from private life without losing the public advantage of the danger, may be attained by any laws which give the poor a claim to a maintenance to be levied upon certain districts in proportion to the wants of the poor which each shall at any time contain-when the effect of all such laws must be to change the dread of want in the lowest orders of the people into an expectation of a competence, or of something which idleness will prefer to a competency is a question which it is not my province to discuss. The fact I may take leave to mention that the burden of the imposition in this country is grown, as all know, to an enormous size: the benefit to the industrious poor, I fear, is less than the vast sum annually levied on the nation ought to procure for them; and the pernicious effect on the manners of the lowest rank of people is notorious. In another place the question might deserve a serious investigation, how far the manner of our legal provision for the poor may or may not operate to increase the frequency of criminal executions.

Meanwhile it is my duty to inculcate, that neither the heavy burden nor any ill effects of the legal provision for the poor, may release the citizen from the duty of voluntary benefaction; except indeed so far as what the law takes from him diminishes his means of spontaneous liberality. What the laws claim from him for public purposes he is indeed not to consider as his own; what remains after the public claims are satisfied is his property; out of which he is no less obliged to contribute what he can to the relief of poverty, than if no part of what is taken out of his nominal property by the law were applied to charitable purposes. For the fact is, that after the law hath done its utmost, that most interesting species of distress which should be the especial object of discretionary bounty goes unrelieved. The utmost that the law can do is confined to the poverty of the lowest rank of the people: their old age or their debility it may furnish with the shelter of a homely lodging, with the warmth of coarse but clean apparel, and with the nourish

ment of wholesome food: their orphans it should cherish, till they grow up to a sufficiency of strength for the business of husbandry, or of the lowest and most laborious trades. But to the poverty of the middle and superior orders, the bounty of the law, after its utmost exactions, can administer no adequate relief.

Thanks be to God, that heavy as our public burdens are, of which the legal provisions for the poor is among the greatest, they seem to be no check upon the charitable spirit of this country; in which free bounty is still dispensed with a wide and open hand, Witness the many large and noble edifices, the pride and ornament of this metropolis, many raised, all enriched, by voluntary contribution and-private legacy, for the supply of every want, the mitigation of every disaster, with which frail mortality is visited, in every stage and state of life, from helpless infancy to withered age: witness the numerous charitable associations in all parts of the country, among all descriptions of the people: witness the frequent and ample contributions to every instance of private distress, once publicly made known: witness the pious associations for the support of distant missions, and the promotion of Christian knowledge: witness this annual celebrity, the prosperity of this charitable institution, and the numbers now assembled here. For I trust it is less the purpose of our present meeting to feast the ravished ear with the enchanting sounds of holy harmony (which afford indeed the purest of the pleasures of the senses), than to taste those nobler ecstacies of energizing love of which flesh and blood, the animal part of us, can no more partake than it can inherit heaven. They are proper to the intellect of man, as an image of the Deity; they are the certain symptoms of the Christian's communion with his God, and an earnest of his future transformation into the perfect likeness of his Lord.

Although every species of distress, not excepting that which may have taken rise in the follies and the vices of the sufferer, is an object of the Christian's pity (for the

