ing patiently." Morality hath said, "Shame on the coward and the fool who suffereth patiently; eternal wrongs, and everlasting patience be his reward for it.""Lie down," saith Religion," and be trampled on, and so help ye God!"-" Rise;" saith Morality, "crush your oppressors, and so help yourselves." Under circumstances of such wide dissent as this, our good friends of the tabernacle, church, or chapel, who may on this occasion, have so far sacrificed their faith to their curiosity, as to leave the places where they might have heard what they had heard before, to come hither and hear what they never heard before, will not (I trow) expect the conciliation of their prejudices, or the recognition of their sentiments. In this great science of morals, to know the fit and right of duty, is the grand essential and, all-sufficient requisite to the doing it; but morality would be no science; the fit and right of duty would have no distinction from what is unfit and wrong, if men could really be good without taking any pains to be so; and wise without giving themselves the trouble of reflection. lo In order to perform the duties of good citizens, we have, therefore, heedfully studied what the duties of good citizens are. order to enjoy the benefits of good citizenship, we come now to the study of what the privileges of good citizens are, in order that regulating our expectations, as well as measuring our duties by the immutable standard of everlasting righteousness, we may learn, not the slave's lesson of being content, but what it is, wherewithal a good citizen should have reason to be content; and what he ought to do when he hath no reason to be content. With this view, this, our Society of Universal Benevolence, most anxiously looks to the moral improvement of the rising generation, and hopes to see the present race of believing and adoring, and, therefore, tythe-paying, and starving denizens, who have learned only,like the witches in Macbeth, to "put each his chappy finger on his scaly lip, and look as if they were not of this earth, and yet are on it," succeeded by a race of virtuous men and women who shall have learned to be an honour to their country, and to make their country an honour to themselves. The children to be educated in the Sunday-school of this establishment:-educated, you will observe, not to the stale tune of singing Halelujahs to God above, and ducking bows to God below, but to exercise the faculties of their minds, and bring forth all their powers; not to be content with thinking by proxy, but each to think for himself; after having clearly understood the duties which they owe, not because of any authority divine or human, but from the mathematically demonstrable propriety and -fitness of those duties, to their country and to society, shall severally answer to the catechetical question --What duties does your -country owe to you ?* "My country owes me the partiality of a preference above all • Catechism of the Society of Universal Benevolence.. foreigners its aid and patronage in all wise and generous endeavours to promote the public good, and the protection of my person, property, and liberty, from all outrage, unjust taxation, and oppression." To the question.-What duties does society owe to you? The Society of Universal Benevolence propounds as the fit answer-Society owes to me, at all times, an equitable reward for my labours, whether they be of mind or body, expended, or such as I am willing to expend in its service. It owes to me honour and respect for my person. It owes to me reputation for my virtues, encouragement for my exertions, and the perpetual supply, and secure enjoymeat of comfortable subsistence. It owes me relief in my distresses; support in sickness and in age; and a grateful remembrance of my excellencies after my death."-Society's Catechism.. A country and state of society in which these advantages are ensured to all its good and virtuous members, is a happy country, and a well-ordered state of society; and every good and virtuous man being a member of such a country, and such a state, whatever rank he may hold in it, will perceive and be sensible of these advantages; and to his grateful heart and intelligent mind the thought or imagination of resistance to the constituted authorities, would be as alien and unnatural as the meditation of self-destruction. But, in proportion as these advantages are in themselves incalculably precious; dear above all price; dearer than life itself (inasmuch as the life s happiness of millions, and therein the lives of millions, should be of greater consideration to each individual than his own single life, and separate happiness). And, from the mathematical certainty that a state of government and of society, so intensely to be desired, could be no result of any throw of accidents and chances, it follows in demonstration, that he would be a bad citizen, and an ill-member of society, who should be content with leaving the welfare of his country to the result of accidents and chances; who should not care to acquaint himself with what the reasonable expectations of citizens are, nor be ready at all times, to co-operate with his fellow citizens in the business of causing those reasonable expectations to be reasonably realized. For it will never be sufficiently well, with any wise or good man, when it is well with himself only. To be capable of being stimulated to resistance or stung into resentment only by our immediate sensations, and when we ourselves are housed and clothed and fed, to sing all's well! amid surrounding poverty and desolation, in a country, which, perchance starves its own inhabitants; in which the very hands that produced the house, the food, the clothing, shall lack them for themselves;-such sentiments and feelings are compatible with the prevalence of religion, and of religion enough, but they are utterly abhorrent to morality. The moral man will consider that sanctified selfishness as more criminal in itself, and more mischievous in its consequences, than the secret dagger of conspiracy, or the bold phalanx of open rebellion. The traitor betrays the king-the coward betrays the kingdom. He, who by the best means in his power, or by the worst, shall seek the alteration of a state of things in his country under which the majority are miserable, may fall a glorious patriot; but he who can be indifferent, or think it no concern of his, when millions are oppressed, may be a very peaceable sort of a character, and may go to heaven when he dies; but, for all the good that this world hath of him, the sooner he goes to that, the better. For it is to this indifference, this sanctified state of unconcern to the welfare of our fellow-countrymen, and ignorance of what we have a right to expect from our country, and in that right to expect a right to claim; and in that right to claim, a right to enforce-that the Hydra of civil corruption rears its monstrous head, and grows at last too strong for wholesome cropping. Thus, in a country which I have visited in my travels—a country in which nature's propitious hand hath emptied her cornucopia on its inhabitants, and laid them on the very bosom of luxuriance; the creature man is found; his form all rags without; his mind all dark within; his habitation desolate of