or more productive of enjoyment or safety, than a chastened imagination, regularly subjected to the control of the conscience. Wherever this faculty is under this control, the mind has achieved a power of keeping temptation at a distance, of resisting it when approaching, and of overcoming it when invading, attainable in no other manner. Its path towards heaven becomes therefore comparatively unobstructed, easy, and secure. Sin does not easily beset it; and its moral improvement, while it is on the one hand undisturbed, is on the other rapid and delightful.

II. This command forbids all licentious words of the same

nature.

Impure thoughts beget impure words; and impure words, in their turn, generate, enhance, and multiply impure thoughts. This retro-active influence of the tongue upon the heart, by means of which sinful conversation becomes the means of producing sinful thoughts, I have had occasion to explain at large in a former Discourse. It will therefore be unnecessary to dwell upon it here. No serious observer of human life can doubt, that by our own language, as well as that of others, whenever it is impure, impure thoughts are awakened; a licentious imagination set on fire; and licentious designs, which otherwise would never have entered the mind, called up into existence, and execution.

In this employment also our fellow men unite with us in the strange and melancholy purpose of mutual corruption. All the dangers and mischiefs, all the temptations and sins, presented to each other by evil companions, are to be found here. Here, 'wicked men and seducers wax worse and worse; deceiving, and being deceived;' mutually seducing, and being seduced.

The only safety, with respect to this part of the subject in hand, is found in an exact conformity to the very forcible precept of St. Paul: 'But filthiness, foolish talking, and jesting, let it not be so much as named among you.' The original words are αισχροτης, obscenity; μωρολογια, impure scurrility; and ευτραπελία, when used in a bad sense, as here, answering to double entendres, or seemingly decent speeches with double meanings. Of all these the Apostle says not, Let them not be used; but, Let them not be, so much as named among you, as becometh saints.' Let no foundation be furnished by your conversation even for mentioning it as a fact, that such language has ever been uttered by you. For no conversation beside that which is thus pure, can become your character as Christians. See Eph. v. 3, 4. Strict and virtuous delicacy in our language is not only indispensable to decency and dignity of character, but to all purity of heart, and all excellency of life.

III. This command forbids all licentious conduct of this

nature.

As this position will not be questioned, and as this conduct, in every form, is prohibited elsewhere, in a multitude of Scriptural passages, I shall spare myself the labour of proof; and shall proceed to suggest several reasons for our obedience to this precept; or, what is the same thing, to mention several evils arising from disobedience.

1. The licentious Conduct forbidden by this precept, discourages and prevents marriage.

This discouragement and prevention regularly take place in exact proportion to the prevalence of the conduct; and are therefore chargeable upon it, whenever, and wherever, and however it exists.

The innumerable and immense blessings of the marriage institution have been summarily recited in the preceding Discourse. They are the blessings which keep the moral world in being, and secure it from an untimely and most terrible dissolution. They are the blessings, without which life, in instances literally innumerable, would be blasted in the bud; without which, when it escaped this premature destruction, its continuance would prove a curse; without which, natural affection and amiableness would not exist; without which, domestic education would be extinct; industry and economy never begin; and man be left to the precarious subsistence of a savage. But for this institution, learning, knowledge, and refinement would expire; government sink in the gulf of anarchy; and religion, hunted from the habitations of men, hasten back to her native heavens. Man, in the mean time, stripped of all that is respectable, amiable, or hopeful in his character, and degraded to all that is odious, brutal, and desperate, would prowl in solitudes and deserts, to satisfy his rage and hunger. The correspondence between heaven and earth would cease; and the celestial inhabitants would no longer expect, nor find, new accessions to their happy society from this miserable world.

To all these evils every lewd man directly contributes. Were his principles and practices adopted universally by his fellow-men, all these evils would universally prevail. That they do not actually thus prevail, is in no sense owing to him. To the utmost of his power he labours to introduce them all.

2. This conduct, in almost all cases, pre-supposes seduc

tion.