love of Christ, who died for his enemies, is our example; and the beneficence of our heavenly Father, who is kind to the evil and the unthankful, is the model of our charity); yet our joy in doing good must then be the most complete, when innocence is united with distress in the objects of our bounty, when the distress is out of the reach of any other help, and when in the exercise of the general duty we fulfil the special injunctions of our Lord. In the distress which our present charity immediately regards, we find these circumstances united. The widow and the orphan are our objects: their claim to misery is in the common right of human nature; it stands not on the ground of guilt and ill desert: and for those widows and those orphans, in particular, whose cause we plead, should we be questioned by what means their condition hath been brought thus low, we will confidently answer, by no sins of their husbands or their parents more than of their own. It is peculiar to the situation of a clergyman, that while he is ranked (as the interests of religion require that he should be ranked) with the higher orders of the people, and is forbidden by the ecclesiastical law, under the severest penalties, to engage in any mercenary business, which might interfere with the duties of his sacred calling, and derogate in the eyes of the multitude from the dignity of his character-his profession, in whatever rank he may be placed in it, the least of any of the liberal professions furnishes the means of making a provision for a family. It may be added with great truth, that what means the profession furnishes, the cleric who is the most intent upon its proper duties, the most addicted to a life of study and devotion, is the least qualified to improve. Hence it will oftener happen to the families of clergymen than of any other set of men, and it will happen perhaps oftenest to the families of the worthiest, to be left in that state which, by the principles established in the former part of this Discourse, is poverty in the truest import of the word-to be left destitute of the means of earning a live

lihood in employments for which they are not disqualified by the laudable habits of their previous lives.

This evil in the domestic life of the minister of the gospel, I will venture to predict, no schemes of human policy ever will remove. Grand in the conception, noble in the motives which suggested it, promising perhaps in its first aspect, but fraught with ruin in its certain consequences had it been adopted, was the plan of abolishing the subordinate dignities of the hierarchy, in order to apply their revenues to the better maintenance of the parochial clergy. The parts of civil societies, as of all things in this nether world, are severally wholes, similar to the compounds. Every order of men in the great society of a nation is but a smaller society within itself. The same principles which renders a variety of ranks essential in the composition of a state, require inequalities of wealth and authority among the individuals of which each rank is composed. These inequalities, to form a harmonized, consistent whole, require a regular gradation between the opposite extremes: which cannot be taken away, but the extinction must ensue of the whole description of men in which the chain is broken.

Nor less fatal to our order would be any change in the tenure of ecclesiastical property; especially the favourite project of an exchange of tithes for an equivalent in land. Many of us here have felt, in some part of our lives, the inconvenience of succeeding to dilapidated houses, with small resources in our private fortunes, and restrained by the circumstances of a predecessor's family from the attempt to enforce our legal claims. But what would be the situation of a clergyman who in coming to a living should succeed to nothing better than a huge,dilapidated farm?-which would too soon become the real state of every living in the kingdom in which the tithes should have been converted into glebe; not to mention the extinction of our spiritual character, and the obvious inconveniences to the yeomanry of the kingdom, which would

be likely to take place, should this new manner of our maintenance send forth the spirit of farming among the rural clergy.

The truth is, that the hardships of our order arise from causes which defy the relief of human laws and mock the politician's skill. They arise, in part from the nature of our calling; in part from the corrupt manners of a world at enmity with God; but primarily, from the mysterious counsels of Providence, which, till the whole world shall be reduced to the obedience of the gospel, admit not that the ministry should be a situation of ease and enjoyment. A Christian minister, in the present state of Christianity, hath indeed an indisputable right to maintenance, from the work of the ministry, for himself and for his family; as he had indeed from the very earliest ages; "For the labourer is worthy of his hire." In a Christian government, he justly may expect to be put, so far as the secular powers can effect it, into the same situation of credit and respect which might belong to a diligent exertion of equal talents in any other of the liberal professions. Such provision for the maintenance and for a proper influence of the clergy is at least expedient, if not necessary for the support of Christianity, now that its miraculous support is withdrawn, and a continuance of the magistrate is among the means which God employs for the maintenance of the truth. Yet after all that can be done by the friendship of the civil powers, since our Lord's kingdom is not of the present world, it would indeed be strange, if his service, in the ordinary course of things, were the means of amassing a fortune for posterity, more than of rising to heredi tary honours. Our great Maker, when he calls us to the ministry, holds out no such expectation. He commands us to wean our affections from this transitory world, and to set our hearts upon a heavenly treasure-to be more anxious for the success of our labours upon the hearts and lives of men than for the prosperity of our own families. He warns us, by his inspired apostle, that all who will live