comfort, his heart of hope; his wife forlorn: his children naked-O, God! his poor children! The landlord had seized his cow; the churchlord had seized his furniture. I asked, who did it all;—and I saw a regiment of soldiers: I asked the soldiers "what will the poor man say what will he say?" and they said, "Why, he has got a bible, and he'll say his prayers!" Were it a mere speculation of the imagination, and utterly beyond the probabilities of sober reality that such a state of things could ever happen in this highly favoured country, where all the soldiers are so tender-hearted, and all the clergy so disinterested, it would be no office of moral inculcation to bring any body into mind of the natural rights of man, and no offence against morality to be entirely and for ever ignorant of what those rights are. But as the most obvious of all reasons must suggest to the remembrance of every reasonable mind the proverb-" Et mea res agitur paries cum proximus ardet”—“it is my look out when the next house is on fire :" and as the scantiest knowledge of what the world was before we came into it must have taught us, that not one of the civil liberties or privileges which we now enjoy, and without which we should feel the social state intolerable, was ever obtained, or would have been obtained by stupid ignorance, by yielding indifference, or by submitting piety; but was achieved, conquered, and wrested from the reluctant hand of vanquished tyranny by those who were called the rebels and the traitors of their day, we must surely feel the force of the moral lesson that calls us to acquaint ourselves with what our country owes to us, and to bestir ourselves to sce that what is owed, be paid. It is the voice of reason, therefore, and good policy, as well as of virtue, that calls us to take an animated interest, and put forth all our energies-first, to the clear understanding of what our claims on our country are, and then to the steady, determined, and unconqnerable prosecution of those claims. Our country, itself, requires this of us, and may well be considered as regarding as more hostile to her interests, and more traitorous to her state, the submitting slave than the usurping tyrant, the timid fools who endure oppression, than the oppressors who inflict it, only because it is endured. Hear, then! for it is the voice of virtue "Wouldst thou gain thy country's loud applause, Be thou the bold assertor of her cause, Her voice in council, in the fight her sword; In peace, in war, pursue thy country's good; For her bare thy bold breast, and pour thy gen'rous blood.” Br. OF LONDon. Is it by any ill chance of fortune, (not to say that it is so) that no natural causes of dearth and scarcity existing, no deluges having swept away the works of man, nor blasts from heaven smitten our fruitful fields, it is possible that the majority of the inhabitants of a country shall be tantalized with want in the midst of abundance, that honest labour of body, or honourable ingenuity of mind shall not be competent to secure to him who brings them to the public service, his sufficient share of the sufficiently existing means of sustentation and comfort; or that he who hath toiled, or is willing to toil, shall have to take from eleemosynary subscription, favour or pity, what being earned by labour is his, by right, more sacred and by title more just, than the lord's demesne or the prince's palace? Such a state of things is a state as bad as it can be, and any change must mend it. If, in any state, restrictions and imposts are allowed to exist, after, the experience of the happier and more prosperous condition of states, in which such restrictions and imposts do not exist, has demonstrated their useless or mischievous character; the state in which they are continued, is demonstrated to be essentially corrupt, and its ministers and its governors are traitors to the people. If in any state under pretext of subserving higher interests than those of this world, any order of men seen to be fallible and liable to error as ourselves, shall be sanctioned and upheld at the people's heavy charges, in the intolerable arrogance of delivering their own conceits as suggestions of infinite wisdom; while it is seen that they cannot and dare not encounter that liability to be questioned, and that obligation to answer, to which all fallible men ought to be subject, and of which no honest men ever were afraid;-in such a state, the consciences of men are oppressed, and not merely the consciences of the innumerable weak and silly people who for want of more rational means of instruction must remain for ever weak and silly, being obliged to receive as divine truths whatever their ministers shall choose to deliver as such; but the consciences of the teachers themselves, who are oppressed, in the wild luxuriance of an irresponsible dictation, must necessarily lose that faculty of perceiving, and care of speaking the truth, which a sense of responsibility can alone call into action in any man. Under such a state of things no man has reason to be content, no man ought to be content. For it should not be enough that his own mind may have struggled its way ont of the trammels of superstition and priesteraft, whilst his honour is pawned to the connivance at the continuance of those trammels, for the inthralment of his fellow citizens; and to which alone all the miseries that can afflict a country, all the poverty, wretchedness and vice in it, the tyranny of the oppressor and the patient endurance, that is to say, the villainous cowardice and desperate stupidity of the oppressed, are wholly to be attributed. For could we but give to the mind the capacity of being free, who should keep freedom from it? Could we but engage our fellow men to be faithful to themselves, and to their inherent strength; could we but reclaim a tenth part of the noble energies of the human mind to their proper destination and cause the hammer to strike, where God himself intended it to strike, that is, just exactly on the nail's head, and no where else-it should go home! who could resist its passage? For what were fifty, what were ten thousand swords, against the virtue of as many men, that had learned to think as men' should think, and speak as men should speak. Already, in this very early morning of the mind, when something like a faculty of reasoning beyond the measure of what was enough to sing psalms and throw a shuttle with, appeared in our manufactories, our Oxford and Cambridge trembled for the fortunes of their monopoly and seemed to read the sentence of their extirmination. "Obstantia fata removit Altaque posse capi faciendo, Pergama cœpit." "It hath removed the Fates which were their shield, There is a shorter way to logic than through the dictionary. The best reasoner shall be the best man, and you may pit him against the University? And how long think you should a tyrannical aristocracy be likely to hold its ground, before the face of a wisely thinking and consequently virtuously-acting people? Where should wrong find its protection, from the almighty power of wit enongh to set it right? Or how should they, who to subserve tyrannical purposes have ever inculcated on the people the divinity of the gallows, the notions of slaves and the sentiments of cowards |