of our busy race have deemed themselves capa- 
 ble of informing and directing the rest of mankind. 
 How many who were powerful in thought, or labori- 
 ous in research, have had their brief season under 
 the sun, have attained their respective shares of in- 
 fluence and fame, and are now no longer on earth ! 
 What a vast amount is collected here of the results 
 of the most strenuous and protracted exertions of so 
 
10 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 many minds ! What were, in each of these claim- 
 ants that the world should think as they did, the 
 most prevailing motives f How many of them sin- 
 cerely loved truth, honestly sought it, and faithfully, 
 to the best of their knowledge, declared it ? What 
 might be the circumstances and influences which de- 
 termined, in the case of that one author, and the 
 next, and the next again, their own modes of opinion? 
 How many of them were aware, and acted on the 
 conviction, of the importance of a devout intercourse 
 with heaven, in order to their being truly wise them- 
 selves, and to their being the successful teachers of 
 wisdom f How many of them were actuated by a 
 genuine desire to benefit their fellow mortals ? What 
 may be conjectured as to the degree of complacency 
 with which many of them have since, in a state 
 where they better knew the truth of things, and 
 better knew themselves, regarded the spirit in which 
 they speculated, and the tendency of what they left 
 to speak in their name after they were gone ? 
 
 And how much have they actually done for truth 
 and righteousness in the world ? Do not the con- 
 tents of these accumulated volumes constitute a 
 chaos of all discordant and contradictory principles, 
 theories, representations of fact, and figurings of 
 imagination ? Could I not instantly place beside 
 each other the works of two noted authors, who 
 maintain for truth directly opposite doctrines, or 
 systems of doctrines ; and then add a third book,* 
 which explodes them both ? I can take some one 
 book, in which the prime spirits of the world, through 
 
OF RELIGION. H 
 
 all time, are brought together, announcing the 
 speculations which they, respectively, proclaimed to 
 be the essence of all wisdom, protesting with solemn 
 censure, or sneering contempt, against the dogmas 
 and theories of one another, and conflicting in a 
 huge Babel of all imaginable opinions and vagaries."^ 
 Within these assembled volumes, how many errors 
 in doctrine may there not be maintained ; how many 
 bad practical principles palliated, justified, or dis- 
 played in seductive exemplification ; how many good 
 ones endeavoured to be supplanted ; how many ab- 
 surdities and vain fancies set forth in plausible col- 
 ours ! Is it not as if the intellect of man had been 
 surrendered to be the sport of some malicious and 
 powerful spiritual agent, who could delight in play- 
 ing it through all traverses, freaks, and mazes of 
 fantastic movement, mocking at its self-importance, 
 diverted at its follies, gratified most of all when it is 
 perverted to the greatest mischief; and malignantly 
 providing for the perpetuation of the efl^ect of all 
 this, through subsequent time, by instigating the 
 ablest of the minds thus sported with, to keep their 
 own perversions in operation on posterity through 
 the instrumentality of their books ? If such a thing 
 might be as the intervention of the agency of a 
 better and more potent intelligence, to cause, by- 
 one instantaneous action on all those books, the 
 obliteration of all that is fallacious, pernicious, or 
 
 For example, the work of Brucker. 
 
12 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 useless in them, what millions of pages would be 
 blanched in our crowded libraries ! 
 
 The man who is supposed to be thoughtfully 
 passing his eye over a large array of books may 
 make such reflections, without being guilty of arro- 
 gance. It is not supposed that he can be intimately 
 acquainted with the contents of the majority of 
 them, or that he is assuming to be the infallible 
 judge how much might justly be doomed to oblivion 
 in those which he has examined. But being ap- 
 prized, in a general way, of the qualities of a large 
 proportion of them ; having learned something of the 
 characters of many of the authors : and to what 
 class, or party, or school, to what faith, or in some 
 instances no faith, to what prevailing system of an 
 age or nation, or to what singularities of opinion 
 they were severally addicted, he necessarily knows 
 that the multifarious collection contains innumerable 
 things at variance with intellectual and moral recti- 
 tude. He knows, that if each author had one living 
 disciple wholly obsequious to him, and if all these 
 disciples could be brought together, there would be 
 a company in which almost every error of the hu- 
 man understanding, and every wrong disposition and 
 practice, would have an advocate. 
 
 Such ideas, arising in the exterior survey of the 
 works of so many intellects, may yield some instruc- 
 tion to a reflective man. While the swarm of no- 
 tions and conceits of fancy comes upon his mental 
 sight thick and tumultuous, and as lawlessly capri- 
 cious in their shapes as the imps figured as throng- 
 
OF RELIGION. 13 
 
 ing about the magician, he may reflect what the 
 reason of man, which should have been the light 
 and glory of such a creature of God, has become, 
 and become capable of producing, through some dis- 
 astrous lapse into disorder. He may consider what 
 the rational faculty has been, and would ever be, in 
 the absence of divine revelation ; and also what 
 necessity there is for a corrective and regulating in- 
 fluence from above on the mind, if, notwithstanding 
 that revelation, it can have wantoned into so many 
 aberrations. It will be shown him under what ill 
 omens he will apply himself to the study of the most 
 important subjects without simplicity in his motives, 
 and a concientious care of the procedure of his 
 judgment. He may think, and deplore to think, 
 what mischief may have sprung from the intellectual 
 obliquity, the pride, the turpitude, the irreligion, or 
 even the carelessness, of one mind of great powers 
 of seduction. He may be mortified to see how folly 
 can link itself to intelligence, as if to expose it to 
 scorn, wdiile he reflects how many men of superior 
 intellect, who therefore ought not to have been the 
 dupes of a phantasm, have been impelled to the 
 most intense exertion by the passion to be renowned 
 in this world, where they were to stay so short a 
 time — to be renowned in it, even after they should 
 have passed away beyond the possible enjoyment of 
 their fame : and a sentiment of mingled contempt 
 and pity will arise at the failure of these anticipa- 
 tions in the case of some of them, whose earnest, in- 
 2 
 
14 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 defatigable labours have barely preserved their 
 names from oblivion. While his look is arrested by 
 the works of some of those of highest distinction, 
 splendid in literary achievement and lasting fame, it 
 may be suggested to his thoughts, with respect to 
 one of them, and another, whether, on a Christian 
 estimate of things, he would be deliberately willing, 
 were it possible, to shine in all that splendour in his 
 own and a succeeding age, on the condition of being 
 just of the same spirit toward God and the best in- 
 terests of mankind, as those celebrated men. While 
 pronouncing their names, and looking at these vol- 
 umes, in which they have left a representative ex- 
 istence on earth, left the form and action of tlieir 
 minds embodied in a more durable vehicle than their 
 once animated clay, how striking to think, that some- 
 where, and in some certain condition, they them- 
 selves are existing still ; existing as really and per- 
 sonally as when they were revolving the thoughts 
 and writing the sentences which fill these books ! 
 From the character of these images of their minds, 
 these enshrined statues, created to receive homage 
 for them after they are gone, what may be deemed 
 of their present condition elsewhere ? The musing 
 of our contemplatist may at times be led to solemn 
 conjectures at the award which these great intellec- 
 tual performers have found in another state ; and he 
 follows some of them with a very dark surmise. 
 
 His eye may rest on a book inscribed with a name 
 far less " proudly eminent" in the honours of genius 
 and talent ; but a work which has unquestionably 
 
OF RELIGION. 15 
 
 done very great, and almost unmixed good. And 
 he may be reminded of that sovereignty of the Gov- 
 ernor of the world in his selection and appointment, 
 by which, minds greatly below the highest order of 
 natural ability may be rendered preeminent in use- 
 fulness. It may also occur to him, diverting for 
 an instant from all the ranks and varieties of those 
 who have aspired to be teachers of mankind, to re- 
 flect how many humble spirits, that never attempted 
 any of the thousand speculations, nor revelled in the 
 literary luxuries, contained in these books, have 
 nevertheless passed worthily and happily through 
 the world, into a region where it may be the ap- 
 pointed result and reward of fervent piety, in infe- 
 rior faculties, to overtake, by one mighty bound, the 
 intellectual magnitude of those who had previously 
 been much more powerful minds. And finally, 
 when he has such evidence that this world has been 
 always a tenebrious and illusory scene, for the search 
 after truth by a spiritual nature itself weak, pervert- 
 ed, and obscured, he may surely feel some aspira- 
 tions awakened toward that other world, where the 
 objects of intelligence will be unveiled, to faculties 
 rectified and nobly enlarged for their contemplation. 
 
 Thus far, the instructive reflections which even 
 the mere exterior of an accumulation of books may 
 suggest, are supposed to occur in the way of think- 
 ing of the authors. But the same books may also 
 excite some interesting ideas, through their less ob- 
 vious, but not altogether fanciful, association with 
 
16 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 the persons who may have been their readers or 
 possessors. The mind of a thoughtful looker over 
 a range of volumes, of many dates, and a consider- 
 able proportion of them old, will sometimes be led 
 into a train of conjectural questions : — Who were 
 they that, in various times and places, have had 
 these in their possession ? Perhaps many hands 
 have turned over the leaves, many eyes have passed 
 along the lines. With what measure of intelligence, 
 and of approval or dissent, did those persons re- 
 spectively follow the train of thoughts? How many 
 of them were honestly intent on becoming wise by 
 what they read? How many sincere prayers were 
 addressed by them to the Eternal Wisdom durins: 
 the perusal ? How many have been determined, in 
 their judgment or their actions, by these books? 
 What emotions, temptations, or painful occurrences, 
 may have interrupted the reading of this book, or 
 of that ? In how many instances may a reader have 
 shut one of them, to indulge in a folly or a vice, of 
 wliich that very book had warned him to beware? 
 Some of these volumes are histories of the life and 
 death of good men ; how many readers may have 
 proceeded along the narrative, approving and ad- 
 miring ; and, envying the happy termination of the 
 course, have said, " Let me die the death of the 
 righteous," and nevertheless have pursued a con- 
 trary course, and come to a melancholy end ? May 
 not some one of these books be the last that some 
 one person lived to read? Many that have perused 
 them are dead 5 each made an exit in a manner and 
 
OF RELIGION. ]7 
 
 with circumstances of its own ; what were the man- 
 ner and circumstances in each instance ? It was a 
 most solemn event to that person ; but how ignorant 
 concerning it am I, who now perhaps have my eye 
 on the book which he read the last ! What a power 
 of association, what an element of intense signifi- 
 cance, would invest some of these volumes, if I 
 could have a momentary vision of the last scene of 
 a number of the most remarkable of their former 
 readers ! Of that the books can tell me nothing ; 
 but let me endeavour to bring the fact, that persons 
 have read them and died, to bear vv^ith a salutary in- 
 fluence on my own mind while I am reading any of 
 them. Let me ciierish that temper of spirit which 
 is sensible of intimations of what is departed, re- 
 maining and mingling with what is present, and can 
 thus percieve some monitory glimpses of even the 
 unknown dead. What multiplied traces of them, 
 on some of these books, are perceptible to the imag- 
 ination, which beholds successive countenances long 
 since " changed and sent away," bent in attention 
 over the pages ! And the minds which looked from 
 within through those countenances, conversing with 
 the thoughts of other minds perhaps long withdrawn, 
 even at that time, from among men — what and 
 where are they now ? Among the representations of 
 the objects of faith, contained in any of these works, 
 what passages may they be which approach the 
 nearest to a description of that condition of exist- 
 ence to which those readers were transferred, after 
 
18 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 closing the book for the last time ? If I could have 
 a sign, when I happen to fall on some page dark 
 with portentous images of the evil which awaits the 
 impious and wicked, that a certain former reader 
 carelessly and presumptuously dared the experiment, 
 and has found a reality corresponding to those men- 
 aces, but more tremendous ; or a sign, when I am 
 reading sentences animated with noble and delight- 
 ful ideas of the fehcity which awaits the faithful, 
 that a certain preceeding reader, (and suppose him 
 signified by name,) is now in the experience of a 
 fact, true in principle to these anticipations, but far 
 transcending in degree, how powerfully should I be 
 arrested at those passages, as if I were come to an 
 opening from the invisible world, through which I 
 could hear " sounds of lamentation and woe," or 
 songs of triumph, from the identical beings who, at 
 a certain hour in the past, looked on these lines ! 
 There is actually a person telling me, that he looked 
 once on these very descriptions, these emblems, 
 which are at this moment before my sight, and that 
 he, the same person, is, at this time that I am look- 
 ing at them, overwhelmed or enraptured by the real- 
 ity. But I, that am come after him, to read these 
 representations now, do I solemnly consider tliat I 
 am myself making my election of the yet unseen 
 good or evil, and that very soon I shall leave the 
 books in my turn, and arrive at the consequence ? 
 
 Sometimes the conjectural reference to the former 
 possessors and readers of books, seems to be ren- 
 dered a little less vague, by our finding at the be- 
 
OF RELIGION. 19 
 
 ginning of an old volume, one or more names writ- 
 ten, in such characters, and perhaps accompanied 
 with such dates, that we are assured those persons 
 must long since have done with all books. The 
 name is generally all we can know of him who in- 
 serted it ; but we can thus fix on an individual as 
 actually having possessed this volume ; and perhaps 
 there are here and there certain marks which should 
 indicate an attentive perusal. What manner of per- 
 son was he ? What did he think of the sentimentSa 
 the passages, which [ see that he particularly no- 
 ticed ? If there be opinions here which I cannot 
 admit, did he believe them ? If there be counsels 
 here which I deem most just and important, did they 
 afFectually persuade him ? Was his conscience, at 
 some of these passages, disturbed or calm ? In 
 what manner did he converse on these subjects with 
 his associates f What were the most marked fea- 
 tures of his character, what the most considerable 
 circumstances of his life, in what spirit and expec- 
 tations did he approach and reach its close ? The 
 book is perhaps such a one as he could not read, 
 without being cogently admonished that he was go- 
 ing to his great account; he went to that account, 
 how did he meet and pass through it ? This is no 
 vain reverie. He, the man who bore and wrote this 
 name, did go, at a particular time, though unrecord- 
 ed, to surrender himself to his Judge. But 1, who 
 handle the book that was his, and observe his name, 
 and am thus directing my thoughts into the dark 
 after the man, I also am in progress toward the same 
 
20 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 tribunal, when it will be proved, to my joy or sor- 
 row, whether I have learned true wisdom from my 
 books, and from my reflections on those W'ho have 
 possessed and read them before. 
 
 But it may be, that the observer's eye fixes on a 
 volume which instantly recalls to his mind a person 
 whom he well knew ; a revered parent perhaps, or 
 a valued friend, w^ho is recollected to have approved 
 and inculcated the principles of the book, or perhaps 
 to have given it to the person who is now looking at 
 it, as a token of regard, or an inoffensive expedient 
 for drawing attention to an important subject. He 
 may have the image of that relative or friend, as in 
 the employment of reading that volume, or in the 
 act of presenting it to him. This may awaken a 
 train of remembrances leading away from any rela- 
 tion to the book, and possibly of salutary tendency ; 
 but also, such an association with the book may 
 have an effect, whenever he shall consult it, as if it 
 were the departed friend, still more than the author, 
 that uttered the sentiments. The author spoke to 
 any one indiffrently, to no one in particular ; but 
 the sentiments seem to be specially applied to me, 
 when they come in this connexion with the memory 
 of one who was my friend. Thus he would have 
 spoken to me, thus, in effect, he does speak to me, 
 while I think of him as having read the book, and 
 regarded it as particularly adapted to me ; or seem 
 to behold him, as when reading it in my hearing, and 
 sometimes looking off* from the page to make a gen- 
 tle enforcement of the instruction. He would have 
 
OF RELIGION. 21 
 
 been happy to anticipate that, whenever I might look 
 into it, my remembrance of him would infuse a more 
 touching significance, a more applying principal, into 
 its important sentiments ; thus retaining him, though 
 invisibly, and without his actual presence, in the ex- 
 ercise of a beneficent influence. But indeed I can-, 
 at some moments, indulge my mind to imagine 
 something more than this mere ideal intervention to 
 reinforce the impression of truth upon me ; inso- 
 much that, supposing it were permitted to receive 
 intimations from those who have left the world, it 
 will seem to me possible that I might, when looking 
 into some parts of that book, in a solitary hour of 
 night, percieve myself to be once more the object 
 of his attention, signified by a mysterious whisper 
 from no visible form ; or by a momentary preternat- 
 ural luminousness pervading the lines, to intimate 
 tliat a friendly intellioence, that does not forget me, 
 would still and again enforce on my conscience the 
 dictates of piety and wisdom which I am reading. 
 And shall it be as nothing to me, for effectual im- 
 pression, that both my memory recalls the friend as 
 when living, in aid of these instructions, and that 
 my imagination, without any discord with my reason, 
 apprehends him, when now under a mightier mani- 
 festation of truth, as still animated with a spirit which 
 would, if that were consistent with the laws of the 
 higher economy, convey to me yet again the same 
 testimony and injunctions ? Is all influential rela- 
 tion dissolved by the withdrawment from mortal in- 
 tercourse ; so that let my friends die, and I am as 
 
22 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 loose from their hold upon me as if they had ceased 
 to exist, or even never had existed ? 
 
 In this slight exemplification of the manner in 
 which the sight of an assemblage of books may 
 awaken serious reflection, by recalling to our view 
 the persons who are imagined or known to have pos- 
 sessed or read them, we are supposing the associa- 
 tion confined to the particular volumes on the spot. 
 Any attempt at widening the scope of reflection, 
 toward the whole extent of all the editions and co- 
 pies of each book, ^vould confuse and dissipate 
 the meditation in a multiplicity inconceivable and 
 endless. Think of any one book that has been long 
 and extensively circulated ; — suppose Doddridge's 
 Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. The 
 immense number of impressions have engaged the 
 attention, less or more, of hundreds of thousands of 
 persons. Each of those copies has had its own par- 
 ticular destination, and many of them have, doubt- 
 less, been attended with remarkable circumstances, 
 though to us unknown. If some of the most mem- 
 orable could be brought to our knowledge, in con- 
 nexion with the individual and still existing copies 
 which they befell, what an interest would be attach- 
 ed to those books, bearing such memorials of the 
 past ! Imagine by what a strange diversity of per- 
 sons, as to disposition, mental endowment, conduct, 
 age ; in what a variety of situations, under how 
 many peculiar conjunctures of occurrence ; and 
 with what dissimilar impressions and results, the book 
 
OF RELIGION. 23 
 
 has been perused or noticed ! It is striking, to a 
 degree even awful, to reflect what such a book must 
 have done ; to how many it may have imparted 
 thoughts new and affecting, and which nothing could 
 expel ; how many it may have been made the mean 
 of leading into a happy life, and to a happy end ; how 
 many it has arrested, disturbed, and warned, whom 
 it could not persuade ; of how many it has aggra- 
 vated the responsibility, more than influenced the 
 conduct. So great a number and diversity of ac- 
 countable beings, unknown, for the most part, to one 
 another, scattered here and there, over more than 
 one country, and over a space of time approaching 
 to a century, have come into some certain relation 
 to this one book ! Among them, many a single in- 
 stance might, if the case could be fully brought to 
 our knowledge, exhibit a remarkable history of a 
 train of thought and emotion, of determination and 
 practical result; possibly including singular inci- 
 dents, opportune and auspicious, or of disastrous 
 influence. And who shall presume to cast any 
 thought toward an assignable duration of the effect 
 resulting to so many persons, from their attention 
 having fallen on this work, when that effect is gone, 
 or is to go, into the interests of eternity? Let the 
 idea of its unknown prolongation be combined with 
 that of the number of beings experiencing it, and 
 it would be no extravagant fantasy, to believe, that 
 the pious author may find it one of the amazements 
 of his future enlarging knowledge, to have a mani- 
 festation in some way unfolding itself to him, of even 
 
24 THE IMPORTANCE. 
 
 a minor part of the consequences of what he 
 wrote. 
 
 It is but a diminutive portion of what must have 
 happened to the book, in relation to its former read- 
 ers, and transient inspectors, that we can bring 
 within the view of our mind, with any distinctness 
 of apprehension. But it is easy to represent to 
 ourselves a kw instances of so general a descrip-. 
 lion, that it must be certain there have been many 
 such. And we may perhaps be indulged in the 
 hope of inducing somewhat of a serious and favour- 
 able predisposition, in some one or other, whose 
 attention may hereafter be drawn to the work, by 
 employing the remainder of this Essay in specifying 
 a few exemplifications of the manner of reception 
 and attention, which the book may be imagined to 
 have found, with persons of several supposed char- 
 acters of mind ; and suggesting, in each case, some 
 of the appropriate considerations. We would wish 
 to fall on such questions, persuasives, or expostula- 
 tions, as might have been pertinently addressed, and 
 possibly in some instances were addressed to the 
 persons so described, by a sensible religious friend ; 
 whose character we may be allowed to personate^, 
 in representing how his office might be performed. 
 
 It would be of little use to expatiate on the sup- 
 position, (not an improbable one,) that such a book 
 may casually, at one time or another, have fallen 
 under the transient notice of a decided unbeliever 
 in revealed religion ; an unbeliever, therefore, in 
 
OF RELIGION. !iD 
 
 effecl, in religion altogether. We can easily con- 
 ceive the supercilious air, and the note of scorn, at 
 the sight of what cost the excellent author so much 
 earnest labour, with the most pure and benevolent 
 intention, and has occupied so many thousand hours 
 of the grave attention of readers ; what has been 
 the mean of awakening many thoughtless spirits to 
 seriousness ; what has, in not a few instances, op- 
 portunely occurred to decide a mind wavering in the 
 most momentous of all practical questions ; and 
 what has by many been gratefully recollected, near 
 the close of life, as having greatly contributed to the 
 cause of its closing well. He could not be unap- 
 prized of such things belonging to its history, unless 
 we suppose him more ignorant of the extension and 
 effect of what may be called our religious literature, 
 than is quite consistent with the character of a well- 
 informed man, which we may be sure he claimed. 
 But we may believe, that the knowledge of this did 
 not at all modify the tone of contempt, in which he 
 repeated the title of the book, to give it a new turn : 
 " Rise and Progress of — delusion, superstition, 
 nonsense ! Rise of an ignis faiiius, from fermenting 
 ignorance, to glimmer and ramble in a progress to 
 extinction and nothing !" And he was elated in the 
 self-complacency of being so much more wise and 
 fortunate than all such writers, and all their believ- 
 ing readers. 
 
 But was it a self-complacency quite entire and 
 unmingled, or which could be maintained in steady 
 3 
 
26 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 uniform tenor, through the diversity of circumstan- 
 ces, and the varying moods of the mind ? Let us 
 suppose that, soon after his indulging this contempt 
 of the book and its subject, some grevious occur- 
 rence, or even the mere unexplained fluctuation of 
 feeling, reduced him for a while to a somewhat re- 
 flective or gloomy temper; and that just then one of 
 his own fraternity turned in to see him, and happened 
 to catch sight of the same book, — if indeed it be an 
 admissible supposition, that it could have been suf- 
 fered to remain any where near him. We may im- 
 aofine the visitant to recrard the book with the same 
 disposition as his friend ; and let it be supposed, that 
 he went into a strain of congratulation something 
 like the following : What a noble privilege of eleva- 
 tion we enjoy over those silly dupes of imposture 
 and superstition, the authors of these works, (such 
 of them as really think as they write,) and their dis- 
 ciples, who gravely and honestly believe what they 
 read. To think what a mighty concern these sim- 
 ple people are always making of their souls, talking 
 of their spiritual nature, their immortal principle, 
 their infinite value ! Whereas we, by virtue of rea- 
 son disenchanted and illuminated, could tell them 
 that this soul, so fondly idolized, so ludicrously ex- 
 tolled, is nothing more than an accident of corporeal 
 organization, and necessarily perishes with the ma- 
 terial frame — \yith the body, as they call it in con- 
 tradistinction, and speak of it in terms of compara- 
 ' live contempt, as if they possessed something in- 
 comparably more noble. They are for ever, too, 
 
OF RELiGlOxN'. ^t 
 
 referring to a Supreme Being, with whom they fancy 
 they are standing in some mysterious and sublime 
 relation. They talk of his favour, his providence, 
 his grace ; and actually imagine they can hold a 
 direct communication with him, indulging a fantas- 
 tic notion of some special good to be obtained from 
 him by importunate solicitation. What an inflation 
 of vanity ! to fancy that such a being (if there he 
 such a one) must be continually thinking of them ; 
 that he should care about their dispositions and de- 
 portment toward him ; and that they can attract his 
 special attention, and constrain him to give peculiar 
 tokens of his favour. And what a wretched bond- 
 age of superstition, to be, at every step, in every 
 practical question, with respect to every inclination 
 and emotion, and with the sacrifice of whatever their 
 own immediate interest may plead, under the con- 
 straint of an imaginary obligation to consult the will 
 of some invisible and unknown authority ! Our 
 privilege of sounder reason reduces and restores us 
 to ourselves, from all such visionary amplitude of 
 relations ; and exempts us from all the vain solici- 
 tudes and distractions of an unremitting endeavour 
 to live in consistency with them. It is enough that 
 we hold our transient being under certain laws of 
 nature, fixed in the system of the world, to which 
 it is more easy to submit, than to the will and con- 
 tinual interference of a formal and foreign authority. 
 Our subjection to these laws we cannot help, but are 
 happy to take our destiny under it, with the free 
 allowance to follow our^ own inclinations as far as we 
 
28 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 can. If there be an Almighty Power, we may well 
 believe he has other affairs to mind, than that of 
 interfering with us while we are minding our own. 
 
 It is true, these deluded people are persuaded 
 that he has made an express communication to men, 
 declaring the relations in which they stand, and an- 
 nouncing his will. And indeed it must be confess- 
 ed to be quite miraculous, that so many things con- 
 cur to make a semblance of evidence that there has 
 been such a communication. But let us not trouble 
 ourselves about the matter : it is absurd to imagine 
 there can have been any such anomaly in the course 
 of things, any such arbitrary substitution for the 
 dictates of our reason : our license of acting as we 
 desire, would be surrendered in believing it ; and 
 we will not believe it. 
 
 To crown the whole set of delusions which these 
 people call their faith, they are actually persuaded 
 that there remains for men a conscious existence 
 after death ; a perpetual existence, they say, in a 
 state bearing a retributive relation to what they shall 
 have been in this life. Ai>d they are elated with 
 the hope, and vehemently stimulated to exertions 
 for the attainment, of an eternal felicity. A mag- 
 nificient dream, certainly, for those who can lay their 
 sober senses aside, to admit the illusion. Nor can 
 we deny, that, through the medium of such a notion, 
 these enthusiasts have a view of death vastly differ- 
 ent from ours, and feel an augmented interest in 
 their existence, as they approach near the end of 
 what they are calling its introductory stage. To 
 
OF RELIGION. 29 
 
 hear them talk, one would think they had received 
 messengers or visions from another world, to inform 
 them of a splendid allotment and reception already 
 prepared for them there, and of friends impatient 
 for their arrival. And it is a notorious fact, that, on 
 the strength of such a presumption, great numbers 
 of the devotees to this faith have resigned their life 
 with exultation, not a few of them under tortures 
 inflicted for their fidelity to this their superstition. 
 Well, the delusion and the existence broke up to- 
 gether. And for the present race of pious fools, 
 let them expend their cares, their passions, their 
 life, their very souls, upon their adored fallacy ; 
 while we, on a higher ground, can be amused to see 
 them led on by a phantom, which ere long will mock 
 at their sudden fall, one after another, into nothing. 
 We envy them not the ambitious aspirings which 
 cheat them out of the enjoyment of this world, 
 never, assuredly, to repay them in another. If we 
 lose any thing worth calling pleasure, in being desti- 
 tute of that hope which flatters them with images of 
 a happy futurity, we have an ample compensation in 
 the riddance of that fear which visits even some of 
 them, in their gloomy moments, with alarms of a 
 miserable one. Besides, a happiness of such a na- 
 ture as they dream of, would be little congenial with 
 the inclinations which actuate us, and which we 
 have neither power nor desire to alter. Our wis- 
 dom is, to make the most that we can, in the indul- 
 gence of these inclinations, of the world that we are 
 3* 
 
30 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 in. We hope in a good fortune, that our life may be 
 long and prosperous ; and if any thing of a sombre 
 hue should threaten to come over its latter stages, 
 through infirniities and the evident approach of its 
 termination, we shall have the resource of philosophy 
 and fate ; and may find some remaining amusements 
 that will please and divert us to the last. And 
 when, at length, we are forced out of the world and 
 existence, we shall have no consciousness of our 
 loss. How insensible, happily for us, we, or rather 
 the dust that once composed us, will be, while thou- 
 sands of deluded creatures will be occupied with 
 such books as the Rise and Progress of Pveligion in 
 the Soul, and with the gravest earnestness afflicting 
 themselves with a superstitious discipline for the at- 
 tainment of an imaginary heaven, with the frequent 
 intrusion of the dread of an equally fictitious hell. 
 
