chains of sin, which, if any man prefer to the liberty of truth, and the gospel, to the sweet sleeps of virtue, to her free step, to her pleasant thoughts, to her delicious promise of immortal life, he knows not the highest joys of this world, nor merits those of a better world than this.

We shall love truth better if we believe that falsehood is useless; and we shall believe falsehood to be useless if we entertain the notion that it is difficult to deceive;-the fact is, (and there can be no greater security for well doing than such an opinion) that it is almost impossible to deceive the great variety of talent, information,and opinion, of which the world is composed: Truth prevails, by the universal combination of all things animate, or inanimate, against falshood; for ignorance makes a gross, and clumsy fiction; carelessness omits some feature of a fiction that is ingenious; bad fellowship in fraud betrays the secret; conscience bursts it into atoms; the subtlety of angry revenge unravels it; mere brute, unconspiring matter reveals it; death lets in the light of truth; all things teach a wise man the difficulty, and bad success of falsehood;

and truth is inculcated by human policy, as well as by divine command.

The highest motive, to the cultivation of truth, is, that God requires it of us ;-he requires it of us, because falsehood is contrary to his nature, because the spirit of man, before it can do homage to its Creator, must be purified in the furnace of truth. There is no more noble trial for him, who seeks the kingdom of Heaven, than to speak the truth; often the truth brings upon him much sorrow; often it threatens him with poverty, with banishment, with hatred, with loss of friends, with miserable old age; but, as one friend loveth another friend the more if they have suffered together in a long sorrow, so the soul of a just man, for all he endures, clings nearer to the truth ;-he mocks the fury of the people, and laughs at the 'oppressor's rod; and if needs be, he sitteth down, like Job, in the ashes, and God makes his morsel of bread sweeter than the feasts of the liar, and all the banquets of sin.

To carry ourselves humbly, and meekly, in the world, is a sure sign of a

VOL. I.

sound understanding, and an evangelical mind; but we have duties to perform to ourselves, as well as to others; and there is no one to whom we can owe as much deference as we owe to inward purity, and religious feeling. The submission paid to any human being, by the sacrifice of truth, is not meekness, nor humility, but an abject, unresisting mind, thatbarters God and Hea ven, for a moment of present ease; and puts to sale man's best birthright of speaking truth;-and the excellence of this virtue of truth consists in this, that it almost necessarily implies so many other virtues, or so certainly leads to them; for he who loves truth, must be firm in meeting those dan gers to which truth sometimes exposes him; if he loves truth, he will love justice; he will gain the habit of appealing to the precepts of conscience, and of stating the real conceptions of his own mind, with that disregard to good and evil consequence, which those only can feel who look on sin as the highest evil, and obedience to God as the greatest good..

Lastly, remember that other sins can be measured, and the degree of evil, which ori

ginates from them, be accurately known ;--but no man, when he violates truth, can tell of what sin he is guilty; where his falsehood will penetrate; and what misery it willcreate. It may calumniate, it may kill, it may embitter, it may impoverish, what evil it may prove you cannot tell, all that you do know is, that it is a crime which injures man, and offends God; therefore, for every reason for which God has chained man up in his particular tendencies to individual sins, for all those reasons he has sanctified, and ordained truth; because, by truth every other virtue is upheld; and upon truth, as the deep rock, stand all the glories, and excellencies, of the human mind. Shake that basis, and with it fall justice to man, and piety to God; the frame of social order is broken up, and those talents, and passions are used for mutual destruction, upon which Providence intended that the dignity, and 'sublunary dominion of man should for ever rest.