king:' this aspiring, haughty wretch could add, Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate.

Our first parents became discontented with their very nature; and under the influence of ambition wished to become 'as gods.' In this monstrous wish they have been often followed by their descendants. Several of the Persian emperors, Alexander the Great, and several of the Roman emperors, claimed divine honours, and demanded sacrifices and libations. The bishops of Rome also have arrogated to themselves the peculiar titles of Jehovah;* and have accordingly granted absolutions of sin, and passports to heaven. Nay, they have abrogated the commands of God, substituted for them contrary precepts, ascended the throne of the Redeemer, assumed the absolute Government of his church, permitted and interdicted its worship at their pleasure, claimed the world as their property, and declared all mankind to be their vassals. Beyond all this, they have given, openly, and publicly, indulgences, or permissions to sin. Thus has this ' man of sin,' this 'son of perdition, exalted himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped.' Thus has he, 'as God, sat in the temple of God, showing himself to be God.'

With all these boundless demands of enjoyment, however, this unvarying claim to the exclusive possession of natural good, ambition never performed a single duty to God, or to man. To a mind under the control of this passion moral good has no charms, and never becomes the object of either complacency or desire. By such a man his own soul is neglected and forgotten; his fellow-men are neither befriended nor loved; and his God is neither worshipped nor obeyed. All his talents and all his time are employed, with unceasing drudgery, solely to adorn, gratify, and exalt himself. Of this wretched idol he regards the earth as the shrine, and the skies as the temple. To this idol he sacrifices all that he is, and all that he has; and demands from others every offering which he can claim, and they can give. In homage to this idol he makes every duty give way, and, so far as is in his power, bends all the interests of his fellow-men, and those of the universe, and sets it up as a rival to God himself.

• Dominus, Deus noster, Papa.

In such a mind how can the sense of duty be kept alive? How can he whose attention is thus fascinated by personal greatness and distinction, whose soul is swollen by the consciousness of personal superiority, find either inclination or leisure for so humble an employment as the performing of his duty? In such a mind how can repentance even begin? How can such a mind comprehend the necessity of relying on the Redeemer for acceptance with God? How can such a mind realize either the importance or the existence of moral obligation; or feel itself bound to obey the will of its Creator? Given up to sin, not from negligence only, from inconsideration, or heedless propensity, but from settled design, from ardent choice, from laborious contrivance, how can such a mind furnish room for the admission of humility, dependence, the fear of God, submission to his will, contentment, benevolence, equity, or compassion? But where these attributes are not, no duty can be performed.

To his own family, indeed, he may be thought to render some of those services which are obviously required both by reason and revelation. All men are commanded to provide for those of their own house ;' and for his own house the ambitious man actually provides; but not in such a manner as either to perform his own duty, or benefit his family. He labours indeed to make them great; but not to make them wise, just, or good. His children he regards merely as heirs; and not as moral beings, placed during the present life in a state of trial, and destined in a future world to a state of reward. They are therefore taught, governed, influenced, and habituated to no duty, and to no real good. His only object is to invest them with a superiority resembling his own; that they may be decent companions to him while he lives, and inherit his grandeur after his death. They are therefore educated to be in all respects as bad, and in most, worse than himself. The great point of instruction which they receive, from the cradle to the end of his life, is, that all things human and divine are to give way to the pursuit of personal distinction. He who educates his family in this manner, cannot be believed to perform of design a single parental duty.

As the ambitious man regards not the real interests of his own family; it cannot be believed, that he will exercise any greater tenderness for those of his fellow-men. I have al

4

ready remarked, that his mind can furnish no room for the admission of benevolence, equity, and compassion. Without these attributes, it is hardly necessary to observe, no duty to mankind can be performed.

To God, this lofty-minded being cannot be expected to render any part of that homage which he demands from all other beings to himself. The only language of his heart, while looking down from the height to which he imagines himself raised by a series of prosperous efforts, is, ' I will ascend into heaven: I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds: I will be like the Most High.' What submission, what obedience, what worship, can co-exist with this language, and the thoughts from which it springs!