 Now, could the supposed speaker, without plainly 
 belying the matter, have made out the case for con- 
 gratulation in terms much more gratifying than 
 these .'* But we may reasonably doubt whether a 
 strain like this, expressed in a confident tone of su- 
 perior wisdom, but so palpably betraying, with inad- 
 vertent honesty, the sordid and disconsolate charac- 
 ter and adjuncts of the vaunted privilege, would be 
 listened to with complacency, during the depressed 
 mood of the scorner of the religious book, religious 
 persons, and religion itself. We can imagine him 
 saying. Pray suspend your song of triumph and dis- 
 dain ; it has to me a raven sound. Are we, then, 
 in the very elation of our pride, in plain fact thus 
 
OF RELIGION. 31 
 
 prostrate on the earth ? Must we confess, that we 
 hold our advantage of reason disabused, of stronger 
 and freer intelligence, at the cost of admitting so 
 humiliating an estimate of our being and destiny ? 
 Really, we are in danger of giving these people that 
 we dispise, occasion to indulge contempt or pity 
 in their turn. I could almost whish that I were un- 
 der the same delusion. 
 
 It would have contributed little to recover him 
 from this recoil of feeling, if, just about the same 
 time, an intelligent religious man had fallen into his 
 company, had happened to learn in what manner 
 the serious book and its subject had been disposed 
 of, and had thrown in a few of his suggestions, to 
 re-inspirit the shrinking arrogance of irreligion. — I 
 am rather sorry, (we may suppose him to say,) that 
 a book like that, written with the most simple and 
 benevolent desire to do good, by a man who. had 
 deeply studied his subject, should have been the 
 object of a contempt which I should have thought 
 full as justly bestowed on some of those productions, 
 of frivolous quality, or dishonest intention, which I 
 believe are the objects of your favour. However, a 
 work which has engaged the most serious attention, 
 and powerfully operated on the character, of multi- 
 tudes, and will do so of multitudes more, can af- 
 ford to incur your passing glance and expressions of 
 disdain. And the subject of the book, religion, can 
 afford it too — that religion, which has sustained the 
 severest examination, and secured the conviction, 
 and animated the virtues in life, and hopes in death, 
 
32 THK IMPORTANCE 
 
 of many of the strongest, noblest minds, who have 
 bequeathed to its glory all that was illustrious in hu- 
 manity. So honoured, what can it lose, think you, 
 of its dignity and venerableness, by the refusal of 
 your homage ? It can, I repeat, afford that you 
 should be its rejecters and contemners, and should 
 lend all the credit of wisdom and virtues such as 
 yours, to the cause which is so fierce to explode it. 
 With perfect impunity to its honours, religion can 
 have you going about proclaiming, that you have re- 
 ceived a light by which it is exposed as a delusion 
 and imposture, — a light of the same kind, (if so 
 grave a topic would allow so ludicrous an illusion) 
 as that which was obtained where the satirist reports 
 to have seen the wise men at work to extract sun- 
 beams from cucumbers. But when, in this self- 
 assurance of rectified understanding, you are indulg- 
 ing your contempt of religion, does the thought never 
 strike you, what a very curious chance it was that 
 this brighter illumination, under which the old im- 
 posture vanishes, should fall exactly on you ? For, 
 was your mind of an order, or in a disposition, the 
 most likely to attract the latent element of truth to 
 combine with it, and disperse the fog ? Was yours 
 the spirit to contemplate, with comprehensive survey, 
 in purer serenity of temper, the theory of religion ? 
 If from moral causes you needed and wished that 
 religion should not be true, was thai the security for 
 impartial inquiry, and undeceptive conclusions ? If 
 you experienced what you thought injustice, (or I 
 will suppose it really such) from persons of religious 
 
OF RELIGION. , 33 
 
 profession, and your resentment against them grew 
 into re-action against religion itself, was that the 
 proper mood for examining its authority ? If you 
 had yourself made pretensions to piety, but, forfeit- 
 ing your christian character by misconduct, were 
 censured or disowned by a religious community with 
 which you had been connected, and then called on 
 infidelity to assist your revenge, was that a benign 
 conjunction under which to commence your new 
 intellectual enterprize ? And if, to decide your hes- 
 itation, expel your yet lingering fears, and promote 
 your progress, you betook yourself to the compan- 
 ionship, through the attraction of their irreligion, of 
 men whom you knew to be unprincipled and profli- 
 gate, and perhaps ignorant too, was that the school 
 in which you can feel pride to have been learners ? 
 Such things recollected, however, may be quite com- 
 patible with self-complacency, in persons of your 
 principles ; but you may believe that religion will 
 suffer no default of its honours, by not having such 
 as you for adherents. 
 
 I allow that you have your advantages in its re- 
 jection. Indeed, why should I deny this very thing 
 to be one — that you can think of such a mode of 
 deliverance from it, and not be stifled with shame ? 
 You have the still greater privilege of being set 
 loose from the constraint of many obligations and 
 prohibitions. You " are a chartered (^eZ/'-ch arte red) 
 libertine," and can give yourself freely away to 
 pleasures, amusements, or ambition. And you 
 boast that you have the high advantage of being in- 
 
THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 tent on realities, while the captives of religion, you 
 say, dragged or threatened off from a thousand at- 
 tractive objects and opportunities, are consuming 
 their spirits and life on mere ideas, on the imagina- 
 tions of some intangible, unseen, and reversionary 
 good. But suspend, for a moment, your boast about 
 this reality of the materials of your happiness. Say, 
 whether it be not a fact that you are in no other 
 possession of your favourite objects, than merely in 
 idea, during the far greater proportion of your time. 
 Your thinking of them, wishing for them, imagining 
 how delightful would be the possession of them ; 
 contriving how to attain them, feeling how wretched 
 and impatient you are in not having them yet, fretting 
 at the obstacles, raging at your disappointments ; 
 again eagerly anticipating them, as now nearly within 
 your reach, being mortified at a new delay, thrown 
 in this chilling moment on the reflection what the 
 pursuit has already cost you, and what it may cost 
 you still J alarmed, perhaps, at what the very suc- 
 cess may cost you, in its possible or certain conse- 
 quences — what kind of reality is all this f Nearly 
 the same as that of a fair garden of fruit to a man 
 looking at it or attempting it across a treacherous 
 moat, a steep slippery bank, and an almost impene- 
 trable fence of thorns. Is this the reality which 
 will bear you out in your exultation over those who 
 are wasting, you say, their energy on objects which 
 exist to them only in idea ? 
 
 But you do sometimes obtain your objects, and 
 can say you now possess the thing itself; which the 
 
OF RELIGION. 6o 
 
 devotees to religion, you say, never can, since that 
 which they are peculiarly to aspire after, is confess- 
 edly something not belonging to this world. And 
 you account it the spcial advantage which you have 
 over them, that it is through the rejection of the 
 truth and authority of religion that you are empower- 
 ed to make a large appropriation of what the real 
 world contains and oflers. Had I remained servile 
 to that domination, you will exclaim, what an inter- 
 dict should I have met, whichever way I turned ! 
 This object I must not have put forth my hand to- 
 ward at all ; this other I must beware of following 
 beyond a certain length. If, thus enclosed round 
 with a restriction from so many desirable things, I 
 could soar aloft, that were well. I had leave to 
 mount up through the sky, to walk ideally in a par- 
 adise, holding converse with angels, and fixing, by 
 anticipation, on a mansion In new Jerusalem. But 
 I was for no such ethereal altitudes, and impalpable 
 superfine felicities. I wanted the substantial good 
 of this earth ; wanted some things of a kind, others 
 in a measure, and many on terms, which religion for- 
 bade. I have disowned the usurped authority, have 
 burst through the restricting circle ; and now, see 
 me here in possession or command of things which 
 need no faith to give them substance, and which are 
 not the less agreeable for being a litte seasoned with 
 what your spiritual people call sin. 
 
 But these realities, when actually possessed, do 
 they never let in upon you a mortifying conviction, 
 that you have been nevertheless the dupe of illusion.'* 
 
36 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 As a purveyor to your senses, or as a gay spirit, or 
 as a pertinacious aspirer to some pitch of pre-emi- 
 nence above your fellow mortals in wealth, or display, 
 or power, you may, in some instance and measure, 
 have succeeded in converting the mere images into 
 the very substance ; exulting, I may suppose, to 
 think how much you owed in this achievement to 
 your emancipation from all religious belief; but re- 
 collect, how long did the possession preclude all pain- 
 ful sense of deficiency ? Did no invading dissatis- 
 faction turn your mind to bitterness of reflection on 
 the previous enchantment of imagination, which had 
 so long prompted you on with assurances of complete 
 delight? Might you never have been overheard to 
 murmur, " What inanity in all these things !" and 
 to curse your destiny, as secretly but an accomplice 
 of religion, to punish and plague you for its rejec- 
 tion ? 
 
 Thus, then, if you bring to account the entire 
 quantity of the busy occupation of your faculties 
 about that which you pursue as your supreme good, 
 and observe that the proportion of perhaps nineteen 
 parts in twenty of all this is not the interest of ac- 
 tual possession, and then make the deduction for the 
 feelings of disappointment and chagrin incident to 
 the possession obtained, (and which throw you back 
 again into reflection and imagination, that is, into 
 mere ideas, and those of a most irksome kind,) it 
 will appear that you have an extremely narrow 
 ground for your boast of being a man for the real- 
 ities of good, in contrast with the believer in religion^ 
 
OF RELIGION. 37 
 
 who, you say, subsists on mere images, gleams, and 
 shadows Would your exoerieace thus far warrant 
 you to compute, that all the moments of full satis- 
 faction added together would amount to as much as 
 one year in a long life? A splendid triumph, for a 
 man who is blessing his superior reason and good 
 fortune, that he is not cheated out of what is real and 
 substantial, to waste h's behig on the phantasms of 
 christian faith ! So much it is that you can gain by 
 availing yourself, to the utmost extent that you dare 
 under the limitations imposed by the constitution of 
 nature and society, of the license conferred by your 
 infidelity. And so high is your advantage over those 
 who, while indulging the hope of an immortal hap- 
 piness, can make more than you can of this world 
 itself, under the sanction of christian principles in 
 their selection and pursuit. 
 
 But, while forced to admit so humiliating a repre- 
 sentation, you will, perhaps, in the re-action of 
 pride, say, that your being in possession of truth, is 
 itself alone a noble eminence that you have attained 
 above the subjects of an imposture, the deluded be- 
 lievers in a revelation. Your spirit has risen up in 
 its strength, and defied the antiquated superstition to 
 lay you under its spell ; it has gone forth in its might, 
 and exterminated from your field of view the crowd 
 of spectres and chimeras. But you must allow me 
 to doubt, whether you really feel in this matter all 
 the confident assurance which you pretend. 1 
 4 
 
38 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 suspect there are times when you dare not look out 
 over that field, for fear of seeing the portentous 
 shapes there again ; and even that they sometimes 
 come close to present a ghastly visage to you 
 through the very windows of your strong hold. I 
 have observed in men of your class, that they often 
 appear to regard the arrayed evidences of revealed 
 religion, not with the simple aversion which may be 
 felt for error and deception, but with that kind of 
 repugnance which betrays a recognition of adverse 
 power. Say what penance you would not rather un- 
 dergo, or of which of your most favourite pleasures, 
 (even of those in which you verify your privilege of 
 exemption from the authority of religion) you would 
 not rather deny yourself, for a considerable time, 
 than be obliged to study deliberately, in sober retire- 
 ment, a few of the works most distinguished for 
 strength of argument in defence of Christianity ; 
 though this, it might be presumed, should be a fair 
 expedient for confirming your satisfaction ? I know 
 that some of your class, (and perhaps your conscience 
 testifies as to one,) have no resource for escaping 
 from their disquietude, but in diverting their atten- 
 tion completely from the subject, by throwing them- 
 selves into the whirl of amusement, into business, 
 conviviality or intemperance. But it is not the 
 hero's part to affect to be occupied with necessary 
 employments, or to hide himself in a throng of 
 masks and revellers, when he descries the antagonist 
 approaching to challenge him. 
 
OF RELIGION. 39 
 
 But it may happen, that the subject, in its menac- 
 ing aspect, will present itself to you under circum- 
 stances which preclude this escape. And you can 
 not be unapprized what a striking difference, in spirit 
 and deportmenl, we have sometimes had an occasion 
 of observing, between one of your tribe, and a man 
 whose moral strength was in the belief and power 
 of revealed religion, when overtaken by some ca- 
 lamity, or attacked by a dangerous distemper. Nor 
 can you have failed to hear of examples in which 
 that difference has become quite prodigious, when 
 the parties have sensibly approached their last hour. 
 You cannot have forgotten instances among those 
 now lost to your fraternity, of some whose closing 
 life presented a direful scene ; who could maintain 
 no longer either their disbelief or their courage ; who 
 poured forth execrations on their principles, and on 
 those from whom they had learned them ; called out 
 on pious relatives, absent or even dead ; implored 
 the intercession of christian friends, as if, ridiculed 
 so often before for their faith, they were now be- 
 lieved to have power to propitiate insulted heaven; 
 adjured and dismayed their associates in irreligion, 
 if any of them had friendship or hardihood enough 
 to stay by them, in impotence to console them ; were 
 agonized with horror indescribable ; and expired, as 
 it were, in an explosion of the last feeble life by the 
 energy of despair. What security can you have 
 that yours shall not be such an exit f For some 
 that have ended so, were exceeded by none in the 
 previous ostentation of confidence in both their prin- 
 
40 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 ciples and their bravery. It would betray a con- 
 temptibly reckless temper of m-nd, if you can answer, 
 in a tone of indifference, that if such is to be the 
 event, it will only be the addition of one hideous cir- 
 cumstance more, to the sufferings naturally incident 
 to death ; the concurrence of a disorder of the mind 
 with that which may be destroying the body ; the 
 ultimate working out, perhaps, of a little superstition, 
 which may have lain latent from the infection of early 
 false instruction. Allow the case to be put so, look- 
 ing no further ; and even then, if you were a thought- 
 ful man, and apt, as comports with that character, to 
 look forward; the anticipation of so frightful a scene 
 as possible, would be enough to quench many a live- 
 ly sparkle, to imbitter many an unhallowed gratifi- 
 cation, to repress many an irreligious daring, to dis- 
 pirit many an ambitious pi-oject, to mortify many a 
 proud sentiment. But there is another thing not to 
 be overlooked, which may warn 3'ou to take care 
 how you dispose of the matter so lightly. In most 
 of these fearful death-scenes of infidelity, the un- 
 happy mortal has been racked to a confession, that 
 he had never dealt honestly with the subject and 
 with his soul ; that he had never fairly examined 
 the question ; that he had not been sincerely intent 
 on knowing tlie truth ; that he had repelled intru- 
 sive lights, and suppressed remonstrant emotions ; 
 that he had suffered liis pride, his vanity, or his sen- 
 suality, to determine his rejection of the authority 
 of revelation. So that conviction rushed upon them 
 not in the simple character of truth, but also in that 
 
OF RELIGION. 41 
 
 of vengeance. It had retreated before their defi- 
 ance of both its more imperative and more gen- 
 tle attempts during theT progress, only to await them 
 in retributive power at the end. See that you do 
 not forget that circumstance of their experience, 
 when you are disposed to make so light of the ac- 
 knowledged possibility that your end may be like 
 theirs. 
 
 But I am unwilling, while looking on your coun- 
 tenance, to foresee you as exhibiting, one day, an- 
 other such spectacle ; and will limit my imagination 
 to represent you as in a situation less appalling, but 
 very mournful. Let it be. supposed that you live 
 on, constant to your present system, and considera- 
 bly successful in your endeavour to make the best 
 of the world on your own plan, till you attain an ad- 
 vanced age, a period when accumulating signs, and 
 even the mere reckoning of time, must warn you, 
 that you have nearly had your day. Let it be sup- 
 posed, that you then happen to be in company with 
 a man of equal age, who has been governed from 
 his youth by a firm and cordial faith in that which 
 you have rejected. Imagine that you hear him, in- 
 duced, perhaps, by the hope of conveying an influ- 
 ence to the minds of some youthful friends, advert- 
 ing briefly and unostentatiously to his past life, as a 
 religious course ; recalling what he regards as the 
 most sensible commencement of the decisive opera- 
 tion of religion on his mind, when the conviction of 
 its truth and necessity became his reigning principle ; 
 4* 
 
42 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 then, noting some of the effects which have evinced, 
 in their succession, the progress of its efficacy, both 
 in the power of its dominion, and in the creation of 
 happiness ; and, finally, expressing w^ith emphasis 
 his delight and gratitude, that now, in the cold even- 
 ing shade of life, this heavenly light shines still 
 brighter, as intermingling with those rays which are 
 coming fast from a nobler state of existence, confi- 
 dently expected to be attained through death. Im- 
 agine yourself silently hearing all this, expressed in 
 perfect collectedness of mind, in language clear of 
 all wildness and inflation, and observing the aspect 
 of the speaker, uniformly dignified, whether grave 
 or animated ; and imagine, too, your own feelings at 
 being placed in such a comparison. Can you con- 
 ceive it possible for you to maintain the sense of a 
 privileged condition, or not to sink in the profound- 
 est mortification ? What will you not be compelled 
 to think of a system, which throws an aggravation 
 of gloom on a period which the order of nature 
 deprives of pleasures, and besets with multiplying 
 grievances, thus brought in contrast with that other 
 system which warms, and invigorates, and enriches, 
 the close of a worn-out being, with something far 
 better than all the vivacity and prospects of youth ? 
 What will you think of a system, which forbids 
 thoughtfulness to old age, and throws it, for relief, 
 under the pressure of its infirmities, upon the re- 
 sources of business, which it has no longer strength 
 to transact, or of amusements incongruous with the 
 character of that season, and in which the antiquat- 
 
OF RELIGION. 43 
 
 ed performer appears like a man dancing and jest- 
 ing to tiie place of execution. You shrink at the 
 idea of being placed in such a contrast. I do not 
 say to you, Embrace, then, without delay, the faith 
 which would place you, in that last stage, on the 
 superior ground ; for you will tell me, that your be- 
 lief is not in your own power ; meaning, when you 
 say so, (is not this the plain truth ?) that you have 
 no disposition to a serious, diligent, and really im- 
 partial re-examination of the subject ; but, at least, 
 I am authorized to advise you to be henceforth a 
 little reserved in your ridicule of books describing 
 the rise and progress of religion in the soul. If 
 tempted at any time to its unrestrained indulgence, 
 just look forward to the predicament in which you 
 may one day feel that you stand, in compaison with 
 a man who has experienced that process, (whether 
 the operating cause be a beguilement or a truth,) 
 and is joyfully awaiting its consummation. And I 
 venture to predict to you, that, in such a case, your 
 utmost efforts to re-assure yourself that the man so 
 constrasted with you is but a deluded fool, will do 
 little to disperse the gloom settling and thickening 
 on your spirit. 
 
 But now let us turn our thoughts to conjecture 
 the kind of reception which this good book may 
 have found with persons of several classes greatly 
 different from the example we have been supposing. 
 We may assume, as a certainty, that it has caught 
 the notice of very many persons indisposed to reli- 
 
44 THE IMPORTANCE. 
 
 gion, but entertaining no doubt that we have a reve- 
 lation to declare its nature, and to command our sol- 
 emn attention to it,. The circumstance d'd actually 
 happen, th?t the words of the title were talvcn in by 
 the e3'es, and th?_t some thoughts were involuntarily 
 raised in the m5nd. Persons now living may jecol- 
 lect this hav'-^g occu-red to them as an incident 
 which did not olease them. We can imag'ne it to 
 have happened to more than a few c^y young per- 
 sons, of minds not uncultivated, not left v-^nlirely un- 
 instructed respecting the highest concern of their 
 existence, but quite averse to ihink of so serious a 
 subject. A pious relative might have placed the 
 book; by a dclicpie device, in the way to seize the 
 eye ; or Jl might be taken up whon casually lying on 
 the table of an acquaintance. And we are to sure 
 w^e are but picturing an exa-nple of many that there 
 have been of the same kiad, Vi^hen v.e imagine we 
 see the young peison has^'Iy laying down the volume, 
 with a look of disappointment and distaste, expres- 
 sive of the sentiment, That is no book for me. To 
 glance over the title-page was quite disgust enough 
 for so frivolous a spirit to end die. In another in- 
 stance, we seem to see the young person inspecting 
 the book for a few moments, in an unfixed, heedless 
 manner, plainly indicating it would soon be closed ; 
 presently throwing it aside, as worth no further at- 
 tention ; then fortunately detecting, where it had 
 slidden in among better books, some very silly ro- 
 mance ; seizing it as a discovered treasure, and 
 unable to lay it down till a whole volume was run 
 
OF RELIGION. 45 
 
 through. Another case may be conceived, in which 
 our book, of the Rise and Progress of Religion, has 
 chanced to be within sight, in the interval of ani- 
 mated, restless expectation of meeting some gay 
 associates, or of going to some amusement ; when 
 it detained the youthful thought no longer than to 
 suggest a pleasurable idea of the difference, between 
 the dull and funeral business of religion, and such 
 exhilaration as that in prospect. It might be no ex- 
 cess of fancy to suppose another case ; that this 
 same book obtruded itself on the sight of a young 
 person in an hour of disgust and fallen spirits, after 
 suffering some disappointment and mortification 
 amidst those gay delights which had been so exult- 
 ingly anticipated ; and that it excited no better feel- 
 ing than this, Let me not have another odious thing 
 just now to plague me ; I am vexed and out of pa- 
 tience enough. For one more instance ; a young 
 person of this light spirit might be on terms of ac- 
 quaintance with one of a more thoughtful character, 
 and might happen to find the latter reading, or ap- 
 parently having just read, the book, in question ; 
 and might betray some marks of sincere wonder at 
 so strange a taste ; internallv saying. If /were ever 
 to have been caugJit employed with such a book, J 
 would have hastily put it ouc of sight, ac the entrance 
 of a pleasant visitor. — No one will doubt, that there 
 may have been facts answering to these conjectural 
 descriptions ; and we might, with equal piobabilityj 
 diversify the representation into many other prrticu- 
 lar forms. Where and what are the persons now. 
 
46 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 who were the reality of what we thus are supposing ? 
 But will there .not be yet many more human beings 
 to be added to the account of such examples ? 
 
 It may be that, in some of these instances, the 
 young person did not escape receiving some hints of 
 admonition, from a friend, \vhose benevolent vigi- 
 lance had perceived this refusal to converse an hour, 
 or a moment, with a book soliciting attention to the 
 most important subject. Whatever might actually 
 be the strain of such an admonition, we may think 
 that friend, — not laying any stress on the bare cir- 
 cumstance of dislike to this particular book, but 
 taking occassion from it, as indicating aversion to re- 
 ligion itself, — would have deserved to be listened to 
 in using such terms as the following : — Will you be 
 persuaded, is it possible to induce you, to make a 
 short effort with your mind, to constrain it to serious 
 reflection ? Would you have me, or not, to regard 
 you as capable of thinking and judging, as in pos- 
 session of a share of good sense, and as admitting 
 that there really may be a just call for its exercise, 
 €ven at your age? You are not willing to be ac- 
 counted the reverse of this. Well then, prove that 
 you can think, and that you can perceive when there 
 is a subject before you which has peculiar claims 
 that you should think. And is there any thing 
 which can urge a more peremptory claim than the 
 questions, What manner of being it is that you pos- 
 sess, to what end you possess it, and how it should 
 be occupied in order to the attainment of that end ? 
 Is your own nature a thing of such little account with 
 
OF RELIGION. 47 
 
 you, that you are quite satisfied with the mere fact 
 of its being an existence ; and that you have no 
 doubt whether you may give away all its faculties, 
 without care or accounlableness, to whatever pleas- 
 es them and invites them into action? Does every 
 consciousness you feel of what there is in that na- 
 ture, agree to your living as a gay bird of the spring - 
 as a creature made for the play and reve! of mere 
 life and sensation ; or at most, fitted for some little 
 schemes of transient interests, confined to a span of 
 existence, and liable to be broken up and given to 
 the winds at any hour ? Is this all you find in the 
 endowments of your nature ; is this the amount of 
 its capabilities and dignity ? No, you would say ; 
 you believe that you possess, for you have been 
 taught that all of us do, a spirit, of noble quality and 
 important destination. Do you indeed believe any 
 such thing f what, while I see the whole vigour of 
 your being, animal and ment d, at so ne times dissi- 
 pated in levity, spirited off in eflfusions of mirth ; 
 or at other times consumed in earnest protracted 
 assiduity to accomplish some contrivance for per- 
 sonal display, some little feat of competition, or 
 some scheme, (a grand one, you think,) of creating 
 for yourself a happiness for a few years, from mate- 
 rials which every day must diminish, and any day 
 may annihilate ? Is it impossible to you, or do you 
 not think it worth while, to reflect whether so living 
 be consistent with so believing ? Does it never 
 strike you as a thing to wonder at, that there can be 
 a creature so strangely formed as to admit these 
 
48 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 things to coalesce, and that you happen to be that 
 creature ? Or do you escape all sense of inconsis- 
 tency and shame through mere thoughtlessness, 
 which pre Agents your being reminded of that truth 
 whi^h you say you believe ? 
 
 Mere thoughtlessness ! and how is that possible ? 
 How is it possible to believe what you affirm that 
 you do, and not often feel a solemn influence com- 
 ing over your mind, and banishing, for at least a 
 little while, all trifling moods and interests? Assur- 
 ed that you are, as to the most essential property of 
 your nature, a spiritual and immortal being, think, 
 account to yourself, hov/ it can be that such a con- 
 viction, fixed and abiding within you, should abide 
 there alone, disconnected from all the activity of 
 your ideas and feelings, having, so to speak, nothing 
 to do there ; while in all reason it ought to be com- 
 bined there with many most inportant ideas with 
 which it has an inseparable relation, and which it 
 ought to keep there in active force. 
 
 For, consider what you are admitting, when you 
 say you believe you are such a being. You are ad- 
 mitting that you stand in a solemn relation to the 
 Almighty ; that your present state of existence is 
 but a brief introduction to another ; that your body 
 is but a frame accommodated to retain your supe- 
 rior and more essential being for a short period in 
 this world ; that its interests, therefore, and all in- 
 terests which respect this world exclusively, are in- 
 finitely insignificant in comparison with those of the 
 spirit; that you are every moment in progress 
 
OF RELIGION. 49 
 
 toward the experience of a happiness or misery of 
 incalculable magnitude ; and that this short and un- 
 certain life is the season for maturing the disposi- 
 tions and habits to a state which will consign you to 
 the one or the other, if the declarations of God be 
 true. Can you attempt to deny, or pretend to doubt, 
 that all this is included in the fact of your possess- 
 ino" a rational spirit, destined to endless existence, 
 and most justly required to obey the commands of 
 your Creator? But if this be true, you cannot ex- 
 ercise your judgment, and listen to your conscience, 
 for one hour, without plainly seeing what is your 
 highest interest and most imperious duty. Nothing 
 in the world, nothing in all truth, can press upon you 
 with mightier evidence, than that your grand busi- 
 ness in life is the care of the soul, that shall live for 
 ever. Confess to your reason and conscience that 
 the case is so, and that any assertion to the contrary 
 would instantly strike you as false and foolish. 
 
 You do confess it. 'But what, then, should be 
 thought of you, what should you think of yourself, 
 if you will then act as if the very contrary were 
 the truth. Suppose that, (in such a spontaneous 
 escape of thoughts in words, as sometimes happens 
 to a person musing in the security of solitude,) the 
 prevailing disposition of your mind were to utter 
 itself involuntarily and audibly, and in expressions 
 like these : — " My supreme concern is as clear to 
 my view as the sun ; there is no denying it, there is 
 no question about it ; it is, to apply myself earnestly 
 
60 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 to secure the Aveliare, here and hereafter, of my 
 immortal spirit ; but I feel no such care ; I dislike 
 and evade all admonitions which would enforce 
 it on me ; I yield myself to this disposition, without 
 restraint, or remorse, or fear, for the present, and 
 shall do so — I do not know, nor much care, how 
 long." Supposing this uttered in an almost uncon- 
 scious passing of your mind into your voice, w^ould 
 you not be awaked and startled into recollection at 
 sounds of such import, and be almost surprised into 
 the question — " Who was saying that ? Was it I ? 
 How strangely it would have sounded if any one had 
 been within hearing." If any one had been within 
 hearing ! And could you forget that there is One 
 who perfectly knows that internal disposition, of 
 which expressions like these might be the genuine 
 utterance ? 
 