Seduction, in its very nature, involves fraud of the worst kind. It is probably always accomplished by means of the most solemn promises, and often with oaths still more solemn., Both the promises and oaths, however, are violated in a manner supremely profiigate and shameful. The object to which they are directed is base, malignant, and treacherous in the extreme; and the manner in which it is prosecuted is marked with the same treachery and baseness. He who can coolly adopt it has put off the character of a man, and put on that of a fiend; and, with the spirit of a fiend alone, he pursues and accomplishes the infernal purpose. The ruin sought and achieved is immense. It is not the filching of property. It is not the burning of a house. It is not the deprivation of liberty. It is not the destruction of life. The seducer plunders the wretched victim of character, morals, happiness, hope, and heaven; enthrals her in the eternal bondage of sin, consumes her beyond the grave in endless fire, and murders her soul with an ever-living death. With the same comprehensive and terrible malignity, he destroys himself; calls down upon his own head the vengeance of that almighty hand, which will suffer no sinner to escape; and awakens the terrors of that undying conscience, which will enhance even the agonies of perdition. All this is perpetrated, in the mean time, under strong professions of peculiar affection, with the persuasive language of tenderness, and with the smiles of gentleness and complacency. For, the seducer

VOL. IV.

" Can smile, and smile, and be a villain."

R

3. It brings incomprehensible wretchedness upon the devoted object.

No human being can support the pressure of infamy, a degradation below the level of mankind, and the envenomed stings of reproach, sharpened by a guilty conscience. I well know, that philosophy prates and vapours on topics of this nature with a proud self-complacency, and an ostentatious display of patience, fortitude and serenity. But I also well know, that philosophy is in these respects a mere pretender, a bully, and not a hero. Philosophy never furnished, and never will furnish, its catalogue of martyrs. All its votaries, like Voltaire, intend only to rule and triumph; not to suffer, nor even to submit. As cool and parading reflections on subjects of a calamitous nature are uttered in the peace of the closet, the possession of ease and safety, the conviction of acknowledged reputation, and the enjoyment of friends, comforts, and hopes; philosophy rarely encounters real sufferings. Her hardihood is all premature; and is all shown in telling the world what she would do, and what others ought to do; and not in the history of what she has done.

The excruciating anguish to which the miserable female victim is reduced, is dreadfully exemplified in the unnatural and enormous wickedness to which she is driven, in the desertion, and the consequent destruction, of her helpless offspring. • Can a woman forget her sucking child; that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?' is a question which points out the strongest affection, the highest tenderness of human nature; the attachment which outruns, survives, and triumphs over every other. To this question, the exposure to a merciless sky, the drowning, the strangling, the smothering of illegitimate children, returns a terrible and excruciating What must be the agonies of despondence and degradation which can force the susceptible heart of a female parent to the contrivance, and execution of a design like this? Yet such is the dreadful catastrophe of the wickedness in question. It is worse than trifling, for the author of all these evils to allege, that this catastrophe is neither contrived nor accomplished by himself. They are all, and all are known by him to be, the frequent as well as natural consequences of this iniquity. They are chargeable to him therefore as the legitimate results of his own conduct; results, which by every obligation, human and divine, he was bound to foresee, and prevent. Both the murder itself, and the miseries which give birth to it, are stains of that crimson guilt in which he is so deeply dyed.

4. This licentious character soon becomes habitual.

To a person moderately acquainted with human conduct, an attempt to prove this assertion would be mere trifling. All transgressions of this cast soon become fixed, obstinate, and irreclaimable. The world teems with evidence of this humiliating position; and the whole progress of time has daily accumulated a mountainous mass of facts, evincing its certainty in a more and more humiliating manner.

Of these the most humiliating and dreadful collection is found in those baleful tenements of prostitution and profligacy which deform, so far as my information extends, every populous city on the globe; and stand publicly as the gate-way to hell, opening to their miserable inhabitants a broad and beaten road to perdition. Into these deplorable mansions the polluted female, cast off by mankind as an outlaw from human society, shorn even from the side of natural affection, and parental mercy, betrayed by the villainy of a second Judas, and hurried by shame, remorse, and anguish, enters-never to escape! Here, from the first moment, she closes her eyes upon friends, kindness, and compassion; takes her final farewell of earthly comfort; and sees, with a dying eye, the last glimmerings of hope go out in eternal night. Here she bids an everlasting adieu to the sabbath, the house, and the word of God. To her the calls of mercy are made no more. To her the voice of the Redeemer sounds no more. The Spirit of truth cannot be supposed to enter the haunts of sin and death; nor to shed the dew of life upon these voluntary victims of corruption by whom they are inhabited. Immortal life here becomes extinct. Hither the "hope" of heaven "never comes, that comes to all:" and the wretched throng, embosomed by these baleful walls, enter upon their perdition on this side of the grave.

Who, that is not lost to candour, and buried in misanthropy, could believe, unless he were forced to believe, that princes, and other rulers of mankind, have taxed and licensed these houses of ruin; and that in countries where the Gospel beams,