adapt either the matter or the language of such discourses as these to the various characters,conditions, circumstances, capacities, and wants of all those different ranks of people to whom they were addressed; and when he is also told, that these Lectures were drawn up at a very advanced period of life, and not in the ease and tranquillity of literary retirement, but at short broken intervals of time, such as could be stolen from the incessant occupations of an arduous and laborious station, which would not admit of sufficient leisure for profound research or finished composition. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. LECTURE I. FEB. 23, 1798. 7 LECTURE I. being my intention to give from this place, on the Fridays during Lent, a course of Lectures explanatory and practical on such parts of Scripture as seem to me best. calculated to inform the understandings and affect the hearts of those that hear me, I shall proceed, without further preface, to the execution of a design, in which edification not entertainment, usefulness not novelty, are the objects I have in view; and in which therefore I may sometimes perhaps avail myself of the labours of others, when they appear to me better calculated to answer my purpose any thing I am myself capable of pro than ducing. Although my observations will for the present be confined entirely to the Gospel of St. Matthew, and only to certain select parts even VOL. I. B of |