 While you are intent on being happy, surely it 
 should be one thing regarded as indispensable to 
 your being truly so, that you can approve yourself; 
 that, whatever imperfections there are for you to 
 condemn and regret, you yet can feel a deliberate 
 complacency, a complacency of reflection and con- 
 science, in the prevailing habit and purpose of your 
 mind. What is it worth, that a variety of outward 
 things should please you, if you are haunted with a 
 sense that your ow^n internal condition, the condition 
 of your very self, is something to grieve you ? Now 
 I wish it were possible to induce you to turn upon 
 yourself one resolute, patient, impartial inspection. 
 Tiiook, with the intentness with which you w-^^*^ ' 
 
OF RELIGION. 51 
 
 gaze on an emblematical picture, in whose signs you 
 could believe your destiny to be figured out, look on 
 the being, formed for an endless futurity, but en- 
 grossed by the interests of a day; appointed, after 
 a short term, to pass into another world, but repel- 
 ling all thoughts and monitions of it ; capable of an 
 elevated and perpetual felicity, but sunk and expend- 
 ed in transient pleasures and precarious hopes ; in- 
 vited to communion with the Father of Spirits, but 
 turning away, with indifference or aversion, to seek 
 all that it wants, for affection and assistance, in the 
 intercourse of associates who are equally careless of 
 his favour ; and summoned to adopt a wise and con- 
 stant discipline, to make sure of its true welfare, in 
 time and eternity, but surrendering the formation of 
 it scharacter, and the direction of its course, to wiiat 
 ever may happen to obtain the ascendency, to cas- 
 ual impressions, ill chosen friends, or the prevailing 
 spirit and habits of the world. Behold this specta- 
 cle as being yourself, your very self. Do you turn 
 from the sight, and say you do not like to look at 
 it ? What, then, you confess that, amidst all the 
 youthful vivacity in which you spring to catch the 
 passing pleasures, and call them happiness, one 
 primary requisite to true happiness is wanting. * You 
 cannot be happy w^hile you dare not be sometimes 
 still, and abstracted from the stir, lest you should 
 hear a complaining and accusing voice from within, 
 telling you there is something fatally wrong there. 
 
 You are reluctant to give any attention to religion, 
 and to look into a book w'hich describes its Rise and 
 
62 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 Progress in the Soul. Why should you, you think. 
 have the brightness of your early season overcast 
 with the gloom of such a subject? — preferring, in 
 effect, that this shade, if it must come sometime, 
 should wait to bring additional darkness over a pe- 
 riod when the sunshine of youth will be past, and 
 life be declining into that season which you never 
 think of but as of itself a dreary one. How cruel 
 the gay youth can resolve to be to the aged person 
 that he expects to become ! I will repel, he prac- 
 tically says, all invasion of a grave subject from this 
 my season of animation and delight, at the cost of 
 having it to come, as a melancholy cloud over a time 
 when I shall, by the course of nature, have outlived 
 the best part of my life. So that my season of en- 
 ergy and enjoyment be kept clear, never mind what 
 I may be accumulating to bring sadness on my spirit 
 in that stage where I shall need every consolation. 
 — Surely the consciousness of acting on such a plan* 
 should itself be enough to damp the gayest of your 
 vivacities. 
 
 Your are unwilling to yield to the claims of reli- 
 gion. But will you not take the trouble to con- 
 sider what religion is, and in what manner it con- 
 cerns you? It is not a thing which your Creator 
 imposes on you by a mere arbitrary appointment ; 
 as if he would exact, simply in assertion of his su- 
 premacy, and in requirement of homage from his 
 creature, something which is in itself foreign to the 
 necessities of your nature. By its intrinsic quality 
 it so corresponds to your nature, that the possession 
 
OF RELIGION. 
 
 of it is vital, and its rejection mortal, to your felici- 
 ty, even independently of its being made obligatory 
 by the positive injunction of the Almighty. From 
 the spiritual principle of your soul, there is an ab- 
 solute necessity that it be raised into complacent 
 communication with its Divine Original ; it is con- 
 stituted to need this communication, now and for 
 ever ; apd if it be not so exalted, it is degraded and 
 prostrated to objects which cannot, by their very 
 nature, adequately meet, and fill, and bless, its fac- 
 ulties : to be elevated to this communication, is reli- 
 gion. You do not, I presume, wish that your spirit 
 were a being destined to final extinction a few years 
 hence ; but would you have it be immortal, and yet 
 estranged from what must naturally concern it as 
 immortal ? If really immortal, it is under a plain ne- 
 cessity of its nature to give a devoted regard to its 
 interests of hereafter, of eternity : to do so, is reli- 
 gion. Again, your soul is tainted with corruption ; 
 it is infected with sin ; your are sometimes conscious 
 that it is ; and this is a malady which may cling to 
 it, and inhere in it, after all bodily diseases have 
 ceased in death. But then there is the plainest ne- 
 cessity that some grand operation be effected in it 
 to remove this fatal disorder ; that its condition be 
 renovated and purified ; that the action of its povv- 
 ers be determined to the right ends ; that its guilt be 
 pardoned ; that, in one word, it be redeemed : now 
 this great process in the soul is religion. Thus you 
 may see that there can be no grosser misapprehen- 
 sion than that which has sometimes prompted the 
 6* 
 
54 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 impious wish, that God had not made religion neces- 
 sary by enjoining it; for that, but for this extrinsic 
 necessity, this necessity of mere obligation to his 
 authority, religion might have been neglected, and 
 the neglecter have fared never the worse. 
 
 But you plead that, whatever may be your con- 
 viction, and ought to be your feeling, you cannot 
 help regarding religion as an austere and. gloomy 
 concern ; that you have at times wished the case 
 were otherwise ; but so it is, that the subject still 
 presents the same repulsive aspect, whenever it 
 comes by unpleasant surprise, or in the returns of 
 public or private religious instruction, on your atten- 
 tion. You will take every precaution to avoid being 
 left alone with a person, however estimable and kind, 
 from whom you are apprehensive of recieving any 
 admonition respecting it. Perhaps even the sight 
 of a book, familiarly known to be (as this of the 
 Rise and Progress of Religion) an earnest pointed 
 inculcation of it, is like glancing at the picture of a 
 skeleton. The subject might become quite a griev- 
 ance of your life, — even this subject, which repre- 
 sents to you how to be happy forever ! — did not 
 your health, your elastic spirits, your companions, 
 your diversions, defend you so well against its fre- 
 quent or prolonged annoyance. But sometimes, 
 perhaps, an interval does occur, when it visits you 
 in such a character of authority, that your resistance 
 fails for a short time, you are taken at an advantage, 
 and compelled to hear something of its declarations, 
 claims, and remonstrances. And then you murmur. 
 
OF RELIGION. 5d 
 
 and say, A cruel alternative! to yield such submis- 
 sion, or incur such consequences. Is it not hard that 
 I should be required to surrender all the delights 
 which are the privilege of my age, to repress my 
 vivacity, to forsake my gay society, abandon my 
 amusements, to inflict self-denial on my inclinations 
 at every turn, to deplore all that I am, and all that I 
 have been ; to force my attention and affections 
 away from this interesting world around me, toward 
 another and unseen world of which I know nothing ; 
 to toil through severe and never-ceasing exercises, 
 called discipline ; to exhaust my spirits in solemn 
 reflection ; to live in terror lest every thing I do or 
 enjoy should be sin ; to renounce, and put myself 
 in conflict with, the prevailing habits of society ; to 
 be marked as an over-righteous or melancholy mor- 
 tal ; to look through a darkened medium at every 
 thing in life ; and to go through the world thinking 
 of every step as a progress toward the grave ? 
 
 Now, even were it admitted that all this is a true 
 representation of religion, that all this is its require- 
 ment, the friend who is urging it upon you might 
 still maintain his argument. The question, he would 
 say, what cost we should be willing to bear in a pro- 
 cess, is to be determined, if wisdom be the judge, 
 by an estimate of the result. The greatest tempo- 
 rary evil would be a mild condition of the attainment 
 of an eternal good. If religion actually did require 
 all this, but in return assured you of being safe and 
 happy forever, what would your high endowment of 
 reason be worth, in practical application, if you would 
 
56 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 not resolve on the endurance of such an introduc- 
 tion, rather than lose such a sequel ? 
 
 But you well know that such a representation, 
 unqualified, is no just account of the demands of 
 religion. And beware of allowing yourself in the 
 disingenousness of exaggerating the hardship, in 
 order to extenuate to your conscience, or to vindi- 
 cate against your friendly admonisher, your neglect 
 of the duty. 
 
 At the same time it is true, and must be unequiv- 
 ocally avowed, that religion, effectually prosecuted, 
 does involve great labours, a discipline often severe, 
 and therefore many painful experiences. It must 
 include much that is mortifying to natural inclina- 
 tions. How should it be otherwise with a being of 
 a corrupt nature, who is to be trained and prepared, 
 and that while under the incessant influences of a 
 corrupt world, for a final state of holiness and felic- 
 ity .^ If the natural condition of the mind be un- 
 congenial what is divine and heavenly, its affec- 
 tions unattempered to live and delight in that ele- 
 ment which is the vitality of the happiness of the 
 beings whom, alone and exclusively, the revelation 
 from God, and even your own reason, authorize you 
 to conceive of as happy in a superior state, — if there 
 be this alienation and unfitness, (and what is the 
 aversion to religion but the proof of it ? or rather, it 
 is the thing itself,) — if the case be so, then the soul 
 is in a condition so dreadfully wrong, that it is not 
 strange the agency for transforming it should inflict 
 pain in the salutary process. That it should work 
 
OF RELIGION. 57 
 
 with some expedients of bitterness, keenness, and 
 fire, is quite in analogy with the operations neces- 
 sary for subduing the extreme maladies of an infe- 
 rior order. Perhaps you will say that, as the Di- 
 vine Power, in the time and in the person of our 
 Lord, annihilated the worst diseases of the body by 
 a single act, making the subject perfectly well, in an 
 instant, and without pain, so the Almighty could in- 
 stantaneously set the moral nature right, causing the 
 spirit to rise up suddenly in the delightful conscious- 
 ness, that not a particle of evil remains, blessed with 
 a triumph over the disastrous fall, and assuming a 
 ground still higher than that which our first progeni- 
 tor lost. No doubt he could ; but since he has not 
 willed such an economy, the question comes to you, 
 whether you can deliberately judge it better to carry 
 forward a corrupt nature uncorrected, untransform- 
 ed, unreclaimed to God, into the future state where 
 it must be miserable, than to undergo whatever sever- 
 ity is indispensable in the process of the religion 
 which would prepare you for a happy eternity. 
 Reflect, that you are; every day practically answer- 
 ing the question. Can it be that you are answering 
 it in the affirmative ? Do I really see before me the 
 rational being who in effect avows, — I cannot, will 
 not, submit to such a discipline, though, in refusing 
 it and resisting it, I renounce an infinite and eternal 
 good, and consign myself to perdition ? 
 
 Religion, it is acknowledged, brings its pains; 
 just because it comes from heaven to maintain a 
 deadly conflict in the soul, with principles and dis- 
 
5S THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 positions which are rebellious against heaven, and 
 destructive to the soul itself. Notliing can be more 
 thoughtless or unknowing than the strain in which 
 some have indulged in the recommendation of it, as 
 if it were all facility and enjoyment. You have pos- 
 sibly heard or read graceful periods of descant on 
 the subject, representing to young people especially, 
 that their unsophisticated principles, their lively 
 perception of the good and the fair, their generous 
 sentiments, their uncontaminated affections, are so 
 much in unison with the spirit of piety, that it is 
 a matter of the utmost ease for them, for such as 
 you, to enter on the happiness of the religious life. 
 Some little obstruction surmounted, one light spring 
 made, and you regain the walks of Eden ! Did you 
 believe it? If you did, what unaccountable caprice, 
 what pure wantonness of perversity, could it be that 
 withheld you ^ Or, if you were induced to make 
 some short attempt in the way of experiment, did 
 you not wonder how it should happen, by a peculiar 
 untowardness in your case, that these youthful qual- 
 ities, so congenial with piety, and so easy to be re- 
 solved into it, did nevertheless prove obstinately 
 repugnant to the union .'' Did you not think, Why, 
 then, this aversion to read the Bible, or to retire for 
 serious meditation and devotional exercise, or to any 
 act of duty to be done simply in obedience to God t 
 But, the declamation which you had heard was idle 
 rhetoric, or wretched ignorance. 
 
 It must be acknowledged, also, that much worthier 
 teachers have, from a better cause, sometimes com- 
 
OF RELIGION. 59 
 
 mitted an error in underrating, or keeping nearely out 
 of view, the austerer characteristics of religion, when 
 inculcating it on youth. In their benevolent zeal to 
 persuade, they were desirous of presenting a picture 
 wholly attractive. And perhaps religion was be- 
 come so decidely their own chief happiness, that 
 they could, for the time, forget the pains of the 
 transformation through which it had become so. 
 They have therefore made a representation illumi- 
 nated nearely all over with delightful images. It is 
 better that you should see the whole truth, and 
 clearly understand that the agent which, in a ca- 
 pacity like that of a tutelary spirit, takes in charge a 
 perverted, sinful, tempted being, to be humbled and 
 reclaimed, taught many mortifying lessons, disciplin- 
 ed through a series of many corrections, reproved, 
 restrained, and incited, and thus conducted onward, 
 in advancing preparation for the happiness of an- 
 other world, must be the inflicter of many pains dur- 
 ing the progress of this beneficent guardianship. 
 And it is not, as your aversion and murmurs would 
 imply, the fault of religion that the case is so, but of 
 that depraved nature which religion is designed and 
 indispensable to redeem. 
 
 So much for the darker side. But now, on the 
 other hand, you can surely conceive, as compatible 
 with all this, a great preponderance of happiness in 
 this life. And therefore you ought to take it on 
 your conscience as a reproach for criminal want of 
 thought, or of honesty, that you will admit no other 
 notion of religion than that of a gloomy melancholy 
 
60 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 thing. When you are turning away from it, as a 
 grim and ghostly object, sent to encounter you for 
 no more friendly purpose than to obstruct you, with 
 threatening aspect, at every avenue to the scenes of 
 delight, there ought to arise within your mind a 
 sterner image, to condemn you for wilfully misjudg 
 ing its character, and the service it has to offer you. 
 For you can comprehend that there is attainable, 
 through the efficacy of religion, something far better 
 than all you can hope ever to enjoy under the unhal- 
 lowed advantage of rejecting it. Try faithfully 
 whether you cannot understand, that it would be a 
 great felicity to feel that your spirit is changing into 
 conformity to a nobler model, growing into the only 
 right constitution and image to be retained forever; 
 to feel that the evil which infests it is shrinking and 
 subdued under a mightier power ; to regard the best 
 and greatest Being as no longer an appalling object, 
 thought of with reluctance, and a wish that you 
 could be forever out of his sight and reach ; but now 
 with emotions of love, and confidence, and hope, 
 with an assurance of his mercy through Jesus Christ, 
 with an experience of real communication with him 
 concerning all your interests, and with a conscious- 
 ness that you are in activity for a Master who will 
 confer an infinite reward. Think whether it would 
 not be happy to feel habitually a power, maintaining 
 a sacred control over your passions and your will, 
 and preserving the current of your life unmingled 
 with the world's pollutions. Imagine yourself ani- 
 mated, at the close of each year or shorter period, 
 
OF RELIGION. Gl 
 
 with a fervent gratitude to God, in the consideration 
 wliat sins and follies he has saved you from thus 
 much longer. Can you doubt whether that one 
 emotion would really be worth more, to an account- 
 able being, than all the pleasurable feelings which 
 an irreligious person can have enjoyed during the 
 whole interval ? 
 
 Place before your mind a scheme of life, in which 
 you shall see yourself committing to the care and 
 disposal of a beneficent Providence, the course of 
 your life from the beginning, with a constant assur- 
 ance that Sovereign Wisdom and Goodness will 
 watch over all its movements and events, will con- 
 duct you through its perplexities and perils, will give 
 you just so much temporal good that more would not 
 be for your welfare, and will constrain all things which 
 you are to pass through to co-operate to your ulti- 
 mate happiness. Think also of enjoying the con- 
 sciousness that you are not throwing the inestimable 
 spring season of your life away, but expending it so 
 as to enrich every succeeding period, and to ensure 
 a fine setting sun upon the last. Say honestly, 
 whether all this be not something better than any 
 scheme of life v/hich you have indulged your imag- 
 ination in shaping. Or, if you sometimes surrender 
 yourself to the fascinations of romance and poetry, 
 glowing over bright pictures of felicity in which re- 
 ligion has no place, make the experiment on your 
 mind, in an hour of cooler feeling, whether you dare 
 pronounce that it would be well to forego this hap- 
 6 
 
62 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 piness of religion, by a preference of that exhibited 
 in these highly coloured fictions, on the supposition 
 that they could, for you, be turned into reality. 
 Yes, if these images could be turned into facts ; but 
 let me hint to you, that the very exhibitors of these 
 delectable fabrications out of air would scorn your 
 folly in expecting any such realization- They would 
 tell you, deriding your simplicity, that the shows 
 which enchant you so much are the creation of their 
 genius^ exerted to a much finer purpose than that of 
 representing an actual or even possible order of 
 things 5 that they consciously and intentionally aban- 
 don the ground on which plain mortality must toil 
 along through ordinary good and evil, to range 
 among imaginary elements, obsequious to their will. 
 Ludicrous and juvenile indeed, they would say, 
 must be the credulity of any one sitting out to find 
 somewhere, as a fact, what it requires the utmost of 
 their inventive power but to figure out in fiction. 
 And you may perceive, if you have any sober ob- 
 servation, that no such felicity, wrought out of the 
 mere materials of this world, is actually in the pos- 
 session of any of its inhabitants — its youthful inhabi- 
 tants, I mean ; for yourselves will readily allow, 
 that those of them who are grown old, and are going 
 to leave it, must have a hopeless task in striving to 
 make it yield them happiness, when it is shaking 
 themselves off; shaking them off who have expend- 
 ed their life in idolizing it, and are clinging to it in 
 the forlorn condition of feeling no hope or attrac- 
 tion toward a better. 
 
OF RELIGION. 63 
 
 You do not deserve to know how to be happy, 
 even in this hfe, if you will not be persuaded to 
 make an honest effort of comparison between any 
 scheme that would promise to make you so inde- 
 pendently of religion, and the felicity which would 
 attend a religious course, commencing in youth. 
 
 Do not think to defend yourself by saying, that 
 the representation how happy a youthful spirit might 
 be in a devotement to religion, is greatly exaggerat- 
 ed. Besides that in theory it is evidently in the 
 nature of that great cause, and in the gracious de- 
 sign and promise of Him from whom it descended, 
 that it should confer advantages surpassing all others, 
 you should be willing to receive testimony as to the 
 fact, fi'om those who have gone effectually into the 
 experiment. And you know, that they whom you 
 verily believe to have made the most competent trial, 
 are the most decided, though not boastful, in their 
 declarations; and that the tenor of their deportment 
 proves their sincerity. Observe some of those young 
 persons, (I hope you are not so unfortunate as not to 
 know such,) whom you yourself believe to be most 
 fully under the power of religion ; call them, if you 
 will, its prisoners, its bondmen, its slaves ; some of 
 your gay companions attempt to ridicule them as its 
 fools ; but do you observe whether their piety con- 
 duces to their happiness. It is true, they are not 
 happy after the manner in which your lighter friends 
 account of happiness ; not happy, if the true signs 
 of that state be a volatile spirit, a continual glitter of 
 mirth, a dissipation of mind and time among trifles, 
 
64 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 a dread of reflection and solitude, an eager pursuit 
 of amusements ; in short, a prevailing thoughtless- 
 ness, the chief suspensions of which are for the 
 study of matters of appearance and fashion, the 
 servile care of faithfully imitating the habits and no- 
 tions of a class, or perhaps the acquirement of ac- 
 complishments for show. It must be confessed, 
 they have thoughts too grave, the sense of too 
 w^eighty an interest, a conscience too solicitous, and 
 purposes too high, to permit them any rivalry with 
 the votaries of such felicity. Certainly they feel a 
 dignity in their vocation, which denies them the 
 pleasure of being frivolous. But you will see them 
 often cheerful, and sometimes very animated. And 
 their animation is of a deeper tone than that of your 
 sportive creatures ; it may have less of animal brisk- 
 ness, but there is more soul in it. It is the action 
 and fire of the greater passions, directed to greater 
 objects. Their emotions are more internal and cor- 
 dial ; they can be cherished and abide within the 
 heart, with a prolonged, deep, vital glow ; while 
 those which spring in the youthful minds devoid of 
 reflection and religion, seem to give no pleasure but 
 in being thrown off" in volatile spirits at the sur- 
 face. Did you think that these disciples of religion 
 must renounce the love of pleasure 't Look, then, 
 at their policy for securing it. The most unfortu- 
 nate calculation for pleasure is to live expressly for 
 it ; they live primarily for duty, and pleasure comes 
 as a certain consequence. If you have but a cold 
 apprehension of the degree of such pleasure, if you 
 
OF RELIGION'. 05 
 
 can but faintly conceive how it should be poignant, 
 you can at least understand that it must be genuine. 
 And there is in it what may be called a principal of 
 accumulation ; it does not vanish in the enjoyment, 
 but, while passing as a sentiment, remains as a re- 
 flection, and grows into a store of complacent con- 
 sciousness, which the mind retains as a possession 
 left by what has been possessed. To have had such 
 pleasure is pleasure, and is so still the more, the 
 more of it is past. Whereas you are aware, if you 
 have been at all observant of the feelings betraved 
 by the youthful children of folly, in the intervals of 
 their delights, (and does nothing in your own expe- 
 rience obtrude the same testimony r) tliat those de- 
 lights, v.'hen past, are wholly gone, leaving nothing 
 to go into a calm habitual sense of being happy. 
 The pleasure is a blaze which consumes entirely the 
 meterial on which it is lighted. So that the uncal- 
 culating youth, who seized a transient pleasure last 
 week, or yesterday, has no satisfaction from it to- 
 day ; but rather, perhaps, feels fretted with a sense 
 of being cheated, and left in an irksome vacancy, 
 from which he has no relief but in recovering his 
 eagerness to pursue another, which is in the same 
 manner to pass entirely away. And observe, this is 
 the description of the unenviable kind of felicity of 
 the less criminal class of the young persons desti- 
 tute of religion ; it represents the condition of those 
 who surrender their spirits and life to vain and tri- 
 fling interests, as distinguished from the grosser evil 
 
66 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 which we denominate vice. To insist that religion 
 is better than ihat, as productive of happiness in this 
 life, would seem but an impertinent pleading in its 
 favour. 
 
 Now be, for once, a thoughtful and serious being, 
 willing to apprehend the contrast between all this 
 and the state of a young person who feels a profound 
 invariable conviction that he has made the right 
 choice ; who finds that his grand purpose will bear 
 the severest exercise of his judgment, and pleases 
 him the most when he judges the most rigorously ; 
 who feels an elation of spirit in vowing an eternal 
 fidelity to his object ; who beholds it undiminished 
 in excellence, if there come a season of gloom over 
 his other interests and prospects, when it proves to 
 be not a thing of mere splendid colours, which vanish 
 in a deepening shade, but of intrinsic lustre, a lumi- 
 nary which shines through, and shines the brighter 
 for, the darkness. Not that this youth makes any 
 pretension to be a stoic philosopher, serenely inde- 
 pendent of the temporal good and evil attending or 
 awaiting his progress into life, w^ith no warm affec- 
 tions to the things in the scene around him, to be 
 painfully mortified when adverse events and influen- 
 ces frustrate his hopes and projects. But his ad- 
 vantage over those of his coevals who have no better 
 than such interests, is, that he has enshrined his best 
 affections in that one thing which does not partake 
 of mortality and this world's uncertainty, and there- 
 fore but evinces its worthiness the more under the 
 failure of every thing else that can fail. It is, like 
 
OF RELIGION. 67 
 
 Him who is its author and guardian, " the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever." The pious youth, 
 then, is not abandoned, for his chief enjoyment, to 
 an endless fluctuation, alternating between delight 
 and disgust, eager to seize, and wondering that the 
 possession turns so soon to nothing ; all the while 
 neglecting, or fearful to reflect, whether the whole 
 plan be not essentially wrong ; and thus fulfilling the 
 decree, that " to him that trusteth in vanity, vanity 
 shall be the recompense." 
 
 Be assured there are young persons who can 
 testify that this is their own experience of the hap- 
 piness of religion, in so considerable a degree as to 
 inspire an earnest wish to become more completely 
 possessed by its power, from the conviction that then 
 they should be much happier still. And now do not 
 let your mind evade the question, whether they 
 would not be right in the feeling, that they would not 
 for all the world be in the condition of those who 
 never think of religion but as the enemy of youthful 
 happiness. Some of them can well remember 
 when they were themselves in that condition ; and 
 they would at any time prefer instant death to the 
 calamity of relapsing into it. No wonder, then, if 
 you perceive them holding extremely light the opin- 
 ion of those, too many of their own age, who can 
 look on them with a propensity to ridicule, or an 
 affectation of pity. 
 
 And, tell me, what do you think of such judges ? 
 I conjecture you may have been under no small in- 
 fluence of the opinions of some rather like them, and 
 
G8 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 would have deemed it a sad misfortune to be dis- 
 countenanced in their community, or excluded from 
 it by their aversion. But at what rate do you really 
 estimate their judgment f If they were to tell you, 
 plainly, that it is needless and unseasonable in youth 
 to consider deeply of the best use of life, with refer- 
 ence to both its continuance and conclusion ; to begin 
 the expending of your time with a careful estimate 
 of its value ; to feel the importance of your immor- 
 tal nature, and be solicitous for its welfare ; to seek, 
 as the highest good, the favour of the Almighty ; in 
 short, to begin well, that you may go on well, and 
 end well, — if they were expressly to tell you so, as 
 their opinion, what would you think their opinion 
 worth ? And should you not be ashamed of what- 
 ever it was in your mind that could give that opinion 
 any weight with you ? Think how it should be pos- 
 sible for you to feel, for a moment, any thing but 
 contempt or pity for their very understanding. But 
 if they did not tell you so, and could not deny thr.t 
 the contrary is true, what should you account of their 
 conscience, their practical principle ? Or, if they 
 never reflected enough to have any opinion at all of 
 the matter, what should you deem of them altogeth- 
 er, as authorities and examples f 
 
 Perhaps your plea would be, that they are never- 
 theless, full of vivacity, pleasant and joyous ; and 
 that you must confess this captivates you so, that 
 you have not thought of any such grave affair as that 
 of thus taking account of them. But, while you 
 plead so, you know how flimsy is the consistence of 
 
OF RELIGION. G9 
 
 this joyous mood of theirs, and by what means you 
 could instantly break it up. It is like that thin 
 slime of variegated hues which you sometimes see 
 spread on the surface of polluted water, and which 
 you can disperse into fragments by throwing in a 
 twig or stone. When they are at the highest pitch 
 of their spirits, and apparently " shut up in measure- 
 less content," you have but just to mention the doom 
 we are all under to die ; to name some young per- 
 son of their acquaintance who lately died, perhaps 
 in great distress and alarm for having been thought- 
 less like them ; or to make an allusion to the final 
 account, — " For all these things God will bring thee 
 into judgment ;" — you have but to do this, and you 
 will quench, for the time, all their animation, and 
 will see wiiat awkward efforts they will have to make 
 for its recovery. But, then, when you would plead, 
 Why should you not be allowed to have, free and 
 unalloyed, the pleasure of your youth with and like so 
 many of your age, and be innocently happy though 
 without religion — does not your conscience smite 
 you at the reflection, that you are coveting the par- 
 ticipation of a happinss which, in its liveliest hour, 
 ten words, or five, would suffice to dash ; and those 
 words no other than such as every young person 
 should often hear, and with a serious thought of 
 their import ? 
 