At the same time, the ambitious man surrounds himself with a host of temptations. The 'unclean spirit' which originally dwelt in his heart, after having 'gone out, and walked in dry places, seeking rest, and finding none;' after saying, ' I will return to my house, whence I came out;' has already entered it again, ' and found it empty, swept, and garnished,' for his reception. Already has he gone, and taken with himself seven other spirits, more wicked than himself; and they have entered in,' and taken final possession of this convenient residence. His temper, his ruling passion, his course of life, holds out a welcome to every temptation, a call to every sin, a summons to every fiend. His mind is a cage of unclean and furious passions. His purposes demand for their accomplishment the continual intervention of falsehood, fraud, injustice, and cruelty, of impiety and irreligion. The 'sins' of such a man, instead of following after' him, march before him in regular array; and fight, maraud, and plunder, to fulfil his designs, and to satiate the malignity of those evil spirits who have taken up their final habitation in his bosom.

3. Ambition is the source of numerous and terrible evils to mankind.

To comprehend the import of this truth, even in the imperfect manner in which it can be comprehended by us, it would be necessary to recur to the history of the human kind. In all ages, and in all nations, this vast record has been little else than a delineation of the miseries which this malignant passion has produced. It has been a tale of sorrows and groans, and sighs and tears. The earth has rung throughout its immense regions with the melancholy murmur; and the walls of heaven have echoed back 'mourning, lamentation, and woe.' In a short discourse like this, were it to be changed into a mere vocabulary, the very names of the various sufferings wrought by ambition could not be alphabetically recited. A loose and general specification of a very few of these evils is all that can be accomplished, and therefore all that will be attempted.

Among the several adventurers in the field of distinction, none appears so likely to be harmless, as the candidate for literary fame. Learning is an object naturally so useful, and the pursuit of it an employment so quiet, and so little ominous to the public peace, as to induce us very easily to believe that ambition here, at least, would be innoxious and unalarming. Should this, however, be our conclusion, we should find ourselves not a little disappointed. There has been a period, of which but too many traces still remain; a period in which it was fashionable, and therefore an object of ambition, to be a free-thinker. Literary men of this description trumpeted so loudly and so incessantly the learning, genius, and philosophy of themselves and their coadjutors; vapoured with so much parade concerning their superiority to superstition, their independence, their liberality, and their exemption from prejudice; and promised so magnificently to rescue their fellow-men from the mists of error, and from the bondage of the mind, that the young, the ignorant, and the silly, dazzled by these splendid pretensions, became ambitious of this distinction, and, without examination or conviction, became free-thinkers in numerous instances, merely that they might have the honour of being united to this cluster of great men. The men themselves, finding that they had become great in the estimation of others by means of these lofty pretensions, went on, and became still greater by increasing their pretensions. By the mere dint of study and reflection, they claimed to understand and teach the will of God concerning the duty and salvation of men; to explore the future designs of Omniscience; and to prescribe rules of justice and propriety, according to which, if they were to be believed, God himself was bound to conduct his administrations to mankind. The Scriptures they not only discarded, but loaded with every calumny, and every insult. The Redeemer of the world they insulted even more grossly than the ancient Jews had done; stained his character with vice and infamy, annihilated his meditation. In the mean time, they poured out a torrent of immoral principles, which they dignified with the name of philosophy, and which they proposed as proper rules to direct the conduct of men. By these principles the faith of mankind was perplexed, their morality unhinged, the distinction between virtue and vice destroyed, the existence of both denied, and the bonds of society cut asunder. Men, of course, were let loose upon each other without the restraint of moral precept, without the checks of conscience, without the fear of God,

The late revolution in France, that volcanic explosion, which deluged the world with successive floods of darkness and fire, had all its materials collected, and all its flames kindled, by men of this description. It is not intended, that literary consequence was the only distinction sought by those who were the prime agents in producing this terrible shock of nature. The lust of power had undoubtedly its full share in bringing to pass this astonishing event. But the desire of fame had its share also. Had not the principles of the French nation been deeply corrupted, their morals dissolved, and their sense of religious obligation destroyed by the pen of sophistry, it is incredible that they should at once have burst all the bonds of nature and morality, transmigrated in a moment from the character of civilized men, into that of wolves and tigers, and covered their country with havoc and blood.

In the career of political distinction the progress is usually more rapid, and the change more astonishing. In this career, men of fair moral reputation and decent life, when seized by the disease of ambition, lose suddenly all their former apparent principles, and are changed at once into office-hunters and demagogues. To obtain a place, or to acquire suffrages, they become false, venal, and treacherous; corrupt and bribe others, and are themselves corrupted and bribed; become panders to men of power, and sycophants to the multitude; creep through the serpentine mazes of electioneering; and sell their souls for a vote, or an appointment, in the dark recesses of a cabal.

Their rivals also they calumniate with all the foul aspersions which ingenuity can invent, malignity adopt, obloquy utter, or