 There is but one topic more on which I will ex- 
 postulate with you. Perhaps you will say that your 
 neglect of religion is only deferring it; that you are 
 sensible it is a concern which you imist attend to^ 
 
70 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 sometime, and that you are fully resolved to do so 
 in maturer or advanced life. And are you saying 
 this with the images before your mind of one, and 
 another, and still another, within the circle of your 
 knowledge, whom you have seen cut off in youth ? 
 Go, stand by their graves and repeat it there ; 
 for there is folly in it, if you could not on those spots 
 repeat it with undisturbed assurance. Say, over 
 those dead forms, now out of sight, but which you 
 can so well, in memory, recall, such as you saw 
 them, alert, and blooming, and smiling, say there de- 
 liberately, that you know not why you should not be 
 quite at your ease in delaying to some future distant 
 time your application to that, without which you be- 
 lieve it to be a fearful thing to pass out of life. It 
 is possible that some one of them, in approaching 
 the last hour, expressed or conveyed to you an ear- 
 nest admotion on this subject, conjuring you, in 
 the name of a friend dying in youth, to beware of 
 the guilt and hazard of delay. If so, go to the 
 grave of that one especially, and there pronounce, 
 that an impertinence was uttered at a season when 
 every sentence ought to be the voice of wisdom, 
 Say, "I am wiser in this carelessness of my spirit, 
 than thou wast in the very solemnity of death. " 
 Why should you shrink at the idea of doing this ^ 
 And if you dare not do it, what verdict are you ad- 
 mitting, by implication, as the just one to be pro- 
 nounced on your conduct ^ 
 
 But perhaps you are ready to reply, that this is 
 pushing the argument beyond its real strength ; for 
 
OF RELIGION. 71 
 
 that I seem to be assuming it as probable that your 
 life will terminate in youth ; whereas, judging from 
 a collective account of the actual duration of lives, 
 I must know this is not the probability. Just so, 
 no doubt, in reference to themselves, thought they 
 whom you have seen vanish in their early day. And 
 a few examples, or even one, of the treacherous- 
 ness of the calculation, should suffice to w^arn you 
 not to hazard any thing of great moment on so men- 
 acing an uncertainty. For, in all reason, when an 
 infinitely important interest is depending, a mere 
 possibility that your allotment may prove to be like 
 theirs, is to be held of far greater weight on the one 
 side, than the alleged probability of the contrary is 
 on the other. The posibility of dying unprepared, 
 takes all the value from even the highest probability 
 that there will be prolonged time to prepare : plainly 
 because there is no proportion between the fearful- 
 ness of such a hazard and the precariousness of such 
 a dependence. So that one day of the certain ha- 
 zard may be safely asserted to be a greater thing 
 against you, than whole imaginary years, promised 
 you by the probability, ought to be accounted of 
 value /or you. 
 
 In minor concerns, there may be purposes not im- 
 properly formed by a healthy young person, which, 
 though he could effect them now, he may defer upon 
 a calculation of protracted life ; because the degree 
 of probability that this life will be protracted may be 
 equal to any degree of importance or urgency that 
 there is in the design ; so that he may be content to 
 
tZ THE DIPORTAXCE 
 
 refer and trust it to that degree of probability, say- 
 ing thus, — I reckon on accomplishing such a pur- 
 pose, if my life be prolonged. Or in other words, 
 it is such a design that, in the event of his life not 
 being so prolonged, it will be no serious misfortune 
 not to have accomplished it at all. He may be con- 
 tent to hold, as thus dependent on the contingency 
 of lengthened life, a purpose, for example, of visiting 
 some foreign country, of seeking a more agreeable 
 locality to reside in, of acquiring some particular 
 branch of not absolutely indispensable knowledge ; 
 and so of many other things. The object may be 
 of as much less than the highest necessity to him, 
 as he possesses less than a certainty of long surviv- 
 ing his youth. But when you acknowledge a con- 
 cern to be all-important, and that a failure in it 
 would be immeasurably disastrous, and avow a pur- 
 pose not to fail in it, and yet can deliberately consign 
 this purpose for its accomplishment to a contingent 
 futurity, confidently reckoning on years which you 
 confess may never be yours, as an adequate provis- 
 ion for it in reserve, this is, indeed my young friend it 
 is, the worst insanity, because a criminal one. When 
 the concern is so momentous, and any hazard from 
 delay so formidable, this supposed probability of 
 your life being prolonged should not be taken as 
 more worth than it may prove to be worth. And 
 what would it prove to be worth, in the event of 
 your being, in this prime of your life, attacked sud- 
 denly by an illness threcttening to be mortal ^ 
 
OF RELIGION. 73 
 
 Do not trifle with the matter so wretchedly and 
 wickedly as to say, that, even in that event, perhaps 
 you may have time allowed you for redeeming what 
 you are now wilfully. losing, and for securing the 
 safety of the great interest. Perhaps may ! why, 
 this plainly means that you may not. But even if 
 such an undeserved indulgence should be granted, 
 and your perverse will be suddenly transformed to 
 make the utmost use of it, are you not at this mo- 
 ment infallibly certain that it would be a cause of 
 inexpressible grief to you to have made nothing of 
 life, for its grand purpose, till ow the point of breath- 
 ing its last f Besides, that a consideration of what 
 is the merely natural effeot of the dread of death, 
 might justly throw a painful uncertainty on the genu- 
 ineness of the principle which excited your solici- 
 tudes and efforts. Besides, too, that you are per- 
 fectly aware severe illness is a situation to the last 
 degree unadapted to hard exercise of mind. 
 
 If you can give your attention for a while to such 
 representations, and still feel that you dare consign 
 your most momentous interest to take the chance, if 
 I may express it so, of your having time for it long 
 after the season of youth, and can look undisturbed, 
 undismayed, at the uncertainty where you shall be 
 when the time so reckoned upon shall arrive, it 
 seems almost in vain to reason with you any further ; 
 except entreating you to turn one reflection on the 
 state of that mind with which it is in vain to reason 
 to iBUch a purpose. Nevertheless, there are con- 
 7 
 
74 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 siderations which might be enforced upon you, even 
 though you could have every degree of assurance, 
 short of absolute certainty, that a time far off in 
 prospect will be yours in this, life. — I am supposing, 
 all the while, that you really do intend, or think you 
 intend, to apply yourself in earnest to the supreme 
 concern at a more advanced period of your days. 
 
 It has been already enough insisted on, that reli- 
 gion would make you far happier than any thing you 
 can enjoy in the neglect of it, during youth itself, 
 considered as one distinct stage ; but I would now 
 speak of it as connected with the whole of life, al- 
 lowing you to assume, if you will, that your life is to 
 reach the full term of the aoje of man. 
 
 You say this protracted liJ^ must and shall event- 
 ually be religious, confessing that otherwise all 
 would be wrong. What do you mean by its being 
 religious f If you have any just conception of the 
 nature of religion, while you are resolving that your 
 life shall sometime assume that character, you are 
 resolving it shall then be service to God. But, now, 
 v/hat claims can there be, that he will have on any 
 later portion of your life, but has not on this earlier ? 
 Answer your conscience luhy it should be a duty to 
 serve him then, if it be no duty now. What is to 
 bring you under an obligation from which you are 
 now exempt ? Is it that you will then be more 
 dependent on him, or subsist more entirely on his 
 bounty, or be more immediately and constantly in 
 his presence ^ Or is it that you will have more 
 »if^our and liberty for his service ; that you will have 
 
OP RELIGION. 75 
 
 less to do with the cares and grievances of the world f 
 Or is it that he has, in the communications of his 
 will, less expressly required the services of youth, 
 than of more advanced age ; giving, by implication, 
 a license to youthful spirits to forget him, and to 
 take favours most largely at his hands, on an under- 
 standing that there is to be no present return ? No ; 
 you readily say that all this is absurdity. You do 
 not deny, that there extends over your whole life 
 one grand obligation of service to God ; only, you 
 have your own purposes to serve, and he must wait ! 
 He has given you, for cultivation, a small tract of 
 life, of time, on which you might raise precious 
 things for offerings to him ; when you have ex- 
 hausted its best faculties of production to gratify 
 yourself, you will resign to him what it may be 
 made to yield when reduced to the condition of ster- 
 ility and weeds. But supposing you should become 
 truly religious in the latter part of life, you can even 
 now understand, that the very emphasis and intensity 
 of the convictions of that new state of mind will be 
 to feel how absolute was the duty, and how sublime 
 would have been the happiness, of devoting every 
 stage of life to the service of God. What, then, 
 will be the reflections with which conscience will 
 sting you, for having expended the most animated 
 part of it on the principle, that what would be gained 
 to him, would be lost to you ? 
 
 Again, when you are making to yourself these 
 promises, that you certainly will sometime, in a 
 yet distant part of life, apply yourself seriously to 
 
76 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 religion, you must mean, that you will make it an 
 earnest concern that your spirit, by that time ad- 
 vanced far toward the conclusion of its sojourn on 
 earth, may attain a prepared state for removing to 
 a superior and permanent scene of existence. This 
 «> what you mean, is it not? But then how can it 
 be, that you are not struck with a sense of some- 
 thing flagrantly absurd, in a plan of excluding from 
 all but the latter portion of life, an aifair standing re- 
 lated to so mighty a consequence ? Think of that 
 existence during endless ages, an existence to com- 
 mence in a condition, determined for happiness or 
 misery, by the state of mind which shall have been 
 formed in this introductory period. And is this 
 the single case in which all rules o^ proportion may> 
 without absurdity, and with impunity, be set aside ? 
 You intend, I will suppose, to apply as much as a 
 few years, somewhere yonder in the decline of life, 
 to this great business of preparation ; that is to say, 
 as much of the time within those years as will not 
 be inevitably consumed by worldly cares and atten- 
 tion to your infirmities. That is the measure of 
 time to be placed over against the immense futurity I 
 Behold those two, presented in such a relation. 
 Look at that ocean, and at the competence of the 
 time to prepare a vessel for launching upon it. Set 
 the poor fragments of weeks and months in the 
 years so appropriated in your determination, set 
 them in your view, against the ensuing millions of 
 years or ages. Have you no perception of a fright- 
 ful disproportion f' 
 
OF RELIGION. 77 
 
 If you attempt an evasion by saying, but what 
 would be the whole of this short life employed in 
 preparation, as set against that futurity ? — the an- 
 swer is, that the whole term of life, diminutive as it 
 is for a preparatory introduction to that stupendous 
 sequel, is what our Creator has allotted to us, leav- 
 ing to us no responsibility that it is not longer, and 
 is therefore a space of time which his blessing can 
 render competent to the great purpose ; but you are 
 presuming to take a difl^erent and exceedingly di- 
 minished measure, on your own responsibility ; ap- 
 portioning oft', as an adequate space for the prepara- 
 tion, a small section only of what he has assigned 
 for it. This is, in eftect, telling him that a far 
 shorter time than the short one which he has allot- 
 ted for the purpose, will be quite enough for it ; and 
 demanding of him that his blessing shall be confer- 
 red on this arbitrary unsactioned adjustment of your 
 own, so as to make a shorter time suffice for the 
 object, than that which he has appointed and re- 
 quired to be devoted to its accomplishment. But 
 turn your thoughts upon your conduct, to reflect 
 what an act of reason you are performing when you 
 say. The w^hole of the time which God has assigned 
 for a preparation to enter happily on an eternal ex- 
 istence is very short, and therefore a much shorter 
 is sufficient ! 
 
 And reflect what an estimate you are entertaining 
 of both the nature and importance of that prepara- 
 tion, while you can in ease or gaiety see one month 
 7* 
 
78 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 and year after another passing away, and anticipate 
 that many more will pass, without contributing to it 
 one particle. Whatever truth there may be to be 
 learned, whatever discipline to be applied, whatever 
 habits to be formed, whatever communications with 
 heaven to be opened and maintained, and whatever 
 may be lost, and whatever guilt may be incurred, by 
 neglecting all this, still, this year, and many more 
 yet to come, can well be spared from the concern, 
 and surrendered wholly to any other demands. 
 You can account with yourself that it is so much, 
 and so much more, gained to your temporary inter- 
 ests, and lost only to the process for raising you to 
 the eternal ones. At the end of one of these peri- 
 ods you have to reflect, a year of the prime and 
 vigour of my life has passed in a lively career, and 
 is gone to be mine no more ; it might have effected 
 for me, and left me possessing, something of inesti- 
 mable value toward what I own to be tho supreme- 
 ly important business of my life ; but it has left me 
 nothing. When I shall be constrained, at length, to 
 apply myself to that business with all my might, I 
 shall have to remember this year, with the conscious- 
 ness that there is not with me one advantage deriv- 
 ed from it in aid of my new and difficult undertak- 
 ing ; that, as relative to that concern, it was, by my 
 own determination, flung with all its rich possibilities 
 out of my existence ; that I shall have no benefit 
 from it to all eternity. You will have to reflect — I 
 decided that the latter part of my life was all I would 
 give to the great affair; I have accomplished my 
 
Of religion. 79 
 
 determination by alienating from it the finest portion 
 of my life ; I advance to old age, to death, to judg- 
 ment, to eternity, under the voluntary loss ; and 
 whether, with the impoverished resources of this late 
 remainder of my time, I shall succeed or fail in the 
 grand work, I shall for ever have to remember, that 
 I have not thought it worth appropriating to it my 
 most valuable years. 
 
 So you will have to reflect. But now is the time 
 in which you are actually doing that on which you 
 will have so to reflect ; you are deliberately and 
 daily adding something toward your being placed 
 in that predicament. It is pressed upon you as the 
 plainest truth in the world, that you ought to be, 
 through the largest possible extent of your allotted 
 time on earth, in a state adapted to an endless life ; 
 and you resolve, and act on your resolution, not 
 to be in that state during many years of this intro- 
 duction. You lay a resolute hand on this invaluable 
 portion, to withhold and defend it against the claims 
 of that sovereign interest, practically pronouncing it 
 better, that the commencing and animated stage of 
 your existence should be alienated from all advan- 
 tageous connexion with the grand whole ; that it 
 should not conduce to final good ; that it should be 
 forever lost as to all tha|; is to follow. Let it be 
 enough, you seem to say, that the endless life to 
 which I am appointed and advancing, shall have, as 
 I do intend, a small part of this introductory one 
 yielded to a conformity with the solemnity of its 
 character, and applied to secure its happiness ; and 
 
80 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 if its importance would insist on more, I will resist 
 the encroachment. No authority of its requirement 
 shall wrest from me the liberty, of casting as much 
 as I please of this precious part of my time into an 
 abyss, never to emerge in wealth or pleasure to me 
 in futurity. And whatever that futurity of exist- 
 ence may be the poorer or the worse for so much 
 lost to it, I am content to stand in my lot. My 
 choice is rather to feel how much has been lost to 
 my welfare then, than to forego the pleasure of fol- 
 lowing my inclinations now. 
 
 And yet, at this very time, at any time, you will 
 acknowledge that the interest of that futurity is the 
 transcendent one, that it is vast and eternal, that it 
 is critically depending, and that it is your own. O 
 what trivial things are the most lofty and solemn 
 words, or their import either, to a mind that will not 
 reflect, or cannot feel ! 
 
 If, nevertheless, you are still positive in the reso- 
 lution that you will devote your attention to religion 
 at a more advanced period, I would represent to you 
 that what you are meanwhile losing, is not merely 
 so much time. You deem there is a peculiar value 
 and charm in this prime of your life, so that you re- 
 joice you are not old nor middle-aged. You do so 
 even independently of any direct thought of being 
 so much further off* from the latter end. And what 
 is this so valued peculiarity of youth ^ Doubtless 
 it is the plenitude of life, the vigour and elasticity of 
 body and mind, the quickness of apprehension, the 
 liveliness of emotion, the energy of impulse to ex- 
 
OP RELIGION. 81 
 
 periment and daring. Now, consider under what 
 signal advantage, with respect to the subsequent 
 progress, religion would commence its course in the 
 strenijth of these animated forces. It would be like 
 taking a steed of fire for some noble enterprize, 
 instead of one already tamed with time and labour, 
 or nearly worn down. You would thus be borne 
 onward a great length before the vigour of nature 
 begins to remit, and would have acquired a princi- 
 ple of impulsion to advance, after that peculiar vigour 
 should have ceased. Your youth at leaving you 
 would seem to send its spirit forward with you. The 
 religious career thus commencing would have all 
 the advantage which a stream, of vast length of 
 course, acquires from rising, and running its first 
 stage, on the slope of a lofty mountain, as compared 
 with that which is put in motion on a tract little bet- 
 ter than flat, and creeps heavily on for want of such 
 an impulse from its origin. So important is it to the 
 Progress of religion, that it should have the utmost 
 benefit from its Rise. 
 
 Again, consider that a person prosecuting, in ad- 
 vanced life, a course which he deeply approves, has 
 a peculiar pleasure in recollecting it as having been 
 also the favourite interest of his youth ; a pleasure 
 additional to that of knowing that his early life was 
 not thrown away. For, all the pleasing associations 
 of that season adhere and impart their charm to that 
 which continues the approved favourite still. There 
 is the memory of departed friends, the coeval or 
 elder associates and promoters of his youthful piety, 
 
82 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 his allies in the best cause, whose images in some 
 solitary hour seem to smile on him from the past, or 
 from heaven. The remembered conscientious ef- 
 forts and vows of self-dedication augment his satis- 
 faction in that which he still feels deserved them so 
 well. The animated emotions, which he may some- 
 times regret that he cannot now revive in their vernal 
 freshness, are still his, as having been given to that 
 which is still his, to that which has been continuous- 
 ly his grand object. Thus, what is now ripening 
 into fruit he can delight to recollect in the beauty 
 and fragrance of its blossom. What a difference 
 between this and the feelings of a man who, becom- 
 ing religious in later life, finds himself by that very 
 cause dissevered, as it were, from his youth, except 
 for painful, self-reproachful reflection ; who feels 
 that its associations, instead of conveying a genial 
 warmth to him along an uninterrupted train of piety 
 to the present time, are gone away in connexion 
 with what he regards as the dishonour and calamity 
 of his existence ; like the gardens that once were 
 on a tract which a man has lost from his estate by 
 subsidence into the sea. 
 
 But still further : while you are resolving to adopt 
 the right plan sometime,, and flattering yourself that 
 thus there will have been, on the whole, and in the 
 conclusion of life's account, a safe preponderance 
 in favour of religion, you are to be admonished that 
 the absence of it in the earlier part of life is some- 
 thing more, and worse, than simply so much lost to 
 that account. It is not only that you are not reli- 
 
OF RELIGION. 83 
 
 gious during the time that you shall postpone that 
 concern ; not only that you are rendering so much 
 of life, with respect to that, a mere blank ; you are 
 all the while aggravating the difficulty, and lessening 
 the probability, of your being religious at a later 
 period, or ever. Are you so thoughtless or unknow- 
 ing as to fancy that a long course of estrangement 
 from this interest, of aversion to it, of resistance 
 against its claims, of suppression of the remonstrances 
 of conscience in its behalf, is to leave you in a kind 
 of neutral state, impartial to admit at length the con- 
 viction that now it is high time, and easily converti- 
 ble into a christian spirit ? Consider that all this 
 time you are forming the habits which, when invete- 
 rately established, will either be invincibly upon you 
 through life, or require a mighty wrench to emanci- 
 pate you. This refusal to think, this revolting from 
 any attempt at self-examination, this averting of your 
 attention from serious books, this declining to seek 
 the divine favour and assistance by prayer, this pro- 
 jecting of schemes bearing no regard to that favour, 
 and which are not to need that assistance, this eager- 
 ness to seize each transitory pleasure, this preference 
 of companions who would like you the worse if they 
 thought you feared God or cared for your eternal 
 welfare — these dispositions, prolonged in a succes- 
 sion of your willing acquiescences in them, will grow 
 into a settled constitution of your soul, which will 
 thus become its own inexorable tyrant. The habit 
 so forming will draw into it all the affections, the 
 workings of imagination, and the trains of thought. 
 
84 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 will SO possess itself of them that in it alone they 
 will live, and move, and have their being. It will 
 have strong, unremitting propensity to grow en- 
 tire, so as to leave nothing unpreoccupied in the 
 mind, for any opposing agent to take hold on, in 
 order to counteract it ; as if if were instinctively 
 apprehensive of the effect of protests from con- 
 science, or visitings from the powers of heaven, or 
 intimations from the realm of death; and therefore 
 intent on forming the sentiments of the soul to such 
 a consistence and coalition, as shall leave none of 
 them free to desert at the voice of these summoners. 
 And if you would reflect, you would be sensible 
 thatj in effect, you ivish the case to be just so. Do 
 not practice any dissimulation with yourself on the 
 subject. In making the resolution that sometime 
 (and, now, honestly, is not that a time willingly re- 
 garded as far off.?) that sometime you will apply 
 yourself to religion, you plainly intend that you will 
 not be religious, that you will be estranged from re- 
 ligion, till then. But, in resolving that it shall not 
 command you, you necessarily must wish that neither 
 shall it disturb you. You wish that, during all the 
 time, no interfering, opposing, alarming principle 
 may abide in your mind ; because you desire to ein- 
 joy fully, and in peace, the kind of happiness which 
 you are to exclude religion in order to enjoy. You 
 are wishing, then, in effect, that your affections and 
 tastes may be entirely in harmony with a system of 
 life devoid of religion, that your judgment may ac- 
 commodate itself not to condemn your proceeding, 
 
OP RELIGION. 85 
 
 and that your conscience should either be beguiled 
 to acquiesce, or repose in a long deep sleep. That 
 is to say, while you are resolving that at some ad- 
 vanced period you will be religious, you are also re- 
 solving that, during the long preceding time, you 
 will yield yourself to a process for consolidating 
 those very habits, which will fix your mind in a con- 
 firmed antipathy to religion. You are intending to 
 enter at last on consecrated ground, and yet are sur- 
 rendering yourself to a power, which will hold you 
 back with the grasp of a fiend when you attempt to 
 approach its border. You presume ihat the latter 
 stage of your journey shall be an ascent to heaven, 
 and yet, in this earlier one, you deliberately choose 
 a track in which you can calculate how each down- 
 ward step goes in aggravation of the arduousness of 
 that ascent, if you shall indeed ever attempt it; as 
 if a man who had to reach the summit of a vast 
 mountain, and might do it on one side by a long, 
 gradual, and comparatively gentle declivity, should 
 prefer essaying it on that other side, where, descend- 
 ing first to a great depth to reach its base, he must 
 then climb its precipices. Whatever I am now gain- 
 ing, he might say to himself, in the way of pleasant 
 indulgence, in this descent, is so much that I shall 
 find to have been gained against me by the difficul- 
 ty on yonder steep. 
 
 It may be easy for you to have credit with your- 
 self in denying, in a light inconsiderate way, that 
 S 
 
86 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 you are actually adopting a plan of such monstrous 
 absurdity. You will say, that you are far from being 
 conscious of any wish to aggravate the future diffi- 
 culty of applying your mind in good earnest to reli- 
 gion. But this is an evasion, of the thoughtlessness 
 or disingenuousness of which you ought to he more 
 tlian ashamed. You are bound to consider, that in 
 adopting a plan, you are accountable for every thing 
 which is necessarily involved in it. And when your 
 plan is that of spending an indefinite but large por- 
 tion of your life exempt from religion, you necessa- 
 rily wish to have the unalloyed benefit of your priv- 
 ilege. (But what terms 1 am using !) That clear 
 advantage you cannot have if invaded by convic- 
 tions, if harrassed by conscience, if kept in awe of 
 the invisible Observer, if lightened upon by intima- 
 tions of a judgment to come. You necessarily wish 
 an immunity from all this, in the prosecution of your 
 scheme. But therefore, by implication, you wish 
 for that which alone can so exempt you; and that 
 is no other than such a hardened state of mind, such 
 an oblivion habitually, and such a power of defiance 
 occasoinally, as will constitute, when fully confirmed^ 
 a most fatal aversion and unadaptedness to that trans- 
 fer of your thoughts and affections to religion, on 
 which you are presuming as the ultimate resource. 
 
 And it is probable that, if you had self-observa- 
 tion enough, you might perceive this process toward 
 a c-onfirmed state is going on. Have you no con- 
 iciousness that the last two or three years of your 
 neglect of religion have rendered your disinclination 
 
OF RELIGION. 
 
 87 
 
 to it more positive ? May there not be a more sen- 
 sible reaction against its remonstances ? If the 
 earlier feeling was that of mere carelessness about 
 the subject, has it in no degree changed to the 
 stronger one of aversion ? Perhaps a serious book, 
 (like this of the Ris3 and Progress of Religion,) 
 which would at a former time have been lightly put 
 aside, as what no way concerned you, would now be 
 regarded with a pointed sentiment of dislike, almost 
 of hostility, as against an ungracious intruder, come, 
 like the ancient prophet to the impious king, " to 
 speak no good of you, but evil." Perhaps you find 
 that you can more promptly set aside any scruples 
 of conscience that rise to obstruct you in the way 
 of your inclinations. And perhaps, as a reward— an 
 advantage, do you deem it f— of this boldness- yoi| 
 are now seldomer incommoded by such scruples. 
 So that, though your feelings clash more unequivo- 
 cally with the dictates of religion when it does arrest 
 your attention, you are stronger to resist, and more 
 expert to elude, and suffer on the whole less of the 
 trouble of its interference. 
 
 This is quite the natural course ; but you ought 
 to be aware of its progress. If you absolutely will 
 proceed on this plan, of retaining a purpose in fa- 
 vour of religion, but deferring it to some future 
 distant time, I wish you would be induced to keep 
 yourself apprized of its effect in you, by making now 
 and then an experiment, in the way of test, on the 
 temper of your mind. Will you be advised to take 
 occasionally some very serious and cogent book on 
 
88 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 the subject of personal religion, the one just named, 
 or any other, or some peculiarly solemn part of the 
 Bible ; to read it a little while, and watch in what 
 manner your inmost feeling responds to it f Do 
 this again after an interval, and observe whether the 
 displacency, the repugnance, of your heart, be lessj 
 — whether it be not sensibly more. In an hour 
 when you are left alone, with a perfect freedom to 
 remain for a while in this retirement, recollect the 
 duty of approaching your heavenly Father, with 
 thanks, confessions, and supplications : and observe 
 the movement of your soul under this thought in 
 this opportune hour. Do the same in subsequent 
 opportunities, and see whether the indisposition be 
 not increased rather than diminished. And if the 
 fact be so, what a melancholy phenomenon ; a little, 
 dependent spirit voluntarily receding from its benefi- 
 cent Creator ; directing its progress away from the 
 eternal source of light, and life, and joy ; and that 
 on a vain presumption of being under the comet's 
 law of returning at last to the sun ! In a similar 
 manner, at successive intervals, try the effect, on the 
 temperament of your mind, of some remembered 
 example of eminent piety in youth, of the recollec- 
 tion of former youthful associates dead, or of the 
 solemn idea of your own death, and your continual 
 approximation toward it ; and see whether, under 
 these applications, there will not be betrayed, in the 
 habit of your feelings, an increasing alienation from 
 religion. And yet you are the person to indulge an 
 easy confidence, that, after you shall have gone on 
 
OF RELIGION. 
 
 c?9 
 
 many years thus confirming the estrangement and 
 aversion from it, you shall easily turn to it as your 
 best friend ! 
 
 Might it not be well to enforce it on yourself as 
 a rule, That this your resolution to be religious 
 sometime, shall be distinctly recalled to mind in each 
 successive instance of your d^ing what tends to its 
 frustration? 3lhen you ^"ind yourself making an 
 effort to banish the shad*? of pensive feeling, or grave 
 reflection, which any circumstance of the time may 
 have had power to throw over you, say to yourself, 
 It is I, nevertheless, that am to be religious, and 
 therefore to cherish such thoughts and emotions, in 
 a season ypt to come. If you perceive yourself 
 carefully avoiding " the house of mourning," even 
 though it be your friends that are visited there with 
 sickpess or death, say, again, I am on© day, how- 
 ever, to entertain and welcome that religion which 
 would be there, at this time, enforced on me with 
 such powerful admonition. When you are entering 
 a gay thoughtless party, to mingle in such a hilarity 
 as any visitings of religious reflection would quell, 
 say to yourself, That very thing which would freeze 
 this animation of theirs and mine, shall after a while 
 be the grand solace of my heart ; and this is the 
 way I am taking to prepare myself for its being so ! 
 If you go so far as to endure voluntarily and without 
 repugnance, society Avhere serious subjects and pious 
 men are turned to jest, and the most awful names 
 taken in vain, say, I am training myself here, through 
 8* 
 
90 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 familiarity with irreligion, to give my utmost rever- 
 ence and affection to that of which I am thus abet- 
 ting the sctirn and profanation. If you are project- 
 ing a scheme for the occupation and satisfaction of 
 a considerable portion of your life, but cast upon a 
 principle and plan evidently unfavourable to your 
 spiritual welfare, reflea, on it, and say again, There 
 is another scheme to be afterwards undertaken, into 
 which I shall pass with all the advantage of having 
 wholly excluded the care of > from this prior one : 
 when my lighter juvenile uncoicern about religion 
 shall have settled into an utter estrangement, as a 
 part of the habit confirmed through my long and 
 complete engrossment by a worldly project, then I 
 shall need but one touch of conviction, Uit one re- 
 collection of my former vow, but one aci of my 
 will, to throw my spirit free, and become religious 
 enough for death and for heaven. 
 
 I repeat to you, that by this course of procrasti- 
 nation, this scheme of reversionary piety, you are not 
 simply losing so much, with regard to the greatest 
 affair, but are also taking strong security against 
 yourself that you shall not save the remainder. The 
 worthless or noxious growth which you suffer to 
 overspread the first large division of your allotted 
 tract of time, is continually extending its roots far 
 forward, and will scatter its seeds thickly over all 
 the space beyond. Consider how well, even at 
 your age, you are informed of it as a truth, that 
 whatever entwines itself with the youthful feelings 
 maintains a strange tenacity, and seems to insinuate 
 
OF RELIGION. 91 
 
 into the vitality of the being. How important to 
 watch lest what is thus combining with its life, should 
 contain a principle of moral death ! Consider, that 
 in this earlier period you are peculiarly disposed to 
 entertain social partialities, are perhaps giving your- 
 self to companionship and friendships, or contracting 
 more intimate relations, which must have an impor- 
 tant influence on the growing formation of your 
 mind into its decided character, and on the con- 
 sequent tenor of your life. New when this social 
 attraction combines several parties destitute of reli- 
 gion, they are in effect giving mutual pledges never 
 to be religious ; since they are giving and receiving 
 the whole influence of their friendship to fix their 
 minds in that state in which they are at present 
 pleased with one another ; that is to say, in a state 
 of aversion to religion. And supposing that each of 
 them were, nevertheless, like you, intending to be 
 religious sometime, we cannot well conceive any 
 fairer occasion for the scoff'of a malignant spirit, than 
 to see them thus all in a league to frustrate what each 
 of them believes he intends. 
 
 This same intention, you have no reason to 
 doubt, has been entertained in earlier years, by many 
 whom you now see advanced to the middle or the 
 decline of life, without having done any thing toward 
 its accomplishment. Yet they were, in their time, 
 as confident as you are now. Should not this 
 alarm you ? Some of them may have yielded up 
 the design, not by any express act of renouncement, 
 but insensibly, in the gradual hardening of their 
 
92 THE IMPORTAXCE 
 
 consciences, their complete immersion in the world, 
 and assimilation to its spirit ; with the addition, in 
 too many cases, of the practice of some more positive 
 kind of sin. Many of them, however, are perhaps 
 still retaining the purpose, inert and buried under an 
 accumulation of repressive habits ; like a seed arti- 
 ficially kept torpid in order that it may be quickened 
 into germination at a preferable time. The con- 
 sciousness that they are mortal, and must be forced 
 at last out of all that now occupies and pleases them, 
 is soothed to repose in this presumption, that they 
 shall bring a reserved expedient into action, before 
 the neglect of it be fatal. But answer honestly, do 
 you think it probable that they will .^ Do you ex- 
 pect, if you should live to see them forward a few 
 years further — do you expect to see them withdraw- 
 ing their engrossed affections, breaking asunder their 
 inveterate habits, and doing a great thing which 
 they have systematically and w^ilfully prepared them- 
 selves not to do, that is, devoting themselves to 
 God and the care of their salvation ? Perhaps you 
 have allowed yourselves to imagine that you, after 
 having made a considerable progress in years, shall 
 become, at every advance, proportionally more and 
 more sensible of the shortening of life, and shall 
 necessarily behold nearer the visage of death, pre- 
 sented through a clearer medium, and with enlarging 
 and more defined features. How can it, you may 
 have said, be otherwise, in the exercise of mere 
 common sense, than that this approach toward the 
 end should aggravate upon me the cogency of my 
 
OF RELIGION. 93 
 
 grand duty ? Do then look again at the multitude 
 of examples around you, and see what avails them 
 this obvious arithmetic of time. You see persons 
 with whose names you and your companions, with a 
 tacit pleasure of contrast in your favour, couple the 
 epithet " old," still a? heedlessly and confidently as 
 yourselves, reckoning on time enough yet, to con- 
 tinue deferring the grand business without peril of 
 its being left undone. If their youthful " trust in 
 their own heart," that they would ultimately apply 
 themselves to the indispensable business, fixed that 
 determination on about some given point or period 
 in their future life, they can pass, or perhaps have 
 passed that period, with the same facility of neglect 
 as any former one, finding nothing to stop them 
 there with the peremptory exaction to perform their 
 vow. The lying spirit which had promised to meet 
 them at the assigned spot, to conduct them thence- 
 forward toward heaven, appears not on the ground 
 when they arive there, unless to tell them that ano- 
 ther stage, still further on, w^U be more advantage- 
 ous for commencing the enterprise. You look at the 
 marks of time on their countenances, recollect them 
 perhaps as in mature or middle age when you were 
 in infancy, and wonder they can yield themselves to 
 such an imposition ; and all this without a single re- 
 flection, that you are putting yourself in the train of 
 the same delusion. How can they act so, you say, 
 when I feel so certain of the justness of my deter- 
 mination to act otherwise, on the strength of my 
 conviction of the ultimate necessity of religion ^ Be 
 
94 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 you assured there is no more fatal betrayer than a 
 right and excellent principle adopted, but consigned 
 to future time and more favourable inclination for 
 being carried into action. The consciousness that 
 you are certainly keeping a good resolution, only 
 deferred to await a " more convenient season," 
 will help you to indulge a fallacious security, while 
 every season for accomplishing it is passing away. 
 Through one period of your time after another, it 
 will appear to you infallibly efficacious for the next ; 
 and no period will come as that from which you 
 cannot look forward to still another. And this your 
 purpose, suspended as it were in advance over your 
 course, as a malign imitation, by infernal art, of the 
 star which the sages followed to find the Saviour of 
 the world, will probably lead you on, still confiding 
 that it must stand arrested at the spot where you 
 shall accept the grace of that Redeemer, till you are 
 drawn to a precipice, where your deluder will van- 
 ish and you will fall. 
 
 All the latter course of this pleading has proceed- 
 ed on the supposition that you may have a protracted 
 life. It has been an attempt to represent to you, 
 that even if you might be allowed to assume a very 
 strong probability, little short of certainty, of reach- 
 ing the full term of human life — nay, that if you 
 were certain you shall, your scheme of exempting 
 its earlier portion from religion, on a promise to 
 yourself and to God of taking that for your chief 
 coi.cern at a more advanced stage, would still ^' ab- 
 
OF RELIGION. 95 
 
 surd, and wicked, and most dangerous. But I warn 
 you again, do not so criminally trifle with your own 
 reason as to pretend on any such calculation, in sight 
 and in contempt of the thousand instances of your 
 fellow-mortals dying in youth, and in the immedi- 
 ately following stage. 
 
 Now, will you, my young friend, lay such con- 
 siderations to heart ; or will you rather have it to 
 remember, perhaps when all to late, that they were 
 pressed upon you in vain ? 
 
 This expostulation, conceived as what might have 
 been addressed to some one of the many young per- 
 sons who may, in various times and places, have had 
 their attention drawn for a moment to this treatise 
 of the Rise and Progress of Religion, and averted 
 by the seriousness of its purport, has been prolonged 
 so exceedingly far beyond our intention, and its 
 due proportion, that but little space is fairly left for 
 exemplifying, in other forms, the trains of instructive 
 reflection that might take rise from imagining what 
 has happened in connexion with the book. We 
 therefore leave it for an exercise of the reader's own 
 thoughts, if he should deem there is any profit in 
 such an employment of them, to imagine in what 
 manner a variety of individuals, each a specimen 
 of the character of a class, may be supposed to 
 have noticed the book at one time or another ; what 
 feeling was excited at the sight, or transient inspec- 
 tion, or perusal of it ; how they were affected to- 
 ward its subject, so inculcated ; what influence, if 
 
96 THE IMPORTAXCE 
 
 any, it had on their determinations ; and to conceive, 
 in each case respectively, what would have been the 
 appropriate admonitions, which it had been well if 
 there had been any intelligent and persuasive friend 
 opportunely to offer. What such a friend might per- 
 tinently have said in any of those instances, is of 
 course the advice or remonstrance applicable in any 
 similar cases, occurring now and hereafter, among 
 the incalculably numerous persons whose attention 
 must be attracted, more or less, to a work which is 
 in still widening circulation. 
 
 Foregoing, then, the design of specifying several 
 other discriminated examples, we will protract this 
 discourse only a little further, by supposing one more 
 instance; an example, however, of a character un- 
 happily far too generally prevalent to be called that 
 of a class. We may describe the person as a mere 
 man of the world — yet not in the worst sense of 
 that designation ; for we do not suppose him an 
 abandoned profligate, trampling and spurning the 
 most obvious rules of social morality ; nor a scoffer 
 at religion ; nor a scorner, in a virulent spirit, of 
 pious men ; but devoted to this world, idolizing it 
 in his affections, exerting all his active energy in 
 its pursuits, surrendering his whole being to mingle 
 v^ith its interests and be conformed to its temper; 
 and therefore habitually forgetting the other world, 
 and all the grand economy of truths, overtures, 
 means, preparations, and cares relating to it. He 
 might have been in youth just the same kind of per- 
 son as the one expostulated with in the preceding 
 
OF RELIGION. 97 
 
 pages; we are supposing him past that age, and all 
 that belongs peculiarly to its character ; yet not ne- 
 cessarily as very far advanced in life. 
 
 It cannot have failed to happen that many such 
 persons have been accosted, as it were, by the spirit 
 of our pious and benevolent Author, in the vehicle 
 of his book. If we may conjecture that fifty thou- 
 sand copies have been diffused among all orders of 
 society, and have obtained, through choice or acci- 
 dent, with approbation or under sufferance, a posi- 
 tion in almost so many abodes, our fancy has a 
 warrant to figure an indefinite variety of circum- 
 stances, under which these volumes have fallen in 
 contact with such men of the world. 
 
 There may have been the case of such a man's 
 unwittingly laying his hand on the book, as one of 
 a number which had been left him by a religious 
 parent, opening to see what it was, as not recogniz_ 
 ing it by its exterior, and being smitten with some- 
 thing like an electric shock at the sudden reflection, 
 that for ten, or twenty, or thirty years since that 
 parent's death, he has been no better for this or any 
 other religious book. Another such man, on hap- 
 pening to fix his eye on the volume, has been struck 
 with the recollection, inflicting perhaps a twinge of 
 mental pain, that there was a time, a transient one, 
 long since, in his youth, when he felt some convic- 
 tions and emotions of a religious tendency ; and 
 procured this identical book in aid of those salutary 
 movements in his mind. Another may have chanc- 
 9 
 
9S THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 ed to notice it among books, which a better care 
 than his had provided for the instruction of the young 
 people of his own family; and has perhaps had the 
 momentary thought — what, then, are these young 
 men and women to be reminded of religion, while / 
 forget it ? Another may have retained from early 
 instruction, accompanied by example, a certain im- 
 pression, resting on his mind somewhat like a super- 
 stition, that the Sunday, ought to be in some degree 
 unlike his other days, and a small portion of it given 
 to serious reading j and in looking for a book of 
 that character, he may have happened to take this, 
 and to read enough of it to cause him a disquieted 
 consciousness, or a suspicion that his spirit and hab- 
 its are not quite in the right. The case may have 
 occurred, that such a man has caught sight of this 
 book in the recess of an apartment where he and 
 others were waiting to follow a dead person to the 
 grave ; and that, under a passing gleam of right 
 apprehension and kind feeling, he internally said, 
 The Progress of Religion — I hope it was that road 
 that the deceased took in his way to the world whith- 
 er he is gone, for else it were ill with him now. 
 
 It may seem as if these suppositions do not quite 
 agree with the general description of the character, 
 as altogether estranged from religion. Such invol- 
 untary and transitory excitements of a recognition of 
 that great interest, are not, however, incompatible 
 with a prevailing decided neglect and alienation : 
 but, in truth, the conjectures may justly fall into a 
 less charitable train. We suppose the case of such 
 
OF RELIGION 99 
 
 a man's observing that the book had been offered to 
 the attenion of the younger branches of his family, 
 and admitting a slight reflection of self-rebuke. 
 But it is not less likely to have happened, that a 
 man of this character, on perceiving such a circum- 
 stance, has signified displeasure at this expedient 
 for rendering the happy young creature prema- 
 turely grave and melancholy, extinguishing, he 
 said, their delightful vivacity, (which would soon 
 enough be repressed by the cares and troubles of 
 life,) by unseasonable apprehensions about the wel- 
 fare of their souls. It is no improbale case, that 
 the book may have come in the way of such a man 
 just about the time when he has seen, or perhaps 
 experienced to his injury, an instance of want of 
 principle in some person making high pretensions to 
 religion ; and that he said, with irritation and a 
 frown, I think I may as well let this affair of religion 
 alone, till I see more integrity in those who profess 
 to be so deep in it. The main matter of duty is? 
 to be upright in our transactions ; and, thank God, 
 I am that without making any canting pretensions 
 to saintship. Another man of this description may 
 have accidentally looked into the book a little 
 while, and then laid it aside, evading all personal 
 application with the thoughtless sentiment. That 
 is all very w^ell for persons whose situation allows 
 them to give themselves up to retirement and think- 
 ing ; but men like me have far too much to do 
 with the practical business of life to have leisure for 
 attending to the subject. The book may have ob- 
 
100 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 truded itself on the notice of a man deliberating 
 whether to add a new worldly undertaking to those 
 he was involved in already, an undertaking not ne- 
 cessary, but calculated to make a little more of the 
 world his own. And might it not be supposed that 
 such a monitory intervention might contribute to 
 suspend the affirmative decision, by force of the 
 question whether this concern of religion, did not 
 demand to take precedence of every other new un- 
 dertaking ? No ; the question struck but feebly on 
 his mind ; the suggestion was easily cleared away 
 from interference with his debating thoughts ; reli- 
 gion could be attended to at any time indifferently ; 
 whereas now or never was the time for the project 
 which was warming his desires. The book was 
 thrown by, and the subject vanished. 
 
 It is familar to observation that men of the 
 world have an arrogant estimate of worldly wisdom, 
 though the sphere of its objects be so limited, and 
 the term of its employment and profit so short. 
 Never did the adepts in abstract philosophy, or in 
 science, indulge a prouder conciousness in virtue 
 of living and reigning in the intellectual world, than 
 these men do on the strength of being shrewd and 
 efficient in the judgment and conduct of affairs. Sup- 
 pose, then, one of them, on returning from a place of 
 resort and competition, where he has excelled in the 
 discussion or transaction of some of these affairs, to 
 have been led by any chance to open such a book, 
 and to have glanced over a few sentences or para- 
 graphs. He probably did not waste even his con- 
 
OF RELIGION. 101 
 
 tempt in more than a few brief expressions to this 
 effect : — These men, all for religion, talk of the in- 
 significance of what they call earthly things, the 
 vanity of the world, the Christian's vocation to live 
 above it, the meanness of its concerns compared with 
 their nobler pursuits ; and all the while the} know 
 nothing about it. Too fantastic and feeble for the 
 vigorous activities of our department, let them be 
 indulged in their notion that they have vastly supe- 
 rior employments in their own. It were hard to deny 
 them the pleasure of declaiming against that which 
 they do not understand, and in which they would 
 make a miserable figure in attempting to act a part. 
 Another man of the worldly character, in a less su- 
 percilious temper, may be supposed to have looked 
 a little into the book with a feeling like this : One 
 does wish one could manage to have some commo- 
 dious sort or share of religion, that would not cost 
 much trouble, and would put one in safety as to 
 future consequences. But religion as described 
 here, meets me as an inquisitor and a tyrant. It 
 would force a judicial investigation through my whole 
 soul, and that only to expose, condemn, and affright 
 me ; insists on some strange revolution in my prin- 
 ciples and feelings ; demands an unconditional, un- 
 limited submission, to a jurisdiction which will leave 
 nothing within me, or without me, at my own free 
 disposal; and, in short, insists on setting the main 
 purposes of my life in a new direction. This is not 
 to be endured. If I must at last, for safety's sake, 
 9* 
 
102 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 submit on such terms, let me enjoy my exemption 
 as long as I can or dare. 
 
 But a man of the world may be a formalist ; may 
 think that no such religion can ever be necessary, and 
 that he A«5a sufficient one in his regular performance 
 of an order of mere external observances. Some- 
 where, no doubt, there is a copy of the book in 
 question which such a man has inspected, with eyes 
 now perhaps closed for ever ; and we can figure the 
 aspect, (though the pages do not reflect the image,) 
 of alternate disdain and indignation at what he pro- 
 nounced to be rank enthusiasm, with self-congratu- 
 lation on knowing a far easier method of satisfying 
 the requirements of his Creator. 
 
 We might go on indefinitely recounting, in pro- 
 bable conjecture, the modes in which the worldly 
 spirit has been affected at coming in contact with this 
 vehicle of serious admonition. And what a mani- 
 festation would be given of the nature of that spirit, 
 if, from unknown times and places, on twentieth 
 part would be recalled of the instances in which its 
 quality has been the most remarkably betrayed un- 
 der such a test. We will describe but one example 
 more. It is not to be doubted that this production 
 of pious zeal has at some time fallen in the way of 
 a person who had continued faithfully devoted to the 
 world quite to old age. Perhaps it met his notice 
 at the time when he was just upon making the ut- 
 most exertion of his declining strength, and with an 
 eagerness equal to any passion of his youth, to ac- 
 complish the concluding, the crowning part, of a long 
 
OF RELIGION. 103 
 
 wrought project for bringing within his grasp a ma- 
 terial acquisition of emolument or distinction ; in 
 other words, for gaining more possessions against the 
 day of losing them, and more decorations against 
 the day of putting them off. And perhaps he did 
 not plainly say, Religion, with all that depends on it, 
 must take its chance ; I never yet have been dis- 
 posed to forego any thing for its sake, nor am I now. 
 But we may confidently suppose him to have said in 
 effect, I must at all events complete this affair in 
 hand, whatever become of any thing else. And 
 who knows but he was smitten with death before 
 either the momentous something else obtained his 
 attention, or the project, for the sake of which he 
 refused it, was accomplished ? Or we may imagine 
 the occurrence happening to a man in a more pros- 
 trate state of feeling, when a long prosecuted scheme 
 had failed, too late in his life for him to form a new 
 one ; or about the time that increasing infirmity had 
 constrained him to the dreaded task of making his 
 will ; or when he had recently seen his most trusty 
 co-operator, or his nearest relation, of his own age, 
 or even the last of his children, sink into the grave. 
 And would it be too hard upon human nature, or an 
 uncharitable judgment of the temper of a mind 
 grown old in devotedness to the world, to suppose 
 that, even in circumstances like these, the man still 
 could not resolve on so serious a thing as attention 
 to religion ? No, we can believe that he revolted 
 from the urgent enforcement of the subject, felt as if 
 any other way of disposing of it were preferable to 
 
104 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 that of thinking of it, and threw aside the book. He 
 had recourse to some expedients of change and 
 amusement, to relieve his drooping spirits and dark- 
 ening days 5 or, perhaps, he made a strife to force 
 his decaying powers to some farther and superfluous 
 exertions in the world's business. It may even be 
 conceived, that the very terms " Rise and Progress." 
 suggesting the idea of long and laborious continu- 
 ance, excited a gloomy sense of the want of com- 
 mensurateness between such a lengthened process, 
 and his now shortened life ; and that, through a 
 lamentable perversity, the sadness of this considera- 
 tion, instead of alarming him to an instant applica- 
 tion to the grand concern, made him the more recoil 
 from it, and but added to the infatuation of his con- 
 suming the short remainder of his life, as he had 
 consumed all before. 
 
 Now, in each of all these instances, an intelligent 
 christian friend might have remonstrated in terms 
 specially adapted to the individual's state of mind, 
 modifying the general argument for religion to meet 
 the cast of irreligious feeling in the particular case. 
 And a discerning and skilful pleader in this good 
 cause may sometimes seize upon the peculiar mode 
 of feeling, in such a manner as to turn it to account, 
 availing himself of it to give his remonstrance some- 
 thing of the point and appropriation of the argu- 
 mentum ad hominem. But we shall content ourselves 
 with a short address of the nature of a plain general 
 expostulation, applicable to the general qualities of 
 the worldly character. 
 
OF RELIGION. 105 
 
 It is true, that the spirit required in any eftbrt so 
 directed, is not a little repressed by a sentiment par- 
 taking of despondency. There is no evading the 
 thought, Why should words, and arguments, and 
 images of unseen things, and adjurations, be ex- 
 pended on that man, on those men ? They will con- 
 tinue the same. Why should Religion, like Cassan- 
 dra, waste her dictates and premonitions on a hope- 
 less determination to the wrong ? How can it be 
 worth while to be trying, as if it had so much as 
 even the uncertainty of an experiment, how many 
 missiles will rebound from a rock, or disappear in a 
 swamp ; or how many times the taper may burn out 
 in the vain attempt to kindle a fire in materials which 
 contain no fuel f 
 
 But we would wish to turn this very fact itself, 
 of the dispirited sentiment which damps the chris- 
 tian pleader's efforts to press religion on the attention 
 of devoted men of the world, into a topic of admo- 
 nition to them. How comes it to pass, we might 
 say to them, that a person, whose own mind is pos- 
 sessed with the most absolute and mighty conviction 
 of the importance of religion, cannot help feehng it 
 nearly a forlorn attempt to awaken any sense of that 
 importance in you ? Has he good cause for this 
 despondence .? Is it his experience, his just esti- 
 mate, of the character of your minds and habits, 
 that makes him feel so ; and does your self-know- 
 ledge tell you it would be too sanguine for him to 
 feel otherwise ? Is it, then, a fact, that you are hard- 
 ened into a settled insensibility to the things which 
 
106 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 most vitally and profoundly concern you ? Have 
 you really a power, and that power so complete that 
 it is effectual almost without an effort, and through 
 the inert force of habit, to meet with indifference or 
 defiance the aspects of whatever is the most sub- 
 lime, most amiable, or most tremendous, in exist- 
 ence ? When mercy, in a celestial form, approaches 
 to apply to your soul the redeeming principle with- 
 out which it will perish, can you turn it away, coolly 
 saying, Another time, perhaps, — or perhaps never f 
 And in refusing it access, do you feel the satisfac- 
 tion of a person who has promptly and easily dis- 
 missed an unreasonable applicant; regarding it as 
 an arrogant requirer, rather than as a benefactor 
 offering you inestimable good ? Do you feel, in thus 
 being out of the power of religion, a gratifying sense 
 of immunity from one of the evils which are infest- 
 ing mankind ; that there is one malady against which 
 your mental constitution is fortified, while some of 
 your fellow-mortals, attacked by it, are objects al- 
 most of your pity ? And do you account this ex- 
 emption, and carry it upon you through the com- 
 merce of life, as a privilege of your class, which 
 you as rightfully maintain as any other advantage, 
 and with which it were little better than impertinence 
 for any one to interfere, by representations in favour 
 of that from which you thus walk at liberty ? If 
 this be the established condition of your minds, it is 
 what ought to alarm you, like that deadly calm 
 which, in some climates, would be an omen to you 
 of the subterranean thunder, and of the ground 
 
OF RELIGION. 107 
 
 heaving and rending under your feet. But at the 
 same time, it is what may well cause a christian 
 friend to be despondent of the efficacy of expostu- 
 lation. 
 
 He is so, because he is aware that there is nothing 
 within your minds adequately, or in any tolerable de- 
 gree, corresponding to the important and solemn 
 terms which he must employ. He must speak of 
 the soul, redemption, faith, holiness, conformity to 
 the divine image ; of heaven and hell, of judgment 
 and eternity. But these are insignificant sounds, 
 unless, when pronounced, they strike upon concep- 
 tions already in the mind, which answer to their im- 
 port, conceptions which contain in them, so to speak, 
 the ideal substance of what is meant by these signs. 
 And he can perceive too well that this whole order 
 of ideas has but a crude, undefined, obscure, and 
 feeble formation in your understanding. The most 
 solemn call of these great words, is replied to with 
 but a faint and equivocal recognition from within. 
 It is as if the names were called of a company of 
 persons asleep, who answer without the distinctness 
 of consciousness, and some of them not at all. Nay, 
 might not men of the world be found in such a con- 
 dition of the intellect, that these words, addressed to 
 raise the corresponding ideas in it, would be nearly 
 like calling aloud, in a field of the dead, the names 
 which are inscribed on their tombs ^ Change the 
 subject, and see the difference. There are many 
 terms which have their appropriate ideas most per- 
 fectly formed in your understanding ; distinct, palpa- 
 
108 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 ble, and, in full dimension. Let the denominations 
 be pronounced of diverse kinds and values of world- 
 ly property, of methods and rules of* transacting 
 business, of the different stations in society, with 
 their respective relations and circumstances, or of 
 the materials and accommodations for gratifying the 
 senses; let some of these be named, and instantly 
 the corresponding ideas arise in the mind, substan- 
 tial and distinct ; so that the utterer of the designa- 
 tions knows he can do with the auditor whatever 
 depends simply on his having a right notion of the 
 things. But when you hear some of these terms 
 expressive of the most important meanings that 
 could ever enter into human intelligence, how con- 
 fused, uncouth, and inane, how spiritless and pow- 
 erless, are the forms of thought which glimmer on 
 your apprehension ! It is as if words pronounced 
 to evoke mighty spirits, were answered only by the 
 coming of the owls, bats, and insects, of the twilight. 
 The religious monitor is tempted to despond, 
 again, because he sees that your devotion to the 
 world is established into system, almost into mecha- 
 nism. A very young person may be frivolous and 
 thoughtless to the last degree ; but he is variable ; 
 his present impressions may quickly give place to new 
 ones; he may abandon one fine favourite pursuit for 
 a different one ; and should religion attempt to seize 
 him at an interval of these versatile movements, it 
 will indeed have to contend with his levity, and the 
 radical aversion in his nature to sacred subjects, but 
 not with a set of habits grown to a firm consistence, 
 
OF RELIGION. 109 
 
 in a shape, we might say an organization, adapted ta 
 keep his whole soul in one steady mode of adhesion 
 to the world. This latter is a description of the 
 condition of many of you, its devotess. There is 
 no longer any question whether, or in what way, you 
 shall be wholly surrendered to it. The habitual 
 fact has taken the matter out of the province of vo- 
 lition. That you faithfully adhere, in spirit to 
 the world, that you live for it, to-day, and to-morrow, 
 and each ensuing day, and wherever you may be, 
 seems as much of course as that bodily you walk 
 on its surface. And not only are you under this 
 principle of determination to it as your general ob- 
 ject, but you have a settled adjustment of feeling 
 and estimate to its diversities respectively. You 
 have your maxims, associations, and affections, in 
 an orderly state to meet and coalesce with them all 
 and each. And your general worldly spirit pre- 
 serves a consistency of its special action throughout 
 all the detail of its objects ; the manner in which 
 the predominant law operates with respect to each, 
 agreeing with its mood of operation in all the oth- 
 ers. Thus, you are men of the world not only by 
 one general sentiment of devotedness to it, but in a 
 systematic appropriation of that sentiment to various 
 and numberless particulars. While you cleave to 
 the world generally, we maybe allowed the figure 
 of saying, that each fibre, each nerve, of your mo- 
 ral nature, has its own particular point of application 
 to this your sovereign good ; and all pervaded and 
 10 
 
110 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 kept in uniformity of action by the ascendant prin- 
 ciple ; that principle by which you " serve the crea- 
 ture more than the Creator." 
 
 While you are beheld in this firm conjunction 
 with the world, by a general attachment, and by a 
 distributive application of that attachment, like the 
 Indian fig-tree connecting itself vitally, at a hun- 
 dred spots, with, the soil over which it spreads, it is 
 no wonder that a person desirous of warning you 
 not to make light of infinitely higher interests, should 
 attempt it with very faint hope, or be discouraged 
 from making the attempt at all. That which he has 
 to present to you will be repelled by a principle 
 which acts in a combination of resisting impulses, 
 working with uniformity and constancy ; some of 
 them proceeding, perhaps, from the temper of 
 mind acquired in commercial pursuits ; some of 
 them from the habits of feeling which have grown 
 from *' friendship with the world," from contented 
 and preferred association with men devoid of reli- 
 gion ; some of them from the disposition produced 
 by the study and strife to make your way upward in 
 society ; some of them from the practice of reliev- 
 ing the cares of business only by the indulgences of 
 pleasure ; and some of them, perhaps, from a taste 
 for appearing as men of fashion. All this is a sys- 
 tematic fortification against the access of religion, to 
 instruct, persuade, or remonstrate. And the fatal 
 completion of the evil may be, that you are insensi- 
 ble of any great evil or danger in all this. For you 
 have fully adopted the world's standard of charac- 
 
OF RELIGION. ill 
 
 ter, according to which you may be, all this while, 
 what are called honourable men. You may even 
 come to take credit for considerable liberality of 
 opinion in allowing, that it is right enough there 
 should be in the world a class of earnest devoted 
 religionists, as well as other varieties of character ; 
 that they do very right to follow up their own con- 
 victions ; their only offence being the fanaticism of 
 insisting, that all ought to be such — that you ought 
 to be such ; whereas yours, you say, is a character 
 much better adapted to the world we are to live in 
 than theirs. 
 
 So you are, on the whole, in high favour with 
 yourselves. You may not, indeed, be entirely se- 
 cure against occaisional disturbances to your self- 
 satisfaction ; there may be moments when a suspi- 
 cion arises from the dark depth within that all is not 
 right ; when conscience, generally still, gives some 
 intimations, like the sighs of a person beginning to 
 recover from a suspended animation ; when some 
 glimpses of a greater economy are admitted through 
 narrow rents and openings in the little system within 
 which you are immured. But you suffer no habitual 
 annoyance of an impression that you must alter your 
 plan. This your general satisfaction with the part 
 you are acting, depresses the spirit of the pleader 
 tor religion. He wants to persuade you to reflect ; 
 but how and when can he bring an adequate force 
 of such persuasion to act on such a state of the 
 mind ^ You are so possessd, he says, with your 
 own good opinion, that any serious examination. 
 
112 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 whether it be not a delusive one, will appear to you 
 a superfluous trouble, and the exhortation to it, offi- 
 cious and impertinent. 
 
 But will you absolutely refuse such an exercise of 
 your reason ? How can you have lived so long 
 without feeling that so much, at least, is what a ra- 
 tional, accountable being ought to do? Do it now ! 
 What should prevent you f You have in that spirit 
 the power to think at this very time. Yon can fix 
 it intently on the subject that you shall choose. 
 Now is an interval which can be exempted from the 
 indispensable demands of business, and, if you will 
 it so, from the allurements to dissipation. You 
 may, you can, this hour, recollect whether there be 
 a subject of transcendent importance, which you 
 have never duly considered yet ; and you may choose 
 it, instead of ajiother subject, for present considera- 
 tion. You cannot help seeing what that subject is. 
 It is Religion that stands before you, with oracles, 
 lights, and an exhibition of the most grand and aw- 
 ful images. It is that which represents to you, the 
 real truth of the state of your soul toward God, the 
 concern of your eternal interests, the relation you 
 stand in to another world, the peremptory require- 
 ment of what you must do to be saved. What can 
 ever, through endless duration, be worth your con- 
 sidering, if this be not.^ You know that religion, 
 unless it be a fable, has all this importance, that it 
 has this importance to you, and that it has it to you 
 now, while this day, this hour, is passing. In a mat- 
 ter of incomparably less magnitude, (say it were a 
 
OF RELIGION. 113 
 
 most critical hazard, threatening you at the point 
 where your temporal prosperity mainly depended, 
 and might he ruined for life,) you would feel that 
 the concern pressed importunately and justly on the 
 thoughts and cares of the present instant. If any 
 one advised you to take no trouble of vigilance or 
 exertion about it, to occupy yourself entirly with 
 other matters, and indifferently await the event, you 
 would spurn the suggestion as equally unfeeling and 
 absurd. What ! you would say, when the whole 
 question of safety or utter ruin may be depending 
 on the judgment and activity which I may exercise 
 this day.'^ But here is the supreme interest of your 
 existence. It cannot be safe, you will confess it 
 cannot, if you will give it no serious attention. But 
 then you are confessing that you have left it till now 
 in peril, and that it is so at this very hour — nay, in 
 greater peril than ever before, as aggravated by the 
 guilt of such wilful neglect, and by the diminution 
 of the term allotted for the attainment of a happy 
 security. And can you repel from you, can you 
 resolutely set yourself to force off, its urgent appli- 
 cation for your immediate attention ? Look at the 
 action of your mind. Is it really, even now, in the 
 very effort of an impulse to drive this subject away, 
 and are you giving your whole will to make this im- 
 pulse successful ? And do you feel that you are 
 prevailing ^ And is it impossible for you to reflect, 
 at this moment, what it is that you are successfully 
 doing.? Cannot you perceive, have you no suspi- 
 10* 
 
114 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 cion, what dreadful principle it is that is giving you 
 this power and this success ? Can you let it per- 
 form such a work, and not resolve to inspect its na- 
 ture ? Look at it, observe its fatal operation just 
 wow going on ; and then say, honestly, whether any 
 thing can be of a quality more execrable ? Do not 
 say this is extravagant language ; do not stay to 
 mind the language at all ; but fix your attention on 
 the thing itself. Words are wind ; but there is a 
 reality there in operation at this moment in your 
 mind. It is actually there — the fearful principle, 
 which is actuating your feelings and your will to 
 force away from your spirit the thoughts, and all the 
 benefit of thinking, of your highest duty and interest, 
 of your eternal salvation. If it could be suddenly 
 revealed to you in full light, what an operation this 
 is which you are even now suffering there in your 
 heart, no awful catastrophe in nature, no tempest nor 
 shock of an earthquake, would affright you so much. 
 After an interval, we would ask you. And is it now 
 done ? Has the repelling principle, after so many 
 former successes, prevailed once now ; so that the 
 great subject which approached you, appealed to 
 you, solicited you, displayed smiles of divine benig- 
 nity, alternating with just menaces and frowns on 
 your obstinacy, has been driven off, and is vanishing 
 like the images of a disturbing dream when one 
 awakes ! Are you now quite at your ease again, to 
 go free into your business, conviviality, or amuse- 
 ments ? Then, what have you accomplished, — but 
 to send an angel of mercy away, and to vanqui&ih 
 
OF RELlGlOPf. 115 
 
 any last power that remained in an almost expiring 
 conscience ? What have you gained, but to have 
 your soul still more securely grasped by that which 
 withholds it from God, and a confirmed power and fa- 
 cility of rejecting that which speaks in his name, 
 if it should obtrude on you again ? In what new 
 principle do you walk forth, but that of having less 
 remaining time, and augmented disinclination, for 
 that one thing of which the failure is perdition ? 
 
 Such a view of the disposition of your minds, and 
 of the manner in which you submit and betray them 
 to be acted upon, chills the animation of a person 
 who would plead with you to apply them to religion. 
 But still we would hope better things, and that it 
 may yet not be in vain to conjure you to reflect on 
 this great subject as involving your welfare. Tell 
 us whether it be utterly an idle hope, which a more 
 perfect knowledge of you would show it foolish to 
 entertain, that you may be induced to employ, in the 
 exercise of such reflection, this day and hour to 
 better purpose than any former one of your life. 
 Why should not this be the day for a determined 
 seriousness of thought ? Think enough, at least, to 
 give a reason why it should not ; and think whether 
 it would not be worse than a shame to refuse such 
 an employment without a reason. And if the only 
 reason be, that you are reluctant, consider whether 
 that reason, that reluctance, will ever spontaneously 
 cease. But consider, too, whether that reluctance, 
 be not itself, in truth, a mighty reason on the oppo- 
 site side, as implying, in the conscious discordancy 
 
116 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 between your spirit and the subject, a disorder so 
 formidable, that madness alone would be content to 
 leave it unexamined and unreformed. Would that 
 a super-human power might stand in your way jiist 
 here, stop you at this point in your course, and con- 
 strain you to reflect now ! The hours, the day, 
 which you are just now entering on, are as yet va- 
 cant, but will soon be filled, and gone. They are 
 coming as a space of time which might be, may be, 
 filled with a mental exercise of immense value. Here 
 is a subject claiming to occupy them as they come 
 on. If admitted to do so, it will indeed inflict re- 
 morse for your having sent away into tlie past, a 
 long succession of the portions of your time charged 
 with no such precious contents; thus avenging itself 
 on you for your prolonged rejection. But will that 
 be an indication that you would have done well to 
 reject it still, and excite your grief that it has for 
 once eflfectually arrested you f Would you, under 
 this arrest, struggle as to escape from an enemy ; 
 when the subject will bring with it the evidence and 
 the conviction that, though with an austere and ac- 
 cusatory aspect, it is certainly come as a friend ? 
 Admit it into your mind and time this once, with all 
 its solemnities, and even its reproaches. And if, as 
 a condition of doing so, you will insist on retaining 
 some precautionary resource against being absolute- 
 ly and irrecoverably surrendered to it, you may be 
 assured, (if you can accept so melacholy a fact for 
 consolation,) that in the strength of your corrupt 
 nature you will not easily lose all power of re-action 
 
OF RELIGION. 117 
 
 for debarring its entrance, when, at another time, it 
 shall present itself to you again. 
 
 There possibly are special circumstances of the 
 present time of a nature to enforce this exhortation. 
 It may be, that one of you, worshippers of the world, 
 has just experienced an ill reward of his faithful 
 devotion. Some grievous dissapointment, perhaps, 
 some failure of a project, some fall of your fortunes, 
 some blast on your hopes, has reduced you to a 
 temporary disgust with what you have so unreserv- 
 edly loved. Just now the world stands before you 
 with faded attractions, and you feel as if you could 
 forswear your dedication and attachment to it. 
 Now, though this be a turn of feeling not the purest 
 in principle, it might be made beneficial in effect. 
 Instead of allowing your spirit to remain stagnant 
 in a sullen and resentful mortification, waiting till the 
 world, which, however cruelly it may sport with its 
 votaries, (ioes not easily let any of them go, shall 
 again assume an aspect of blandishment, and renew 
 its promises, how wise would it be to take advantage 
 of this reflux of your affections to turn your thoughts 
 toward religion, and see, and try, whether there may 
 not be something better for you there. It would be 
 a worthy revenge on a world that has disappointed, 
 cheated, and wronged you, to avail yourself of the 
 recoil of your heart from it, in reinforcement of the 
 conviction that it is time to "seek a better country;" 
 thus turning it into an impulse to a new formed aim 
 at " the prize of the high-calling." But at any rate, 
 and at the least, do not let this disturbance of your 
 
1 1 S THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 friendship with the world be lost, as a circumstance 
 to coincide with the remonstrance which would 
 awaken you to serious reflection. Do not, at once, 
 fall out with the world, and disregard or resent that 
 which would tell you how just is your quarrel, how 
 long since it ought to have taken place, and how in- 
 comf arably better you may do than make up the 
 breach. 
 
 Perhaps some of you have just witnessed, with 
 indignant vexation, one of the iniquitous partialities 
 of fortune, as you call it. A man whom you know 
 to be of worthless or detestable character, has ob- 
 tained, through apparent casualty, or by means of 
 craft or corrupt interest, or even by the most undis- 
 guised violation of right, some remarkable advan- 
 tage of enrichment or precedence ; such a thing as 
 you ^had coveted but not presumed to hope for; or, 
 poss.bly, as you had hoped and indefatigably labour- 
 ed for, many years, b;U never could grasp the prize. 
 And in the pride of this acquisition he insulted the 
 more deserving men, at the cost of whose disap- 
 pointment and injury he had made it. You exclaim- 
 ed. What a world this is, where the good things go 
 to the worst men ; and merit may pine and die ! 
 But is this the identical world to which you, never- 
 theless, are so infatuated that you will not so much 
 as think of another.^ What, are you resolved that 
 a glaring manifestation to you of the quality of the 
 object you have idolized, shall rather serve to any 
 effect, even that of corroding your heart to no avail, 
 than to that of lending force to the persuasions o 
 
OF RELIGION. 119 
 
 religion; of religion, which has uniformly testified 
 to you that your object is — what you are now prac- 
 tically finding it ? Would you rather be retained, 
 resentful but still servile, for this tyrant to exhibit you 
 in scorn as a slave, fretting indeed, but impotent, even 
 in will, to revolt, than adopt the hero's language, 
 exalted into a christian sense and spirit, " Then, 
 thus I turn my back ; there is a world elsewhere ?" 
 
 It may be, again, that one of you has lately seen 
 a rival and coeval worshipper of the world leave it. 
 Perhaps the manner of his departing answered to 
 the description, " driven away." You observed the 
 long, lingering look cast after all that was receding, 
 and the fearful glance toward what was approaching. 
 You saw what was the result of that choice which 
 had been made by you both, and to which he had 
 remained constant nearly to the moment when an 
 irresistible power interposed to rend him off. You 
 have the images of this sad spectacle fresh now in 
 your mind ; and those images — are they atheists 
 there ? 
 
 Or you may have beheld a less tragical exempli- 
 fication of what the world will do for its friends, in 
 the case of one whom you had long known as a be- 
 liever in its promises, a zealot to its principles, and 
 a staunch pursuer of its objects ; but who, in the 
 closing scene, relented into shame and penitential 
 sorrow, faintly mingled with hope in the divine 
 mercy which he emplored. He declared to you his 
 overwhelming conviction of the folly of his course, 
 and yours ; and entreated you no longer to leave 
 
120 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 your whole soul immersed in that which must, in 
 such an hour, break away from around you, and 
 abandon you to a desolation like his. Now recol- 
 lect ; at the time of receiving such an admonition, 
 did you really think there was nothing rational in 
 it ? While, for decorum's sake at least, you put on 
 a grave and assenting manner, did you, neverthe- 
 less, coolly say within yourself, or was there a con- 
 sciousness equivalent to saying, I need not take any 
 further thought of this f I do not wonder that this 
 person, in such circumstances, should talk so ; but 
 what he says or feels has no appropriateness in 
 its application to me. I must not let any such 
 gloomy ideas take possession of my mind ; no, not 
 even though it be possible enough, I may ultimately 
 come into a situation in which [ shall think and feel 
 in the same manner. 
 
 We may confidently assume, that you did not, on 
 the spot, maintain such composure, and pledge 
 yourself to these conclusions. A certain indistinct 
 dismay, at the least, invaded you, to the effect of 
 subduing you, with some general kind of conviction 
 to the formation of some general kind of purpose. 
 Or possibly the impression was exceedingly power- 
 ful, the conviction a distinct act of judgment, and 
 the resolution very determinate. And what then t 
 Have you since deliberately judged all this to have 
 been a vain agitation of your spirit, a brief delirium, 
 occasioned by a sympathetic infection from the sight 
 of sickness, distress, and death ^ If not, have the 
 intervention of a certain number of hours and days 
 
OF RELIGION. 12 1 
 
 a short succession of risings and settings of the sun, 
 and the return of the accustomed thoughts and em- 
 ployments, essentially altered the merits of the case ? 
 Have these caused what ivas truth, and obligation, 
 and danger, to be such no longer? Has the mere 
 passing of time reduced importance to inanity? Or 
 has it detached from you, and brought to appear as no 
 longer your own, that grand interest which can have 
 no reality but as a personal one, but as your own ? — 
 just as if you were to consider the things affecting 
 your natural life (for instance, your state of health 
 or disease, your exposure to a peril or security 
 against it,) as something existing in the abstract ; a 
 reality indeed, but something quiet separable from 
 yourself. The circumstance, too, that by the pass- 
 ing of the intervening time, you are carried a little 
 nearer to the final result of your plan of life,- — has 
 this actually lessened the importance which you saw 
 in such magnitude by that solemn light, which flash- 
 ed upon you in the gloomy chamber where a rival 
 lover of the world was penitentially preparing to 
 leave it ? Think of a rational being so easily pass- 
 ing free from the hold of the strongest forms of ad- 
 monition ; and spending his time to the very pur- 
 pose, in effect, of reducing his apprehension of the 
 awful magnificence of eternity, progressively to a 
 more and more diminutive impression against the 
 moment when he is to plunge into it ! 
 
 Should no circumstances nearly resembling these 
 have occurred within your recent experience, it 
 11 
 
122 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 would be a rather unusual lot if you have not met 
 with some incident, some turn of events, some aspect 
 of life or death, adapted to enforce serious reflection. 
 Look a little way back in memory, and see if no 
 image will arise to remind you that then, and there, 
 by such an event, such a spectacle, such a voice, you 
 were specially admonished to consider your course. 
 And answer it to jourself what effect that appeal to 
 your conscience ought to have had. But do not 
 narrowly limit such a review, as if afraid to retun to 
 those spots in past time, where the hand of a dreaded 
 power touched you as you passed, where truth spoke 
 to you in severe accents, or a more gentle, pursua- 
 sive voice entreated *^you not to go thoughtlessly on. 
 If you he afraid to go back thither, what is it that 
 this apprehension tells you ? Do not limit the retro- 
 spect as if you had no concern with the occasions 
 and causes that once, long since, challenged your 
 consideration to the most important subject. Do 
 not yield to the deluded feeling, that all those, being 
 gone so far away, have perished from all connexion 
 with you ; like the portion of air which you then 
 breathed, or the grass or flowers on which you hap- 
 pened to tread. For be assured they inseparably 
 belong to your present and ultimate responsibility. 
 They are all coming after you, however silently and 
 unthought-of, and will be with you in the great ac- 
 count. And if you could be induced to make an 
 effort, in any thoughtful hour, to imagine with what 
 a vividness of recognition, and intensity of reproacii, 
 the monitory occurrences of your past life will at 
 
OF RELIGION. l2o 
 
 last present themselves to strike upon your con- 
 science, if they shall have been disregarded in their 
 time, and suffered to go useless into oblivion as you 
 have proceeded on, it might have the effect of re- 
 calling them now, to combine in operation with all 
 the other things which summon you to reflection. 
 
 When a religious observer sometimes has his 
 thoughts directed upon you, he is struck with the 
 idea, what a mighty assemblage of considerations, 
 that should irresistibly compel you to thoughtfulness, 
 you are insensible of. As, when we extend our 
 contemplations conjecturally into the economy of 
 existence which surrounds us, it is suggested to 
 thought what unembodied intelligences, what com- 
 munications, what agencies, what elements perhaps, 
 what processes, there are on all sides, and many of 
 them relating to us, but of which the senses admit 
 no perception ; so in the spiritual economy, that is, 
 the system of relations in which the immortal mind 
 stands involved, there are realities, there are truths, 
 of highest import, there are arguments, warning cir- 
 cumstances, alternatives of good and evil, most vi- 
 tally relating to your welfare, but non-existent to 
 your apprehension. The very emanations of heav- 
 en, radiating downward to where you dwell, are in- 
 tercepted, and do not touch you. It is the frequent 
 reflection of a thoughtful mind, in observing you — 
 what ideas, what truths, what mighty appeals, belong 
 to the condition of this one man ; and of that, de- 
 voted and enslaved to the world — O, why is it im- 
 possible to bring them into application ! A few 
 
124 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 words are sufficient to express such things, as. if 
 they were to fall with their proper weight, and no 
 more, on their spirits, enclosed, as it were, in the 
 consolidated habits of the world, mixed and harden- 
 ed in its clay, would excite a commotion through 
 their whole insensate being, and alarm them to a 
 sense of a new world of thoughts and interests. A 
 few minutes of time would b(^ enough for the enun- 
 ciation of what, if it could be received by them in 
 its simple, unexaggerated importance, would stop 
 that one man's gay career, as if a great serpent had 
 raised its head in his path ; would confound that 
 other's calculation for emolument ; would bring a 
 sudden dark eclipse on that third man's visions of 
 fame ; would tear them all from their inveterate and 
 almost desperate combination with what is to perish, 
 and, amidst their surprise and terror, w^ould excite 
 an emotion of joy that they had been dissevered, 
 before it was too late, from an object that was car- 
 rying them down a rapid declination towards destruc- 
 tion. — And the chief of these things, so potent if 
 applied, are not withheld as if secreted and silent in 
 some dark cloud, from which we had to invoke them 
 to break forth in lightning ; they are actually exhi- 
 bited in the divine revelation. 
 
 This so strange a condition, — that there are migh- 
 ty truths, requisitions, overtures, promises, portents, 
 and menaces, as it were close to you, suspended 
 just over you, of a nature to demolish the present 
 state of your mind if brought in contact with it, 
 and that, nevertheless, it remains undisturbed, — is 
 
OF RELIGION. 125 
 
 sometimes a matter of gloomy, indigant, and al- 
 most misanthropic speculation. But in the season 
 of better feeling, the religious beholder is excited 
 to a benevolent impatience, a restless wish that 
 things so near and important to you should take hold 
 upon you. Why cannot, he says, that which comes 
 between and renders those things, intrinsically of 
 such awful force, actually powerless, be destroyed 
 or removed ? If there be a principle of repulsion, 
 if there be a veil, if there be a shield invisibly held 
 by a demon's hand, let it be annihilated, that the 
 appropriate truth may rush in with all its power. 
 Let the thought of the Almighty fulminate on the 
 mind of that mortal who is living " without God in 
 the world." Let the idea of eternity overwhelm 
 that spirit, whose whole scheme of existence em- 
 braces but a diminutive portion of time. Let the 
 worth and danger of the soul be instantly revealed 
 to that person, whose chief cares are engrossed with 
 the accommodation or adornment of the bodj. 
 Let the value of treasures in another world be 
 brought into sudden contrast with earthly wealth, 
 in the view of that worshipper of Mammon. Let 
 the scene of the last judgment present itself, in a 
 glare, to him whose conscience is in repose on the 
 delusive principles of the world's morality and reli- 
 gion. Let an austere apparition, as from the dead, 
 accost him who is living as if life were never to have 
 an end. To him who is indifferent to the whole 
 concern of salvation, let there be an affecting display 
 11* 
 
126 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 of what an extraordinary appointment, of mingled 
 justice and mercy, was required to render it possi- 
 ble, and of what it cost the Saviour of the world. 
 Let these things strike into the souls of men of the 
 world, and they would awake in amazement at their 
 previous condition, and continue long in sorrow for 
 its criminality and absurdity. And are these still to 
 be exactly the things for which they have no sensi- 
 bility or perception ? And is it in the immediate 
 presence of these objects, constantly pressing for 
 their attention, but unacknowledged and unseen, that 
 they are to occupy themselves with every business, 
 or entertain every trifle and vanity, satisfied that 
 nothing is greatly wrong, assured that all is safe, or 
 not even caring so much as to think whether they be 
 safe or not ? 
 
 But, men of the world, it is possible you may be 
 provoked to assume the defensive, and deny the jus- 
 tice of so strong a charge of irrationality and guilt 
 as we make, in applying to you this denomination 
 with these comments. But it is not safe for you to 
 do this with a thoughtless confidence, without an 
 exercise of reflection to ascertain the real state of 
 your mind and character. Be persuaded to make 
 an effort to take a true account of that state, as a 
 simple matter of fact. Of what, in all the world, 
 should you be concerned to know the truth, if not 
 of that internal condition which is forming your des- 
 tiny for hereafter ? 
 
 Now, then, is it not true, is it not a fact, that 
 almost the whole system of the feelings and activity 
 
OF RELIGION. 127 
 
 of your mind is limited exclusively to this world, so 
 as to be practically much the same as if you were 
 unaware that your being has an ampler sphere of in- 
 terests ? Observe what is the extent of the range 
 which your spirit takes. Question it how far it 
 goes forth, habitually, or at any time. See, and 
 acknowledge to yourself, what it is that is in sole 
 possession of you, as if you were made for noth- 
 ing more. 
 
 Take a view of your thoughts. They are in 
 number incalculable, and they can go in all direc- 
 tions, to a boundless extent; they might "wander 
 through eternity." Whither do they go, the count- 
 less thousands of them, and on what do they fix ? 
 You may perceive that nearly all of them stop within 
 the circle of this world's concerns. They start, and 
 move, and traverse, incessantly, but still within this 
 contracted scope ; seeming to know of nothing that 
 is revealed, or important, or possible to you beyond 
 it. How many of them ever go, in the impulse of 
 faith, into the spiritual region, or bring you intima- 
 tions of having seen into a superior world? But 
 there is no need of thus adding question to ques- 
 tion; you plainly know, that the continual activity of 
 your thoughts is centred upon an order of temporal 
 interests ; that there, and there almost exclusively, 
 they are busy and never tired, morning and evening, 
 and throughout all your times and seasons. 
 
 Observe, also, your affections and passions, those 
 "feelings of the heart which often accompany the acts 
 of thought. See what it is that most certainly 
 
12S THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 awakes them at the slightest call ; that attracts, at- 
 taches, and absorbs them. Suppose that, at very 
 many times, fallen upon indifferently and without 
 any selection of occasions, the question were to be 
 suddenly put, and ingenuously answered from con- 
 sciousness at the instant, What is, just now, the 
 most an object of complacency, desire, or solicituder 
 how often do you think it would happen, in a thou- 
 sand repetitions of the question, that the answer 
 would name any object of higher order than this 
 world's affairs ? Would it be twenty times ; w^ould 
 it be ten ? 
 
 And your schemes of active pursuit, — what is that 
 which would be their success ^ Is there one of them, 
 or any part of one of them, of which no possible 
 turn of worldly events would be the disappointment? 
 Would any thing, that should be the most disastrous 
 to your spiritual welfare, be a frustration of any one 
 of those schemes ? 
 
 We say, is it not true, that this is your state of 
 mind? But, then, reflect, that you practically dis- 
 own the grand relations of your nature. You en- 
 deavour not to belong, if we may express it so, to a 
 spiritual world, but to the merely material and ani- 
 mal order of existence. In plainer terms, you ac- 
 knowledge no good in being spirits, but to serve the 
 earthly purposes of this short life. You do what 
 you can to withdraw, by a resolute subsidence and 
 degradation, from that economy which holds the 
 spirit's sojourning on earth connected with every 
 thing higher in existence. From the system con- 
 
OF RELIGION. 129 
 
 stituted, (as a part of that economy,) for renovating, 
 trainins:, and finally exalting them, you practically 
 make yourselves aliens and outcasts, rejecting its 
 benefits, and wishing you could be forgotten in its 
 jurrisdiction. You are content that any other fallen 
 beings, rather than you, should be included in the 
 dispensation of mercy, through a Mediator. And, 
 to complete this abdication of your most solemn re- 
 lations, you assume to be only in some very relaxed 
 and undefined manner subjects of responsibility and 
 retribution. All this, in effect, you are doing, in 
 devoting yourselves, with soul and life, exclusively 
 to the interests of this world. For what less can 
 you be doing, while you refuse all practical acknow- 
 ledgment of these grand relations, maintain a state 
 of mind unconformed to them, employ no cares or 
 affections upon them, and will not allow even your 
 thoughts to be directed to them ? But is it not an 
 enormous and fearful absurdity, that while thus you 
 are actually involved in relations which no power 
 but that which could annihilate your being can dis- 
 solve, with a grand system, comprehending whatever 
 belongs to the existence and interests of spirits, com- 
 prehending a method of redemption through a Me- 
 diator, an invisible state, heaven, hell, and eternity, 
 you should form your life on a plan, as if this relative 
 condition of your spirit were abolished, or were noth- 
 ing but a fantastic theory, and contract all the inter- 
 ests of your spiritual and immortal being to a span 
 of time and earth ? Think what the predicament 
 will be, when these disowned but indissoluble rela- 
 
130 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 tions shall vindictively verify their reality and autho- 
 rity, and wrest you away from that object to which 
 you have reduced and confined yourself, so as to be 
 almost growing into one substance with it. 
 
 Again, is it not true, that, in this devotedness to 
 the world you are living estranged from God? 
 Though this was implied in the preceding represen- 
 tation, you would do well to make it a distinct matter 
 to be brought to the proof. Try it by any mode of 
 questioning that would the most prominently expose 
 the truth. For example : suppose that such a thing 
 were at any time to take place, as that you should 
 feel a mighty impression of the divine presence, a 
 consciousness of being pervaded, in your every fac- 
 ulty, quality, and thought, by the sunbeams, as it 
 were, of his irresistible intelligence, an affecting 
 sense of your entire dependence, a horror for having 
 sinned against him, an ardent aspiration to enjoy his 
 eternal favour, and a determination, with the utmost 
 impulse of your affections and will, to serve him 
 thenceforward, — say whether this would not be the 
 most amazing phenomenon that had ever happened 
 to you. Would you not wonder, beyond all power 
 of expression, what new moral element could have 
 been shed around you, for your spirit to see and 
 breathe in ? But then the fact must be, that the 
 present state of your mind is the reverse of all this ; 
 that the Almighty God, your creator, preserver, and 
 governor, the supreme benefactor, and the sole pos- 
 sible giver of ultimate felicity, has hitherto been in 
 your regard a comparatively insignificant object. 
 
OF RELIGION. 131 
 
 The universe of his works, the revelations of his 
 word, the directing interference of his dominion, the 
 wonders and mysteries involved within your own ex- 
 istence, have but feebly and seldom brought the ap- 
 prehension of him to your minds. The good which 
 you have enjoyed, and which could not have come 
 to you but through an inconceivably multifarious 
 agency of an intelligent Power, you have received 
 as if resulting from some mechanism of nature, or 
 imparted by the pagan unthinking soul of the world ; 
 but indeed, without reflecting on it so much as to 
 acknowledge even that for its source. The schemes, 
 which have been the chief business and interest of 
 your life, were formed with no express consideration 
 whether God would approve them, and prosecuted 
 in utter forgetfulness of dependence on him for aid 
 and success. If the thought had spontaneously 
 arisen, What is God to me, in sensible importance ? 
 the reply might have been, Nothing ; or less, at 
 most, than that person, ni} friend, or that other, my 
 foe ; than that ability of my coadjutors, that appli- 
 cation of art, that machinery, that sum of emolu- 
 ment. As to piety, aspiring so high as the experi- 
 ence of communion with God, and the influential 
 operation of his Spirit, if such ideas, conveyed in 
 such terms, incidentally met your notice, they ap- 
 peared either unintelligible or fanatical. Recollect 
 and question the habitual temper of your mind, 
 whether it has not been an unwelcome thing to be 
 reminded of God at all. If it might have been con- 
 ceded to vou that you should obtain what would 
 
132 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 please you most, with respect to a lasting condition 
 of your existence, would not the wish have been 
 something like this : that God, contenting himself 
 with carrying on the general system of the world, 
 only rendered a little more commodious, would allow 
 you to live in it indefinitely onward — and let you 
 alone ^ 
 
 Now, if there should be an interval when you are 
 inclined, (for some of you profess to be capable of 
 abstracted mental employments,) to indulge your 
 imagination in contemplating awful and portentous 
 spectacles, in ideal or actual existence, you need not 
 range in quest of such into the visionary world. Nor 
 need you go to far-oft^ tracts of the creation, seeking 
 what mighty forms of evil may there have their 
 abode. The guardians of the fearful secrets of any 
 dark coast might justly remand you back, to behold 
 here, in your own place, a visitation of the most 
 direful prodigy which can have blasted any region 
 with its presence. For here, in the condition of 
 your spirits, the sovereign and most sacred principle 
 of order in the creation is abjured and exterminat- 
 ed. To be most intimately in the presence, to be 
 surrounded continually by the glory, of a Being om- 
 nipotent and infinitely intelligent, existent from eter- 
 nity to eternity, the originator, supporter, and dis- 
 poser of all other existence ; and to feel no power- 
 ful impression on your mind, no reverential fear, no 
 frequent intimations even of the very fact, — is not 
 this an astonishing violation of all rectitude, a most 
 melancholy dereliction of all reason? This is to 
 
OF RELIGION. 133 
 
 have your best faculties shrunk and stupified to a 
 strange conformity with brutal nature, without its in- 
 nocence and impunity. This is in effect to tell that 
 Being, that his infinite supremacy is a vain circum- 
 stance in this province of his dominion ; that his is an 
 unnecessary and undesirable presence, tolerable only 
 while leaving you unreminded of it, or consenting to 
 be regarded with indifference. It is as if, with an 
 inversion of piety, you would thank him only for 
 being invisible and silent, and pray only that he 
 would be more entirely and be always so. You tell 
 him that the most inconsiderable of the things he 
 has made, or even the things which men have made, 
 are of more importance in your view than all the 
 magnificence of his glory. Under the heaven and 
 efiulgence of that glory, you deliberately involve 
 your spirits, as it w^ere, within little opaque spheres 
 of matter, pleased to be secluded from the light of 
 the universe. 
 
 How can we help it, if you will regard this as a 
 mere rhetorical and perhaps pompous display of an 
 evil really of no formidable magnitude, and cooly 
 pass it by with the remark, that we might as well 
 employ sober language ? We will only say, beware 
 that, in calling for sober language, you do not mean, 
 a language conveying a faint and unawakening ex- 
 pression of the truth. Bew^are, also, that you do 
 not, on such a subject, mistake for soberness, any 
 thing less than deep and most serious thought. And 
 if you will but have the conscience to exercise such 
 12 
 
134 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 thought, it may be left to your own judgment to es- 
 timate the evil involved in the undenied fact, that, 
 being continually and inevitably in the presence and 
 power of the Almighty, you yet are careless of this 
 infinitely the most important circumstance of your 
 situation. The character of that fact would be ex- 
 posed to you in alarming manifestation, if your re- 
 flection should cast a faithful light upon it in the in- 
 i^stances in which you may have the evidence that it 
 is a fact. Fix your attention on some of those cir- 
 cumstances which will prove to you that you are 
 "without God in the world," and honestly endea- 
 vour to see, in those exemplifications, whether it be 
 possible to overrate the irrationality, the guilt, and 
 the danger. Thus, for instance, when you feel your- 
 self vigilantly, and even intensely solicitous about 
 your reputation among your fellow mortals, as if the 
 essence of your happmess depended on their opin- 
 ion of you, and are gratified or wounded as that 
 opinion honours or depreciates you, reflect, that you 
 feel no such concern, and perhaps never have felt a 
 thousandth part of the measure of concern, how you 
 stand in the account of the Governor and Judge of 
 the world ; and then, dwell on this fact with judicial 
 consideration, and answer to yourself whether there 
 be not a profound depravity in such a state of mind. 
 When you have been spending many hours in soci- 
 ety, with a lively interchange of sentiments, with 
 your attention directed to various persons, and with 
 a variously modified interest in being- in their com- 
 pany, reflect, (for may not this be often the truth ?) 
 
OF RELIGION. 
 
 135 
 
 thai you hardly once, all the while, recollected the 
 presence of the greatest Being in the universe ; and 
 then soberly consider what a grossness of spirit is 
 proved by such an oblivion. A show of human coun 
 tenances and figures, a circulation of ordinary con- 
 verse, with some intermingling excitement of vanity 
 and competition, were enough to preclude, during 
 the race of so many thousands of your moments, all 
 recognition of Him, who was then preserving your 
 life, inspecting your heart, witnessing your proced- 
 ure ; and who was adored by whatever nobler spirits 
 might have their offices to perform in this part of the 
 terrestrial scene. Think of this, and confess that 
 such a complete and prolonged absence of the recol- 
 lection betrays a condition of mind most refractory 
 to the training for that other society, where his pres- 
 ence is continually felt as the one most impressive 
 fact, and most animating cause of delight. 
 
 It may be allowed to descend to still more special 
 illustrations. We may suppose one of you to di- 
 rect his look, or his walk over a piece of ground, in 
 which he has the rights of a proprietor — till his suc- 
 cessor shall take them. He might reflect, that this 
 space of earth has more occupied his thoughts and 
 affections, has been beyond comparison a more in- 
 teresting reality to him, than the author and sustain 
 or of the whole creation. Then let him look again 
 on the soil, exert one solemn act of thought toward 
 him by whom, and in whom, all things exist, and 
 judge whether this be not a horrid impiety. Anoth- 
 er of you has gazed upon, and leaned over, the ma- 
 
136 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 terial which represents wealth, and confers the power 
 of it; he has stood by his god, delighted and ab- 
 sorbed, without thought or care respecting any other, 
 in earth or heaven. It should be possible, when he 
 shall find himself in this situation again, to constrain 
 himself to one effort of serious reflection ; and when 
 he has done so, let him tell whether he did not seem 
 to hear a voice say, " Thy money perish with thee." 
 Some of you may be men of a more refined taste, 
 and may have drawn into your possession a rich col- 
 lection of the works of genius, in literature and art. 
 Let them confess to themselves whether they have 
 not contemplated the splendid and growing accumu- 
 lation with a delight, a care, and a pride, of incom- 
 parably stronger prevalence in the mind, than any 
 sentiment regarding the Divinity. To be thus en- 
 vironed with the productions, (even though they little. 
 in truth, consulted them,) of the most vigorous and 
 cultivated minds of many regions and ages, consti- 
 tuted, perhaps, a kind of heathen elysium, in which 
 they were insensible of any necessity of converse 
 ■with the' perfect Intelligence, the Source of all men- 
 tal light, of all beauty and grandeur. But, shall 
 their dwelling amidst the collected results of think- 
 ing, be itself a cause to disable them for reflection ? 
 If not, let them consider what is the true quality of 
 that passion by which they are rendering this abode 
 the scene of a voluntary exile from " the Father of 
 lights," raising as it were a wall, constructed of the 
 works and monuments of human intellect, to shut 
 themselves up from his communications. And let 
 
OF RELIGION. 137 
 
 them reflect how melancholy it must be, to go away 
 from amidst the pomp of literary treasures, poor, 
 ( and the more so for the very passion for possessing 
 them, and the idolatry of them as possessed,) in 
 all the attainmets and dispositions preparatory to 
 an entrance on that scene where no truth, no intel- 
 lectual glory, no ideas or realities of sublimity or 
 beauty, can be apprehended separately from their 
 Divine Original. Let the gratified possessor look 
 again at the imposing array of the vehicles of all that 
 has been the most powerful, admirable, and enchant- 
 ing in human thought and fancy, but with a reflec- 
 tion with which he may never before have surveyed 
 the spectacle. Here is the intellectual world con- 
 centrated, as it were, and embodied before me. It 
 is but a small portion of it which the brevity of life, 
 with its many employments and grievances, will per- 
 mit to be of any avail to me for a valuable use ; but 
 1 find there is a principle operating, which can turn 
 the whole collectively to a pernicious efl^ect. For, 
 the more I delight myself in being surrounded with 
 this affluence of the productions of mind, the less 
 am I disposed to communication with Him whose 
 living influences on my spirit can alone make me wise 
 and happy. But can 1 be content to think that I 
 shall, after a little while, retire from this proud temple 
 to the honour of human intellect, actually doomed to 
 take with me an unfitness acquired in it for the life 
 of intelligence and felicity in the immediate presence 
 of God .? 
 12* 
 
13S THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 Again, some of you might be addressed as per- 
 sons raised high above the level of the community, 
 in wealth, rank, or power, or all these together. 
 You, of this order, sometimes look down to see how 
 far the multitude are below. And proud indeed 
 would your position be, if, in looking down from 
 your eminence, you did not descry certain things 
 which, if we may express it so, dare to look up, and 
 dare, though the multitude do not, to ascend. 
 Against such things as vexation, pain, sickness, old 
 age, and death, your lofty station is not embattled; 
 and their commission to ravage the plain below, con- 
 tains no restriction that they respect your elevated 
 ground. Still, notwithstanding you are highly pleas- 
 ed with the situation which exhibits you in such 
 splendour, affords such variety of gratifications, and 
 gives so commanding an ascendency over inferior 
 mankind. You indulge sometimes in the luxury of 
 verifying to yourselves, by an act of reflection, what 
 a fortunate lot it is that you possess ; and the images 
 you raise to augment this luxury, by contrast with 
 what you can the most forcibly represent to your- 
 selves as infelicity, are those of a condition in life 
 insignificant, obscure, and indigent. This proud 
 complacency would perhaps be heightened, if you 
 could have a disclosure fully made to you of the 
 mortification and envy felt, by many tens of thou- 
 sands, in comparing their situation with yours. In- 
 deed you sometimes do, some of you, gratify your- 
 selves by imagining this. But, amidst all the satis- 
 faction or exultation, have you no perception of a 
 
OF RELIGION. 139 
 
 shade stealing over the tract of brightness where you 
 are walking in pride ; an ominous gloom, charged 
 with deep meaning, " instinct itself with spirit," and 
 giving intimation of a Being who knows no envy or 
 admiration, and is " no respecter of persons ?" True, 
 there is very much in your situation to prevent all 
 such perceptions. It is striking to consider, what 
 resources it affords for escaping or expelling the in- 
 vasion of all serious thought that should make any 
 reference to heaven. The means you possess for 
 change of place, and every other stimulant variety ; 
 the pomp and show of life ; the routine of cere- 
 mony ; the amusements offering in rapid and endless 
 succession ; the epicurean gratifications ; and, in 
 the case of some of you, the extensive concerns of 
 business and enterprize, or the management of im- 
 portant public affairs ; — all these are of mighty effi- 
 cacy, as long as you enjoy tolerable health, for 
 averting the admonitions of a more solemn interest. 
 On every side to which you turn, the " god of this 
 world" has disposed his enchantments, that you 
 should not see the objects which are making signs 
 to you by authority of heaven, nor hear their call. 
 And you are pleased to have it so ; as the people of 
 former ages, when that spectacle of rare appearance 
 in their hemisphere, which they denominated the 
 blazing star, was regarded as of direful presage, were 
 glad that an unbroken array of clouds should veil 
 the sky, to yield them a temporary but thoughtless 
 alleviation of their alarm, by concealing the dreaded 
 phenomenon. If you could resolve on an exercise 
 
140 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 of reflection, to ascertain the causes of the gratifica- 
 tion you feel in these pomps, diversities, luxuries, 
 and occupations, you would find a very material one 
 to be, that they save you from any serious and pro- 
 longed recognition of the Almighty, and of those 
 great subjects inseparable from the idea of him. Yoi\ 
 would instantly be sensible that you are so estranged 
 from him; and would discover that you have been 
 thanking these beguilers lor assisting you to be so. 
 
 But is not this a most perverted and perilous con- 
 dition ^ With the full consent of your will, you 
 suffer this worldly grandeur, this prosperity, these 
 quickly successive and variegated gratifications, to 
 have the effect, that whatever is to be dreaded from 
 the justice and disapprobation of a God neglected 
 and despised, approaches still more and more near, 
 and hovers imminently over you, without being seen 
 or apprehended ; as the monarch of Babylon's 
 sumptuous revelry was the very cause that the de- 
 stroyer of all that triumph could come so close with- 
 out being perceived. Think also of the circum- 
 stance that, while you are placed, by the possession 
 of the high advantages (that is, what may and ought 
 to be advantages) of your situation, under a most co- 
 gent responsibility to God for their use, you sufier 
 this very possession to render you thoughtless of this 
 responsibility. What will prove to be the guilt and 
 the consequence of such conduct towards him ^ To 
 complete the estimate of such a condition, consider 
 how certainly all this pageant of your pride, pomp, 
 and luxury, will break up, and be gone, when the 
 
OF RELIGION. 141 
 
 angel of death alights by you, to send your spirits, 
 divested, disenchanted, but unprepared, to their 
 great account. A funeral parade over your dust will 
 seem as if expressly designed in mockery of your 
 past grandeur, by celebrating your ejection from it ; 
 and will serve your equally thoughvtless successors for 
 a variety in the exhibition of their pride and state. 
 
 In all the ranks of society, (below the highest,) 
 thnre are very many actuated by a restless ambition 
 to obtain the notice and conceded ticijuainiarice ot 
 those above them. In turning our observations, for 
 a moment, to persons of this description, we might 
 appeal to their own consciousness of what it is that 
 they allow to take precedence of all thoughts and 
 solicitudes relating to God. There is sometimes 
 stealing upon you a sentiment of mortification that 
 your lot had not been cast in a higher rank, and that 
 it is in vain to think of attaining the envied station. 
 Fortunately for your self-complacency, you can turn 
 this chagrin into an active spirit for gaining the next 
 best object in your esteem, that is, to be on such 
 terms with those above you as shall gratify both your 
 pride and your vanity. You aspire eagerly to be 
 acknowledged by them, and to be seen to be acknow- 
 ledged, as persons of some account in their estima- 
 tion. You work assiduously, by manners expressive 
 of deference, by adulation, when you can venture 
 to offer it, by officious and voluntary services, and 
 some of you by gross servility, to purchase their 
 favourable attention. And when a degree of it is 
 conferred on you, in a manner not too palpably that 
 
142 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 of condescension, (though you are not, perhaps, 
 very fastidious on this point,) you are elated as if 
 you had acquired some great accession of intrinsic 
 worth. You soHcitously watch for still more une- 
 quivocal tokens of the gracious disposition, and lor 
 occasions of putting yourselves in the way to receive 
 them. And the progress of your success is probably 
 marked by a more stately or a more condescend- 
 ing manner, assumed toward your inf(;riors. Some 
 ot you, 01 prouder temperament, and vigorous tal- 
 ent, disdaining all the servile expedients, aspire to 
 comm nd the estimation and respectful attention of 
 the higher favourites of fortune. And when you 
 have in a measure done so, you exult as if it were 
 some grand victory. It appears to you a splendid 
 acl ievement to have conquered possession, by means 
 of solely personal qualifications, of a ground where 
 you stand on nearly an equality, in effect, with per- 
 sons whose honours and importance in the world may 
 consist alone in the splendour of their external cir- 
 cums ances. You may affect to depreciate this ex- 
 trinsic importance of theirs ; but you are vastly 
 grai fied by that kind of community with them to 
 which your abilities and exertions have mounted 
 you. — Thus, "man worships man," as a method in- 
 stinctively adopted in aid of each man's worship of 
 himself. 
 
 Now this habitual passion and labour to realize 
 some imaginary element of well-being in the good 
 graces of your superior fellow-mortals, may have so 
 debased the temper of your spirit, that any admoni- 
 
OF RELIGION. 143 
 
 tion suggested to withdraw and raise your thoughts 
 toward him who is supreme to judge, to bless, and 
 to confer honour, may be like calling the attention 
 of an uncultivated rustic to the sublimities of astron- 
 omy. The infinite greatness of God above all things, 
 the obligation of a constant reference to him, the 
 honour that comes from him, the duty of aspiring to 
 be acknowledged by him with approbation, and the 
 glory of possessing it, — all these are but feeble 
 glimpses on your apprehension. But this is a de- 
 graded and guilty perdicament. Endeavour to think 
 what it must be to be valuing yourselves just so much 
 the more, in proportion as you succeed in prevail- 
 ing on these earthen demi-gods of your prostrate 
 superstition to accept, and sparingly reward, the 
 homage which you refuse to the Almighty. Think 
 what it is to watch and wait with anxiety, with ma- 
 noeuvres of insinuation, with patience resolutely main- 
 tained, or impatience unavailingly indulged, and even 
 with sacrifices and self-denial, for looks and expres- 
 sions of complaisance, acknowledging you as not 
 unknown or despised, from creatures of your own 
 kind, possibly of little worth, and insignificant but for 
 their appendages of fortune, so soon to be resigned ; 
 while you are totally regardless of that sovereign 
 Power who is inviting you to the honour of being 
 acquainted with Him. And when your vanity is 
 gratified, in thinking how you stand exhibited in the 
 view of other men as enjoying a measure of the 
 dearly bought privilege, one serious reflection might 
 expose to you what ignominy inexpressible it is, to 
 
144 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 be elated at appearing before a portion of society with 
 the distinction of some flattering attention from your 
 superiors, and to be perfectly indifferent in what ac- 
 count you shall be seen to be held by the Judge of 
 the world, when men and angels will be the witnesses 
 of the estimation. 
 
 Men of the world might be addressed on one 
 other very general characteristic of their spirit and 
 proceeding. Many of you are zealously intent on 
 the advancement and amply endowed establishment 
 of your families ; ambitiously compassing for them, 
 at whatever moral cost or hazard, the utmost quan- 
 tity of the materials of prosperity. Under the con- 
 sciousness, though little and reluctantly brought into 
 any distinctness of thought, that your own tenure is 
 but for a very limited term, the mind instinctively 
 seeks to escape into any factitious mode of extend- 
 ing the interest of mortal existence, and yields to 
 some undefined sort of deception, as if in your sur- 
 viving descendants you were to retain some kind of 
 sympathetic life yourselves. In this enigmatical 
 feeling, for yourselves and them, you study, and 
 scheme, and toil, to place them on the most advan- 
 tageous ground, or in the way to attain it. And this 
 being effected, the great business for them is accom- 
 plished ! How often we have been struck with won- 
 der in observing some of you, dwelling with delight 
 and pride on the prosperous introduction into life, 
 and the fine prospects, of one and another branch of 
 your family, and evidently w^ith an entire inadvert- 
 ence to any greater concern affecting their welfare. 
 
OF RELIGION. 145 
 
 Secure the primary object, of their passing through 
 life in a handsome style, in fair repute, and with 
 plenty of the world's accommodations at their com- 
 mand, and that other affair, of their being accounta- 
 ble to God, of its being their chief business in life 
 to be his servants, may be left as an insignificant 
 matter, about which you do not, and they need not, 
 take any trouble. You are thus willing to be desti- 
 tute of religion virtually beyond your individual ca- 
 pacity, and to take on you the weight of responsi- 
 bility for its exclusion from your relative sphere. 
 You are consenting, as it were, to be irreligious both 
 in yourselves and in those who are to survive you ; 
 saying, Let us form a family compact for the pro- 
 longation of impiety ; a patriarch and a posterity 
 estranged from the Father in heaven. But, thus to 
 render yourselves expressly their authorities for liv- 
 ing without God, is it not a most sinister and fearful 
 office that you perform for them ? When they shall 
 find that all you have wished and schemed for them, 
 and incited them to attain, has left their main inter- 
 est abandoned to ruin; that paternal care has oper- 
 ated systematically to betray them out of all recol- 
 lection and all favour of the mightiest Patron, what 
 will be the language of the thanks they will return 
 you ? And think what it will be to be associated 
 with them in the natural result of this present es- 
 trangement from him, in a sad exile, at last, from his 
 presence. And see, in this condition, and in that 
 prospect, how alienation from God destroys the value 
 13 
 
146 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 of that one affection which is always represented as 
 the most genuine and faithful of human charities. 
 
 These exemplifications, with the questions and 
 censures on them, have been attempted in a form to 
 lead you, men of the world, into such reflection as 
 would verify to your own minds, that your prevailing 
 spirit actually does disown your relations to God, 
 that it is irreligion ; and to expose to you that such 
 a condition is fatally wrong. They have represented 
 that irreligion chiefly as it is apparent in reference 
 to the more commanding and awful characters in 
 which the Divine Being is to be acknowledged, as 
 supremely great and powerful, as present with per- 
 fect intelligence through all existence, as the ob- 
 server and judge of all moral agents. We should 
 have more distinctly admonished you to take account 
 how 5^ou are affected toward him in his character of 
 sovereign goodness, in which you might have access 
 to find infinite resources for felicity. Reflect what 
 it is that you do, in declining all communication w^ith 
 him in this relation. In a certain possible state of 
 your spirit toward him, you would have the sense of 
 his attention resting on you, directly and individual- 
 ly, as a favoured creature, with emanations of be- 
 nignity which would breathe a deep emphatic vitality 
 into your soul. And from all the objects and inter- 
 ests which would diversely engage your thoughts 
 and affections, you would return, at intervals, to be 
 sensibly in the presence of a Divine Friend, and 
 realize it still again as both the delight and the en- 
 ergy of your existence. Think, then, what it is ta 
 
OF RELIGION. 147 
 
 be so compacted and consubstantial, as it were, with 
 the world, as in effect to say, Nothing of all this is 
 mine, and for nothing of all this do I care. I have 
 no adaptation nor desire to reciprocate sentiments 
 with any being of higher order than myself. If God 
 do really offer himself for such communication with 
 men, I must forego the privilege, of which I could 
 have no possession without I know not what vast 
 change in my spirit and habits. But indeed I have 
 no conception of such a mystical source of delight. 
 How should any one receive tokens of special fa- 
 vour, responsive to his own emotions and aspirations, 
 from a Being who never appears nor speaks to the 
 world, and whose concern is with the wide creation 
 as a whole ? However it may be, such a spiritual 
 sympathy is not for my experience ; and I must 
 content myself with such good as I can draw from 
 intercourse with the objects in the scene around me. 
 With these is my soul in communion ; they are my 
 happiness ; and do not disturb me with warnings of 
 what it will be to go into the presence of God as a 
 stranger when I must leave them. I hope that, in 
 some way or other, I shall have sufficiently made 
 peace with him, against the time when 1 am to find 
 myself present with him, and no longer with them. 
 
 If your devotedness to the world be thus a fatal 
 alienation from God, it is comparatively but little to 
 add, that it places you out of fraternity of feeling 
 and character with the best and noblest of mankind. 
 This may generally not cause you much mortifica- 
 
14S THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 tion; and, lest it should do so, you have recourse to 
 the expedient of depreciating the religious character, 
 as exemplified in those who professedly bear it. But 
 your attention must have been sometimes arrested 
 by such examples, on record or in the living world, 
 as defied your self-defensive malice. You have be- 
 held a real, unquestionable devotion to God, to truth, 
 to holiness, and to another world. You have ob- 
 served men living in habitual acknowledgment of 
 the divine presence and authority ; preserving a 
 faithful conscience and obeying it, in scenes of temp- 
 tation ; maintaining fidelity to their high principle 
 through all changes of season and condition; amidst 
 the troubles of their lot deriving consolation from 
 above and from hereafter ; throughout their mortal 
 course still looking forward to the end ; and termi- 
 nating it in the assurance that they were " dying in 
 the Lord." There was left you no cause or power 
 to doubt that this was all genuine, and you felt self- 
 convicted of baseness, if you affected to question it. 
 You were also constrained to admit, that these are 
 the true exemplifications of religion ; and that, there- 
 fore, all cavils raised against it from the unworthy 
 character of many of its ostensible adherents, are 
 wickedly dishonest. To say that but few professed 
 religionists exhibit this combination of qualities in 
 such high excellence, is saying nothing, unless you 
 could assert that such excellence, when it does ex- 
 ist, is something more, or something else, than re- 
 ligion. 
 
OF RELIGIOJf* 149 
 
 It is a matter of great difficulty to decide, what 
 degree of deficiency of such a character may not be 
 incompatible with the essential of personal religion. 
 But at all events, here are placed in your view those 
 whom religion has rendered the very best of the hu- 
 man race. Nor can you evade the point for which 
 we cite them by saying, they were recluses and as- 
 cetics, and therefore inappropriate examples for any 
 use of condemnatory comparison with you, who are 
 necessarily occupied with the business of the world. 
 For many of them were much and variously em- 
 ployed in that business ; and showed how religion 
 may be mingled with secular interests and transac- 
 tions, so as to retain its own brightness and throw 
 lustre on them. 
 
 Now, we are confident you cannot deny that there 
 are moments of transient light on your mind, when 
 the conviction comes upon you, that this is the wor- 
 thiest, noblest, most admirable order of human char- 
 acter ; however indistinctly you may apprehend some 
 of the most refined principles on which it is formed, 
 and however disposed you may be to the imputation 
 of mysticism and excess. On any question arising 
 in your reflections, luho are the most truly estimable 
 and dignified, the most wise and the most safe, your 
 thoughts involuntarily glance toward this class of 
 men, and you cannot make them fix on any other. 
 They are the honourable and select of mankind, the 
 " people favoured of the Lord," and Balaam cannot 
 blast or degrade them for you. 
 13* 
 
150 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 And shall it be your only regret that you cannot 
 reduce them to your own level ? Would you deem 
 it a desirable thing that they could be re-converted 
 (such as are living) to that worldly character which 
 now separates you so far from their community ; so 
 that there should be none to shine in contrast with 
 you, as exemplifying the possible glory of that nature 
 which you degrade ? Reflect soberly whether, if 
 you did see, and feel, and act, like the best of those 
 men, it would not be a most happy change from your 
 present condition. Would it not be happy that the 
 state of your mind corresponded to one inspiring- 
 sentiment of these men, — that they have a Master 
 in heaven whom it is delightful to serve 5 to another^ 
 that no faithful effort or sacrifice will, as to its re- 
 ward, be lost; to another, that every victory over 
 sin surpasses the value of all worldly successes or 
 triumphs; to another, that their guilt is pardoned 
 through the divine mercy ; to another, that they, and 
 all their concerns, are under a sovereign guardianship 
 which can never err or fail, and that, therefore, in 
 every juncture they have the mightiest power in the 
 universe at hand for their assistance ; and to still 
 another, that one sensible interest in transacting the 
 successive affairs assigned them in this world, is in 
 the circumstance, that each one accomplished has 
 carried them so much farther toward quitting the 
 whole, for something better? Comprehend in the 
 account whatever other things form a part of the dif- 
 ference which religion makes between them and 
 you ; allow this difi'erence to verify itself to you as a 
 
OF RELIGION. 151 
 
 reality ; and then say whether you can be fully con- 
 tent and self-complacent in standing thus dissociated. 
 Estimate impartially any favourite worldly object, 
 pursued or possessed, and think whether that would 
 not be well surrendered to place you in a community 
 of situation with these christian spirits. In a lucid 
 hour, you cannot but perceive that, by being asso- 
 ciated with them in congeniality of feeling and ac- 
 tion, you would be in harmony with those grand 
 laws and relations of your existence with which you 
 are now at variance, and often at war. Those bonds 
 of connexion with the highest objects, adamantine 
 bonds, which with all your striving you cannot break, 
 but which you now feel, when recognized at all, as 
 fatal chains to what you cannot love, and to a doom 
 which you dread and cannot escape, would then be 
 vital conductors through which you would communi- 
 cate with heaven. United to that assembly, you 
 would stand on a ground where beams descend from 
 the eternal sun, where angels visit, where afflictions 
 are turned to blessings, where death is divested of 
 his terrors. You would be able to say, with cordial 
 emphasis. Wherever their souls shall be, there let 
 mine be forever. 
 
 On the other hand, look at the men with whom 
 you are now conjoined and assimilated. As your 
 own men of the world, the models to which you con- 
 form yourselves, the class wdth whose destiny you 
 are committing your own, it might be presumed they 
 should have your approbation, your confidence, your 
 sincere affection. But is it so.^ Take an honest 
 
152 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 account of what you think of them, in moments when 
 you are drawn a little aside from the bustle in which 
 you are mingled with them, and when, for a short 
 time, you feel your league with them somewhat re- 
 laxed. At such times, you will have found yourself 
 looking at them with a cold, keen, judicial inspec- 
 tion ; recalling to mind their conduct, toward one 
 another or yourself; observing their motives, and 
 admitting an estimate of these men of your prefer- 
 ence and fraternity. The narrowness of their pur- 
 poses, their selfishness, the world-hardened cast of 
 their feelings, and their unsound principles, stood 
 palpably exposed in your vietv. Confess how often 
 you have been thrown into a very different train of 
 thinking of them from that of considering them as 
 your friends, your own chosen favourite class. Con- 
 fess that you do not, and cannot, feel a genuine es- 
 teem for them, not to say affection or veneration. 
 You do not repose a tranquil confidence in them. 
 You have to watch, and guard, and surround your- 
 selves with every precaution. With many of them 
 you find yourselves in undisguised competition ; and 
 with your very allies and coadjutors you dare not 
 remit the exercise of a silent vigilance on their move- 
 ments, and all the indications of their dispositions 
 and designs, — a vigilance which, you need not doubt, 
 is exercised on you in return. What invaluable 
 beings you are to one another, if you be right in this 
 reciprocal distrust ! 
 
 Even as to religion, careless as you are about it, 
 you occasionally feel a certain indistinct impression. 
 
OF RELIGION. 153 
 
 that some other worldly men are too careless ; espe- 
 cially when you observe any of them in declining 
 health, or far advanced in age, as eagerly intent on 
 worldly pursuits as if they had the assurance of half 
 a century of life before them. You could not avoid 
 some perception of incongruity in this, which has be- 
 trayed you into the expression, Jt is really time for 
 that man to begin to think a little of other concerns. 
 It may very possibly have happened to you to be dis- 
 gusted, and almost shocked, to see one of }our tho- 
 rough men of the world resuming all his ease, vivaci- 
 ty, and ambition, for playing his part in it, with 
 hardly the shortest interval after some sad event in 
 his family or nearest connexions. If such an event 
 brought him an accession of temporal advantage, he 
 waited, perhaps, barely "one little month," to rush, 
 with the impulse of his new forces, and the exulta- 
 tion of having acquired them, into the busiest or the 
 gayest scenes of life. Supposing, again, that you 
 have been dangerously ill, and visited by one of your 
 fraternity, you have seen what a man of the world 
 can do in* the way of consolation. What was the 
 balm which that physician applied ? If you could 
 not believe the assurances which he made to you, 
 (whether he thought so or not.) that you would re- 
 cover, what resource was presented to you besides.'^ 
 
 In short, you will not deny that, if there could be 
 given you what you could believe to be an undecep- 
 tive presage, that though associated with the men of 
 the world now, you should not be so hereafter, it 
 would please you exceedingly. We mean, it would 
 
154 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 do SO at those most thoughtful seasons, when the real 
 quality of your worldly association, its heartlessness, 
 its want of mutual approbation, its poverty of the 
 means of alleviating sorrow, and its destitution of 
 moral dignity, are exposed, in a degree, to your re- 
 luctant apprehension ; and when to all this is added, 
 that its advantages and pleasures, whatever they may 
 be, are limited, both in fact and hope, to a diminutive 
 portion of your existence. This closing consideration 
 throws a deeply melancholy character over the whole 
 vast spectacle of your multitudes and activities. A 
 crowd of human beings in prodigious ceaseless stir to 
 keep the dust of the earth in motion, and then to 
 sink into it, while all beyond is darkness and desola- 
 tion ! It is as if a great army, appointed to march 
 on some magnificent enterprise of distant conquest, 
 should confine themselves to waste all their energy 
 in an idle tumult of strifes and revellings in their 
 camp, and obstinately stay on the ground to perish 
 away, and be interred there. 
 
 On a whole view of these representations, it must 
 needs appear, that, in your devotion to the world, 
 you are losing the grand object of your existence. 
 This is the plain brief sentence on your course of 
 life. And it is most striking to think how insignifi- 
 cantly it may sound to you, whose guilt and calamity 
 it pronounces. Will you say what combination of 
 words that you could hear, would pass more lightly 
 off. You have heard it, and, perhaps within a few 
 minutes after, retained in your consciousness no trace 
 of any thing impressive having been made sensible to 
 
OF RELIGION. 155 
 
 your mind. Are you not tempted to repeat it for 
 the mere curiosity of observing how much at ease 
 you can be with what seems of such formidable im- 
 port ; as if you were playing with a snake, rendered 
 harmless by the deprivation of its fangs, or by your 
 possessing the Egyptian's charm against them. Re- 
 peat the sentence, which affirms you are disowning 
 and losing the great purpose for which you are sent 
 into the world, and smile at the seriousness which 
 thinks it an expression of fearful meaning. Say 
 you are sensible of nothing lost, as long as the good 
 things of the world are gained. " Thou sayest, I 
 am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of 
 nothing ; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and 
 miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked ?" It is 
 not, however, that you are incapable of being pro- 
 foundly affected by the short proposition in words 
 of something disastrous in your situation. The few^ 
 words that should announce to you that your house, 
 or other valuable property, was in flames 5 or that, 
 (supposing you a trafficker by sea.) a ship, in which 
 you had an important venture, had been last seen 
 driving, in a shattered state, at the mercy of a storm 5 
 or the judgment positively signified to you on a top- 
 ical disease, that you could be relieved only by a 
 frightful amputation ; or the most laconic whisper 
 that should apprize you of a design formed against 
 your life ; would produce such an intense excite- 
 ment, as if all your strongest past emotions, extinct 
 and almost forgotten, came, as by a general resur- 
 rection, again to life, combined in one tumultuous 
 
156 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 alarm. And yet the melancholy truth, pressed upon 
 you in admonition, that the primary object of life, 
 the grand venture and value of your existence, is 
 thus far lost, and in the course to be finally lost, 
 through your devotion to the world, may leave your 
 mind unmoved, to await the stronger impression of 
 the next inconsiderable temporal misfortune. 
 
 But you are awaiting also, little as you may ap- 
 prehend or care for it, impressions of another order, 
 and from another cause. They are reserved, most 
 inevitably to come, after a certain succession, longer 
 or shorter, of emotions from ordinary causes shall 
 have had their times and be gone by. A thought- 
 ful religious mind often perceives intimations con- 
 cerning you, prophetic images, as it were mingling 
 with the sight of your persons, while it beholds you 
 thus absorbed in vvordly interests, and insensible of 
 what you are doing in throwing away an infinitely 
 greater. That man, and that other, how little do 
 they care that all the powers of their being, and 
 periods of their time, are useless for the noblest and 
 the absolutely indispensable purpose of life ! How 
 content that what they are acquiring should be at the 
 cost of what they are losing ! How easily they can 
 say, in effect, " Get thee behind me," to any thing 
 that would tell them what it is that they are sacrific- 
 ing to their idol, and warn them of the consequence. 
 But, to each of them an hour is coming, at some 
 certain distance in approaching time, when they will 
 awake from the infatuation, to the surprise and dis- 
 may of seeing that their life has been so far in vain. 
 
OF RELIGION. 157 
 
 They will look back to behold it, with all its fair 
 and precious possibilities, blasted and desolated by 
 their having passed over it. They will look back to 
 measure how far it might have carried them on to- 
 ward the possession of incorruptible treasures, un- 
 fading honours, and eternal inheritance ; and then to 
 acknowledge the miserable fact, that it has not ad- 
 vanced them one stage or step. It will come, — the 
 hour which is charged with the destination to afflict 
 them. There may be temporal grievances or mis- 
 fortunes, affixed by divine appointment to certain 
 parts of the time coming on ; but infallibly there is, 
 somewhere in the train, the hour commissioned to 
 bear the yet unkindled element which will flame 
 against their consciences. Will it be while there are 
 yet to follow days of protractad grace, and possible 
 " newness of life ;" or will it be the conclusion of 
 their time, and lighten on them only that they may 
 read the sentence of an inevitable doom ^ Or is the 
 appointed moment, of that awakening to the convic- 
 tion that life has been expended in vain, reserved to 
 come after the last of the hours on earth ? — With 
 such thoughts the serious observer looks toward fu- 
 turity on your account, while you are heedlessly, and 
 perhaps you call it pleasantly, occupying your life 
 in the very manner which will bring at length this 
 conviction, that you have slighted and lost its chief 
 end. 
 
 Allow us to remind you of so obvious a considera- 
 tion, as that of the rapid passing away of your life. 
 14 
 
158 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 A. large proportion of you, of the character in ques- 
 tion, have reached its middle period, many are going 
 down into its decline, some have the certainty of 
 being near its termination. And you can not but 
 have been often struck with the reflection, how soon 
 each period of it, which had been before you, was 
 gone into the past. Have you never felt an impulse 
 to quarrel with time for leaving you so fast, after you 
 had perhaps been impatient for some particular por- 
 tion of it to arrive ^ But it would neither stay to 
 be your companion, nor slacken to receive your re- 
 proach. It seems to come past you but for the pur- 
 pose of stealing away your life ; each day, each 
 hour, taking off a share of that as its spoil. Ob- 
 serve how the theft and diminution are incessantly 
 going on, while you are planning, or consulting, or 
 executing, while you are striving or relaxing, exult- 
 ing in success of fretting at failure. The one con- 
 tinual fact is, that life is speeding off. 
 
 Now surely it is high time to adopt a determined 
 policy with respect to that which, while of immense 
 importance to you, is thus continually deserting you. 
 And the right policy is, not to attach yourselves, as 
 your main object of interest, to any thing to which 
 life cannot be attached and fixed in abiding conjunc- 
 tion. In other words, how is any thing practically 
 of value but as you can have life for its prosecution, 
 possession and use ? There are \r the world riches, 
 *' respects of honour," amusements, gratifications of 
 curiosity, delights of the senses, what you please. 
 If you could command life to delay, or to take a fixed 
 
OF RELIGION. 159 
 
 state, so that you might effectually appropriate these, 
 and unite them as it were to your being, that were 
 something. But by the rapid departure of life, that 
 Is to say, of yourselves, you are denied the essential 
 condition of making them yours. You but snatch 
 at them in passing, hold them for a moment, are 
 carried away from them ; leaving them to make a 
 similar mockery of offering themselves to the next 
 coveters in the ever-transient succession. If you, 
 believing yourselves to be immortal beings, can be 
 content with this, if you are willing to place your all 
 in things of which your fleeting life allows you to 
 try the good but for a moment, how mysterious is it 
 that such beings should have come into the world to 
 be so befooled I 
 
 You will hardly be so unwitting as to retort, that 
 neither can life bo stayed, and rendered a durable 
 condition, for taking and holding the good of the 
 spiritual interests, any more than of these temporal 
 ones. This would be true in but so narrow a sense 
 as not to be worth the saying. For the cases are 
 infinitely different. It is in the nature of those 
 higher interests that they belong to this life only 
 as a brief preparatory term, the great scene of their 
 enjoyment necessarily being hereafter. The main 
 principle of the aspirant's connexion with them here 
 is avowedly not that of possession, but of anticipa- 
 tion ; and in that anticipation he sees combined with 
 them an endless life, as his condition for a full pos- 
 session of them. So that he may be more than con- 
 tent, he may be gratified, that the present life is so 
 
160 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 fleeting, because, in being so, it hastens him toward 
 that where the circumstance of transiency, insepara- 
 ble from the experience of a created being, will seem 
 lost in the character of permanence. For, though 
 he must possess his felicities in a succession of dura- 
 tion, the assured eternity of that duration will infuse 
 a certain effect of the permanence of the whole, to 
 be perceived in every successive point ; thus pre- 
 cluding the character of evanescence from tbe series 
 perpetually passing. In contrast to all this, your 
 objects belong exclusively to time, and to the very 
 short time of your life on earth. And therefore, 
 the speedy pace of life is the rapid parting from all 
 you are possessing, or endeavouring to possess. 
 And the possession itself during its brief continu- 
 ance, is turned to vanity, by your knowing that this 
 pressing haste, with which you are carried away 
 from each particular of it, is just so much fatal speed 
 toward your losing it all. 
 
 But the consideration of the rapid progress of life 
 toward a close, is enforced on you by more familiar 
 and plausible forms of admonition. There must 
 often be brought to your remembrance events and 
 circumstances in your experience, which appear as 
 receding far into the past. Can these recollections 
 be always unaccompanied by the obvious reflection, 
 If all the time since then be so much taken out of 
 my life, how reduced must be the remainder; and, 
 if the interval between that time and this, in one 
 sense so wide, appears to have been very soon pass- 
 ed over, can I be reckoning on a very slow move- 
 
OF RELIGION. 161 
 
 ment, which shall afford leisure for all manner of 
 occupations or diversions, in passing over any space 
 that can be yet in reserve for me to traverse ? Per- 
 haps some of you are conscious of a feeling occa- 
 sionally arising, \v'hich would shape itself into the 
 wish that you could be young again. Is this senti- 
 ment dismissed without reminding you what pro- 
 gress you have made, and what despatch you are 
 makitig, in the journey of life ? Some of you see 
 your descendants already busy in the worldly career ; 
 can you have evaded the suggestion, what period of 
 your life it must be to which this stage in theirs is 
 parallel ; with this tliought further, how soon they 
 will, if they live, have reached the same point in theirs 
 as you have in yours ; and where will you be then ? 
 When sometimes a tempting occasion is presented 
 to you, of embarking in a new scheme, the thought 
 will come over you, like one of the cold winds pre- 
 cursory of winter, that you are gone too far for any 
 reasonable prospect of living long enough to see such 
 a project through to its desired result. You are 
 compelled to a brief reluctant computation, of about 
 what stage in its prosecution might very probably be 
 the last in the course of your activities under the sun. 
 Some of you may be seen building a house, for your 
 more respectable and commodious residence in the 
 latter part of your life. When, in such a case, we 
 have observed the care and vigilance exerted to en- 
 sure that every part and adjustment be firm and du- 
 rable, the question would occur. Is this person, so 
 14-^ 
 
162 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 careful about the soundness of material, and security 
 of fixture, of each beam, each board, each carved 
 ornament, — is he not silently visited by any thought 
 of where he shall be, long before the time that the 
 structure will show any signs of decay, long before 
 the time at which it would vex him to foresee there 
 would be any such signs ? When you are planting 
 young trees for fruit or nsfreeable shade, can you 
 avoid the reflection, how likely it is, that before these 
 trees will be matured to their full productiveness, or 
 be amply spread and thickened round the dwelling, 
 or over the walks, you will have entered another 
 kind of shade ? And then " whose shall those things 
 be which you have provided ?" 
 
 While exemplifications of so special a cast will 
 bear directly on some of you only, there are many 
 things of a more common kind, which would admon- 
 ish any of you who would practise a little reflection. 
 Consider how often you fail to complete what you 
 had in intention limited to a certain time 5 and then 
 you say the time was gone to soon for you to ac- 
 complish it. You appropriate a portion of time, to 
 be taken from business, to some pleasurable pursuit j 
 and how soon you have to say it is gone like a dream ! 
 The great changes of the year, or some marked point 
 of it, the anniversary of your nativity for instance, 
 return upon you by surprise ; it is but as yesterday, 
 you exclaim, since this was here before. The ap- 
 pointed terms for transactions and settlements in the 
 course of your affairs are here upon you again, when 
 you seem to have but just got rid of the last. Some 
 
OF RELIGION. 163 
 
 of you have become afraid of pledging yourselves to 
 do one thing, and another, from experience that the 
 time is apt to be gone before you can make any 
 effectual movements. Many of you have begun to 
 remark, that it seems to go faster now than it did in 
 your earlier life. Some of you, perhaps, occasionally 
 fall into a mood of thought in which you number 
 the years between your present age and the farthest 
 term to which it is in any way reasonable, under the 
 most favourable circumstances, to calculate that you 
 may live ; and then intrudes the idea that, (even 
 supposing you assume that you shall have so many 
 years of life,) if they shall steal off as fast as an equal 
 number of the preceding ones seem to have done, 
 you will very soon be at the end. The most aged 
 class, if they too must still retain the folly of reckon- 
 ing on the future, unsubdued by the certain littleness 
 of their nearly exhausted store, may consider, wheth- 
 er even all the infirmities and burdens of the last 
 stage will so retard the lapse of time, that a very ^e\w 
 more summers and winters will not quickly have 
 vanished from between them and the exit out of 
 life. 
 
 If things in some analogy to these were exhibited 
 as the fancied circumstances of a fictitious order and 
 condition of moral agents, devised to give a strong 
 image of a state of urgency and danger, combined 
 with insensibility, the representation would excite no 
 little of that sentiment partaking of alarm, which 
 you can feel by sympathy for even imaginary beings. 
 But you, men of the world, know that this is a plain 
 
164 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 description of your actual situation. It is yourselves 
 who are beset by so many circumstances to apprize 
 you of the rapidity of the course, by which you are 
 passing out of life. And your unhappy case is, that 
 you make your life as worthless to your true welfare 
 as it is evanescent in its continuance, by rejecting 
 from your care its one grand business. You act as 
 if you really had understood your existence here and 
 hereafter not to be the same existence ; but that the 
 present life was expressly appointed by the Creator 
 to be occupied with the matters of this earth exclu- 
 sively, that it was to be altogether " of the earth 
 earthy ;" and that, for the next, you are to be liter- 
 ally created anew, in a different order of being, con- 
 stituted in a similar adaptation to be occupied with 
 what there may be in another world, and having no 
 reference or relation to the previous and probationary 
 state. But, if such be not the law of your exist- 
 ence, reflect what a fatal proceeding you adopt in 
 so devoting, through this life, your soul to this world, 
 that when you leave it you will find the substantial 
 thing that remains with you, after all its shadows and 
 delusions are past, is an unfitness for a better. 
 
 Here we conclude this long course of remon- 
 strance. Perhaps you are ready to say it is a rueful 
 and offensive representation, just such as a splenetic 
 spirit, which has quarrelled with the world, would be 
 gratified to make, in the wish to poison the satisfac- 
 tions of those who have yet some cause to regard it 
 as a friend j and who, at all events, think it yet too 
 
OF RELIGION. 165 
 
 soon to fall Into hostility with themselves. But con- 
 sider at whose cost it will be that you repel a state- 
 ment which you cannot refute. The truth of the 
 matter goes, in reality, no further off from you for 
 being rejected; any more than the hour of death can 
 be deferred by refusing to think of it, or by heed- 
 lessness of the solemnity of the prospect. Where 
 would be the sense of a man, (if such a case could 
 be,) who should turn with impatient disgust from the 
 sight of characteristic morbid appearances shown in 
 a delineation, and at the same time be well content to 
 bear in his own person the disease itself r That the 
 preceding description of your state is in substance 
 the truth, wo may challenge you to deny; to deny, 
 that is to say, upon such serious and honest consid- 
 eration as you cannot refuse without being guilty of 
 the most deplorable trifling, a trifling which you will 
 in due time meet with something that will avenge. 
 And we may appeal to your own reason, thus exer- 
 cised, what you would think of a doctrine or a teach- 
 er, that would consent to leave you satisfied with a 
 plan of life which, for the sake of this world, re- 
 nounces the good, and braves the evil, of the world 
 to come. 
 
 But, though the representation thus far be of 
 menacing character, all is not dark. As we have 
 seen in a pictured view of Babylon, supposed on the 
 eve of its fall, there remains one portion of the 
 hemisphere, and one celestial luminary, not yet ob- 
 scured by the portentous shade. While no colours 
 can throw too gloomy an aspect on the condition in 
 
166 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 which you have been described, there shines on your 
 view still that great resource to which all this series 
 of what may have seemed austere reprehensions, has 
 been aimed to constrain your attention. And if you 
 could be made to apprehend the importance, which 
 there really is in the considerations so inadequately 
 conceived and expressed, you would be awakened to 
 wonder and gratitude that, after so constant and sys- 
 tematic a rejection of the sovereign good, you should 
 not now find " a great gulf fixed between it and you." 
 On your side of that tremendous chasm there is still 
 Religion, accessible to you in all its blessings of de- 
 liverance, peace, and security for hereafter. You 
 are still on that favoured ground, where you are in- 
 vited by a God of mercy, a Redeemer with his 
 atoning sacrifice, a Divine Spirit with all powers and 
 operations of assistance, to enter yet at last into the 
 possession of that, which will be a glorious portion 
 when all you have been striving with the world to 
 gain will vanish in dust and smoke. But be warn- 
 ed again, that the time is passing, and a very short 
 persistence in your folly may make it too late. 
 
 Shall we, in concluding, suppose that some of you 
 may be disposed to answer these exhortations in 
 some such manner as this ? " But what can we do ^ 
 We cannot make ourselves religious. Though we 
 should admit that all this is true, and of the last im- 
 portance, we cannot, for that, command and compel 
 our dispositions, our affections, the settled habitude 
 of our minds, to change into the new order required. 
 
OF RELIGION. 167 
 
 What can we do ?" The answer to this should be 
 appropriate to the temper in which it is spoken. We 
 have heard of instances of expressions like these be- 
 ing uttered evidently in a spirit of impious and des- 
 perate carlessness. There was no real concern 
 about the subject ; but a determined addiction to the 
 world, and to so much of sin as that should involve, 
 a wilful avoidance of reflection, a stupid and diifying 
 indifference to consequences ; and all this taking to 
 itself an excuse, or almost a justification, from the 
 moral impotence of our na'ure. The man was in 
 eflfect saying. As I am resolved to pursue my course, 
 it were a satisfaction to believe, and T will believe, 
 that 1 could do no otherwise ; and as I am to fulfil 
 my destiny, the less I trouble myself with thinking 
 about it the better. Now, to a person who should 
 reply to religious admonitions in this disposition of 
 mind, we should deem it utterly trifling and useless 
 to offer any pleading of speculatively theological or 
 of metaphysical argument. The reasoning faculty 
 of such a man is a wretched slave, that will not, and 
 dare not, listen to one word in presence and in con- 
 travention of his passions and will. The only thing 
 there would be any sense in attempting would be, to 
 press on him some strong images of the horror of 
 such a deliberate self-consignment to destruction, and 
 of the monstrous enormity of taking a kind of com- 
 fort in his approach to the pit, from the circum- 
 stance that a principle in his nature leads him to it ; 
 just as if, because there is that in him which impels 
 him to perdition, it would therefore not be he that 
 
168 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 will perish. Till some awful blast smite on his fears, 
 his reason and conscience will be unavailing. 
 
 If he be guarded on the side of his fears, by en- 
 tertaining a light opinion of that consequence on 
 which he is so precipitating himself j should he say, 
 that it certainly would be a dreadful thing thus reso- 
 lutely to go forward torward it, and a flagrantly ab- 
 surd one thus to satisfy himself in doing so, if he 
 had any such appalling estimate of that future ruia 
 as religious doctrine affects to enforce ; but that he 
 believes this threatening to be a prodigious exag- 
 geration ; — we have only to reply, that, as he has 
 not yet seen the world of retribution, he is to take 
 his estimate of its awards from the declarations of 
 Him who knows what they are, and that it is at his 
 peril he assumes to entertain any other. — If any one 
 answer to this, that he does not believe in the exist- 
 ence of any such declaration, he is not one of the 
 persons we are meaning to address. 
 
 But some of you will make the supposed reply, 
 " What can we do .^" in a less depraved temper of 
 feeling. We will suppose, that you are not quite 
 indifferent on the subject, that you seriously admit 
 the necessity of religion, that you feel some uneasi- 
 ness at your estrangement from it, that, in short, 
 you wish you could be religious, and in this spirit 
 somewhat despondingly put the question. For you 
 we have a plain short answer ; — indeed, we have an- 
 ticipated Jthis in some preceding part of the dis- 
 course. You can deliberately apply yourselves to a 
 serious, honest, prolonged, repeated consideration of 
 
OF RELIGION. 169 
 
 the subject. Do not incur the shame, for one mo- 
 ment, of pretending to doubt whether you can do this. 
 On any one of your worldly matters of importance, 
 you know that you can fix your thoughts, attentively, 
 long, and again ; you can severely examine in what 
 manner it is connected with your interests, can weigh 
 the reasons for and against, and look forward to near 
 and more distant consequences. And you can do 
 all this with respect to religion. Do you allege that, 
 the subject being a strange and hitherto foreign one 
 to your thoughts, and also presenting itself to you 
 with a disquieting and reproachful aspect, your minds 
 are strongly inclined to escape from beholding it.'^ 
 What then ? You can think again of the absolute 
 necessity of considering it, and can compel them 
 back to confront it once more, and still again. You 
 can recollect that nothing will be gained, and all will 
 be lost, by ceasing to think of it. You can reflect 
 that, if you dismiss it now, because it does not please 
 you, it will infallibly return upon you ere long to 
 please you still less ; and will return ultimately in 
 such imperative force, that it can no more be evad- 
 ed or dismissed. 
 
 Perhaps there may be some of you who will com- 
 plain, that notwithstanding sincere and considerable 
 efforts to this purpose, you find that the subject does 
 not, and seems as if it would not, take effectual hold 
 on your spirits ; that you cannot /eeZ it to have that 
 importance which you Jcnotv it to have. And what 
 then f Again we reply. Are you going to m.ake this 
 15 
 
170 THE IMPORTANCE 
 
 a reason for "suffering your minds to withdraw from 
 the subject and let it go, — the subject which cannot 
 go without abandoning you to the dominion of 
 death ? The question whether to yield to this ob- 
 stinate defect of sensibility, is the critical point of 
 your contest with the deadly power of evil, within 
 you and without you. Yield, and all will hasten to 
 ruin. But, surely, the terror of such a hazard and 
 such an alternative, or the clear conviction at least 
 iliat you ought to feel terror at it, must incite you 
 to persevering and more earnest efforts. Look at it, 
 dwell on it, and see whether a more protracted and 
 intense consideration of it will cause or suffer your 
 resolution to remit. That it should so remit, is 
 hardly conceivable of any rational being. But if it 
 even did so remit, that circumstance itself would 
 bring a new and frightful phenomenon to rouse the 
 spirit which had such a consciousness, and excite it 
 to call for all compassionate powers and agencies to 
 come to its rescue. 
 
 And here you are to be admonished, that you 
 cannot feel that you are faithfully making the re- 
 quired exertion, unless you have recourse to the 
 most approved means for rendering it effectiral. You 
 cannot answer it to God or your conscience, that 
 vou are doing justice to your souls, in this their 
 dangerous crisis, unless you have the resolution to 
 withdraw yourselves as much as possible from tri. 
 fling company ; to seize from your secular occupa- 
 tions some portion of your time for solemn thought ; 
 10 foreoro some recreations, not perhaps sinful in 
 
OF RELIGION. 171 
 
 themselves, for the sake of employing the time on the 
 most pressing concern in all existence ; to read 
 serious books, with an eft'ort of your own to incul- 
 cate their instructions on your minds; and read 
 this excellent book, *' Doddridge's Rise and 
 Progress of Religion in the Soul," which we 
 commend to } our serious and thoughtful perusal ; 
 but especially converse with the Word of Life itself. 
 And there is yet one more expedient, of obvious 
 duty and practicability, and superlative in efficacy. 
 You believe that the Almighty admits his creatures 
 and indeed has with endless iteration invited and 
 commanded them, to express their necessities in 
 petitions to Him ; and that he listens with peculiar 
 favour, to applications for spiritual good. You are 
 not afraid to do this ; and you are convinced, on 
 the strength of innumerable promises, and of the 
 merits and intercession of Christ, that it would be 
 successful. Though there did not appear to be any 
 immediate success, you believe, you absolutely know, 
 that perservering application to Heaven will finally 
 prevail. You can, with this absolute assurance, im- 
 plore the removal of that odious insensibility, that 
 indisposition, that aversion even, which you allege 
 as a discouragement from persisting to apply your- 
 selves to the all-important subject, and feel as ^ 
 temptation to turn away from it. This can be done, 
 a thousand times over, it can be done as long as 
 the evil and the danger continue. And each day of 
 their prolonged continuance supplies a stronger, and 
 still stronger motive, to a more earnest use of the 
 
172 THE IMPORtANCE 
 
 sovereign expedient. And again and again we tell 
 you, that at each repetition you kvow^heca-use God 
 has declared it, that such application cannot ulti- 
 mately fail. Let this be done, and you are victori- 
 ous. And O is it not worth while ! 
 
 Now, you must acknowledge, that this is what you 
 can do. But what ! are we about to use a language 
 seeming to imply that you are reluctant to acknow- 
 ledge it ? What ! are we supposing you would wish 
 it rather proved that you cannot perform this simple, 
 efficacious, inestimable service to your immortal 
 spirits ? Is it possible, that, because the process of 
 discipline is hard, (it is confessedly so,) you u'ould 
 be willing to find in its impracticability a deliverance 
 from its obligation, — at the cost, the inconceivable 
 cost, of losing its great object ? Is your professed 
 thoughtfulness on the subject rather employed in 
 trying and feeling the state of your faculties, to veri- 
 fy that there are invincible bonds of fate around you, 
 than in seeking the intervention of that hand which 
 can break all the bondage off ? Beware that, while 
 you pretend a solicitude for your eternal welfare, you 
 be not, in fact, rather seeking to make a melancholy 
 provision against the event of its failure, in the de- 
 lusion of finding a resource of extenuation in some 
 mysterious destiny, or the determination of the 
 Almighty. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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Theol09ic.il Semmary-Spee' '-''''f'l 
 
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